Another rainy day here in WV. Since I have returned from Arizona, all but six days have been rain or completely overcast, and I realize, painfully, how much impact sunlight has on my mood. I’m fine and back to normal for the most part, but man, the rain sure puts a damper on my spirits.
I suppose it could be worse, and I could be an Arizona Republican:
Although the decision was stayed for two weeks, the political shockwaves were immediate. 59% of Arizona voters believe that abortion should be “mostly or always legal.” Arizona Republicans facing competitive elections quickly attempted to distance themselves from the decision. But many of these same Republicans have previously supported the 1864 law or equivalent policies that would ban abortion from the moment of conception.
United States Senate candidate Kari Lake (R) released a statement saying, “I oppose today’s ruling, and I am calling on Katie Hobbs and the State Legislature to come up with an immediate common sense solution that Arizonans can support.”
In 2022, however, Lake called the 1864 abortion ban “a great law.” In June 2022, Lake said in a primary debate that “she believes life begins at conception and that abortion pills should be illegal.” Lake has also called abortion the “ultimate sin.” When Roe was overturned, Lake celebrated, saying, “I’m so happy that we’re going to be saving the lives of the unborn and finally protecting the rights of the unborn. I believe in Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness for All Arizonans, including our unborn.”
If this law didn’t do so much harm, this would be downright fun to watch.
At ay rate, I have to get up at the crack of dawn, so I’ll holler at you later.
Oh, and read this piece on rural whites.
Baud
“I recognize she’s governor this ONE TIME ONLY!”
piratedan
@Baud: “I demand that Democrats save us from our perfidy of our own political sins!”
Baud
@piratedan:
One common sense solution is that all the Republicans in the legislature resign and let Dems fix this.
Jackie
A LOT of AZ GQPers are suddenly flip-floppers right now. They weren’t supposed to catch the car seven months away from a General Election!!!
Chet Murthy
John, that’s an excellent (and sobering) article. Well worth the read, thank you for suggesting it!
schrodingers_cat
Sharing for the evening crowd, guess who
ETA: Clue it is my new Twitter avataar.
Baud
Reddit thread on that article.
Ohio Mom
@schrodingers_cat: So cute! So adorable!
bbleh
Good article, but as they note, hardly unfamiliar to people who live it every day.
The childlike victim complex I see so often — the combination of ignorance, outrage, overt bigotry, and bristling defensiveness — is frankly so tiring that I mostly don’t bother interacting with the majority of people I encounter except for the bare polite necessities.
I can’t help but think that they — like TIFG — are perpetually unhappy, likely in many cases for reasons they don’t understand themselves — and that a lot of their attitude is ill- or entirely-un-thought-out reaction to that. But oh mah gah it is TIRESOME. Like, just crawl back up on your cross, hammer in the nails, and stop WHINING, wouldja?
eclare
@schrodingers_cat:
What a cutie pie!
zhena gogolia
@schrodingers_cat: Very cute!
Jackie
@Chet Murthy: This! From John’s link above:
Bingo!
eclare
Totally OT: I got a Memphis AF burrito from the food truck, which unfortunately was not on my corner. The pork and especially the mole were wonderful, but the corn was not. But I can’t think of what should been there in place of the corn. Refried beans would have been too crass and overpowering for the pork and mole. Any ideas?
p.a.
Republican party: oh shit we’ve poured gasoline all over ourselves and set ourselves on fire and you bastard Demonrats don’t have fire extinguishers!?!?
Democratic party: mmmmhmmmmm, mmmmmhmmmmmm. We’ve got skewers of marinated meat, corn tortillas, onions & cilantro. Oh and here’s a fine for unlicensed public burning.
eclare
@Jackie:
Wow. QFT.
Jackie
@eclare: Was the corn roasted? If not, that would make a difference between yum and bleh.
Argiope
Wow, those are MY rural whites. That photo was taken 8 miles from my house. Now I gotta go read the article.
schrodingers_cat
@eclare: @zhena gogolia: My dad sent me this photo, he is digitizing the old photos.
eclare
@Jackie:
Yes it was roasted, but it still wasn’t right. But I don’t know what would have been.
The pork and mole were divine.
eclare
@schrodingers_cat:
That is wonderful! I look forward to more photos.
