Post by d***@gmail.comPost by bigdogPost by d***@gmail.comAmericans who were angrily asking, "Where's MY opportunity?" ... as if
they expected something fantastic to happen in their stagnant, rural
community. That's why people move OUT of those areas to ... well ... the
"blue" areas where it's easier to CREATE your opportunities.
This remark seems to me to be looking down upon those that live in rural
areas. "stagnant, rural community". Doesn't that sound just a wee bit
elitist to you?
Obviously, not EVERY rural community is stagnant - but there are plenty of
them out there. Cities tend to be more dynamic. Sure, they have their up's
and down's. Over the years, many of our nation's more troubled cities have
managed to reinvent themselves where certain downtown areas, where nobody
would dare tread in previously decades, have actually become profitable
tourist areas with restaurants and burgeoning attractions.
If any place is stagnating, it is the cities. Columbus, OH where I spent
most of my adult life is about as middle America as it gets. Many
companies consider it a test market because it is so representative of the
nation as a whole. It's a big city, but not too big. Almost all the growth
and development is in the suburbs and the suburbs continue to sprawl
farther and farther from the city. When our family moved there in 1966,
there were numerous small farm towns that were not even connected to the
city that have since been swallowed up by suburban development, much of it
high end. Two in particular are Dublin and New Albany. During that same
period, much of the city of Columbus has gone downhill. There was a lot of
new development inside the city limits in the 1960s and well into the
1970s but that hit a wall in the late 1970s and there has been much decay
since. The Northland and Westland shopping malls which were once
considered jewels of urban development have since been bulldozed. There
have been exceptions, such as German Village just south of downtown where
the old brick houses have been refurbished into upscale housing and
Victorian Village just south of the Ohio State campus has also been
revitalized but those are the exceptions. A few neighborhoods have held
their own but many once thriving areas are now crime ridden. The suburbs
and the exurbs and small towns as much as an hour drive from the city are
where many people are choosing to raise their families.
I myself chose to move out of the city to just outside of the little burg
of Utica. The high school is attended by both kids from inside the town
and the surrounding farms. Those kids are not hayseeds. They are as
sophisticated and dialed into social media every bit as much as their
urban and suburban counterparts. I go to ball games and see these kids
glued to their smart phones doing their Twitter, Facebook, or whatever
else kids these days are dialed into. It is areas such as that went
overwhelmingly for Trump. They voted overwhelmingly for him and that was
more than enough to offset the gains Hillary racked up in the cities.
Small towns and rural areas have always been Republican strongholds but
where Trump won the election was by flipping a lot of blue collar white
voters. This is a demographic that has long sided with the Democrats on
economic issues but culturally are more in tune with the Republicans.
These are people who resent a Democrat Party that has become very much
anti-Second Amendment. Meanwhile they feel abandoned by a Democrat party
that seems to want to pander to minorities, LGBT, and other special
interest groups while taking them for granted. That's why they turned in
droves to Trump. He tapped into their frustrations and they rewarded him
for it. He spoke their language.
Post by d***@gmail.comI don't look down on these people but I do believe that they have become
cynically, and irrationally angry and Trump was the "rock" they could
throw through the window of government as if to say, "Can you f---in' hear
us NOW?" Trump played to their worst fears and insecurities, in my
opinion.
Whether you know it or not, your words ooze elitism. You call their anger
irrational. There is nothing irrational about it. They didn't abandon the
Democrat Party. The Democrat Party abandoned them and 2016 was their
payback. These people are now seeing the rewards for their choices.
Unemployment is at its lowest levels since 2000 and thanks to the Trump
tax cut, these people are seeing more money in their paychecks and
employers are handing out raises and bonuses.
Post by d***@gmail.comJohn McAdams mentioned that people were actually migrating OUT of the
cities. But they're not heading for the corn fields. They're going to the
SUBURBS. In my initial post, I lumped the suburbs WITH the cities. I
included the surrounding suburbs with the cities for the purposes of
distinguishing them from the more rural areas, which are neither cities
nor suburbs.
Both the suburbs, the small towns, and the rural voters went heavily for
Trump. The Democrats rack up huge surpluses inside the big cities but
those get offset by Republican gains elsewhere. That was certainly the
case in Ohio where Trump won easily and I'll bet it was also true in the
blue wall states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Hillary took
those states for granted and they made her pay for her indifference toward
them.
