- cross-posted to:
- politics@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- politics@beehaw.org
In the popular imagination of many Americans, particularly those on the left side of the political spectrum, the typical MAGA supporter is a rural resident who hates Black and Brown people, loathes liberals, loves gods and guns, believes in myriad conspiracy theories, has little faith in democracy, and is willing to use violence to achieve their goals, as thousands did on Jan. 6.
According to a new book, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy, these aren’t hurtful, elitist stereotypes by Acela Corridor denizens and bubble-dwelling liberals… they’re facts.
The authors, Tom Schaller, a professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and Paul Waldman, a former columnist at The Washington Post, persuasively argue that most of the negative stereotypes liberals hold about rural Americans are actually true.
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Kill all the natives and take their land. Manifest Destiny
Oh wow, two bougie urbanite Jews warning me about how awful poor, rural Whites are! What else is new?
You know what they say, the first step to getting help is admitting you have a problem…
I for one enjoyed your comment. It’s like going to a zoo and seeing the apes.
Apes deserve better than zoos- just as they deserve better than to be compared to OP.
What an extremely problematic comment. Are you seriously implying some kind of set hierarchy between yourself and the presumably more primitive apes? Your privilege is showing. Be better.
Wow you sure le pwned him, double plus upvotes for you. Top kek, etc etc
Using speech patterns of libs that was obsolescent even in 2016 just highlights how infrequently you legitimately consider differing thought and is a great signifier to others that you really have nothing to offer except the surface level catchphrases you use to reinforce your beliefs to yourself.
bougie urbanite jews
Ok… i think i can see where the wind is blowing from. But just to entertain myself: where did you happen to stumble on their religious backgrounds?
Usually the aggressive signalling of a particular kind of anti-White, anti-Christian political tradition combined with a “German” surname is enough to give it away. Note that “Jewish” denotes an ethnicity, not a religion. There are plenty of nonbelievers eligible for aliyah.
Waldman doesn’t exactly require a hexagram to identify, but in case you need direct evidence: https://paulwaldman.substack.com/p/when-the-supposed-enemy-of-your-enemy?r=clmeq&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true
I jumped the gun on Schaller. He doesn’t actually seem to number among the chosen. Despite his ardent leftism and anti-theism he somehow still ends up batting for the promised land with regards to the ongoing genocide, and his retweets are like the invitation list to a bar mitzvah, but I guess those are unavoidable phenomena when you’re part of the American intelligentsia. A shabbos goy, no doubt, but not a Jew. My sincerest apologies for this libelous slander toward both Schaller and the Jewish people.
Definitely not an elitist stereotype though, just facts
Our style of government is the largest threat to democracy.
We need to eliminate the electoral college, primaries, the Senate, President restricted to 1 term, perhaps 6 years, term limits for the House, All elections publicly funded, No reason elections cant be conducted via encrypted open source app, where voting can be done remotely and checks in place to ensure the vote has been tallied. No party affiliation on any campaign documents, signs, advertisements, no straight ticket voting.
I love the theory, but considering that every week we see some headline about some digital fraud or another, I think there is a great reassurance in keeping democracy as analogue as possible
Hanging chads…
Well yeah ok.
Voting booths exist for a reason. They are to ensure the privacy of the person voting.
Otherwise all sorts of overbearing people can force others to vote per their direction.
Consider an abusive partner, or a extremist pastor, or a factory manager. In all cases they have power over others, and voting may be one of the few places where individuals can express their choices.
Voting booths are an outdated relic. We live in the most technologically advanced age ever and we should still rely on methods from the 1800s? What would be more convenient than pulling out your phone, wherever you are, being able to pull up details and platform of every candidate, make selections, then cast your ballot? Force people to vote on policies, not parties.
You missed their point.
It’s so convenient, you have no excuse when your boss demands to watch you vote or you’re fired. Your abusive spouse or parent demands your phone to use your vote. Someone manages to identify unregistered voters and register on their behalf and get massive votes because of flaws in the electronic system.
Which is also a potential issue for mail in ballots.
In the in person scenario, you aren’t allowed to have anyone with you, to talk to anyone, or take pictures of videos that could be used as proof of who you did and did not vote for. This means you know that no matter what threats have been made against you, you can’t prove which way you vote at you can vote however you like without fear.
i like the idea of voting by encrypted app as an option, but lots of disenfranchised/disempowered folks can’t rely on that. by which i mean there are homeless folks without phones, and people with abusive families who lack privacy/safety to really utilize it the way we night intend.
