Tom Nichol’s self-congratulatory diagnosis of Flyover Country pathologies in the overnight post needs a bit of pushback, IMO. Here’s an excerpt of what he said:
If you really want to understand the roots of rage in the red states, think about how much time people in those states spending think about cities and blue states. Now considcer how little time anyone in those places spends thinking about what goes on in, say, rural Alabama.
In part, as I explain in my last book, it’s because people now have an *awareness* of how other people live, and the dominant culture in America is rapidly becoming a coastal entertainment/ politics /etc culture. This isn’t about money, it’s about *resentment* /2
People on what is now called “the right” are obsessed with how people live in other places, and they are *furious* that no one cares how *they* live and basically would ignore them if they’d just leave other people alone (and respect their rights as Americans). /3
There’s probably some truth to that, but it’s not that simple. For one thing, most people live in propagandized bubbles, so I’d argue the alleged awareness of how others live isn’t really a thing, sometimes not even within the same state.
An example I’ve shared before: a while back, I stayed in Miami for a couple of weeks to look after a hospitalized friend’s kids. When I got back home, one of my rural uncles commented that it must have been hard to handle the basics there since no one speaks English and you literally can’t order food at a drive-thru or communicate with people in shops unless you speak Spanish.
I told him that’s not true — sure, lots of people only speak Spanish in Miami, but I was never unable to conduct business due to a language barrier on that or previous trips. I don’t think he believed me, even though I’d just come back and he hadn’t been to Miami since the 1980s.
Regarding cultural zeitgeist, while it’s true that the entertainment industry in the U.S. is coastal and urban, the products it churns out quite often focus on rural and small town America. Sometimes the portrayals are even sympathetic.
Also, what valued commenter Kent said:
I think it is more that rural life keeps getting tougher and tougher due to forces outside their control. Big ag consolidation makes farming more difficult. Corporations close outlets and factories in small towns. In this particular farm they lost their New Holland farm equipment manufacturing factory and also the nice IGA grocery and are now down to a Dollar General. And environmental regulations keep increasing for things like manure management.
Whether fair or not, ALL of those things are viewed as urban encroachments because they are decisions being made in the big cities far away. The fact that your local IGA closed has noting to do with blue politics in the city. But it was some corporate city types who made that decision. And they resent it because it all happens completely outside their control.
And in a sense they are right. Rural America was once very local, all the businesses were local, and the small towns were thriving, or at least prosperous. All that has changed with corporate consolidation of every sector of the economy. Big forces completely outside their control that yes, do come from the cities to the extent that big corporations are headquartered in the cities and such decisions are made by MBA and finance twits from Ivy League universities who have never gotten their loafers dirty.
This is absolutely true in my experience too.
None of this is to excuse rural/small town prejudices, small-mindedness, insularity and self-wounding pathologies, which definitely exist! My point is the explanation isn’t as simple as Nichols suggests, i.e., envy-based resentment. If we’re ever to address it, the solutions will have to be more nuanced than compulsory urban walking tours for dumb hayseeds.
Open thread.
Baud
I find tales from right-wingers exaggerated, so I guess they feel the same about us. But it’s interesting how they cling to their prejudices even when close friends and family relate their own experiences. Same thing happened with “cities burning to the ground.”
HumboldtBlue
That’s gonna be the title of my book.
I still think racism and classism play huge roles, as this lady in Suburban Philly proves once again (racist nasty bitch ahead).
Alison Rose
Your uncle sounds like my friend’s uncle who insists that very soon, all schoolchildren in California will be required to learn Spanish. I mean, I don’t think that would be a bad thing! But I’ve never heard a word like that from anyone in any position of political power. Yet he swears it’s true. Okay, Uncle Bro.
OzarkHillbilly
Here I thought this thread was about me. :-(
twbrandt
I live just outside of Detroit and go there often. But I run into so many people who tell me they would never go into Detroit – it’s too dangerous, it’s all burned-out buildings, etc etc. And it turns out they haven’t been to the city in like 50 years, if ever.
Anoniminous
Sarah Ashton-Cirillo got zapped.
Who is Sarah Ashton-Cirillo?
“What Ashton-Cirillo lacks in detached objectivity, she makes up for with her deep community connections. Her networks eclipse what other, more transient, journalists can pull upon. With that comes a keener appreciation for what kind of behavior is appropriate or exploitative. According to Nance, many humanitarian aid workers and journalists have made a spectacle of being near the front lines – a kind of bravado that Ashton-Cirillo has assiduously avoided.
“I hear those people brag all the time and it makes me nauseous, and you wouldn’t hear that from Sarah. She’s a role model. I’ll be the first one to defend her. A lot of guys who come up on Twitter will criticize her gender identity. Artillery shells don’t give two fucks about your gender identity. A bullet does not care what pronouns you use. Cold starving people don’t care. They just know good humanity when they see it, and that’s what I feel she embodies.”
Jay C
Well, while we know that YOU, Betty, don’t excuse this stuff, the bigger problem is that there is an entire media structure in this country that exists primarily to do exactly that. And not just for “rural/small-town” America, either. Those “propagandized bubbles” have an unfortunately widespread reach.
Kosh III
Go into many businesses in small towns, like the banks, and what’s on the omnipresent tv? Fraking Fox News!
Baud
@OzarkHillbilly:
You’re so vain, I bet you thought this thread was about you.
Aimai
It’s a very romantic, ahistorical, fantasy that rural America was any one thing: rural south, west, mid west, and north east were always very different. And as far as the west and Midwest are concerned if you go back to the 1800’s and before the dustbowl many rural areas were entirely dependent on transfers, trains, and financing by outsiders. Read Natures metropolis to see the way meat raising, slaughter and meat packing were all dependent on outsiders for finance, processing, and distribution? The “big banks” foreclosure etc…and outsider threat/xenophobia gave always been a part of our rural areas. Self sustaining/productive/communities? That’s a tiny slice of rural existence more honored in the breach than the reality—the dustbowl brought an end to a lot of rural communities—the new deal and postwar boom revived them, and they have naturally died again.
Burnspbesq
A good chunk of rural rage, at least in Texas, is ginned up by rich outsiders with their own agenda. The current issue of Texas Monthly has a deeply researched and deeply scary piece about the impending destruction of the public schools in Dripping Springs, a rapidly suburbanizing small town south of Austin.
OzarkHillbilly
I think he’s right about that but what they resent is their growing irrelevance. It shows in their boarded up main streets, their half empty schools and their dwindling pocketbooks. So they stand on their chairs and scream “HEY! LOOK AT ME!!!” and rant about the trans and the gay even tho they’ve never met either.
OzarkHillbilly
@Baud: I always knew Carly was singing about me.
Citizen Alan
So in other words, the lives of rural red-staters are being immiserated by late stage capitalism. But they will never admit that and will continue to bitch and moan about every little thing that they attribute to Socialism (which has never been anything but Lee Atwater code for “the blacks don’t know their place anymore.”) So what’s to be done about it?
Wapiti
Gee, I just went for a walk in my urban hellhole with my sister and we were talking about how we were beset by all sorts of rent-seeking banks and corporations. The closest Starbucks shut down – probably to avoid unionization. So I can sympathize, somewhat with my cousin in Nebraska who doesn’t have a grocery store in his village. But it’s not me who’s voting for Republicans and their corporate friends who want to hoover up every fucking dime the middle class has.
scav
The omitted middle (hello suburbia!) has got its own pathologies to explore. Not quite as photogenic as the cherished small-town / sons-of-the-soil back-drop but often equally likely not to venture down to the war-torn, minority-blemished, foreign-speaking, Elitist CBD.
HumboldtBlue
Nazis are planning a national day of hate. I don’t think it’s cultural resentment, Tom, it may be unbridled hate.
Baud
@Wapiti:
Right. The GOP’s current “pro-worker, anti-corporate” stance is all about fighting corporate “wokeism.”
Matt McIrvin
@twbrandt: Several years ago, I had jury duty in Lawrence, Massachusetts. To my coworkers this sounded like I’d been drafted to patrol occupied Baghdad. They were terrified to go anywhere near that town.
It’s just a town, people live there. It’s poor and largely Hispanic. Crime rates aren’t that different from where I live.
PapuJones
Were small rural towns ever really “thriving” compared to cities? This isn’t a rhetorical question, I’m genuinely curious.
Sure, we have movies and anecdotal stories of how wonderful rural small town life used to be. OTOH I’ve also read a few small town newspaper articles from the 1920s and 30s about “oh no! Look at the young people leaving and not coming back”.
Is a rural decline (vs cities) really anything new, or is it just getting more focus because it’s something for people to get angry about?
Paul in KY
@HumboldtBlue: It’s always the dyed blonde haired ones…I’m sure she’s been a craptoid since she was 9.
Kyle
I grew up in rural Alabama, and one source of resentment is the insecurity of the folks there. They see other people living their lives differently and see it as a judgment against their lives. They can’t seem to accept that others have different opinions about how to go about life.
Paul in KY
@Baud: Well played.
mary s
Cities used to be full of local businesses, too.
What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?
@Baud: they don’t even let personal experience change their rhetoric. I have a FB friend from High School who has travelled extensively in Western Europe and had nothing but good experiences there. But, once Stateside Europe becomes some socialist hellscape in all her FB posts about it.
Paul in KY
@OzarkHillbilly: So did I.
OzarkHillbilly
@HumboldtBlue: One usually follows the other, tho I am not sure which comes first. Most people hate what they don’t understand because they fear it. I spend a lot of time living among these people and I can assure you, they resent. It’s at the heart of every spiteful word they utter.
eta: Nazis are a very small slice of America, I am talking about the avg everyday rural American who may or my not be racist, or antisemitic but they are resentful of a world fast leaving them behind.
Joe Falco
The “Dominant Culture” my left foot. Isn’t it enough that Hallmark Christmas movies almost always have a plot about how country life is superior to city life? About any depiction of rural living in culture is either “folks may be simple, but they’re good-natured really” or some grandiose version of Eden that has not been touched by Man.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Baud:
They are fully on team RightWing(TM) and would defend their team, so they expect you to minimize and deny how bad the ‘danger’ is. If several of their friends, especially right wing ones, went to Miami and had similar experiences to you, they would be much more likely to believe it.
Suzanne
Eh, I think the resentment angle is probably close to the right one. As always, there’s complicating factors, and simplifying anything obliterates nuance…..but it’s as close to correct as I can see.
Why do I say this? Because, if they were really pissed about an extractive economy, they’d be pissed at the people doing the extracting. But they’re not. They’re pissed at urban people and people who went to college, the vast majority of whom don’t make much more money and who don’t run anything and don’t have power. Their only sin is to not covet the rural lifestyle, to not hold it in high esteem. Maybe pissed isn’t the right word exactly, envy even implies some straightforwardness.
I think resentment is about accurate.
Anonymous At Work
And yet, their last nominees were Trump, Trump, Mitt Romney (literally the guy who closed the factories or would dump stock in IGA if it didn’t pay out a minimum level of dividends) and McCain (married to the heiress of Arizona’s richest businessman).
