We say very clearly that rural America is hurting. But we refuse to justify attitudes that some scholars try to underplay.
Something remarkable happened among rural whites between the 2016 and 2020 elections: According to the Pew Research Center’s validated voter study, as the rest of the country moved away from Donald Trump, rural whites lurched toward him by nine points, from 62 percent to 71 percent support. And among the 100 counties where Trump performed best in 2016, almost all of them small and rural, he got a higher percentage of the vote in 91 of them in 2020. Yet Trump’s extraordinary rural white support—the most important story in rural politics in decades—is something many scholars and commentators are reluctant to explore in an honest way.
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What isn’t said enough is that rural whites are being told to blame all the wrong people for their very real problems. As we argue in the book, Hollywood liberals didn’t destroy the family farm, college professors didn’t move manufacturing jobs overseas, immigrants didn’t pour opioids into rural communities, and critical race theory didn’t close hundreds of rural hospitals. When Republican politicians and the conservative media tell rural whites to aim their anger at those targets, it’s so they won’t ask why the people they keep electing haven’t done anything to improve life in their communities.
There are tens of thousands of towns that have no reason to exist anymore. The railroads don’t stop there anymore, coal isn’t in demand, or the factory where everyone used to work closed long ago. It’s a death spiral. Nobody who lives there can admit they need to cut bait and start over elsewhere. They cling to the past and the delusion that the world will go back to the way it used to be.
Biden already did the best thing that could be done for these people which is funding a massive expansion of rural internet. If corporations continue to be pushed into allowing remote work, these rural towns would see the new economic infusion they need to survive.
Biden forced federal workers back to the office. I don’t know why people keep trying to pretend we have friends in the capitol. We don’t.
I would say work from home is incompatible with government security and privacy requirements in most situations.
Endless excuses for Biden and his pro-corporate bullshit.
Endless complaints regardless of reality. Biden could personally cure cancer and you people would complain he didn’t cure AIDS too.
We’ll never know though because if Biden had the choice between curing cancer and protecting corporate profits he’d choose the corporate profits.
Don’t let the fact that Biden wants to raise corporate taxes, put a surcharge on stock buybacks, fight corporate tax evasion, and is the most pro-union president in generations interrupt your blind hate…
Yes Biden, like most trash procorporate Democrats regularly want to do things they have no ability to deliver. And flat out refuse to entertain alternatives they can.
Buybacks were illegal in the past. Make them illegal again. Do it today.
You do know that the president can’t pass laws, don’t you?
Digital nomads moving into these places and driving up the cost of living are a big complaint in rural areas. They’ve been complaining about the influx of Californians in Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana for the last few decades now, but it has really accelerated since the pandemic.
But if there’s no industry and no-one moves there, how does the town survive?
They commute to other places to work. They also don’t typically make enough money to actually move and be closer to better jobs.
You’re missing my point. If there’s no industry, and they don’t allow anyone to move in, then the town will slowly die. They basically don’t want anything to change while at the same time they demand everything get better. It just doesn’t work that way.
Cars destroyed rural America. Take a Youtuber like Hoovie’s Garage, he buys a large farm in the middle of nowhere to store cars, drives regularly a 100miles a day. You can’t have compact European style towns, in such a reality. The factory closed, people drive 60 to a 100 miles a day, that means that the town is flattened and gone. Add to that oil disease in places like Kansas, Texas and W. Virginia; the government doesn’t need to have sound businesses as a tax base to fund itself, just oil money.
Cars have nearly nothing to do with this. It started with the industrialization of farming.
Farm towns existed at normal intervals because it took a much larger labor pool to manage them. 200 acres was a lot to manage about 100 years ago. By the 1970’s 400 acres was a normal sized family farm in the US.
Modern machinery can cover nearly 200 acres in a day. There is no reason to have thousands of people per small town anymore. It takes a tiny fraction of that manpower to achieve the same output.
1910 machinery starts to transform farming, killing small subsistence farms.
1920 factories in large towns start draw labor of off small subsistence farms
1930 cheap cars make it easier to travel great distances, small towns start to decline
1930-50s telephones, refrigerators, radios and TVs allow people to live even greater distances apart
1970s new pesticides allow for an even greater mega-farms, and fewer family farmers
1980s Free trade kills off most industrial jobs in small towns
1990s collapse of USSR means rush of cheap engineering labor, depreciates well paying technical jobs
2000s reinvestment into oil fracking and other oil extraction methods causes dutch-disease (taxes come from oil, so little interest in industry)
2010s spike in cheap synthetic drugs rolls through rural America
About the time where biomass started to decline.