cross-posted from: https://midwest.social/post/7076150
Republican states also take more money from the federal govt for social services and entitlements.
this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2024
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Far more. These states wouldn't last more than 3 months if they seceded.
Disclaimer: I don’t live in the US and, when looking at US politicians, my opinions are most aligned with those of Bernie Sanders.
I don’t think that the problem here is the republicans or democrats, but both. These poor places have long been neglected and no politician care about states that are not swing states and have very few electors. The whole political system seems to abandon poor people, old people and people living in rural areas.
The reason why they vote for Trump is that they want to give a big middle finger to those that they see trying to dismantle their way of life: city people and rich people. Farmers work very hard to feed their country and there’s a pride in being self reliant.
Take for example modern cars, you’re not supposed to fix them yourself. That’s the producers fault. But when politicians make fuel costs go up and try to incentivize EV purchases, people can feel like their agency is taken away. The problem isn’t the fuel pricing or the drive train, but the fact that you can no longer service your own car.
This is a problem with society in general, not with republicans. The alt-right movement feeds on these fractures in society. It’s a symptom, not the underlying sickness. To combat this we need better social security, free healthcare, and more wealth redistribution.
But they’re not both the same
My favorite example was a few years back when Trump was elected. Both candidates visited West Virginia:
- Trump made all sorts of claims about creating coal industry jobs, including directly contradicting things he said elsewhere
- H Clinton sympathized with people, recognized that automation and economic conditions have been reducing coal industry jobs for decades and those trends would continue. She proposed expanded training to help people qualify for new jobs and programs to improve economic development
Both are the same? One denied the problem and blatantly lied to his constituents. During his term in office, I don’t think there was any attempt to follow through. The other at least recognized the issue, spoke honestly , and proposed something. There were quite a few people who decided to vote for Trump because they didn’t believe Clinton’s solutions would work, voted for hiding their heads in the sand (somehow denying reality was “telling it like it is”) over recognizing the issue and at least trying something, voted against their own best interests, fucked around and found out
I like this example because it clearly shows both that all politicians suck and that “both sides” really are NOT the same
“We're going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.”
The moment Clinton said that (and that's a direct quote), she lost any hope of getting most of Appalachia to vote for her.
To be clear about what Clinton's plan looked like, even if you ignored her terrible delivery of it, here's what it sounds like to the guys on the ground who'd benefit from it:
Step one, first you lose your job, and we're going to speed that up by tightening regulations with the express goal of killing the coal industry faster.
Step two, then you get put on unemployment and a retraining program. This of course will cause some of you to lose your hones and vehicles, and for some your family too because especially in very socially conservative areas a man losing a job for a prolonged period is often a catalyst to losing a marriage. Now that you've lost your home, downsized your car and lost your family it's time for...
Step three, the industry you've been retrained for doesn't exist, or doesn't exist at remotely the necessary scale here, so now you just need to pull up stakes and move elsewhere. Hope you didn't have any family nearby you cared to see, or took care of, or if you lost your wife in the previous step ever wanted to see your kids again.
Step four, congratulations! If you made it here, you probably have a job again. I mean, you had to sell your home just to stay afloat through the retraining, it pays less than your old job, you're living somewhere with a higher cost of living now, and you had to be cut off from your entire support network, but you're probably employed!
And all of that assumes her plan as proposed was actually going to be a thing that actually happened. As opposed to the at least as likely scenario where they still use regulations to kill the coal market more efficiently, but don't do any of the other stuff. Which was probably at least as likely in a post-Byrd world (Byrd was corrupt as all hell, but he always did his best for his constituents).
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I get that political memes communities are for building an echo chamber where you say whatever confirms everyone's preexisting opinion, but this post is catastrophically dumb.
Conservative economic policies suck (not exactly surprising given conservative policies are largely just aimed at helping huge corporations squeeze as much money out of their labor, the public and the environment as possible and are intrinsically unsustainable and damaging to things that actually matter, like american quality of life), but of course red states have poorer economies- rural areas are both conservative and also intrinsically not going to have as much money as urban areas where there are more and larger businesses.
You can demonstrate that conservative economic "principles" suck dogshit a lot more effectively if your examples aren't obviously hollow to anyone who thinks about them for more than 2 seconds.
But I guess that doesn't make a meme that lots of people will upvote because it tells them their opinion is smart and good and that they don't need to think about why they think the things they do.