They may feel helpless but don’t believe in the diagnosis or cure for what is causing it. They want the government to get out of the way but not to stop sending welfare. They want businesses to open up but not to open up their community to attract the necessary business owners or key employees. They want their young people to stay but only if they obey their elders and traditions unfalteringly.
In short, they want to be kings of their own domain but can’t understand why others don’t want to be their serfs. It’s not an uncommon impulse but growing up in an urban environment, you internalize that the world is bigger and has more connections and you can’t always be the king.
piratedan
In a way, it’s something of a tragic irony…. Those folks in less urban environments want to be considered, as people, hard working individuals who till the lands, keep the roads clear, the lights on, the trucks moving. They don’t enjoy being reduced to a number who don’t warrant having a store kept open because it’s not profitable “enough”.
At the same time, where they demand to be seen as persons with real lives and real interests who perform honest to goodness work, they refuse to see anyone else in the same light… the nurses, the schoolteachers, people who move the paper that deny their insurance claims and process their mortgage payments, none of those are seen as equals instead of the true villians, those that reduce everything to numbers and are more beholden to a bottom line and faceless stockholders, that make those decisions that dehumanize us all in the name of making a buck.
Suzanne
@Joe Falco:
Word.
These things are really, at their core, male fantasies, too. This idea that a dude with not-much education (and in reality, no real prospects) can “get” an attractive woman to turn away from a rich man.
I enjoy escapist entertainment, too, but, like, I don’t know a single one of my woman friends who has ever found the lumberjack type to be a turn-on.
$8 blue check mistermix
Any analysis that doesn’t include the loss felt by rural areas because the kids are all moving to the cities doesn’t fully comprehend the feelings of rural residents. That’s a form of rejection that is visceral and deep.
Suzanne
@piratedan:
In Joan Williams’ book “White Working Class”, she notes that a lot of that cohort resents and looks down on that work (teaching, nursing, admin, etc.) because it’s done by women.
I still remember going to an antiques fair in Arkansas with my in-laws and seeing Nazi memorabilia for sale.
The Moar You Know
@Alison Rose: What I don’t understand is how the fuck you can grow up in California, like I did, and NOT at least have passing ability to speak Spanish, as I do. How does that happen?
And I have yet to meet any Hispanic in this state (not since the early 80s, anyway) who wasn’t capable at a minimum of carrying on a reasonable conversation in English. Most of them speak it better than the Red State foxbots who live in terror that someone might make them eat a taco.
OzarkHillbilly
@$8 blue check mistermix: Yep, very true. I’m in the minority who didn’t mind in the least.
eta which is funny, cause I moved out here for them and as soon as they graduated they moved into STL. Like the very next day.
lowtechcyclist
@Citizen Alan:
Good question. Most rural folks seem practically bullet-proof to any explanation that big corporations are more responsible than any other force for ruining their small towns, and that the GOP is owned, lock, stock, and barrel, by those corporate interests. While the Dems want to put at least some brakes on what they can do.
(Sure, the GOPers may protest against ‘woke’ corporations, but that has nothing to do with their consolidating their operations in large cities and undermining competition.)
I think one thing the Dems need to do is make an issue of regulation. I’ve been thinking this ever since the Hamlet, NC fire back in 1991 – that this is why we need regulation, and this is why we need Federal workers who can check up on corporations and verify that they’re obeying the regs, rather than leaving them to self-enforce. The East Palestine derailment is just the latest reminder of this.
The Dems need to make a point of saying: when the Republicans talk about deregulation, Hamlet and East Palestine and West, Texas are exactly what they’re asking your support for more of, and that if we’re not to have regular, preventable disasters like this, we need to have rules, and we need to have people to enforce them. That shouldn’t be too hard a sale to make, especially right now.
Old School
@OzarkHillbilly:
You had a thread about you yesterday! How many do you need?
Suzanne
@The Moar You Know:
Same thing in Arizona. You learn the basics because it’s all around you.
scav
@$8 blue check mistermix: It’s also not exactly a new thing. Rural hamlets (etc) have been declining since around the 30s.
The Moar You Know
@Kosh III: Every military base in the world as well, which is a real problem so far as I’m concerned.
Suzanne
@lowtechcyclist:
Okay, but that should be evidence that crony capitalism isn’t the cause of their alienation.
It isn’t logical, but feelings aren’t logical.
lowtechcyclist
@Baud:
Exactly. They’ll make sure you never have to spend an hour in a seminar about diversity, while they leave the minimum wage at $7.25. Workers, if you’re happy with that tradeoff, by all means keep voting Republican.
Omnes Omnibus
@Joe Falco: Fucking Rousseau.
OzarkHillbilly
@Old School: About one a day should suffice. :-)
Jeffro
I don’t worry about rural folks’ supposed rage against ‘blue’ cities nearly as much I do the Fox-ginned-up rage of well-off suburbanites with too much time (and a bad case of Dunning-Krueger) on their hands
ETA: sorta what HumboldtBlue & Burnespbesq noted above.
lowtechcyclist
@Suzanne:
OK, but supposedly the hollowing-out of their towns is part of the reason for their alienation. Yes? No? It certainly makes smaller towns more depressing to live in, if the only place to shop is a Dollar General.
Alison Rose
@The Moar You Know: Right? I mean, I sure as heck can’t carry on a conversation in Spanish (I took French in school…can’t carry on a conversation in that language either), but I can absolutely ask and answer some basic questions and know a few handfuls of words. My accent, that’s another story. I couldn’t do a convincing accent of any kind if my life depended on it.
And yeah, most Spanish-speaking immigrants here very quickly learn some basic English, certainly enough that we can understand each other with a little help. What right wingers freak out over is usually the whole “I DON’T WANNA PRESS 1 FOR ENGLISH, THIS IS AMERICA”. But even if you are fluent in a second language, it’s often more comfortable to use your native tongue, especially in situations regarding medical stuff or financial or whatnot.
Alce_e _ ardillo
@Alison Rose: I think it would be a very good idea.
Suzanne
@lowtechcyclist: Oh, agreed. I’m more pushing back on the assertion that rural people aren’t resentful toward urbanites, that they’re really pissed about crony capitalism. Crony capitalism deserves a lot more scorn than it’s getting. But the resentment is fucking real.
I’m gonna be passing through Greensburg here somewhat shortly, where the owner of a building near the train tracks painted FUCK BIDEN on the side of it in gigantic letters.
p.a.
They hate us because we don’t want them to impose their bigotry on us.
They hate us because we don’t want them to impose their bigotry on the public sphere.
They hate us because they get the freedom of their own bigotry as it consigns them to the bottom of the barrel.
And the solution for this is ???
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@lowtechcyclist:
Until these recent inflationary years, $7.25 per hour goes a LOT further in rural America than in urban areas. Land is cheap and frequently just inherited. They hunt and fish and have big gardens. ADFC stretches much further and people can and do sell their cards for luxuries. Plus, you are MUCH more likely have people cheating the system in rural communities. Enforcement is too hard. They think its like that everywhere. That everyone but them is cheating the system and the only way to stop it is to shut it down (unless they have a problem, that is). Truthfully, I think the tendency to not adequately police social service cheats in rural communities (because it is not cost effective) is a part of why GOP narratives have such staying power. It isn’t just Fox and rightwing radio.
scav
@Suzanne: There’s a band of counties in the far west where the average income of women is higher than that of men. Yup, they’re all rural and it is not that the wages are unusually high.
Cameron
Correct me if I’m off-base here, Ms. Cracker, but wouldn’t the population of The Villages be a direct contradiction of Tom Nichols’ theory? They’re there by choice, they have at least middle-class incomes (usually more), and they’re right-wing as hell.
Barbara
@HumboldtBlue: I couldn’t finish it. I think the response should have been that the TV was on Spanish because it’s my TV. Goddamn.
Roger Moore
I don’t think this is nearly as true as people think. Maybe in like the early 1800s small towns were all local, but they’ve been heavily wrapped up in national issues for a very long time. First was the development of industrialized agriculture, which dates back to things like the McCormick reaper and the Deere plow. Then came the railroads, which meant just about every farmer was part of a national market.
The combination has been incredibly hard on farming areas. Mechanization has meant the amount of labor needed to farm a given area has roughly halved every generation, which has led to rural depopulation. Because farmers were competing in a national market, they were forced to adopt mechanization in order to survive. But these trends have been going on at least since the Civil War; they’re not something recent. A lot of the small farming towns out there have been in economic trouble basically since they were founded.
It’s not hard to see this stuff if you look. It’s all over our popular culture, from The Wizard of Oz to The Grapes of Wrath. William Jennings Bryan ran on a program of doing everything possible to save farmers from big business way back in the late 19th Century. A big driving force behind the Sherman Antitrust Act was to keep railroads from exploiting farmers.
oklahomo
@Kosh III: I changed my dentist of twenty years right after Obama was elected because nothing but Fox news in the waiting area (and Fox news radio was piped into the rooms). Plus all the racist innuendo.
The Moar You Know
@$8 blue check mistermix: the woman leave because they don’t want to marry a shelf-stocker at Dollar General who’s addicted to meth. The guys leave because they don’t want to marry a shelf-stocker at Dollar General who’s addicted to meth. The only game in town is the Dollar General and the meth dealer. Their parents and relatives won’t leave because this is all they know and it was good enough for them, why not the kids? Yeah, that hurts. Of course it does.
Here’s a fun inversion. I’ve lost my mother to Fox. She is unhinged-level bitter not because her kids left, but because they won’t. We laugh at her when she tells us she’s going to, because of the “woke” and the politics and the Messicans. And she’s REALLY angry that there’s not a place she can move to that will accept her overt bigotry and hateful politics that isn’t a world-class shithole.
She’s hurt because we don’t accept her fucked up worldview, we’re hurt because this wonderful person who taught me how to be a good person, taught me that racism and war was wrong, is dead. She left a long time ago. All that’s left is this bitter, angry husk who lives in what is literally the world’s best place and thinks it’s awful. And my brother and I frankly are just waiting for her to die so that we can grieve what we lost.
My wife says something that is real wisdom: the only way we make real, fundamental progress is by the shit people standing in the way dying off. Fucking cold. But true.
sab
@The Moar You Know: Same with me growing up in central Florida in the 1960s. Yes we learned Spanish in elementary school, for maybe half an hour per day. So what. It was fun.
Never used it in central Florida. Never used it a couple of years later in Ohio. Used it a lot in restaurants in California twenty years later. Now I translate Mexican restaurant menus for my husband in Ohio because he only learned German in school.
kalakal
@The Moar You Know:
I have to laugh when I hear MAGA types criticizing other peoples English. I don’t mean the accent, it’s the vocbulary & syntax. If I want to mess with their heads I go into Doric( which even a lot of other Scots have trouble with)
Roger Moore
@The Moar You Know:
Because they grew up in White Flight suburbs and avoided interacting with anyone who wasn’t just like them.
OzarkHillbilly
@The Moar You Know: That’s gotta be hard. My parents aged in the opposite direction, something to do with that whole Iraq War imbroglio.
Suzanne
Yes.