Old School
@eclare: Rice?
geg6
@Old School:
That was my first thought.
eclare
@Old School:
Hmmm…yes. Rice would have worked. Thank you!
Ksmiami
@eclare: green Chile, rice, onions, lettuce, crema, tomatoes and cilantro. You’re welcome
schrodingers_cat
@Ohio Mom: Thanks OH mom.
Melancholy Jaques
Nevertheless, they vote for Republicans because . . .
Taxes? White supremacy? The danged fence? Not really sure.
Melancholy Jaques
@eclare:
I may be out of the mainstream, but I generally find the fewer items in a burrito, the better.
eclare
@Melancholy Jaques:
Yes, the pork and mole would have been enough.
delphinium
@bbleh: Yeah, these folks are pretty much perpetually aggrieved and no policy which Democrats come up with will change that. They would rather walk around with a figurative ‘kick me’ sign on their back than consider changing their voting behavior to try and improve their lives.
Of course this attitude can also be found in many better-off folks too.
Sister Golden Bear
@eclare: Mission (SF-style) burritos typically use whole beans and rice as the “bulk,” among with other ingredients. Such as the ones @Ksmiami: mentioned, adding crema, lettuce, etc. is considered a “super burrito.” Pinto beans are more common, but black beans can also be used.
schrodingers_cat
@Melancholy Jaques: That’s why I prefer tacos.
Bupalos
Excellent piece you included there
nut graf:
“We would ask rural scholars to confront this question: How is it that rural minorities, who by most measures face even greater challenges in health care access and economic opportunity than their white counterparts, do not express weakened commitments to our democracy, or the anti-urban, xenophobic, conspiracist, and violence-justifying attitudes so many rural whites do?”
The answer I suspect is that humans react more strongly to loss than to ongoing dearth. This is a point which shouldn’t be seen as morally damning the way it is. It’s just human. And academics should be able to deal with it without feeling a need to obscure it in a kind of rural political correctness.
NotMax
eclare
Quinoa?
John Revolta
@eclare: There’s some as put cole slaw on their BBQ sandwiches. It’s not my thing especially, but it’s a suggestion.
Chet Murthy
@Jackie: I read that and thought “Timothy Snyder’s ‘sadopopulism’ comes to mind”. It explains so much about the G(r)OP.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOjJtEkKMX4
John Revolta
The Rural (and plenty not-so-rural) Whites can’t get over everything not being All About Them anymore. Unless and until they stop seeing so damn many coloreds on the teevee, and in the goddamn gubmint!, I don’t think they’re ever gonna be happy again. Oh, well.
Gvg
@Chet Murthy: yes and as an urban white, may I mention my resentment of all the politicians and journalists I have heard over my years refer to the non rural as “not real Americans”. Sometimes I have trouble not being spiteful about all the help we give “them” but I know our prosperity is actually based on all the different parts of our country helping each other.
Jackie
@Chet Murthy: Yes.
John Revolta
@John Revolta: Mind you, they may still get their way. By 2040, if current trends continue, rural whites will be electing 70% of the Senate. Should be interesting!
Albatrossity
Thanks for that link to the article on rural white folks. I live in a mostly rural state, and the points those authors made are accurate and quite in line with what I have seen and heard here in Kansas. Racists hate to be told that they might be racists, and in refusing to recognize that possibility, they tune out all other discussions that might be fruitful…
El Muneco
@NotMax:
“eclare
Quinoa?”
I was thinking of this. Quinoa is horrible both ecologically and economically, but culinarily I think it would work on a pork and mole application.
piratedan
@Melancholy Jaques: we all know why, their financial betters have helpfully deflected their attention to who’s REALLY to blame and they have pointedly decided to not examine if those people have been lying to them.
Splitting Image
@John Revolta:
There’s a lot of politics going to happen between now and then. The billionaires use rural whites to get what they want because they are the handiest bunch of useful idiots who happen to be around. They’ll abandon the rednecks at the drop of a hat if there is money to be made elsewhere.
If rural white men think they’re marginalized now, I don’t think they’re going to enjoy the next few decades.
Martin
One of the problems of the church of rugged individualism is that when you systematically lie to a community, you can’t assign any of the blame to the liars, so you have to assign it all to the people being lied to.
mrmoshpotato
@eclare: Pico de gallo? Or would that be too much cilantro?
