My reading list is getting angry. The interview isn't quite good enough to get me to pick it up yet. They recognize themselves as being left behind because, in fact, they are the ones in their family and in their social networks who did stay where they were. Most of the people I spoke to grew up in the small town they currently live in, or some other small town nearby. Often their children have already left, either to college or in search of a better job somewhere else. In that sense, they believe, quite correctly, that they’re the ones who stayed in these small towns while young people — and really the country as a whole — moved on. I think this one was a recommendation from a mailing list. Prolly was 'cuz Gibney was a VC flack. I'll bet it will make me mad. The one thing both of these books have in common is the thread that the white Hinterlanders are voting on anger, not on principles, and that if the world was better for them in 1956, it doesn't matter that it sucked pretty hard for everyone else. Because there is no "everyone else."
I make it very clear in the book that this is largely a choice. It’s not as though these people are desperate to leave but can’t. They value their local community. They understand its problems, but they like knowing their neighbors and they like the slow pace of life and they like living in a community that feels small and closed. Maybe they’re making the best of a bad situation, but they choose to stay.
"One of the key indicators for sociopathy is a lack of empathy. So you just don't care for people other than yourselves. So in the case of Social Security, the Social Security Administration projects the trust fund will be depleted in 2034, but by 2034 the median boomer will be dead. And the same sort of dynamic applies to the national debt, which will reach crisis levels in next 20 years. And the same logic applies to — or lack thereof — applies to climate, which is a problem whose most significant impacts are expected from the late 2030s on, but any cost of remediation must be borne today and would therefore imperil the entitlements budget. So, they're deeply focused on maximizing consumption now without regard to problems that are going to be postmortem."