Post by d***@gmail.comHave you ever read J.D. Vance's book, "Hillbilly Elegy"? His book rose to
the top of the bestseller list and stayed there for a long time because,
quite coincidentally and surprisingly (even to J.D. Vance), it hit a
timely chord and a central nerve behind the reasons why the cultural chasm
between rural communities and more urban areas has become deeper and wider
- something that was being purposely exacerbated during the 2016 political
campaigns. Those who live in the "flyover areas" of the country (where you
see all the red on the electoral map) have been conditioned to believe
that the "elitists" are out to get them and, worse yet, are "laughing at
them".
I'd say they are very perceptive. One of the most interesting electoral
maps I saw was one shown by Chuck Todd in the election post mortem.
Interstates I-95 and I-5 roughly parallel the east and west coasts
respectively. Hillary racked up a 6 million vote margin in those narrow
strips of land between those freeways and the coast. Trump overwhelmingly
won all that land in between. Whatever else you may think of Trump, he ran
the most brilliant presidential campaign in my lifetime and perhaps in the
history of the republic. The elitists were literally laughing at his
chances to even win the nomination much less the general election. Who's
laughing now? Trump tested the waters in 2012 but decided it wasn't the
right time. By 2015, he recognized that there was a sizeable portion of
the rank and file in both major parties that was frustrated with their
party's leadership and he crafted a message that spoke to their
frustrations. He easily won the nomination despite most of the Republican
establishment being against him. He was given almost no chance of winning
the general election but he fooled all those so called smart people what
had openly laughed at his chances. I posted this in another thread but I
will repeat it here. It is a compilation of elitists among political
establishment, the media, and the entertainment industry who were mocking
him prior to the election.
https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=donald+trump+will+never+be+my+president&view=detail&mid=768E7EC4975E4F1C92E7768E7EC4975E4F1C92E7&FORM=VIRE
Post by d***@gmail.comJ.D. Vance grew up in these stagnant rural communities and ended up at
Yale Law School. His experience is personal and very insightful. He has a
great TED talk where he briefly mentions "brain drain", where talented,
intelligent, motivated people move out of these struggling, rural
http://youtu.be/iEy-xTbcr2A
More elitism.
Post by d***@gmail.comAnd, if you think Vance is an anti-Trumper, that is not quite so clear
from this interview: http://youtu.be/eljLSzocJwo
[snippets from "Hillbilly Elegy" below - read or don't read - just to give
you a sense of what is in the book]
I once ran into an old acquaintance at a Middletown bar who told me that
he had recently quit his job because he was sick of waking up early. I
later saw him complaining on Facebook about the "Obama economy" and how it
had affected his life. I don't doubt that the Obama economy has affected
many, but this man is assuredly not among them. His status in life is
directly attributable to the choices he's made, and his life will improve
only through better decisions ... There is a cultural movement in the
white working class to blame problems on society or the government, and
that movement gains adherents by the day …
The Democrat Party has thrived on convincing much of their constituency
that they are victims. They depend on these people believing that the
Democrats are their only hope for improving their lot in life yet it never
happens.
Post by d***@gmail.comInstead of encouraging
engagement, conservatives increasingly foment the kind of detachment that
has sapped the ambition of so many of my peers ... What separates the
successful from the unsuccessful are the expectations that they had for
their own lives.
This is the polar opposite of the message the Democrats have tried to sell
their constituency for as long as I can remember. When did you hear a
Democrat tell their supporters to take control of their own lives and be
responsible for improving the quality of their lives. Their message has
always been, vote for us and we'll take care of you. The blue collar white
voters finally wised up to that lie.
Post by d***@gmail.comYet the message of the right is increasingly: It's not
your fault that you're a loser; it's the government's fault
The irony couldn't get any thicker.
Post by d***@gmail.com... My dad,
for example, has never disparaged hard work, but he mistrusts some of the
most obvious paths to upward mobility. When he found out that I had
decided to go to Yale Law, he asked whether, on my applications, I had
"pretended to be black or liberal." This is how low the cultural
expectations of working-class white Americans have fallen.
I guess that's the result of generations of Democrat indoctrination.
Post by d***@gmail.com[J.D. Vance lists numerous wild conspiracy theories, one of which that
Obama was not born in the U.S.]
The list goes on. It's impossible to know how many people believe one or
many of these stories. But if a third of our community questions the
president's origin - despite all evidence to the contrary - it's a good
bet that the other conspiracies have broader currency than we'd like. This
isn't some libertarian mistrust of government policy, which is healthy in
any democracy. This is a deep skepticism of the very institutions of our
society. And it's becoming more and more mainstream
[end of citation]
Given the performance of our government institutions, I'd say the cynicism
is well founded, and I don't just blame the Democrats for that. I blame
the establishments of both major parties.