Political Memes

How does your theory hold up when applied to areas that are predominantly a service or agricultural economy?

The Nevada service sector is the heart of the Democratic vote in that state, just as one data point. Similarly, if you go out to California or New York, you'll find far more service sector democrats than white collar professionals. And where do you think all those Mississippi Democrats are coming from if not the agricultural industry? Millions of African American and Latino ag workers turn out for the Ds every year.

While those conditions do allow for authoritarian regimes to maintain strength in third-world countries, they do not apply one to one to the U.S.

Wyoming, Idaho, Montana, the Dakotas, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Utah, Kansas, Colorado, Texas - show me a mineral rich state and I'll show you a right-wing mega-millionaire (maybe even a billionaire or four) bankrolling the bulk of the conservative political scene.

The US is a hodgepodge of municipal and state authoritarian regimes and has been practically since its founding. With the exception of the Lincoln-era Abolitionist movement, it took us until the Great Depression to get a popular brand of politics meaningfully decoupled from some sponsored industry. Even then, its flaky and hesitant and prone to being co-opted.

But you're fooling yourself if you think we haven't brought our imperialist practices home to the core. Every dirty trick and bloody fist you've seen employed abroad has a parallel back home - often with an individual or organization that tried it first in one place before importing or exporting it to another.