The Partisan Divide on Issues

[pbrower2a]

(01-28-2022, 10:30 AM)David Horn Wrote:

(01-28-2022, 01:13 AM)Classic-Xer Wrote: Bluer as in more darker in terms of peoples skin tone or bluer as in more Progressive minded and big government oriented/related like Washington DC? In Minnesota, the rural Democrats are dying off and the rural communities that were controlled by them for several decades are turning into ghost towns. As a result, the more economic minded and more American minded Republicans and their voters are taking over and the economy is becoming more economically diverse. So, are you familiar with what's going on between Buckhead and Atlanta these days? Buckhead has formally declared its independence and is in the process of breaking free from from Atlanta. I think it's a good gauge what's to come and what to expect as time goes on.

Rural areas have always been more conservative in every meaning of the word -- even during the labor movement period of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  Dogma tends to set-in in more insular communities.  They may get infuriated, but they aren't empowered, unless they decide to bring out the guns.  Then it's open rebellion.  Nothing good comes from that.

The young don't believe it can happen, not even the rural young.  If it does, then the armies are aligned and battlelines drawn.  Youth WILL show up out of pure self-interest.

Rural areas have had their peasant uprisings in some times and places against rapacious aristocrats, but all of those ended when the aristocrats won because they could hire mercenaries to suppress the revolt. Once the revolt is over, survivors on the losing side face the iron maiden, breaking wheel, or stake to be executed with maximal agony. Such reflects the inherent cruelty of feudal elites. Mercifully we are past that.  Revolutions capable of overthrowing feudal elites come from the cities (France, 1788; China from the 1920's to 1949). The end of aristocratic power over peasants has usually appeared as the urban capitalists decide that they need to give the rural peasantry a stake in the system by abolishing serfdom and subdividing great estates to ensure that peasants become smallholders, Once they have some parcel of land that supports a better living than they had ever known, the smallholder farmers have an interest in keeping taxes low often at the expense of public services.  For their levels of income, smallholders are far more conservative in economics and politics than educated professionals, government employees, or especially the industrial proletariat. They see taxes only as a drain.   

Farmers have been prone to populist causes when farm incomes plummet, which may explain the times when rural areas could vote D to get farm subsidies and WPA projects that offered supplementary income that fended off economic distress.  Democrats may have been Senators from the Dakotas, Nebraska, Iowa, and Missouri until recently as reflections of this -- but that is over. As corporate farms squeeze out family farmers who are merely conservative, politics in such states go increasingly to the Right -- the extreme Right.

Know well that the agrarian elites of the Weimar Republic were heavily members of the reactionary, fascist-lite National People's Party that thwarted liberal trends in the rest of Germany and went Nazi when the Nazis showed willingness to be even harsher in suppressing the Left and such political and economic competition (the Jews, of course) to their reactionary agenda. In much of America that endures the loss of industrial jobs, agrarian elites become more powerful by default (just look at Ohio) and politics become more reactionary. Well-educated people and entrepreneurial types who might arrest the economic decline leave, and what remains is an economic nightmare of broken lives. Broken white people are prone to blame non-Christian and non-white minorities for their economic plight while they gravitate to heroin, meth, and fentanyl when alcohol isn't potent enough. Will there be enough jobs, however low-paying, in agriculture and food-processing to employ people who a few years ago fared well on industrial work in places like Dayton, Lima, Chillicothe, Mansfield, Toledo,  Akron, and Youngstown even if such jobs pay third-world compensation? The low pay is itself a pathology, but such is better than nothing. Meanwhile America's economic elites live like sultans.

I can easily imagine that much of the rural labor force in dairies, slaughterhouses, and the like will form its own proletariat that will foster union organization that challenges the primacy of the owners of workplaces that operate much like factories did in the 1920's. If we should get another reversion to right-wing government that gives people stupid enough to fall for it an economic meltdown as severe as that of 1929-1932 that America solves with another FDR-style leader. History can be messy. A country across the Atlantic endured a similar meltdown and ended up with an Antichrist as its leader... and we all know how that ended. 

In my opinion, the best indicator of real prosperity is how well the workers fare. All other display of prosperity is window-dressing for political and economic vileness.