It doesn't matter that the argument is good. Conservative propaganda is completely stupid, but it convinces the right people. It is those people who are less educated that you need to convince. And no rational, educated argument will convince better in 10s than a shitty catch phrase.
Its really strange to me that you would advocate the idea that we should parrot bad points to propagandize our perspective. I don't mean this as insult, I just find that a really alien way to look at the world...
As a counterpoint to some of what I understand your stance to be, in my experience those kinds of hollow arguments tend to only appeal to people who already generally agree with them. To my mind, that makes them much more effective at polarizing perspectives than actually informing anyone's perspective in a meaningful way. They ensure that people who have been consuming intellectually bankrupt reinforcements of whatever they already believed are even more incapable of meaningfully engaging with people they don't see eye to eye with, when that opportunity arises
I understand that the popular, cathartic, take is that we should just hate the bad people who think the wrong thing and that talking with them is a pointless waste of time, but in my experience the only thing that ever seems to change individual perspectives is compassion and sincerity, perhaps especially when not entirely deserved. And I also find that dismissing the intellect or emotional capacity of anyone I disagree with as a means to justify hating them and what I've decided they represent is a really toxic way to engage with the world. And by that I mean toxic to myself- I think its toxic to others too, but frankly writing off half of my country folk as stupid wastes of oxygen we'd all be better without feels poisonous to my own emotional wellbeing.
Do with that what you will 🤷
Edit: some wording.
I don't even necessarily disagree with your point that convincing people who are only going to engage superficially is politically important at scale, and that those people may at times be more swayed by hollow talking points than well reasoned arguments, its just very foreign to how I'm used to relating to the world I guess
Ok, to elaborate a bit, first, your argument is only aimed at people on your side already, as I said.
But more importantly, secondly, the point made is not completely wrong. Sure, it is only a correlation that's pointed, and the left should try to help the conservative voters instead of blaming them. But as a matter of fact, conservative policies do empoverish people. Which means the argument has some truth condensed in an inaccurate catch phrase that can actually hit its audience.
I guess we went to the same conclusion on this.
I'm starting to believe these days that the leftists are prone to argue and disagree about technicalities and details, and it can be counterproductive to the information war that's happening.
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I don't think it's an unfair comparison. Red states have large cities. Blue states have rural counties. I think the stats are based on median income? Red states are more "business friendly," so you would expect all that business activity to trickle down and be reflected in the median wages?
And they want it that way. Because they can look at their constituents, point a finger at everywhere/everyone else, and say "look what THEY'RE doing to you! They're causing ALL of your problems!" And those people continue to eat it up, every single time.
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I'd rather fight alongside republicans and democrats to make sure everyone lives in dignity and isn't ground into dust by the gears of capitalism rather than pushing more red vs blue rhetoric. Fuck the politicians that put the south in the position it's in today.
The problem is both parties are in favor of grinding people into dust to keep the gears of capitalism going, so if anything they're more likely to team up for the opposite reason.
Right, I should've been more clear. I think there's a major disconnect between what the politicians want and what people want, but I think I was referring to the people when I said republicans and democrats in my previous message since so many people identify with either group for one reason or another. Not good phrasing on my part. It probably would've been easier to not use labels at all, but the main topic was about red v blue, so I stayed within that idea.
I also kinda need the hope of everyone getting sick of the late stage capitalism we live in and working together to fix it somehow. It's a lot harder to imagine that becoming a reality if it's only a handful of people going against everyone who calls themselves democrats or republicans.
Easy there or you gonna be called a tankie.
i'd rather call it "unregulated capitalism". because it seems to work pretty goddamn well in most european countries, and they regulate to what extent you can exploit your workers. unions are a good thing for everyone.
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I can usually point out why conservatives think and act a certain way. Logical from their point of view, if mostly wrong. Still, I get them.
I've never had an answer to this sort of post. I guess they just fall back to, "It's $somebody_elses_fault!" And that seems to work for 'em, drives votes.
It's simple. The poor in red states have been made proud of struggling. They've been manipulated in to taking pride in being poor and uneducated. It's such a sinister thing that has been done to them with no way of breaking that belief. They're both victim and villain with no self awareness to save them.
Add in an (un)healthy dose of "rugged individualism" and American Exceptionalism, and everyone is just a "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" looking to get theirs and pull the ladder up behind them.
I have never liked that language tbh. If you talk directly with someone who dropped out of school at an early age, you will see that they are quite aware that they will never ever in their entire lifetime become anywhere close to being rich. Many know that they are likely to die within the decade, lacking access to medical care, which in turn affects whether they can keep even a minimum wage job, much less afford a house. The spiralling downwards of court appearances and jail time, which further affects their ability to even be considered for a job, are all too clear to them.