ETA – oh, rice. Duh. 🤦♂️
RaflW
@Splitting Image: @John Revolta:
I don’t get this math. Is the idea that 35 US states will have their statewide races dominated by rural voters in 2040? I know there’s a ‘great sorting’ going on where red states are getting redder, ie: Idaho, Montana, N & S Dakota, etc.
But most states are, I’m pretty darn sure, still urbanizing more than, uhhh, ruralizing.
I looked at the Kansas abortion vote by (IIRC) precinct back in ’22. Places like Wichita were quite pro-protecting bodily autonomy. But, even in towns of like 2000 people, the shift away from the conservative position was easily detectable.
Don’t want to over-infer, but as soon as people start agglomerating into at least mid-size cities, the voting patterns turn at least more liberal.
I was just having lunch yesterday with a fairly recent transplant to Longmont, CO, and he was saying it wasn’t that many years ago that Longmont voted more like the plains people to the east, but now we were on a city block that sported a trans-inclusion flag on a storefront business, and Joe Neguse is their Rep.
I absolutely get that we have a very long term and serious problem with WY having the same Senate power as CA. I’m not minimizing that.
But I don’t see the Senate moving from (about) parity now to 70-30 G.O.P. in 16 years.
NotMax
@El Muneco
Always viewed quinoa as couscous with pretensions of elitism.
;)
Barbara
@eclare: At a rec soccer team pot luck, one of the mothers brought a kind of cole slaw that she told me was Salvadoran. I would have eaten this on just about anything it was so good, but I think it would go well with pork and mole.
mrmoshpotato
@NotMax:
Thank you. That goes on my shitlist too. (I can’t stand couscous.)
Anyway
@Barbara:
Curtido? Love it.
TBone
Interesting article about Arendt on this subject.
https://www.vox.com/vox-conversations-podcast/23048597/vox-conversations-hannah-arendt-totalitarianism-the-philosophers
NotMax
Random musing.
Statistically improbable but wouldn’t it be neat-o if Dolt 45’s jury ends up being 12 women?
mrmoshpotato
@NotMax: Has a jury been all-men or all-women in recent times?
Martin
“Jacobs uses census blocks to sort each county by rurality, which is a good approach, but even his definition leaves huge numbers of people who live in rural areas within urban-designated counties and vice versa. ”
A good example of this is the movie ‘Nope’ was filmed entirely (or almost entirely) in LA county. This is what the most populous county in the country looks like. So is the church from Kill Bill, all the way out in fucking Hi Vista. Nearby is the abandoned B-52s at Edwards Air Force Base. Roughly half a million people live several large mountain ranges away from LA, but in the same county. Guessing Texas has a lot of this as well.
wjca
I realize that his lawyers are not exactly top flight. But would they really fail to use some preemptive challenges to avoid that?
(Well, unless their client objected. You know, on account of them looking like they came from central casting.) /s
Jackie
@TBone: Covid shutdowns seems to have exacerbated it.
It’s going to take time to undo the voluntary isolation caused by Covid.
NotMax
@wjca
Obligatory IANAL. My understanding is each side gets no more than 10 peremptory (read: instantaneous regardless or in lieu of jury questioning) challenges in this case, none of which can be used to deny service based on gender or race.
Opposing side is permitted to raise objection to ongoing peremptory challenges on the grounds of there being a pattern attached or perceived to be attached to such peremptory dismissals and it falls to the counsel calling for peremptory challenges to prove to the judge that the challenges have been made based on other criteria.
gene108
The italicized portion is stupid.
Folks have believed anytime someone from an out group gets a good job usually done by the in group, it’s because of
Affirmative ActionCritical Race Theory or the “woke” mind virus, and it’s been this way as long as I can remember.Return America to a meritocracy and problems will be solved.
Also, the out groups are always getting special treatment from the government that’s not available to the in group, like special holidays or history months, and more money in welfare payments.
That resentment’s been around forever.
The targets and names for what people resent changes, but at the core of why right-wing media and Republican politics appeals to these people is because they’ve believed what’s being sold for ages. There’s no golden moment in the past when white resentment wasn’t driving a fuckton of America’s policy decisions.