There has been a significant effect on prospects for family formation when women make more than they used to (relative to men). Indeed, when reading the comments on conservative blogs, one of the big things that seems to make them crazy is that the stereotypical nonreligious educated liberals in cities are doing so much better at marriage and kids than rural working-class people.
Assortative mating via educational attainment is much greater for the under-45 age cohort than it is for the older cohort. So their poor economic prospects become poor marriage-and-family prospects.
patrick II
There is a disjoint between the economics that rural voters believe in (and vote for) and the effects of an unregulated market allowing large monopolistic companies to replace their local businesses with chain stores and endangering small farmers with more economically efficient agribusiness. Not to mention pushing profitable but sinful vices like porn.
trnc
If you can’t find a liberal university research study of People’s living conditions in red states, you aren’t looking.
karen marie
@Paul in KY: I don’t know what time of day it was but she was definitely three sheets to the wind.
Suzanne
Yes.
Also, the women now know they need to make their own money and they want to go to college so they can make more.
Gin & Tonic
@Suzanne:
I’ve seen Nazi memorabilia for sale in antiques shops in Connecticut.
WaterGirl
Sounds like rural + progressives all agree that big business is the cause of a lot of our ills.
Suzanne
Fun observation that someone pointed out to me yesterday: y’all know I am an architect, a career path that requires a lot of expensive formal schooling and is relatively low-paying compared to other professional-class careers. The field was, of course, historically male-dominated, and ownership/leadership in American architecture firms is still overwhelmingly white and male.
Architecture schools hit gender parity sometime in the early-to-mind 2000s, right about the time I entered.
Last night, my team all went out for happy hour to celebrate completion of a deadline. I was talking with two of the senior members in my team, both men. They pointed out that every one of our junior staff (who will, of course, be mid-level architects soon!) are women. And only about a quarter of them are American. The profession is changing, not as fast as lightning…..but fast.
different-church-lady
Even the idea that everyone in the same city or town thinks the same way is naive.
Part of my job as a media freelancer is to record interviews. I am not at all exaggerating when I say that the microphone I put on a corporate CEO on day will be the very same mic I put on a recovering heroin addict the next day. These people will never cross paths, even though they live in the same place.
Everybody lives in a bubble. I’m one of the rare people who has a job that requires me to visit a bunch of different bubbles. And it’s very eye opening. It leaves me with very little patience for professional thought-havers describing the world as seen from their bubbles.
CaseyL
@Roger Moore:
I actually have some sympathy for people who resent hearing Spanish everywhere, because of what happened to Miami while I lived there.
As everyone here knows,Florida was inundated for 40-odd years by people fleeing Castro’s Cuba. They were unusual as immigrants go, in that from the very start they had no intention of assimilating. For the older generations, in particular, Miami was only a temporary stop before Castro was swept from power and they could reclaim what they believed was theirs. They weren’t here voluntarily, in their view, so why should they assimilate?
That meant not only was Spanish increasingly the language you heard everywhere (and eventually a requirement for nearly any public-facing job); it also meant people resented having to learn/speak English, and in many cases didn’t do so.
I lost count of the times I went into stores, or restaurants, and all the staff were chatting with one another in Spanish. And they completely ignored me. If I asked for help – politely, may I add- they’d stare at me for a while and then go back to their chatting. Repeat, ad infinitum, all over South Florida.
This caused, let me tell you, a huge departure from my usual liberal self. It made me angry. It made me furious, in fact. Not so much the lack of English; more the rudeness – and what the rudeness meant: We have no commitment to your country; we’re only here until we can go home. So fuck you.
I should note that I have some high school Spanish. And my memory is that when I tried to use it, they made fun of me.
I also want to contrast that, very strongly, with a trip I made to the Galapagos a decade or so ago. The ship’s crew were, of course, locals – they spoke English just fine, but their native language was Spanish. And with them I did try out my very limited Spanish – and they were wonderful. I got teased, sure, but in the nicest way; and they helped me with words, pronunciation; we talked about the regional differences, it was in all ways a delightful experience. More of my Spanish came back, as a matter of fact.
All of which is a long-winded way of saying that, to some extent, I can understand what upsets people who hear a different language in “their town.” It’s not just an inability to take part in conversations; it’s a feeling that the people who are refusing to learn English have no commitment to the country/community they live in.
geg6
What Kent says may be more true for rural areas, but that is not the issue in my area. I live in a ‘burb with plenty of local businesses, including small groceries and such. The small river town next door also has thriving local businesses and a busy Main Street. It’s a weird place. Most local pols in my ‘burb and the small town are Dems. Yet they also voted Trump twice. They know who runs government better, so that’s not an issue. It’s all cultural and resentment. Our population is older and whiter and they are just furious that young people, people of color and many women don’t care about what they think and don’t kowtow to their wishes. Few of these people are poor and few went to college. Their anger and resentment are their most salient features to me and economics is not the issue. It’s that they feel ignored and disrespected. So I agree with Nichols. It’s not the whole story, but it is the most important thing that explains their behavior from what I have seen close up. I also don’t agree with the idea that these are basically good people. They just aren’t or they would not believe or act as they do.
Lifeinthebonusround
Kent says, “Whether fair or not, ALL of those things are viewed as urban encroachments because they are decisions being made in the big cities far away. The fact that your local IGA closed has noting to do with blue politics in the city. But it was some corporate city types who made that decision. And they resent it because it all happens completely outside their control.”
I live in Cambridge MA. Guess what. The changes we experience here *also* happen completely outside of *our* control as well.
japa21
As I said in a thread last night, a popular post WWI song was “How you gonna keep them down on the farm, after they seen Paree?” much of this is similar to that. The rural areas (generalization, not true in all cases) see urban areas as sin cities full of those folks, which will lure their innocent children both the path to Hell. One of the reasons for the attack on education is quite possibly to make kids less attractive to big corporations, thereby keeping them in the rural area.
The problem is the blame is always on the rural area. There is no attempt at introspection. No attempt to see how they can make the rural areas attractive enough for their kids to want to stay there.
Gin & Tonic
BREAKING: Pedophile supports russia:
Kent
The are rich old white people who are paying a premium to live around ONLY other rich old white people. I’m old enough to be Village material and the idea of living somewhere with no kids leaves me cold. I like our current neighborhood BECAUSE it is full of kids, many of whom are not white.
tobie
What amazes me as someone who lives half-time in rural Maryland is how few people in rural Maryland actually work on farms. The consolidation of farms happened long ago and thanks to mechanization, few farmhands are needed to harvest crops like soy, barley and corn–the chief crops in my neck of the woods. Best I can tell, most rural Marylanders work in small businesses, especially in the home trades. Think backhoe operators, truck drivers, plumbers, electricians, automechanics. They don’t work harder than anyone else. This is a self-aggrandizing myth. But they do live in the most subsidized region of the country…though they are loathe to accept this.
geg6
@twbrandt:
Same here. Pittsburgh is apparently a dystopian hellscape. I know people who have never stepped foot in a great city just 35 miles down the road.
Suzanne
@Lifeinthebonusround:
Exactly right. If they’re really and genuinely pissed about corporations immiserating their town by destroying the local economy, it makes no sense to be seething with resentment at mid-level professionals in Boston or San Francisco.
Suzanne
@geg6:
I’m not that bad. I have the prettiest rose bushes on my block!
jonas
This. I think Kent and BC are basically right. Their problem isn’t immigrants and gun control, it’s unfettered corporate capitalism. Unfortunately, their response is to vote for the very people who want to continue kicking their communities in the nuts with unfettered corporate capitalism, like keeping the minimum wage low and sending manufacturing jobs overseas.
Chip Daniels
@Suzanne:
I started architecture school in the early 80s and my small school of 400 students had precisely 4 female students.
About 5 years ago I was working on a very large project in a team of about 20 architects, half of whom were women.
kalakal
@CaseyL: There’s a similar phenomenon in Spain. For many years a lot of northern Europeans would retire to southern Spain. Better weather, cheap property, low cost of living etc. etc. Far too many of them had/have the
Forming their own neighbourhoods, no intention of assimilating. The English are particularly bad for this. There are people who’ve lived there for decades, don’t speak a word of Spanish, eat in English restaurants, drink in English bars.
Weirdly a lot of them voted for Brexit and now can’t understand why the UK blocking free movement & residence of Spaniards in the UK should have any effect on them
Suzanne
@Chip Daniels: Our team is about 40 architects across two firms. Principal-level is still almost all men, mid-level is about 50/50, junior level is all women. Engineers are probably 25% women. Also seeing more and more women on the construction side, which thrills me.
Kent
And a whole lot of men and women leave because THEY don’t want to be the shelf-stocker at Dollar General, whether addicted to meth or not.
CaseyL
@kalakal: Whenever I hear about ex-pat communities in foreign countries, that is literally the first thing that comes to mind. Like Club Med (remember them?) for retired folk.
It strikes me as insane: why move to another country at all if you’re just going to stay in your own enclave?
zhena gogolia
@Gin & Tonic: Vomit.
tobie
We just had a school board election in Cecil County, Maryland. A longtime educator was beaten out by the owner of an equestrian school promoted by MAGA Republicans. She promised to bring religion back into the classroom and to limit the WOKE agenda. Industry will never come to place where you don’t have a skilled work force. Local choices, local consequences.
kalakal
@CaseyL: From their point of view they want their lives to be just the same but with better weather, a bigger house, and cheaper stuff.
I don’t get it, they’re retired, they have all the time to do new things etc. All I can think is that in their heads they’re not moving to a different country, they’re colonizing one ( at least for their lifetime)
Kent
Most actual agricultural labor is done by immigrants these days. That is who works on big dairy farms, big chicken and hog operations, and so forth.
Kent
I have an elderly aunt who lives in an American retirement colony in Lake Chapala, Mexico (outside Guadalajara). The only Spanish ever spoken there is by the maids and gardeners.
UncleEbeneezer
I’d love to see some polling of rural, black people on this because I suspect very few of them share the animosity towards Cities that white (and other, non-Black) rural people seem to harbor in disturbing amounts. I know Black people from rural TX, NC, Nebraska, Alabama, etc. Some are proudly “Country.” None of them have resentment towards Urban America or the belief that big cities are dangerous, hellholes.
EarthWindFire
Because they’re special and deserving, of course. Never underestimate how far that goes in the rural conservative (or any conservative) mindset.
I had a conversation with an exurban hairdresser about the minimum wage. It was all about how she worked hard to get into her profession and someone who didn’t work at McDonald’s didn’t deserve what they were getting now, let alone an increase. Economic arguments were not going to sway her. It was all about who deserved what.
thruppence
Had some old guy (maybe a little older than me) say that some girl’s athletics program had been cancelled because some trans girl hurt her dick. I am sure whatever source he’s reading is lying to him but there are a lot of folks who really really want to hear lies that justify their resentment. That’s their truth.
japa21
@zhena gogolia: Triple vomit when you read the replies.
mrmoshpotato
@HumboldtBlue: Wow. I watched about 10 seconds of that with the sound off.