It turns out though, they simply do not care. They vote conservative bc they (have been told to) actually believe that the rich deserve more than they do. i.e., that phrase gives them too much credit to be voting towards their own best interests, even for the far-distant future, when instead they are aware that they will never become one. Except even my previous sentence still gives too much credit to the enlightened self interest - by way of kinship selection - of some, who do not even think about it as deeply as that, and instead they simply vote as they are told and as everyone else votes around them (especially when those around them who do not vote that way are too afraid to speak openly about their local "defiance" to the entrenched authority structures).
That said, some of them are very much aware that they are being lied to. Though again, they simply do not care, even though the outcome of their vote still affects literally the entire nation (e.g. Mitch McConnell could not be a national leader if he did not keep being reelected locally).
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I assume their answer would be some sort of afactual "it's because we're wasting all our money on illegals and gay libraries!"
When my mother talks about politics she's not really interested in facts, policies, studies, or evidence. She's speaking from an emotional perspective. It's why topics and goalposts shift so easily in discussions with that kind of person. It's like trying to follow dream logic. It makes sense to the person in it, but from the outside you're left wondering why the chickens needed new gloves. They don't even have hands.
Republicans don't have policies. I know because i asked reddit's conservative sub once and got down voted with no responses.
Or you could look at the 2020 Republican platform.
"Fiscally conservative"
Give me a break. If you understood conservatives economic policy you would not want anywhere near it. Unless you're a bigot and think human suffering fuels the prosperity for a select, "morally superior", few.
Points gun at you: "I win". /s
(you may think this is in poor taste but consider: isn't this the actual, authentic reality of the situation?)
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Also, 11 of the 20 most violent crime ridden cities are in red states. The city with the most violent crime is St. Louis, which is in Missouri, a very solidly red state.
Number 20 on that list? Republican favorite boogeyman Chicago. Safer than Nashville, Tennessee. Safer than Anchorage, Alaska. Safer than Indianapolis, Indiana. Safer than Little Rock, Arkansas. But I suppose those are all "blue" cities.
Or maybe poorer (and often less educated people) tend to vote Republican?
Kind of a chicken and egg situation isn't it? One begets the next and so on, but I guess I'm not sure which came first.
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Yeah, republicans are very dumb.
I don't think you can draw a direct line from the statistics to economic policy. It may be more true that the voters for the Republican party are less educated and more rural in those counties
I have a lot of points against conservatives but I don’t think this is one of them. It could similarly be framed as “the rich vs the poor”, and quite often we would side with the poor.
In their eyes, democrats have somehow stolen their wealth through their policies, thus making them victims of external disruption. Not saying I agree, of course, but you can see how they view it that way.
Unfortunately you are correct in that is probably how they see it. Something along the lines of, Democrats flooded the country with immigrants who stole our jobs and therefore we are poor.
Or actually shit like NAFTA and other trade agreements fucked a lot of blue workers out of their jobs.
I actually sympathise with a lot of the anger the reders have with some of the economical policies that were passed, by both sides btw since they fucked the middle class pretty hard and allowed corporations to use our infrastructure to make money while shiping jobs oversees and hiding their money in tax shelter counties all in the name of "free trade".
It's part of the reason the Democrats lost the rural voters so hard, is because they don't even acknowledge this problem.
Republicans acknowledge this problem (that they also caused btw), but they acknowledge it and of course offer no solution except hate, but they are still ahead of the Democrats in the voter's eyes becuase hey... At least they tell us there is a problem.
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Poverty drives people to the right, maybe?
I find that the opposite is true. Poor people tend to lean left. It's just that conservatives don't take care of their impoverished populations, so the whole area rots economically from the bottom up.
One example that hits particularly close to my home is how republicans are vehemently against raising the minimum wage. But they also can't figure out why fast food joints and grocery stores around here can't keep enough staff to stay open.
Nobody can afford to live on 7.25/hr anymore. But republicans here will never acknowledge that. So our economy suffers.
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It’s all about love languages. Gotta find a way to love people the way they want/understand love.
We all know that republicans only care about wealthy people. Poor people who vote Republican do so because they enjoy punching down on marginalized communities. They know that republicans don't care about them, but "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." They'll happily self destruct if it means they can do a genocide. These Christians are chomping at the bit to murder people they don't like. Jesus would be so proud.
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