The only difference is rural communities aren’t doing as well socioeconomically as they did in the past few decades.
wjca
Thank you. I’d hadn’t been aware that preemptive challenges could be contested.
wjca
In at least some, maybe most, cases, they are doing better. In absolute terms. But they feel like they are doing less well in relative terms. Not least because they are seeing POC, especially urban ones, on TV (not least in commercials, which are pretty much the same nationwide**) who are doing better than they are. Of course, the white folks in commercials are also doing better, and always have been. But that’s beside the point..
It makes fertile ground for those looking to profit from bigotry.
** Not that long ago, minorities appearing in advertising were scarce. Now it’s routine. Even if what’s changed isn’t how well minorities are doing, but how visible they are.
John Revolta
@RaflW: https://archive.ph/5ZGWt
Geminid
@RaflW: People who make this argument with such confidence ought to be able to list the actual states where these hypothetical Republican Senators will come from. I don’t think they can.
Martin
@RaflW:
It’s pretty even, according to the census. Though I kind of question whether that matches people’s perceptions.
“To qualify as an urban area, the territory identified according to criteria must encompass at least 2,000 housing units or have a population of at least 5,000.”
So California has very few rural areas because even in-the-fucking-weeds agricultural towns have 5,000 people because ag here is high-labor. A single combine harvesting corn or wheat can do 150 acres a day. You need 300 workers to harvest that many strawberries or grapes. But I don’t think anyone would roll through these farm communities in CA and not think they’re rural. Indeed, CA classifies rural as under 20,000 people which feels about right for this state. A lot of other states have similar kinds of dynamics depending on their economies. But 20,000 people would be the 9th largest city in North Dakota. My homeowners association would be classified as the 6th largest. My kids high school would have made the top 20.
My understanding is that until 2020, rural areas were making up a declining share of the US population – a trend that was consistent for half a century, but since 2020 there’s been a slight uptick in rural, attributed to more work from home jobs. So, perhaps if WFH holds on, you could see more rural growth, but I don’t think the politics of these communities would be the same. WFH would effectively be a gentrification of rural areas.
No One of Consequence
Glad you are feeling better John. Well played on linking that article, what a fantastic read. Money quote for me:
“What isn’t said enough is that rural whites are being told to blame all the wrong people for their very real problems. As we argue in the book, Hollywood liberals didn’t destroy the family farm, college professors didn’t move manufacturing jobs overseas, immigrants didn’t pour opioids into rural communities, and critical race theory didn’t close hundreds of rural hospitals. When Republican politicians and the conservative media tell rural whites to aim their anger at those targets, it’s so they won’t ask why the people they keep electing haven’t done anything to improve life in their communities. ”
Peel away the bullshit, that right there is some hard truth. Most of my family comes from and many still live in rural areas of Iowa. The culture war crap is ever present, but Trump, Covid, opioids and the resultant distrust of the educated and professionally-dedicated still baffles me. That isn’t the Iowa I grew up in, where education was aspired to, heralded, well-regarded and a point of pride.
Anyway, thanks for the post man.
Peace,
-NOoC
Geminid
@Martin: Texas kept their counties relatively small. They have over 250, as compared to California’s 58. California’s southern counties are large even for California.
No One of Consequence
@gene108: Ironic that the passage I found impactful, you found to be stupid. Stupid doesn’t mean false, but from your reply, I gather your gist. But this isn’t a variation of “in-groups who the law protects but does not bind, and out-groups who the law binds but does not protect”.
I posit that the in-group in question here, Rural America, does have outsized political influence, but not the quality of life (no where near since the early seventies anyway) that could reasonably be expected to derive from it.
There seems to be a disconnect here. At least that is what I took away from the piece.
Admittedly, I am rarely allowed to leave the house without my helmet.
Peace,
-NOoC
UncleEbeneezer
I’m glad Waldman and Schaller pushed back on that bullshit Atlantic article. And he’s absolutely right about the reflexive attempts to defend White, Rural MAGA voters and make excuses for their bigotry.
Gretchen
@schrodingers_cat: cute!
VFX Lurker
That’s how I feel. I hope Arizonans claw back their rights this November, but I take no pleasure in their current plight.
Gretchen
@Bupalos: true that people react more strongly to losing something than not having it in the first place. That’s why people who think that the anger about losing abortion rights will blow over are wrong .