Internet, make that racist asshole famous.
scav
@CaseyL: But then, from merely hearing someone speak in a foreign tongue, it’s a hell of a leap to assume they’re refusing to learn English and/or assimilate and/or have no loyalty to the country. It’s as though the last bit of the Pledge of Allegiance reads No tongue other than English shall ever even touch my lips nor assail my ears. Monolingualism is us. Hence their behavior when they even deign to go abroad, bellowing English louder and louder demanding everyone hop to and serve them their hamburgers on the Champs d’Élysées. Seems somehow allied to their hatred of the “over-edjucated” or anyone different from themselves as much as anything else.
Suzanne
@tobie: So in Arizona, back in 2014, just when everyone there was going fucking batshit, Arizonans elected this absolute loser named Diane Douglas as Superintendent of Public Instruction. She was terrible. Her only educational experience was apparently teaching an adult-ed stained glass art class at one point. She beat a guy named David Garcia (Dem), who was much more qualified. When her term was up, she was finally beat by a Dem named Kathy Hoffman. Hoffman lost re-election in 2022, in part due to a lot of anger about COVID-related school closures.
The absolute corpse flower who beat Hoffman last year is this fuckstain named Tom Horne, who has decided that social-emotional learning is terrible and must be eradicated, because it teaches self-control and tolerance for difference. Diversity is bad, guns are great!
(Remember this fact when getting really excited about Ruben Gallego and “Arizona turning blue”.)
Ruckus
Betty
A lot of the resentment is that the world is leaving small town life behind.
Work goes and money follows. Life gets worse. Stores close because enough flowing money is gone. Life gets worse. People don’t want to move but big business goes where the money is, and it ain’t in small town USA. And without a basic business or product the town gets smaller and smaller till poof, it’s gone. And those people who are afraid of cities or suburbs, of a life that minorities get the right to help decide/run, of minorities themselves becomes all that is left. And they become haters because they couldn’t/wouldn’t see life changing in any way, it HAS to be as it ever was. But they are wrong, life is never as it was for very long. People say that life changes too fast, and yes it used to change at a slower pace. But that change has always been there, it just was at a slower rate and not so obvious. And a lot of that change is the power of a few losing what they once took away from everyone else. They created the need for more speed of change, the need for change itself by trying to shut down everything that fought their power. But pure numbers are winning.
RaflW
While some of what rural Americans resent as liberal intrusions (someone commented on watershed regulations, IIRC), so much of the hollowing out of rural American is a function of corporate consolidation, excess lobbying power by business and the very rich, and failures to really implement some of the policy ideas liberals do have (rural broadband has been far too slow, for example).
I saw that Sen. Warnock is going to be working on the next Farm Bill. That behemoth has tended to reward huge, vertically integrated Ag corporations and not done enough to preserve smaller scale farm systems. One of the reasons a bunch of Driftless area farmers in Wisconsin formed Organic Valley farmer coop back in the late 80s was because they needed a way to differentiate their product and not just sell bulk milk at shitty prices for mass markets.
Meanwhile, Walmart was round one of hollowing out market town main streets. Now “Dollar” stores are screwing even smaller towns, and the ‘better’ choice is to drive further to that Walmart that shuttered the local supermarket, the sewing store, the clothing stores, etc. And we know Walmart ain’t f**king liberal.
Suzanne
@EarthWindFire:
I have been told that it is entitled and arrogant of me to make more money than the tradesmen who work on the buildings I design.
cain
@The Moar You Know: Perhaps if something were to happen to her Fox News subscription? I heard a lot of people start reverting back to their old selves once Fox News is no longer running.
tobie
@Kent: But isn’t that the point? Rural white Americans aren’t farm laborers. They’re too well heeled for that. But they routinely vote for politicians promising to build a wall.
cain
@WaterGirl: Except that one group will elect a party that only makes it worse in exchange to giving it to the libs.
different-church-lady
@EarthWindFire: It’s not about the fact that hairdressers make more than fast food workers. It’s that we treat fast food workers like they’re worthless disposable shit who don’t deserve to make any kind of living at all.
Suzanne
@Ruckus:
Yes. This is literally why cities exist. They’re economic engines that allow for specialization of labor, which is more efficient. They don’t exist for the purpose of providing better quality of life, though that is a second-order effect. They exist to make more money and stuff.
Apparently on/around May 23, 2007, for the first time in human history, more people in the world lived in cities than in rural areas. So this is a global change and is a continuation of a pattern of hundreds of years, if not longer.
UncleEbeneezer
Also, the idea that this resentment is based on geography and good faith concern over conditions in Rural America, is belied by the fact that the same anti-Urban resentment can be found in tons of (mostly, but not ONLY) white people who live in suburbs and even in cities themselves.
A much simpler explanation would be to note that: cities have always had lots of immigrants and (after the Great Migration) lots of black people. Cities = black/brown People, immigrants, etc., and we live in a country that has always been horrifically racist and xenophobic, so naturally resentment of Cities will be off the charts in places that are rural and mostly-white/non-black. Throw in decades of the GOP, Fox News and Rush Limbaugh racist, anti-Urban propaganda and here we are. Cities are where the Others are allowed to be (somewhat) free. I don’t think it’s more complicated than that.
El Muneco
@The Moar You Know: My joke is that I’d rather have any random Spanish-speaking immigrant than a MAGA because:
tobie
@tobie: I wish farm labor (i.e., immigrants) could vote. It would change the composition of things like the school board. It would give rural regions a new lease on life.
Kent
If you want to understand the rural mindset, first read Nicholas Kristof’s two stories about the decline of his home town of Yamhill Oregon and its descent into meth addiction and despair (BTW, my dad grew up in rural Yamhill County)
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/09/opinion/sunday/deaths-despair-poverty.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/28/opinion/sunday/deaths-despair-keylan-knapp.html
This is the part that Kirstof doesn’t tell you. Yamhill OR is not in the middle of Appalachia. Pull up google maps and check how far Yamhill is from the Intel HQ in Hillsboro Oregon which is more or less the epicenter for the most prosperous and fast growing economic engine in the Pacific Northwest outside of Bellevue/Redmond Washington
Hint, it is basically a 1/2 hour 20 mile drive to one of the fastest growing economic centers of the entire Pacific Northwest. Construction, healthcare, tech jobs are everywhere there. And the distance is less than most ordinary commuters suffer on a daily basis. A 1/2 hour commute is not that unreasonable. I have next door neighbors who’s commute is twice that long.
Yet instead of getting in their cars and driving to where the jobs are, every damn white person in this story descends into a cycle of despair and addiction because the local mill jobs that their daddy used to have are gone.
And of course the town of Yamhill voted for Trump by 29 points (63% to 35%) in 2020.
cain
@jonas: Because they’ve grown up with the Bible and capitalism as the two pillars of rural life. You work hard, you pray to Jesus, and you obey your elders.
Anything that challenges that – well, that’s just Lucifer doing his business.
What’s funny is that this thing continues to persist in some places even though it is 2023, not 1954.
Suzanne
@different-church-lady:
For plenty of people, it is about that. Income is social status to lots of people.
I see lots of people direct their scorn and derision downward and sideways, rather than upward. I don’t know why I should disbelieve them when they discuss what’s pissing them off.
Jager
@$8 blue check mistermix:
My mom grew up in a small town (160 people) her high school graduating class in 1943 had 8 kids in it, 3 boys, and 5 girls. One of the boys was killed in WWII. another moved to a bigger small town 30 miles, the other boy was considered “essential during WWII and later inherited the family farm, he married a classmate, the other 4 girls all moved on. This has been going on forever in rural America. My old man came back from WWII, Army Air Corps wings on his chest, my grandfather expected him to settle down, and start farming. Dad said no, he finished college on the GI Bill, and supported us by giving flying lessons, crop dusting, and skywriting. Dad and my grandfather barely spoke for the next 8 or 10 years.
Betty Cracker
@The Moar You Know: Same in FL cities, really — you absorb a baseline amount.
@CaseyL: I’m a lifelong FL resident who has spent considerable time in South FL, and my experience was very different from yours.
Kent
That is the point exactly. We don’t live in a Currier and Ives world. In fact we never actually did.
Betty Cracker
@Jager: Your dad sounds fascinating!
cain
@Kent: JFC – you should be required to know Spanish there. It’s what these retirees deserve. They probably vote MAGA in the U.S.
RaflW
@UncleEbeneezer: Oh, there’s a ton of people in the outer ring suburbs of Minneapolis-St. Paul who try their hardest not to come to our fair cities (and I mean, before the George Floyd uprising or anything).
They might dare dash in for a Vikings game, but only by parking their SUV in a close-in garage, eating some hot wings on the heavily securitized arrival plaza, seeing the game and fleeing.
Otherwise, before Covid they’d ring-commute to other suburbs for work, shopping, and recreation. I still think well of my city (Minneapolis – I can see the skyline all winter before the trees leaf out … if I’m not out west snowboarding), but like other cities we’re struggling with the loss of daily downtown workforce, and our policing system seems intractably broken.
But even with that last part, it’s so incredibly different than what a slice of suburbanites think it is.
cain
@Ruckus:
You are missing one other bit here though – those small towns are also getting less white – because the small businesses can only afford immigrant labor so there is more and more brown folks there. Your labor is Mexican, your Doctor is Middle Eastern, your restaurant owner is Chinese. These towns are getting diversified because the kids are leaving and the ones who stay behind don’t want to work for pay rate being offered.
JustRuss
Yeah. One of my in-laws is a nurse, worked in one the places that was a hot spot early in Covid. Shared horror stories about all the people dying in her hospital. Her maga brother still insisted it was a hoax. Effing crazy.
RevRick
@Kosh III: This is a huge factor! All of these tumultuous economic changes have been going on for decades. There are rural counties in America that have been in decline since the 20s, and many big cities peaked in 1950 ( here’s looking at you Baltimore, Buffalo, Cleveland, St. Louis), but the way the residents of those declining areas handle it is almost at polar opposite.
When I first moved to Westmoreland county PA in 1975, it was a rock solid, labor union, Democratic county. And it remained so for another 20 years, despite deindustrialization sweeping the area like a scythe. Today, it’s one of the largest Republican counties in PA.
So, what changed?
The explosion of rightwing media. I recall a study showing exposure to Fox News moves voters rightward over 3%. It tells rural and exurban whites that Democrats are the enemy. (As well as a lot of vile stories about others).
cain
@Kent: Yamhill is also where all the wine growers are – so some of that is big businesses/wine growers wanting lower taxes and of course illegal labor.
Yes, conservatives strongly believe in tradition – even if it is a shit tradition. If their forefathers were miners, by golly so are they. I can see why though – so many things that they associate with cycle comes down to food, family and friend traditions, that create strong social bonds.
I see that for myself – for instance, why do I prefer an Indian spouse vs a non-Indian? While I don’t have a particular problem with it, the non-Indian partner is only going to get a portion of all the bits that goes inside these family traditions.
NotDiggerPhelps
Tom Nichols is biased in favor of anything that allows him to live comfortably in an assertion that his lifelong support of “conservative Republican politics” doesn’t look like the wrong bet and a racist/foolish one as well.
geg6
@Kent:
You just described Beaver County, PA perfectly.
