Why rural Americans are so pissed off
1–10 of 48 posts
Re: Why rural Americans are so pissed off
#2That's complete bullshit. The reason is 100% because of the economy. Many of them will say it's not, others will also believe it, but if you dig down to the truth, it's absolutely and exclusively all about the economy.
Re: Why rural Americans are so pissed off
#3What an oddly combative interviewer. Are you asking questions, or are you soapboxing?
Re: Why rural Americans are so pissed off
#4For 8 years of work, the conclusions don't seem very insightful.
Re: Why rural Americans are so pissed off
#5It seems the article wants to make the case that it's not about economic issues but things like values. This may play a role but when things don't work well economically people are susceptible to attacking scapegoats like foreigners, atheists or whatever.
I am sure these people would be less angry if they perceived to be in a prospering part of the country and not a decaying one.
Re: Why rural Americans are so pissed off
#6It seems the article wants to make the case that it's not about economic issues but things like values. This may play a role but when things don't work well economically people are susceptible to attacking scapegoats like foreigners, atheists or whatever. I am sure these people would be less angry if they perceived to be in a prospering part of the country and not a decaying one.
Exactly this. It is a lot harder to convince people that illegals are stealing your job when you and all your friends have good jobs and a pretty good standard of living.
Re: Why rural Americans are so pissed off
#7My politics are on the left wing of the political spectrum, but as I sit here in my home in rural America (pop 30,000, farm based economy, nearest city of 250,000, 1 hour drive away) it would seem to me that people are mad because:
-There are very few high paying jobs -There is limited access to medical care -Local government ineptitude has a very real daily impact -Small tax base means surprisingly high taxes, but real struggle to maintain infrastructure (especially schools) -“Traditional” upbringing, often religious based, that breed skepticism toward anything “foreign” - which means everything from non-white people to AirBnB. -A fear that Washington DC really is a threat to their freedoms. For example, there is a view that gun laws aren’t really about guns, so much as a perception of a slippery slope toward totalitarianism.
Those are just kinda off the top of my head… but having now lived here in small town, rural America for eight years, I can sympathize with some of their views. People in small towns are not all the slack-jawed yokels city dwellers like to believe they are - many are well-informed and well-educated. By and large, they have legitimate concerns, even if they can be misguided in their beliefs about the potential solutions — and politicians to help them achieve those solutions.
My $0.02 — small towns need to be more entrepreneurial. The government isn’t going to fix it for you. Trying to recruit Amazon (for example) to put a warehouse there isn’t going to bring the desired economic outcomes either. Do it for yourselves.
Re: Why rural Americans are so pissed off
#8My politics are on the left wing of the political spectrum, but as I sit here in my home in rural America (pop 30,000, farm based economy, nearest city of 250,000, 1 hour drive away) it would seem to me that people are mad because: -There are very few high paying jobs -There is limited access to medical care -Local government ineptitude has a very real daily impact -Small tax base means surprisingly high taxes, but r…
How can a small town become more entrepeneurial, competitively against a city, or without becoming a city?
The past 300 years shows that rural is simply not economically highly-productive.
Re: Why rural Americans are so pissed off
#9"I know a lot of people who don’t live in rural America are tired of being told they need to understand all these resentments."
Well, nobody needs to do anything. But if you really want to solve a problem, it usually helps to understand it. Overpowering the other side only works for so long.
Re: Why rural Americans are so pissed off
#10This guy found a handful of the dumbest people in America and concluded people in rural areas are morally degraded and their problems are their own fault.
The arrogance of dismissing their contempt for the government is overwhelming. Just because they don't express their hatred of the elite class of people who rule them in just the right way doesn't somehow add up to their anger being misguided. They're using "the government" as a lightning rod for the myriad elites who do basically dictate the shape of their lives--the media they consume, the state of the market they could never control, and what options for their future they have. It's not expressed clearly, but it's not hard for someone with an ounce of empathy to suss out.
I could come up with a laundry list of the moral failures of the white rural poor, sure. My family tree is full of people just like this. But this researcher and people just like him cannot see past their own ideology. They want to believe they're objective, but they're not, they're caught up in the same sort of scientistic neoliberalism that can't help but see anyone outside of their elite class as a curious primitive and any other value system from theirs as a totemic anomaly. They want to know what character flaws led people to do such a horrible thing as to vote for Trump, but cannot for a moment consider how it was that we got to this position. Hint: it's not the rural poor's fault.