According to a recent study 94% of the unhoused have a cell phone.
I support this entirely, but good fucking luck
The 17th should be reverted and Senators should be elected by the state legislatures, not abolished altogether. It should serve it’s intended purpose as the voice of the States. The Electoral College also still serves a purpose, but all states should be proportional delegate instead of winner take all. Ranked Choice or something similar is also needed, because FPTP always results in 2 shitty parties and is a root cause of many of our issues.
The House definitely need to be unlocked and proportional to population. Term limits are needed in both House and Senate, and money definitely needs to be removed from politics. Government provided war chests and that’s all you get, hard agree on that. Hard agree on no ads, no PACs, etc. Get your message out in debates and town halls in an actual real campaign.
The states do not need a voice that is not proportionate to the population. If you want to have a second body with the indirection through state legislature, that maybe good, but it needs to be promotional allocated or vastly reduxed in power. Likely both.
The US can’t even figure out giving IDs to its citizens, what makes you think they can make a cryptographically secure voting app? Not to mention that all forms of electronic voting opens up new attack vectors, which will definitely be exploited.
Just make election day a public holiday, make mail-in voting easier and assign enough polling stations with sufficient personnel to prevent long queues.
We should also get rid of the two party system by introducing a party chartered to only support or oppose things that multiple 3rd party polls find over one standard deviation from the norm support.
It’s insane that given a political distribution that’s normal for most topics we arbitrarily divide it into two halves rather than focusing on the center.
Even as someone who would fall to the left of the first standard deviation, I’d much rather live in a world where there was consistent stability around the norms as I fought to move the social norms in my preferred direction over time than live in a world where there’s a 50% chance of Nazis being a thing again.
A significant majority of the county agrees on a surprisingly broad number of major topics, and yet we’re divided into two camps currently being driven more and more by outspoken fringes that represent less and less of the general population, with everyone else falling in line out of a greater fear of the “other team.”
No reason elections cant be conducted via encrypted open source app, where voting can be done remotely and checks in place to ensure the vote has been tallied.
You are seriously underestimating just how many people don’t have smartphones (22.5 million eligible voters in the US). A number of your other suggestions are good, but the idea of all digital voting needs at least some form of backup option for people who either have hardware access issues or digital competency issues.
You know, the deriders of this bring up some good points, but I’d also like to bring up the point that digitally secured voting doesn’t really need to be a super great solution. It would be great if it was, sure, but it doesn’t need to be great, it just needs to be better than the alternative, which is pretty easy, I think. Voting analog is not necessarily a very secure way to vote either, as many people who remember the “hanging chads” issue will be quick to point out. It’s also a pretty massive inconvenience for some people, which shouldn’t really be discounted as a thing that prevents people from voting. “Oh but if they can’t spare the time we don’t want their votes anyways”, but then you gotta keep in mind that in some places the wait times are gonna be multiple hours upon hours, and maybe days.
In any case, if you still wanted analog voting for any particular reason, you could still keep it open as a backup, which might not be a bad idea generally.
It’s weird because the leaked Parler account maps showed the density of membership was in red parts of cities. Less in rural.
Is that maybe just because there’s more people in cities? Rather than a higher concentration of parker users compared to the general population
Yes. People in rural areas aren’t using parler, they’re on Facebook like all the other boomers.
The US election system that gives these people completely disproportionate political influence is a threat to democracy.
these aren’t hurtful, elitist stereotypes by Acela Corridor denizens and bubble-dwelling liberals… they’re facts.
As demonstrated by this book written by elitists, Acela Corridor denizens and bubble-dwelling liberals.
The authors, Tom Schaller, a professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and Paul Waldman, a former columnist at The Washington Post,
Point made. Depending on where exactly Waldman currently resides they might both be 3/3.
persuasively argue that most of the negative stereotypes liberals hold about rural Americans are actually true.
We looked at some data and sources intending specifically to justify our prejudices and found that our prejudices were in fact justified! Who knew!
Is this irony?
I think the best solution to this issue is to change the calculus of representation. The article mentions that rural areas have out-sized representation, but it only discusses the senate. The house, as well, has out-sized representation for rural areas. For example, California has approximately one Representative for every 749,000 people, while Montana has one Representative for every 560,000 people.