RaflW
@cain: I’ve written about this a few years ago here, but I’ll shorten it a lot: Lexington, NE used to have a fantastic Mexican restaurant. I ate there several times on my annual MSP-CO Rockies drives.
The last time I stopped in, it was nearly empty and seemed ‘off’. The food had declined.
As I drove back out to I-80, I noticed a new halal butcher, and the shift change at the big chicken processing plant was happening, I saw a significant African immigrant contingent (based, admittedly, on cursory view of their style of dress and skin color).
Lexington is still significantly Hispanic per census, but the small city is changing, again, in demographics. “White alone, not Hispanic or Latino” (census) is now 21.1% there.
Dawson County, which contains Lexington, voted 77% Republican for governor in ’22. Naturalizing a bunch of Lexington immigrants would have interesting effects (if the folks want to naturalize). How conservative-liberal, or R-D, are the Hispanics there? We should not assume anything.
oldgold
For years intelligence has been exported out of rural America. Those left behind, not all – by a long shot, but many, are a few peas short of a casserole. As such, unless their parents left them a farm, life has been difficult. They resent it and are easy marks for cynical political charlatans that place the blame for their difficulties on “others.”
CaseyL
@scav: Trust me on this: that was/is exactly the mentality of about 60-75% of the Cubans in Miami, esp. among the older ones. They said so. Frequently. Reading their political ads and pamphlets back in the 80s was “laugh or else cry hysterically” bad.
Now, I imagine the Venezuelans are replacing Cubans as resentful exiles. They certainly have the same politics.
Suzanne
@RevRick: So the methhead who broke into my house (while high and naked) was from Westmoreland County. New Kensington. Looks like a goddamn Bruce Springsteen song.
Did I tell y’all I looked up his voter registration and social media posts?! Fucker is a registered Republican. No alumni or employer information found. Many lovely posts about Dr. Levine and vaccines. I bet you can guess the tenor of those comments.
Baud
@cain: Por qué no los dos?
Jager
@Gin & Tonic:
Every kid I knew in school had a dad in the service during WWII, All the vets brought stuff home.
Sparkedcat
@Kent: A few years ago I spent a night in the Villages on a family matter. My lasting impression was that the community is a Disneyland for assholes.
AM in NC
@Citizen Alan: Exactly this.
And I don’t know what to do about it except hope that Dominion Voting puts FOX out of business and Democrats figure out how to break through the red propaganda bubble.
Roger Moore
@Suzanne:
Most fields can only change as fast as people leave the job. For something like architecture, where that happens mostly as a result of retirement, it’s naturally a slow process. The only way you can change the makeup of a field quickly is if lots of people are leaving all the time- often a bad sign for the field as a whole- or if it’s growing fast enough that it’s dominated by relatively new people.
Geminid
@Sparkedcat: The Villages has some Democrats, enough at least to organize a golf cart Biden parade in fall of 2020.
Brachiator
The main thing I hear (in cities and so I presume in rural areas as well) is that the Democrats only care about blacks and Hispanics, who are not real people, and before Trump the Republicans did not do enough about illegal immigrants. And if you just kept nonwhite people isolated, and made women docile and made gay people disappear, all would be right with the world, for those who accepted Jesus.
Meanwhile these same people want cheaper food and goods, but higher wages. They worship the idea of big business, but cry when the big businesses horde their profits which, the last time I looked, has always been a feature of capitalism. These people used to whine when railroad magnates and Gilded Age Robber Barons kicked their asses. They used to hate Republicans, but now love them because they hate nonwhite people more.
Things have NEVER been under their control.
Rural areas have always had to get goods and supplies from big cities, and have always sold to big cities. Montgomery Ward and Sears were more important and reliable than local stores in getting essential goods to rural areas, which also depended on the railroads before the modern highway system came along.
There were good times before, but also always some hard times. And Big Business kicked their asses long before MBAs came along.
There has never been a mystical age when there were only good times. Chumps need to wise up.
In the US, the UK, India, Brazil and elsewhere, there are always groups exploited by the right wing who think that all their problems are cause by a designated scapegoat and that only some Big Daddy can Make (insert name of country here) Great Again. I don’t know how you get these people to stop being suckers.
scav
@CaseyL: I don’t doubt there are individual cases. Not all immigrants are the same. But, a single or few examples does not explain the right-wing going bat-shit any time they hear any foreign language in any instance. Shit, even in places (like CA) where that “foreign” language was once the language of state.
dr. luba
@twbrandt: I live in the Union Lake area, my 90 year old mom lives in Troy. I take her to the symphony several times a year (I have season tickets), and she was impressed last night at how good downtown was looking.
She’s a raving liberal, though.
My niblings were raised in Troy, but love the city, and og there often. So do many of the youngs.
It’s the Fox watching olds who fear and avoid it. I go as often as I can.
PaulB
The thing is that we *do* care about some things, like bullying, prejudice, bigotry, misogyny, and racism, along with things like education, health care, childhood vaccinations, and so on. And legislatures in blue states often do pass laws that infringe on people’s ability to openly engage in some of these activities, as well as insisting that every child’s education must meet certain minimum standards, and that everyone should have access to basic health care, including abortions, and so on.
So, in some respects, we are thinking about them, and we are, in fact, telling them what they can do, cannot do, and must do. That does not make their protests valid or right, of course, but it does poke a huge hole in Nichols’ theory.
Jager
@Betty Cracker:
Dad would always take me flying, he had a big skywriting job one Saturday. The woman who would watch me while he was skywriting wasn’t at the airport that day, I had a kid’s leather flying helmet goggles and all, he strapped me in the front seat of the Stearman and off we went into the wild blue yonder. It was great. On the way home, he said, “Don’t tell your mother, she’ll kill us both.” We were riding in his Jeep at the time, no doors and no top.
Roger Moore
@CaseyL:
Sure, but that’s an exceptional case. Most of the people who move here who speak Spanish do try to learn English. It’s hard for them if they move here as adults, and doubly hard if they’re ghettoized so they aren’t exposed to English on a daily basis.
What’s really important is that the people speaking Spanish are usually only first generation immigrants. Second generation- and plenty of first generation if they come here early enough- grow up speaking a mix of English and Spanish, encounter enough English going to school to be native speakers.
I know a lot of immigrants from work. The better educated, higher SES ones aren’t necessarily 100% confident with their English, but they speak it tolerably well. The less well educated, lower SES ones don’t speak as well. In either case, their kids are a mystery to them because the kids are growing up American.
I can’t help but think of the cleaning lady in my department at work. She came here as an undocumented immigrant, took advantage of the Reagan-era amnesty to get legal status, and recently became a citizen. Her English isn’t great- she’s obviously still more comfortable speaking Spanish- but she can get by OK. And her children are fully assimilated.
Lapassionara
@scav: What I find amusing about the “English is our national language crowd” is that they don’t know anything about our history. I live in Missouri, which in the 19th century was full of towns where everyone spoke German. My grandmother was born in one of those towns. The only time she spoke English was in English class. One of those towns is considered one of the “most charming small towns” in the U.S.
Other languages have enriched our culture, and immigrants have enriched our culture.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I had the same thought, and I hope the people who ID’d her and tagged her business got the right person.
Kent
@Brachiator: That is all true.
But it is also true that small towns have been destroyed by big box stores like Wal-Mart that set up in the outskirts of the next town over. And corporate consolidation of smaller industries that used to frequent rural areas.
The history of economics in this country (and any other) is a long process of economic consolidation that has largely been negative for small towns and positive for large cities.
The fact that many small towns and rural areas have no real reason to exist anymore is the problem. 150 years ago they would have just been abandoned as ghost towns but today people want to stay put and there is just barely enough of a social welfare state to enable them to do so. But since it is just barely enough, they end up just barely hanging on lingering in a long slow death spiral.
trollhattan
Is “roots of rage” the same as “butts of hurt”?
Plop me anywhere in ‘murka and I’ll find outraged people. So fucking what is you point, maaan?
UncleEbeneezer
To underscore my point, let’s look at a state with both lots of rural areas and lots of black voters: Mississippi.
A quick Google search lists 27 of them. Of those, only twelve went for Biden: Quitman, Yazoo, Jefferson Davis, Copiah, Jefferson, Noxubee, Claiborne, Tunica, Jasper, Holmes, Tallahatchie and Humphreys. All of them are majority black.
Conversely, the rest of the rural counties that are not majority-Black (often with similar population and geography) all went for Trump. Every rural, Black-majority county went for Biden. All the rest, went for Trump. Every one of them.
CaseyL
@Betty Cracker: Good! I’m happy to hear it. I would love to know my experiences were anomalous, that most people in Miami/Miami Beach were not assholes after all.
phein63
I can’t help but think that Nichols is onto something. As I was reading him, I instantly thought of the famous LBJ quote:
“If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”
Pretty hard to do that anymore, what with a colored President, Vice-President, Senators, House Minority Leader, etc. They could be dismissed as tools of George Soros, but now they see on television shows about black families who may be rich, or successful, or who don’t want those people to move in and ruin the neighborhood (where those people are white). Take away their cultural/racial superiority, and what have they got left?
Betty Cracker
@Jager: Wow! 🙂 What an amazing memory!
Kent
@UncleEbeneezer: There are two factors that largely explain voting patterns in this country. Rural/Urban and race.
Pick any two adjacent states in the country and you can very closely predict how they voted in the 2020 election simply by looking at those two factors.
For example, let’s compare Wisconsin and Minnesota
Wisconsin: 33% rural and 79% white
Minnesota: 28% rural and 76% white
Those to factors almost entirely explain why Minnesota is solidly blue and Wisconsin is reddish. The fact that Wisconsin is 5% more rural and 4% more white entirely explains the fact that Minnesota voted 6% more Democratic in 2020 than Wisconsin.
You can do the same comparison of say Indiana and Michigan. Or Pennsylvania and Ohio. Or Georgia and Alabama.
In every case when you compare two neighboring states, the one that is whiter and more rural is the more Republican one.
The exceptions are pretty few and far between like Vermont and Florida which are more or less anomalies.
trollhattan
@Jager: Some is baked in via farm/ranch consolidation. Far fewer hands are needed because of crop standardization and mechanization, and the remaining farms grow larger as families sell off.
An easy observation driving through my former corner of Iowa: occupied farmhouse, empty farmhouse, empty farmhouse, farmhouse foundation, occupied farmhouse, etc.
When my parents fled with us in tow (in part those farmers not playing their bills at dad’s service station) our town had about 1,200 folks, now it has half that. My home is scraped away entirely.
Other towns, the ones near the processing plants, have grown.
Brachiator
@Kent:
This has often been a feature of cities since cities began.
This is not much different than what happened with Rust Belt cities and towns. Maybe rural areas are just starting to feel it more.
This happens to cities also for all kinds of reasons. I was reading about a High Steet in England that existed for 500 years, a thriving area of markets and shops. The Internet killed it.
What is happening is that the understandable fear and uncertainty that people feel are being exploited, but no real solutions are offered.
