Republican states also take more money from the federal govt for social services and entitlements.
A link that I frequently share:
That was just a gem.
Great read, thanks for sharing!
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).
Both are the same? One denied the problem and blatantly lied to his constituents.
They both lied, they just said different lies. Do you think that if Hillary was elected, she would have done anything substantial for those people? If she really wanted to do something, she could have done it under Obama.
But neither she nor Obama(nor Trump nor any politician) gives a fuck about those people. And those people know it. So if they have to choose, they would choose someone that tells them shit they like. Tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies.
They are the same in that they are alienating this particular part of the population from the rest of society. I agree that one is clearly better than the other, but my guess is that some people vote for Trump just to “own them libs” in California. They see liberalism and socialism as a threat to their lifestyle, something that’s not necessarily true, and they’re protesting that. We do need politicians that are more understanding to their problems and not those that are solely focused on the urban voters.
I think that leftist policy is the way to go for this, but we still need to satisfy that idea of self reliance. Of course the Democratic Party is way more sane but in my view, they are still very conservative.
Family farms went away late seventies early eighties. Farming is mostly corporate in America. There's not a lot of profit margin, so they make up for it with size.
You are very wrong about that.
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
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.
It's always easier to put the blame on someone else and not change anything than to accept that you might have a tiny part to play in the solution, too
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.
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.
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?)
I think it is great tasting
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.
more uneducated than poor, i would vote democrat if it meant i can make a bit of extra money at my job.
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.
Yeah, republicans are very dumb.
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.
But the NASDAQ went up 40% last year. People aren't allowed to complain about their economic conditions. /s
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
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.
Poverty drives people to political disaffection. Low-Income voters are the least likely to vote. Less than 30% describe themselves as liberal or somewhat liberal.
Au contraire - poverty drives people to the left, historically.
There are other factors at play here, covered by others in great detail; the most important being that rural areas (that are obviously poorer than business centers) are more conservative, and with that, Republican.
It should, shouldn't it. Perhaps I mean it makes people more receptive to right wing rhetoric.
I would reckon poverty makes people more easily manipulated, because they are desperate.
It’s all about love languages. Gotta find a way to love people the way they want/understand love.
Red states also have much older and sparser populations, so obviously they'll have less income than the blue states that house much of the young workforce.
Bit of a selection bias here
You just need to ask why there aren't young people there.
Poverty is measured per capita, so population density has nothing to do with it.
I don't think the poster here is actually measuring poverty, bud