I think that to truly honor the idea of “one person, one vote”, 3 steps need to be taken:
- Abolish the electoral college
- Dissolve the Senate, leaving the House as the only Legislative body
- Dramatically scale up the number of representatives in the House, and tie representative count directly to population.
I’d love to see, for example, 1 representative for every 250,000 people, or something similar. That would push us from the current 435 to about 1,340 representatives, which would definitely require a new chamber for sessions. But it would also mean that demographic groups would be much better represented, and it would be much more difficult for batshit insane people like Marjorie Taylor Green to get or remain elected. If you’re representing fewer people, those people have more incentive to vote.
And it’s not like growing the House is a far-fetched idea. In fact, it is baked into the constitution. Article I, Section 2 says that the number of representatives should be directly tied to the population, with each representative representing no more than 30,000 people, and that adjustments to the size of the House should occur after every 10 year census:
Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons. The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct. The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand, but each State shall have at Least one Representative; and until such enumeration shall be made, the State of New Hampshire shall be entitled to chuse three, Massachusetts eight, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations one, Connecticut five, New-York six, New Jersey four, Pennsylvania eight, Delaware one, Maryland six, Virginia ten, North Carolina five, South Carolina five, and Georgia three.
And this is what happened, with the size of the House growing every 10 years up until, in 1929, they decided to keep it constant based on the figures from the 1930 survey. Having a cap on the number of representatives harms democracy. We can see the results in the decaying towns of rural America, and the batshit insane cultists who want to overthrow our government and install a fascistic theocracy.
You misread the passage. It doesn’t say
each representative representing no more than 30,000 people
It says
The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand
That means the opposite of what you said: each representative should represent no less than 30,000 people.
Whoops, my bad. You are absolutely correct, of course.
I have these stereotypes, because I’ve met these people. I used to live among them. So many Confederate flags in northern Michigan
If they didn’t do solid fieldwork, I’d be skeptical. Material conditions partly explain why people are the way they are, can’t see liberals changing that.
I just love how if you don’t vote Democrat, or you don’t have liberal views, you’re a “threat to democracy.” I swear, if it was up to some of you, we’d be a one party system, with every single American thinking the EXACT same way…
Didn’t actually read the article did ya?
Hint: the article isn’t saying all Republicans are a threat to democracy. It’s saying that those who hold anti-democratic views–e.g. election denialism, supporting returning Trump to power by force, etc–are predominantly rural white Republicans.
Those are just facts. You can either accept those facts or join those folks in denying reality.
We both know the article is basically saying that one party is a threat, and the other can just do whatever they want. It’s been like that forever now… Republicans= bad, Democrats= good.
No one is forcing R leadership to be morally bankrupt enablers of fascism.
R invited the bogeyman in because it was the only way they thought they could win. And now they have a problem.
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We’re not forgetting (meaning - all the rest of us who reject that shit) what the leadership pushed and what the rank and file voted for.
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Not sure how they think they will back out of this. Two current examples:
https://www.rawstory.com/trump-fans-missouri-caucus-wellman/
https://newrepublic.com/post/179282/surprise-gops-favorite-gathering-full-nazis
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Denialism it is, then! Very well, carry on.
Nah, I mean, I was around when George Bush was the guy. I didn’t like him, I didn’t feel he was a good leader, or fit for the office. I would try to convince people not to support him or the war(s) in the middle east. But he was not a threat to democracy. Except maybe through The Patriot Act…
There was a lot of things I didn’t agree with that Mitt Romney believes. I think voting him in would have been regressive and bad for gay people, etc, who I care about. I think he is wrong about things. But he’s not a threat to democracy. I belive that he believes the things he claims to believe, and that he believes in his heart that he’s doing the right thing. I just disagree with him.
John McCain seemed like an honorable man. Again, I felt that his priorities and mine didn’t line up, but he was nowhere near a threat to democracy.
The reason this dude is a threat to democracy is because he has openly and repeatedly disregarded voting and the function of government, which is kinda democracy’s whole thing. If the votes don’t count, and the results don’t follow the will of the voters, then it’s not a democratic system. If you systematically choose to make it so some segment of your citizens cannot vote, or their voices are not heard, then it’s not a democratic system.
My friend’s in-laws in rural Missouri are cutting holes into the walls to store guns in for whatever version of the apocalypse they believe is coming.
I know someone whose grandmother died some years ago and when they were cleaning out her house and doing some reno to it, they kept finding hatchets stored in places that would be accessible in case something went down, including several concealed inside walls. Apparently if things turned bad, granny was going to go down axe in hand. This feels like the same energy, just with more money to hide more expensive weapons.