Anotherlurker
@CaseyL: When I was a regular diver visiting Cozumel or Tulum, I would make it a point to cram in some basic Spanish during my travel prep. After 15 years of traveling to these destinations, I found the local to be very supportive of my efforts to speak their national language. They would tease me with good natured ribbing at my imperfect pronunciation, vocabulary and butchered language.
For one example, Katherina, my waitress at my favorite breakfast joint, would make me order in Spanish. We would have a good laugh at my mistakes and she would suggest proper pronunciation, grammar vocabulary. We laughed a lot and I learned at lot from this warm, humorous person.
Citizen Alan
@oklahomo: I stopped going to my chiropractor for the same reason. This was back when Glenn Beck was on.
CaseyL
@Anotherlurker: I’m very aware of how limited my Spanish is, and therefore self-conscious about trying to use it. Having a friendly, supportive environment is absolute gold.
Ruckus
@Suzanne:
Exactly.
City life can be fuller. It is often noisier, busier, faster paced, and more crowed. It also has the issue, good in my mind, of competition for that dollar. IOW there are more supermarkets, more restaurants, more fast food choices, more stores, just all in all more options. A small town might not even have all the options above, like no supermarkets at all, one restaurant, one fast crap food joint. Walmart does not set up a store with less than a certain number of people per sq mile within a set distance from the store. Maybe one mechanic in town. How many docs or specialists, how many hospitals? A dentist? Professional people go where there are patients – got to pay off those school loans of $200-250K
I’m old enough to see the difference over the last 70 yrs of all types of things that make life easier/better and all of them cost money, money that a lot of small town life doesn’t give anyone.
I had a very good friend with sickle cell and she had to exploit the medical system to get care. She was exceedingly smart and driven to live, she volunteered often to be a ginny pig for medical advancements, so she could live. I visited her in hospitals several times when she had a sickle cell attack and she lived a good life a hell of lot longer than her disease normally allowed. Had she lived in a small town she would have been dead many decades earlier.
Matt McIrvin
@scav: Ages ago I recall some kind of study that just revealed that some substantial percentage of people believe that anyone speaking an unintelligible language in their presence is probably talking about them and plotting something against them.
Kent
Yep, and as time goes by all those abandoned farmhouses eventually vanish as the big farms pull out all the old fence lines and old structures such so they can farm whole sections uninterrupted using GPS.
It is exactly the same in every other rural industry. Here in the PNW, modern logging operations and mills can operate with 95% fewer workers than 100 years ago. Same for coal mining or commercial fishing. Economic “efficiency” is relentless and much of it involves reducing human labor.
Dan B
@HumboldtBlue: Awful news. I worked with many local Jewish leaders. Getting into their offices was like Fort Knox. I met one non-Jewish woman who was always at a synagogue. She was shot and killed in an attack on a Jewish organization. Hatred radiates outward.
mrmoshpotato
@trollhattan:
LMAO!
Dan B
@Matt McIrvin: We moved from an 80% white neighborhood, which had been 50% black when I moved in, to a 90% BIPOC and immigrant (Muslim etc.). The crime rate is half what the old neighborhood is.
Roger Moore
@RevRick:
Absolutely. The thing is that communities can only survive by adapting to the change rather than rejecting it. Places that demand to be able to keep living the way they’ve always done are going to fail when that way of living doesn’t work with today’s economy.
I always think about my hometown when this issue comes up. It’s about 150 years old- it was founded during the big town founding boom after the Civil War- and has gone through something like 7-8 major employment shifts during that time. Every generation or so, the town leaders had to find or build another major employer. It only survived because the leaders weren’t assuming they could stick with the same industries that had sustained the town 20 years before. Nearby places that thought they could stay farm towns forever have shrunk or disappeared.
Matt McIrvin
@UncleEbeneezer: You can look at a county-by-county map of any Presidential election starting about 1984 and see the old Black Belt curving across the South as a circular arc of Democratic votes, ending in a sort of T-bar along the Mississippi River.
WhatsMyNym
BTW:
Via Wikipedia
Amir Khalid
@Dan B:
Was heißt BIPOC?
Suzanne
@Ruckus: Funny you mention health care in rural areas. It is no secret that rural hospitals are closing across the country because they cannot financially survive.
In the last couple of years, my in-laws sold their farm on the outskirts of Fayetteville and bought a new one about an hour’s drive further out. I was really concerned about this because my FIL has been in declining health and isn’t supposed to drive any longer due to seizures. Anyway, he got a cancer diagnosis with a not-great prognosis during the pandemic. Now, Fayetteville isn’t tiny, but it’s not a hub for medical care, either. There’s a regional hospital. So I reached out and suggested that I would be happy to use my limited knowledge and connections to help him get a second or third opinion. I suggested Mayo, MD Anderson, Cleveland Clinic, Sloan Kettering, all the bigs. He seemed receptive to the idea, esp. because BIL recently moved to Minneapolis and Mayo Rochester wouldn’t be difficult to access. But MIL was offended by any insinuation that rural Arkansas might not offer the best cancer care, or that living on a farm when one can’t drive and there isn’t a damn thing to walk to is a real hardship. SuzMom doesn’t drive anymore, but she can walk to 50 different stores and services, and call for an Uber, and get to world-class healthcare in ten minutes.
Ruckus
@Lapassionara:
Most of the people that live here have family histories not that long ago from other countries. My mothers father was supposedly here from Sicily because he worked for the “Company” as an enforcer and was too good at his job. I have zero idea if this is true or even close to true, other than he came from Sicily in the late 1800s. The other side of my family is Scotch/Irish. I have no idea how many generations were here before me other than the one grandfather but I don’t think it was all that long ago in historical terms. And my story is not that much different than millions of us.
Eyeroller
I have never lived in a rural area but I grew up in the general region where Wal-Mart started (and is still headquartered). Sam Walton ran a Ben Franklin “dime store” but was forced out, so bought one in Bentonville, Arkansas and turned it into a proto-Walmart. For many years he expanded only in rural/small town areas, because the local “mom and pops” charged high prices and had poor service and selection.
It is likely that any local IGA (which originally stood for “Independent Grocers’ Alliance” and was a franchise/local ownership company) went out of business *because* the locals were driving 30 minutes each way to the nearest Wal-Mart, since it was so much cheaper and had a better range of products than the IGA. Not because some city-based corporation decided to close the store.
I don’t buy for a minute that it’s so much about economics as it is about cultural grievances and racism. The rural white population has also traditionally been much deeper into fundamentalist religion, and throughout the world, fundamentalism is associated with right-wing politics.
mrmoshpotato
@Amir Khalid:
BIPOC stands for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (project)
Ruckus
@Matt McIrvin:
In my experience that concept is not even close to new.
WereBear
Ford made a fortune because he wanted to get the hell off the farm, and he wanted to sell Model Ts so everyone else could too.
Citizen Alan
@Suzanne: People I grew up with have said similar things to me about what lawyers make. My response has been that I don’t have much sympathy for the sort of people who would have slammed me into a locker back in 7th grade because “reading is for fags” only to discover 30 years later that jobs requiring professional degrees generally pay better than those requiring a high school diploma or even a GED.
Amir Khalid
@mrmoshpotato:
Ah. Vielen Dank.
Citizen Alan
@Jager: My late father was nevor angry about it, or at least not to my knowledge. But I’m pretty sure he realized around the time I was 10 years old that I was never going to be the sort of son who would help him raise and tend to the cows hop on a tractor and plow the back 40 for him. And once he came to that realization, he sort of lost interest in me.
Suzanne
@Citizen Alan: I just say that if architecture is so easy, they’re free to try it. Start with the Pythagorean theorem. Don’t remember that? Oh well. Sucks to be you. I’ll take my paycheck now.
It really is about some people resenting that some of their peers are doing better (at least financially) than they are. The crabs-in-the-bucket mentality is strong. Should they direct their anger upward? Sure. But they don’t.
UncleEbeneezer
@Kent: Totally. But for most of America, including MN & WI: Rural = White and Urban = Black. It’s only in the South where there are still some rural, majority-Black counties. They support Dems. So even the Urban/Rural divide between Dem/Rep really hinges on Race more than anything else.
RevRick
@Suzanne: I am not surprised. Rage has a way of chewing you up.
Odie Hugh Manatee
My wife heard a conversation at her job between two elderly customers. One was telling the other about the horrible thing that happened to one of her granddaughters. It seems that she was raised all right and proper but she turned against their family values (about the best way to describe it) when she went to OSU (Oregon). She was telling her friend that they were making sure that this didn’t happen to her grandson by sending him to a “good Christian college”. I don’t think that they realize that the family succeeded in making her granddaughter into a thinking person.
She learned more at college and took it to heart. Good for her and I’m sorry to hear about the grandson’s bleak future.
Frankensteinbeck
Do we have to keep doing this?
It is not economic anxiety. Small town folk don’t uniquely suffer from the horrors of capitalism. Small town minorities are vastly less Republican. Run the statistics, and voting Republican tabulates with bigotry.
I was raised surrounded by these people, so I will tell you what it’s about, an opinion that I am surprised I’ve never heard here.
It’s about the ability to enforce conformity. The smaller the community, the easier it is to (brutally) enforce conformity. To beat the gays into the closet and the weirdos into acting like Men and Women. To shame the high school girl that the sports star raped and got pregnant, hiding his crime. To reward whoever puts on the public face that the community likes people to think they are.
For the majority to stomp the minority into obedience.
We talk about bubbles, but it’s way, way the Hell harder to stay in your bubble in a city, where the weirdos live next to you and work with you at your job and bitch on the subway about the same corporate malfeasance you hate. The bigger the voting pool deciding on what the government does, the more it has to at least tolerate minorities, because they’re part of the decision making process.
The federal government came in and forced desegregation. States rights? Because it’s smaller and easier to enforce conformity than on the national level. Every advance in transportation and communications has shown the weirdos – usually the children because they hadn’t been beaten into total acceptance yet – that there actually are other options, other worlds, possible protections from the conformity police. The internet blew this wide open, and let me tell you, I was at an age to watch the gigantic change it made.
Note the importance of a black president, and a black president winning reelection, proving just how far these people’s ability to enforce conformity has fallen.
As someone who got screamed at on the street, harassed, and physically attacked not for being any minority but just not visibly conforming, I feel very strongly about this. Why are they bigots? Because you used to be able to enforce a bigotry bubble in a small town, enforce it with violence and an iron grip. That has been slipping and slipping and slipping, partly by people voting with their feet, and they’re losing their fucking minds over it.
@$8 blue check mistermix:
Absolutely. It’s the mortal wound of enforcing conformity, and when it plays out on a family level the feelings are life-definingly intense on all sides.
@The Moar You Know:
Be beaten to death for wearing their hair too long or too short.
Kent
Well yes, you can also say that the reason why MN is more Democratic than WI is because Minneapolis is 2x larger than Milwaukee. Which not only makes it a more urban state, it makes it a more diverse state.
Here in the west though, rural areas are increasingly becoming Hispanic. I believe that the least-white counties in both OR and WA are rural counties with large Hispanic populations. The only majority-minority county in Washington is Yakima County which is majority Hispanic. Yakima County went for Trump by about 7 points which is still far less than the surrounding white counties in eastern Washington.
