The GOP, RNC, or whoever, know this already, on top of rural covid death rates being especially bad after the 2020 election. Instead of appealing to moderates or de-extremizing or having any policy platform whatsoever (almost: see below) besides cultural warfare, the radicalization continues. The only explanation is that the GOP is banking on unfair elections. And indeed, "legally" engineering such is arguably the most coherent nationwide GOP policy goal. I wish I shared your optimism, but I think the republican party is about to terminate the American experiment rather than change their ways.
The Republican Party is trapped in a Prisoner's Dilemma - they gotta rush to the right faster than the other guy because the most extreme viewpoint gets the most out-of-state dark money. Unfortunately that which wins the primary is rapidly diverging from that which wins the election. 65% of America supports some form of gun control. 75-80% of Americans support some form of legal abortion. 70% of Americans support single-payer healthcare. 70% of Americans support same-sex marriage. 75% of Americans think the country has work to do on gender equality. 64% of Americans want to raise taxes on the rich. The mechanics of American electoral politics have required Republicans to demonstrate their extremism. This has gotten us extremist politics. However, what started as a populist revolt against mainstream Republican positions has now become a tail wagging the dog. I'm not confident in my hypotheses? But I can argue with confidence that the extremist positions in Republican electoral politics do not represent extremism in the electorate.
Not that I've ever followed the space closely, but I've never read a really good game theory based explanation of why they behave the way they do. It seems to be a feature of all one party political divisions that they revert to the extreme, and most of our country is a de facto one party system. It certainly seems to encourage politicians to behave in the "purest" possible way, but at some point, there's no where to go but crazy, where you come up on the fly with an explanation that the shooter is a "transsexual illegal leftist" without regard to facts, because if you don't say it someone else will and then you're the lefty. When you have to protect both flanks, as you should have to in a two party system, there's a tension that pulls in both directions. When all the pull is only to one direction (and of course it happens on the left a lot, too, it's just that it's so much more obvious when it's a minority party who is for the most part also poor, uneducated and racist), the positive feedback will continue until implosion. The only thing that can stop it is a moderating force, which could easily come from more moderate people moving to rural areas. I'm not going to say I'm a fan of Brian Kemp, but his rejection of Trump and his 52 point win give me hope. The cult of personality is cracking, though it's still intact for now. My vision of a moderating force that could help bring rural America back to reality is someone Jimmy Carter-like. I know that sounds weird, since the GOP looks at Carter as the worst president this side of WWII, but he's a mild mannered white Christian who speaks the language (Southern, I mean) and knows how to connect with rural America. They're waiting for a Messiah, and they thought they found it in Trump, but Trump only knows how to piss off libs, not how to actually bring back the jobs.
Allow me to again recommend this book. Here's the important bit: For anthropological, biological reasons, liberals have to be convinced to follow a political party while conservatives have to be convinced not to. Liberals hate the Clintons because they're hypocrites; conservatives are untroubled by hypocrisy. Any liberal argument you've ever witnessed has been some form of "REASONS!" while every conservative argument you've ever witnessed has been some form of "TEAM!" None of this shit is binary, though. There's a spectrum of liberal-to-conservative thought and liberal-to-conservative political affinity but, in the words of Jon Stewart, "American politics is determined by the extremes because the people in the middle have better shit to do." If you're willing to blow a day standing in front of a Planned Parenthood with a poster of an aborted fetus on a stick, I know two things about you: (1) we don't vote the same (2) you feel much stronger about this than I do. Now add the fact that running for Congress costs an average of over a million dollars (for a job with a salary of $174k) and the perversions become clear. And I mean, I'm guilty. Apparently I bought one half of a useless Amy McGrath vote in 2020. If you don't have national attention, you will lose. And for a local politician to earn national attention, you either have to be Marjorie Taylor Greene or be running against Marjorie Taylor Greene. The mechanism that I hope saves us is that the sane will care more than the crazy. That's the only way we ended up with Raphael Warnock.When all the pull is only to one direction (and of course it happens on the left a lot, too)
Someone should try to get on Fox News by calling this the Down To The Countryside Movement of the leftist Plandemic Cultural Revolution.
I'm worried that's an idea delusional enough to catch on, lol. But honestly, I think there would be a lot of benefit to some sort of national service work requirement. Perhaps bundled with college tuition or something. After all, many Americans are first exposed to other races and cultures for the first time in the military. If we could take the "we're all here to kill people" and replace it with "we're all here to help people"? Yes, please. I know there's no chance in hell something like non-warfare national service gets instituted anytime in the near future. It'd be slandered as "total communism", and there'd be almost a kernel of truth to the accusation, for once.
My grandfather's family in Northern Michigan were literally kept from starvation by Civilian Conservation Corps projects that would be shrieked down today as communist. After he, my extended family and others benefitted from this type of program, they proceeded to spend the next 70 years doing everything they could to make sure that sort of thing could never happen again. When in human history has an entire generation hated their children so badly.