They are just more empathetic than you realize. They just put themselves in the shoes of the black/brown people and were like:
If I were them, I would have definitely shot me by now.
For what!?!
What the hell did some stupid farmer in the bumbfuck middle of nowhere do to warrant being shot in their home by people of a different skin color?
Some racist asshole living in a rural inbred community where everyone looks the same because their family tree has the same roots of people who never left their own poverty stricken hellhole didn’t actually do shit to anyone outside of voting the way they were themselves indoctrinated.
There’s definitely a lot of far right idiots being worked up into a frenzy of normalized violence that’s very concerning.
But in one of the rare instances of legit “both sides-ism” I’m starting to see a very concerning trend of the far left giving in more and more to the language of normalized violence too.
I have a feeling both sides of this are useful idiots with the same hand pulling the strings, but c’mon dude - use your critical thinking skills before regurgitating rhetoric like that mindlessly.
I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say tribalism probably isn’t going to be what bring us together as a country, but hey, what do I know?
Perhaps, you just missed out the sarcastic use of “empathetic” in my post.
What the hell did some stupid farmer in the bumbfuck middle of nowhere do to warrant being shot in their home by people of a different skin color?
The media made them paranoid. No one is actually coming for them. Also, many rural communities put so much effort into making non-white lives miserable (that includes voting to sustain systematic racism); to them retaliation isn’t out of the realms of possibility because that is what THEY would do if THEY were put in the same position.
But in one of the rare instances of legit “both sides-ism” I’m starting to see a very concerning trend of the far left giving in more and more to the language of normalized violence too.
How can you complain about “both sides-ism” when you randomly bring up leftists? What even are the two sides here? There’s paranoid rural people and their news. That’s all.
Some racist asshole living in a rural inbred community where everyone looks the same because their family tree has the same roots of people who never left their own poverty stricken hellhole
Isn’t this a tad much? Not all rural people are racist and inbred.
The media made them paranoid. No one is actually coming for them.
Truth. They also let people on sites like “Truth” and social media grifters tell them shit like “Public schools are turning your kids trans!” and they eat it up.
They also let people on sites like “Truth” and social media grifters tell them shit like “Public schools are turning your kids trans!” and they eat it up.
Yeah, but they get their handful of cases they can use to prop those narratives up, like that girl who decided she was trans, went on T and got a double mastectomy all while still a minor, then desisted and is now generally unhappy since she’s decided she’s a girl again but there are permanent effects from going on T and she had her breasts removed (she’s basically the right wing face of desisting). Or the one school that defended helping students socially transition while keeping it secret from their parents. If you ever ask the “public schools are turning your kids trans” folks for evidence that what they are saying is actually happening you eventually get pointed to one of a few cases like those.
Headlines like this are problematic. I think we can all agree that Trump has done a lot of damage to democracy in the US, but are rural Trump supporters really more dangerous than urban Trump supporters? That claim is suspect, and the article provides no evidence to support it (it provides evidence that most Trump supporters are rural, which is a totally different claim.)
And saying that white rural Trump supporters are worse than non-white rural Trump supporters is an even more serious claim. It’s racially discriminatory, and seems totally baseless in this article.
The article has no evidence of these claims, and seems to indicate that the book doesn’t even make the claims of the headline.
(I’m not objecting to the claims that Trump supporters are mostly rural and mostly white. That is common knowledge.)
65% of rural America voted for Trump in 2020 nearly half 47% believe the election was stolen that’s half of all rurals not half of rural Republicans. Support for political violence is high with 1 in 3 Republicans nationwide and higher yet in rural America. It is easier for violence to take root where their is monocultural acceptance of the false premises used to justify it.
these aren’t hurtful, elitist stereotypes by Acela Corridor denizens and bubble-dwelling liberals… they’re facts.
Listen, I’m as blue as my balls on prom night, but we’d have a huge problem if the right said some shit like this.
I think I’ll withhold judgement until reading the book. Partly due to my own confirmation bias, but also partly:
And Schaller and Waldman bring receipts.
In a book filled with reams of data to back up their arguments, Schaller and Waldman show that rural whites “are the demographic group least likely to accept notions of pluralism and inclusion” and are far less likely to believe that diversity makes America stronger.
And what is the consequence from this observation?
you can remember that you hate your parents some more