Delk
I had two Polish workmen in my house today that spoke English a hell of a lot better than I spoke Polish. They humored me and corrected some of my case use and pronunciation.
Llelldorin
@The Moar You Know: You grow up in a heavily Asian community near Monterey Park, like I did. California has a lot of Spanish-speakers, but they’re not uniformly distributed.
brendancalling
For years, at BooMan Tribune, Washington Monthly, and now at Progress Pond, Martin Longman has been arguing that the Dems need to embrace and push anti-trust legislation, because rural areas are so deeply affected by corporate consolidation.
NotMax
@Kent
Real Housewives of Yamhill never got the green light.
//
Eyeroller
@brendancalling:
This sounds like “What’s the Matter with Kansas” romanticizing about the problems with rural whites. I think corporate consolidation has little to nothing to do with it. It’s mostly about racism and control, as others here have mentioned.
UncleEbeneezer
@Frankensteinbeck: THIS. Rigid belief in and enforcement of a hierarchy of White (Cis/Het/Xtian/Male) Supremacy.
lowtechcyclist
@Suzanne:
What was their definition of ‘city’? Per the Census Bureau, that was true for the U.S.A. according to the 1910 Census. The definition was that any community with a population over 5000 was ‘urban.’
Odie Hugh Manatee
@Kent:
I live in rural Oregon and the big city resentment is something to see and hear. What’s hilarious is that quite a few of these rugged individualists hit the big city to shop and have some fun. For some reason they have a great time and some fun on their trip.
Then they head back to their rural meth-addled community and resume their complaints about the horrors of the big city.
Frankensteinbeck
@UncleEbeneezer:
That is certainly the most important conformity, but sometimes I do like to note that it covers much more of life than that.
lowtechcyclist
@brendancalling:
We have had the same legislation for most of the post-WWII era, AIUI, it’s just how it’s been interpreted by those with the power to enforce it.
Dan B
@Amir Khalid: I don’t know German.
Answered, phew!
Dan B
@Eyeroller: My mother grew uup in Clarksville, AR home of the College of the Ozarks. Her aunts taught there. Now it’s the University of the Ozarks thanks to one Helen Walton.
Jager
@trollhattan:
I have a “Baby” Aunt and Uncle, they are both in my demo. Gary has the farm he inherited and he has bought 7 other farms, He also leases a couple of thousand acres. He has 4 Mexican families who have worked for him since the 80s, he sold them houses on the farms he bought. The rural consolidated school where my Aunt taught for 30 years is now 18% Hispanic. They have lots of $$$, travel in the winter, and have first-class machinery. Uncle Gar has 9 classic cars in his 10 car garage complex. Yeah, life is different than it was for Gar’s parents. Oh, I forgot the lake home and their 3 boats. Last time we were out there, they had a party, I met this goofy bastard (you’d think he couldn’t find his ass with both hands) He not only had a big farm, but he also owned a macadamia nut operation in Hawaii. My grandfather who farmed about 20 miles from Gar’s place would fall over dead at “family farming” in 2023.
Kent
It is an absolutely undeniable fact that much of rural America has declined and small towns everywhere are in a death spiral. I see it in the small PA town where my mother is from that we have been visiting for family reunions since about 1970. Life has gotten a lot shittier. The HS is gone and consolidated with one in another town 20 miles away. Many of the local businesses that used to populate main street are long gone due to the Wal-Mart and other big box stores in the next valley over. And no young person with ambition higher than working at the local Dollar General sticks around unless they happen to inherit a farm and then have to work side jobs to make it pay.
That it all economics and it is happening across rural America. The blame is most certainly misplaced. And a lot of it is self-inflicted. But there is no doubt it is happening.
And yes, they can be racist as fuck. Which has a lot to do with voting patterns. But to say economics has nothing to do with it is equally wrong.
I suppose there are actually two separate questions here.
First, what is happening to rural America? That is mostly economics
Second, why do they vote the way that they do? That is a whole combination of factors of which race is certainly a component. But economics is also certainly a component. And in both cases they are largely misguided or wrong and that is because they live in a sea of Fox News.
Kent
What part of Oregon do you live in?
I grew up in rural Oregon (exurban farmlands north of Eugene). I have lived all over since and we currently live in Camas WA (across the river from Portland.
I’ve lived in rural Texas and honestly the most redneck and hateful place I have ever been was Roseburg Oregon. Back in the late 70s we used to get warned when we would go down there for football games and the assholes in the stands would pour drinks on you and drop stuff when you walked next to the stands to get into the stadium. That is the place that went ape-shit with right wing pro gun rage when Obama came to visit after the school shooting there.
And of COURSE they are STILL the Roseburg Indians because the community demands it. And the county went for Trump over Biden by 38 points.
Glidwrith
@Frankensteinbeck: Thank you, from one of the weirdos that never fit in until getting out of the small-minded, God-help-you if you dared to be more than your socially assigned role.
Glidwrith
@Kent: Visiting the hometown area, Rogue Valley: Ashland, Talent, Phoenix, Eagle Point: you ever notice now that all the prosperity is centered at the college and steadily becomes poorer as you head north up the valley? I can’t unsee it, now that I’ve seen it and those folks hate Ashland and the college with a passion.
suzanne
@lowtechcyclist: Not sure exactly how it was defined, but here’s more about it from Our World in Data.
UncleEbeneezer
@Frankensteinbeck: Like what? Honest question. I struggle to imagine any type of conformity that doesn’t directly relate to what I wrote.
UncleEbeneezer
@Kent:
“Second, why do they vote the way that they do? That is a whole combination of factors of which race is certainly a component. But economics is also certainly a component.”
When poor, rural, Black voters start going MAGA at a heavy clip, then I’ll start believing economics is a significant factor. But as my Mississippi example illustrates, they don’t.
EarthWindFire
Because they don’t deserve to, according to my hairdresser. According to her and a whole lot of other people, they should have moved on from that job and left it to the teenagers. That they didn’t must mean they’re lazy and undeserving. This is a mindset that is very real and imo, pretty prevalent.
Kent
Yep, Cave Junction is literally the poorest shithole town in all of Oregon and it is right there west of Ashland way out in the sticks. Full of equal parts meth heads and MAGA filth.
Kent
You miss my point. They are LIED to by FOX news and convinced that Democratic regulations like the Green New Deal or Spotted Owl or whatever are responsible for taking away their jobs or raising the price of gas. So yes, one part is race, and the other part is economic even if it is the result of lies.
Black people in MS know better because they have a 300 year history and their own alternate sources of information not filtered by Rupert Murdoch.
nasruddin
@Roger Moore: (and others) The difference between Now and say 60 years ago in most small towns is immense. I don’t really understand what the motivation was, but it seems that in the early 20th century a lot of small industries existed everywhere – factories, brickyards, things like that. They started consolidating and moving away in the 60’s (perhaps earlier).
If you go back a generation or two, especially pre WWII, the need for farm labor was very high. Farms were much smaller than now and many more people were on the land working it. If you go back to the 19th C, everyone was on the land – part of the time. The town doctor farmed a few acres. The sawmill owner had some cattle &c.
The long run effect is efficiency in farming going up and industry going down, leading to large population loss.
Why there is resentment & fear I couldn’t say. It’s not restricted to country vs city mice, tho; I knew plenty of people in pre-COVID days in San Francisco who would refuse to cross the water to Oakand / Berkeley (vice versa rarer).
PapuJones
@The Moar You Know: Same situation with my father in law. When I met him 20 years ago he was a nice man who loved his life.
MAGA brought out the hidden bitter bigot that was apparently buried in him. Now all he does is complain about Those Lazy Illegals.
He got to the point wheee he apparently couldn’t stand living in a California beach community one more minute because CA is a soshulist hellhole now. So he moved to Texas where “they don’t deal with all that Blue sh*t”. Good riddance.
Gvg
@japa21: the rural areas do not need the population as such. Farming for instance even on family farms is just more efficient than it was pre mechanization and pre scientific crop breeding, fertilization and fast shipping and packaging to preserve the crop so it doesn’t spoil before market. Basically we need fewer farmers and a lot of farms are being abandoned. That even means the corporations don’t need to acquire more farms to produce more than they did in the past on the same land. I think they are developing a lot of their land as homes and selling. The product isn’t spoiling before market, the farmer needs fewer laborers, even the migrant labor is less massive than it was historically because it isn’t needed any more. And so the farmers kids HAVE to leave or find some other job. Prior generations often worked in a local produce factory or had a side job like small engine repair, but now they are gone. And I guess they blame us, but it’s really a lot of things. Not all of them are corporate monopoly building either, it’s mostly seems to be efficiency in little bits here and there, research, increased knowledge. The best family farmers are always reading and are quite scientific and financially calculating, but the trends are unfavorable and if your neighbors are not introspective you live where nobody helps you see the big picture.
My mothers family lost the family farm a few years ago. About a 150 years in Wisconsin gone because my Aunt got cancer. Bills, time away from the farm, there is always a mortgage, there is never any margin for trouble like that. Farmers get cancer a lot. Too many chemicals especially in the past. Their kids had already left though. Too many other farms had gone, population had been dropping for years.
Breaking up big ag corporations will not change these numbers for actual farmers and ranchers. I can’t think of anything that will. It can still help many things to break up monopolistic corporations all over but it really won’t fix the rural problem. Don’t promise what we can’t deliver.
Matt McIrvin
@brendancalling:
I think this is a great idea, because it’s the right thing to do, but unlike most of the people pushing it, I have zero belief that we will get any kind of electoral cookie for it. It seems to be an idée fixe among the kind of people who believe that rural white racists have an inner socialist waiting to get out if the left just gets out of its own way.
OverTwistWillie
I remember an account of a railroad steel gang boss that worked with African American Gandy Dancers – this was back in the 60’s, and they flat refused to go into some rural American shithole because a worker had gotten lynched there in the 20’s trying to buy groceries.
Maybe the economic hollowing out had some causes deeper than -derp- capitalism /derp.
Albatrossity
Living here in Flyover Country, and also having lived on the coasts, I can tell you that there is plenty of provinciality in this country in both zones More than enough, actually. People always think that the way they have always done things is the best way, and they invent fictions to convince themselves that folks in different parts of the country (or the planet) are clueless about everything.
‘Twas ever thus.
James E Powell
It’s a nitpick, but I’d say the portrayals are almost always sympathetic. Deliverance notwithstanding.
satby
@Anoniminous: Yeah, I’ve followed Sarah and donated to supplies for her team. Sorry to see her wounded (lost her thumb and other injuries on one hand, facial injuries too) but it could have been so much worse. She’s really an inspiration.
kalakal
@Gvg: A lot of my wife’s family is from rural south central Ohio. Around a dying small town called Greenfield. It used to be a city but the population has dropped below 5,000 so by Ohio law it’s now a village. It’s very depressing, looking at the main st you can see by the civic buildings that 100 years ago there was money there. Thanks to changes in farming there are few jobs left, one cousin has thrived with farming and has more money than he can count, 3 others are selling up after their father died, nearly all the rest have moved and gone on to different occupations. The only jobs in the place are healthcare, a cousin is the local doctor, prison guards( the state pen is not far away), services such as plumbing, orTaco Bell.