Martin
@gene108: “past few decades”? They haven’t been doing well since WWII.
Industrialization has always, always focused on increased productivity, and in rural areas where almost all economic activity is constrained by land area (farming, mining, etc.) that can only result in a reduction in workers needed – which is what we’ve seen. You can get some new economic activity (see South Dakota fracking boom, some ag expansion, etc.) but you’re still constrained by what the land can carry so the potential for growth is very limited. Meanwhile the industrialization is unceasing. In that tug of war, industrialization/productivity gains will always win.
In other economic expansions benefits usually come from proximity of workers and access to infrastructure. LA county is the largest industrial area in the US principally because of the Port of LA. There’s a much greater capacity for growth of economic activity because you can increase density of activity, you can build upward, you can take your productivity to increase your density of production, and so on. These trends are strong enough to outstrip property prices and cost of living, which is why CAs economic growth never stalled out in extremely expensive areas like Orange and Santa Clara Counties. When you can generate $2.5M in revenue per employee, your local tax rate isn’t really an impediment to growth. Not having an international airport nearby might be, though. Or a port. Or a massive amount of bandwidth, or access to a highly (or narrowly) educated workforce. All of these things drive toward urbanization. You can’t just pick up these companies and move them to a rural town, even with a WFH policy, and you can’t sustain them in such a town either.
So you then get new dynamics developing. Why are pickup trucks (used to be the very symbol for rural) so expensive? Because there are high wage workers in urban/suburban areas that are willing to pay $90K for a truck, sorry soybean farmer that there’s nothing on the market for you. The wage differential between urban and rural starts to skew the economy in ways that always disfavor rural communities. The electrification of the auto industry will start to choke off rural communities. ¼ of the nations gas stations have already closed. More will follow. Small towns will start to lose their only one, and those communities that can’t reasonably electrify will be greeted by higher fuel costs as economies of scale work against them for refining and distribution.
Putting the blame on late stage capitalism is probably the most accurate, and the US not only has no answer for that, it has no interest in seeking an answer for that.
I’ve argued for a long-ass time that if rural ag communities want the economic lift, they need to get the fuck off of their anti-immigrant stance and start competing with CA with high labor crops, particularly if they have water. There’s a LOT of high water use crops in this state which we don’t have the water for, but do have the workforce for and that’s why they’re here. A lot of this shit would grow a LOT better in Alabama or Kansas, but that would involve inviting a lot of brown workers into your town. These crops earn 10x or more what their existing crops do per acre – it’s cash money, man. And a lot of these crops bring with them a lot of related industry – more canning and processing business, and so on, which are always in close proximity to the crops they process.
wjca
It may be useful, for those here who reject even trying to reach Republican voters, to consider this (from John’s link):
Not just any Republican, but a county chair. Seems obvious that a little outreach might pay dividends. Done right. For thoughts on that, give a listen to this week’s podcast on Jen Rubin’s Green Room. Money quote (roughly): “we know from experience deprogramming cult members, one thing to avoid is calling them cult members. That just leads to them digging in their heels.” There’s quite a bit of how-to there.
opiejeanne
@Geminid: True; Riverside and San Bernardino used to be a single county, and even after the split, San Bernardino is biggest county in the world.
NotMax
@wjca
It’s an uphill battle but a valid, established legal doctrine nonetheless.
Melancholy Jaques
@John Revolta:
Carolina pulled pork with cole slaw is one of my favorites.
NorthLeft
John, thank you for the article on rural whites. We face the same issues up here in Canada. That article hit home for me too.
Starfish
@RaflW: I remember when we were calling Longmont Longtuckey.
It is now where you go to get the freshly made tortillas.
Paul in KY
@Baud: Only for this issue! Save me Katie Hobbs, you’re my only hope!
Paul in KY
@Jackie: But, but but they get extra Jeebus points (when they pass on) for voting for the side that will save all the babbies.
Paul in KY
@TBone: They like the fiction, cause their personal non-fiction is so blah and boring and depressing. And they tend to be drama queens too.
Paul in KY
@wjca: Anybody who sees a paid actor in a fucking commercial and thinks that’s a documentarial snapshot of how the ethnic group that actor hails from is doing is just so, so, so, so stupid.
I admit there are a bunch of them that are like that.