I know you know why this is happening, but for posterity, one of my favorite Beau videos ever recently addressed it:proceeded to spend the next 70 years doing everything they could to make sure that sort of thing could never happen again
Finland offers conscription like that, with a choice between armed/military service and civil service. EDIT: Or just make people do stuff on zooniverse for 6 hours a day. Come on, man, don't be insulting.If we could take the "we're all here to kill people" and replace it with "we're all here to help people"?
You didn't ask for this. I'm sorry. Ukraine is so fucking far from over, but it's a related set of omelettes, b/c fascism. To publicly de-fang two arguments I've very recently heard from two very different people: 1) "Military service is slavery!" No, it's not. Military service, in this day and age in America, is a voluntary contract between an individual and the federal state. Slavery, by definition, is essentially entirely involuntary (fuck off w/ "indentured servitude" shit arguments). Military service is individually consensual. 2) "Mandatory public service would be slavery!" No, it's not. Ideally, any mandatory public service (like, what, 1 year? 2 years?) would be the result of a majority of citizens agreeing to institute the policy upon themselves, their children, etc. etc. Although the agreement is made above the level of the individual, the collective has spoken in their belief of acting in the best interest of the collective. Public service would be collectively consensual. If you can't understand how belittling either of those arguments comes across to the all-too-typically-economically-disenfranchised descendants of slaves, that's funny! That's hilarious, to me. Like "making jokes about children getting shot" levels of humor. Which I have totally done, even on this website recently! We have so much in common. Let's destroy society together.
Since I think we're on two completely different wavelengths here, I'll defer to your deeper understanding of the USA. However, to clarify, what I thought insulting was the rather straightforward implication "[US] military is all kill and no help," which isn't fair.
What I should have also said is that you, Devac, are neither of the two people who expressed either of those arguments, but they were made to me on the same day as our exchange. I should have lead with that, hahha, instead I just got on a soapbox with zero warning. Prognosis: general anger, I guess (and sorry again). We help sometimes, but even in modern history, this country has made mistakes enough for me to feel like there is some ambiguity in the net benevolence of the U.S.'s impact on the rest of the world at times, but Ukraine's situation seems relatively cut and dry. And tragic. I think about it every day. It wouldn't be a proxy war I'd encourage unless the people were so keen to defend their sovereignty and if it didn't have major geopolitical ramifications. Heh, also I saw a clip the other day from Russian (/state) TV where a pundit said something like "America calling Putin a fascist? Putin? What about Trump? How can you not understand that Trump is an even worse fascist??", and I was like cool whataboutism, but also, hilarious, the op-ed author they're railing against (Tim Snyder. it's always Snyder) has said almost the exact same thing. Apiring-to-be-even worse fascist* is the only correction I'd make. Then, I start wondering about the relatively small, but probably growing segment of the Russian population who can still successfully navigate the information hellscape, and realize what a terrible time that's gotta be. I feel for 'em.
Weird. I'm getting gmail notifications, I got one for your reply. Swear I'll get to gamma ray calibration soon :).
Sorry, to resolve some ambiguity, especially in my last paragraph above, the "you" is veryyyy hypothetical/rhetorical. Not a you, you. A distant "you"/someone.
I hope so. But my experience with people who have moved to smaller municipalities is that they tend to be pretty conservative - granted, most of those interactions were before the pandemic.
I dunno, man, I grew up "rural" and even in my most-educated-in-the-nation we-import-our-liberals-from-actual-New-York-City mountain town, my "conservatives" were actual Swastika-tattooed skinheads. More than that? Denver Nazis and Phoenix Nazis are fucking pussies compared to Albuquerque Nazis and Albuquerque Nazis don't hold a candle to rural Rio Grande Valley Nazis. "Pretty conservative" is a gradient and let's be honest - if the guy to the right of your politics moves to the hinterlands, if he's to the left of actual Nazis then the hinterlands get more liberal.
That is true, the general trend of the area will be towards a more liberal stance. However, will that make the conservative-but-ashamed, "oh I don't watch the news it's not edifying" crowd vote Democrat? The skinheads certainly won't be changing their affiliations. And our binary voting structure seems to preclude any sort of change aside from R --> D or R --> no vote. FWIW I have little exposure to truly rural areas outside of the South.
From my lived experience with the knuckle draggers who are holding our species back they were fiercely political during the trump era and are now back to the "awe shucks well I just don't watch the news it doesn't praise and uplift God but gonna vote Republican and disown my kids who don't do the same." When they aren't in active majority power they play at humble and meek as a survival tactic. The tone shift from the Sunday before January 6th to the Sunday after January 6th in the sermons given by my in laws pastor was striking.
Most of the actual skinheads I've run with were politically apathetic. Until Trump. That mutherfucker got the bumper stickers out, got the pride flyin' on Instagram. If we're lucky, the lack of actual accelerationist white supremacists in the cabinet will return them to not giving a fuck in November.
67% last time. 61% in 2016 which basically says "vote as if your life depends on it" causes a ten percent increase in the base rate. Nonetheless, yes, the more disaffected the racists, the better the odds for progressives.