Go off the main street and 80% of the housing stock is decaying. The local joke is the place has been going downhill since the invention of the horseless carriage which put the horse blanket factory out of business.
Everybody who can get out does, whether to Columbus or Cincinatti, or out of state. And that’s not a new thing, couple of uncles & my FiL were in electronics for the Air Force & NASA, some were with IBM, basically all the ones who were surplus to the shrinking manpower demands of the farms but it’s accelerated & seems terminal.
Those who remain have very poor prospects for the most part and there are awful drug abuse problems
I can’t speak as to the attitudes of the people as the ones I’ve met are family & friends and they’re very nice ( to me at least). My wife’s generation & younger tend liberal ( not all but none of the others are MAGAs and there is the Uncle who has been poisoned by Fox. That is most definitely a thing, it’s practically the only source of ‘news’.
Even the nearest ‘big’ city Chillicothe is going downhill.
I’ve seen depressed areas in the UK & northern Europe and this ranks along with them, it just looks cleaner as the others were decaying Steel & mining towns.
The only hope for the place is that some major corporation decides to build a semi- conductor plant or such in the area.
Old industrial towns in the North of England were left wing politically and fiercely insular, the smaller the place the more insular, the old pit villages viewed anyone from 10 miles away as foreign,they were also socially very conservative. They’ve changed a lot.
Around Greenfield I got a very conservative social & political vibe, but I didn’t see much desire for change
Craig
@Joe Falco: yes, there’s a trope on the Hallmark Holiday bingo card about The City Slicker is too much of a jerk to get the girl, and the local yokal always gets the girl. He’s nice and wholesome and sweet.
kalakal
@James E Powell: My Cousin Vinny?
Craig
Whoops replied to the text I just got, can’t figure out how to delete this comment. LOL.
Soprano2
@Lapassionara: I grew up in Billings, MO. There is a German Church there – probably Lutheran. There is a Bible verse in German on the wall above the altar. There are lots of Germans there – Schmidt, Kastendieck, Harter, and so on.
jefft452
@PapuJones:
“Were small rural towns ever really “thriving” compared to cities? This isn’t a rhetorical question, I’m genuinely curious.”
Prior to ~100 years ago (the Sanitary Movement, ie the building of modern sewer systems), urban death rate was greater then urban birth rate. Yet cities never lacked immigrants from rural areas
You might be packed shoulder to shoulder with the carriers of every disease imaginable, breath polluted air, drink polluted water, risk fires and being sacked by invading armies
AND STILL – people wanted to move there to get a better life
This has been true for 10,000 years
tokyokie
I need to get back to studying, but through the first 50 comments, nobody had pointed out the No. 1 cause of the hollowing-out of small-town America. Most towns of about 5,000 or more used to have not just a grocery store and a pharmacy, but a hardware store, and a department store (or at least someplace that sold clothing and furniture), and one or two gas stations that also did car repairs. (They’d have a movie theater, too, but home video killed those.) But then Sam Walton figured out that he could plop a big store on the outskirts of town, consolidate all those services, undercut the local merchants on price, and drive the local merchants out of business. The downtowns in small towns dried up, and Walton accumulated one of the world’s largest fortunes. Sam’s long gone, but his useless progeny continue to generously fund the political party that best ensures that their ill-gotten riches will continue to grow. Rather than bitch about elites in New York or L.A., rural residents should aim their resentment inward, or at least toward a town in northwest Arkansas.
trnc
I finally looked at Nichols’ actual thread, and I don’t see the problem with what he wrote. He didn’t say people in blue states don’t consider people in red states unimportant. After all, we’ve been pointing out for a long time that we’re voting to elect people whose policies help red staters. He was saying that we don’t concern ourselves with what red staters choose to do with their time, while they are so concerned with what we’re doing that they will literally believe almost anything that justifies their obsession with it.
Totally fair points, IMHO.
ETA:
That’s important. The things we’re concerned with about red staters are things for which we have evidence and for which we can see real world consequences. Meanwhile, they imagine that we’re doing things and that the things we’re doing will tear down the very fabric of our society.
O. Felix Culpa
I’m several days behind posts lately, for reasons, but will add a few observations of my own, for reasons. :)
I grew up in a small town (county seat) surrounded by dairy farms. The county’s cow population outnumbered the people. The town had a shoe factory that had already closed by the time we moved there. M&M/Mars wanted to open a plant in the town. The town fathers (and they were all men) said in their infinite wisdom, no, thank you to the opportunity. So M&M/Mars opened a nice, clean plant with lots of jobs in the next county over.
Fast forward a few decades: the dairy farms are all gone and have become either strip malls or horse farms for the rich. The Main Street is shuttered stores or thrift shops. Most of the young people with smarts and ambition move away, just as many (not all) of my classmates and I did.
Politically? It was John Birch Society turf when I was young and militantly MAGA now. Moral of the story: maybe it isn’t about the economics. Did I mention that the area was and remains resolutely white? There were exactly two black families in town, and no Hispanics, other than a Cuban refugee and predictably rightwing family. No Asians of any description.
ETA: I was a lefty smartass in my youth. Ended up getting “shunned” my last year in town. That tool of social control/punishment is not confined to the Amish, and it is miserable, even if you don’t like many of people around you very much. I fled at the earliest opportunity. So fie on “economic anxiety” and yes to control and racism as undergirding politics in rural and exurban areas. Many suburbs too.
tokyokie
@Jager: Dead thread by now. But it occurred to me the other day that my paternal grandfather, who participated in the 1889 Cherokee Strip land run, had 12 grandchildren, many of whom were born after his death. And although he is buried in Oklahoma, not one of his grandchildren lives there these days.
Bupalos
I’m always surprised by how many people’s detailed assesment here just boils down to “these are just bad people.”
I like to compare and contrast the way people talked about the ills of the ghettos in the 80’s, how “those people” just make bad choices and self sabotage with a strident refusal to look at the rational roots of these behaviors. It’s happy to stop at “that’s bad, we need to keep reiterating that it is bad and by extensuon they are bad.”
At the bottom of this refusal is the bad, self-serving assumptuon that everyone has an equal shot and their outcome depends on their free choices. Few are willing to explore the reality that this is a competitive economy designed to run on an expanding pool of “losers” as wealth concentrates to winners. Especially few are willing to explore things like racism, fundamentalism, and fleeing to the imaginary past as having systemic rather personal moral failing. With many it almost feels like a kind of panic that if we acknowledge that these things do come by cause, we’ll be “coddling” them. Again this appears to me as an exact mirror of the way demoralized communities in the inner city have been talked about forever, by people who are really not that interested in questioning the systems involved as perpetuating them.
I am glad at least that some folks here get this and for this somewhat corrective post to the stupid Nichols one.
Wesley Sandel
And then there’s this little factoid:
Higher cognitive ability was associated with selective rural-to-urban migration (12 percentile points higher ability among those moving from rural areas to central cities compared to those staying in rural areas) but also with higher probability of moving away from central cities to suburban and rural areas (4 percentile points higher ability among those moving from central cities to suburban areas compared to those staying in central cities). The mobility patterns associated with cognitive ability were largely but not completely mediated by adult educational attainment and income. The findings suggest that selective migration contributes to differential flow of cognitive ability levels across urban and rural areas in the United States. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289614000750/
Bevstersf
OTOH, she said with profound superficiality, I can’t find an HGTV show that’s not about knocking down and rebuilding an 8000 square foot house in a suburb somewhere, which has very little relevance to me in my city condo. Seriously, if anything “rural life” is over represented in general.
Ontarian
I live in Ontario and guess what?
No Fox News here but still the rural voters are the reliable bedrock of the conservative vote.
I have no evidence for this, but I have a feeling that this is the case in most other democracies.
I also have an evidence-free feeling that this is due to the fundamentalist churches that provide an oasis of community in the rural cultural desert.
If you truly believe that not only does Satan literally exist, but also has human agents working 24/7 to overturn Jesus’s kingdom of righteousness, then you are ready to believe that Satan’s evil minions are Democrats, BIPOCs, LGBTQ’s, woke people etc etc.
And that they stole the 2020 election, no matter how the MSM might try to deny it.
TEL
@Kent: Yep I was going to mention that Kristof’s many columns about Yamhill all too often don’t mention that it’s not really all that rural. (former Hillsboro resident here – I still have family and friends there, so I visit a couple times per year). And while Yamhill may vote overwhelmingly for Trump, there aren’t many people left, so it’s barely a drop in the bucket of the overall vote for Oregon.
StringOnAStick
@Frankensteinbeck: You describe it perfectly. I grew up in a very small, very white town until age 10, when we moved back to at least a bigger small town that had some diversity. I would not have survived in the enforced redneck conformity of the first place, guaranteed. The second place was a place I fled for graduate school; never looked back but it wasn’t as suicide inducing like that first place would have been. Close, but not guaranteed.
robtrim
MAGA/Redstaters basically feel left out – and they are for several simple and complex reasons.
When I was on Twitter I followed Tom and found him usually quite perceptive. Why MAGA and its voice of unreason, Donald J. Trump, have corrupted everything they touch is the question of the last several decades. But, I’ll sum it up with one word – the Internet. And, of course, social media.
Any new communication technology – books, pen on paper, the printing press, radio, television, the WWW, cable “news”, etc. – changes our social and political landscape. This is not a revolutionary insight. Read Sinclair Lewis’s “Main Street”, written over a hundred years ago. It chronicles life in small-town, midwestern America. The human concerns and foibles of that era were not much different from today. Human nature, one could argue, is the underlying demon that civilization has confronted since the beginning of time. And the power of our technology is robust.
The unhappy citizens of rural America do feel left out because they in fact are. Morals, mores, racial divisions, and global friction are changing quickly. And, generally speaking, people don’t adapt to change very easily. If you’re a caucasian MAGA in a Red state, the urban, coastal, increasingly “brown” world looks like the third world – itself a very threatening place. It’s a place to fear.
And fear is Donald Trump’s agent of change. As it has frequently been throughout history.
And, if you’re selling fear, Fox News, social media and 24/7 hysteria are the venues to go to. Gossip and anger are no longer confined to “over the backyard fence” rants, as in the days of Main Street. Tucker Carlson is a single example of the effectiveness of vile propaganda on the public mood. He’s not hand printing political pamphlets for distribution on street corners. He’s got millions of real-time viewers who are part of the “right-wing” media echo chamber. And he is only the tip of the poisonous internet, social media garbage heap.
I’ll save Part II of this discussion for another time.
Paul in KY
@karen marie: Alcohol is a hell of a drug…
Paul in KY
@CaseyL: I was in S. Florida (Homestead) back in 82 – 85 and I didn’t have the same experience. Alot of Spanish being spoken, but when I asked in English the person responded. I heard about what you mentioned, but never really experienced the ignoring like you did.
Paul in KY
@Suzanne: I would laugh at that!