Trump Trainwreck - Ongoing diary of betrayal and evil

[pbrower2a]

(11-23-2016, 04:53 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: We were talking on the thread about those people in the rural areas, about why they stay put in these depressed areas. As Trump's policies condemn them to even more poverty, they may be forced to move to the cities. That's what happens in most poor countries when crops fail, landowners get greedy or poverty gets worse. In fact, I'm amazed that rural voters are still so numerous that they can swing an election.

But if they move to the cities, there's a chance a few of them become less provincial in their thinking, less wedded to the self-reliance meme, and more aware of the benefits of government services and regulations. It used to be one of the demographic trends in America and worldwide, that people moved to the cities, and cities expanded. Could this trend start back up again, and add to the demographic trend of increasing diversity-- likely to still be a factor given that hispanics don't soon forget insults and attacks on them?

Well, at this point I'm grasping for any kind of hope

(11-23-2016, 06:11 PM)Ragnarök_62 Wrote:

Eric the Green Wrote:We were talking on the thread about those people in the rural areas, about why they stay put in these depressed areas. As Trump's policies condemn them to even more poverty, they may be forced to move to the cities.

You're kidding right?  Just look at this   house price.

Quote:That's what happens in most poor countries when crops fail, landowners get greedy or poverty gets worse. In fact, I'm amazed that rural voters are still so numerous that they can swing an election.

I think folks would be better off doing the exact opposite. The best idea is to sell a house in bubbleland and go to nice cheap Oklahoma and retire on the house price differential.

Quote:But if they move to the cities, there's a chance a few of them become less provincial in their thinking, less wedded to the self-reliance meme, and more aware of the benefits of government services and regulations.

Well, if I moved to Silicone Valley, I'd have to live in :

Quote:It used to be one of the demographic trends in America and worldwide, that people moved to the cities, and cities expanded. Could this trend start back up again, and add to the demographic trend of increasing diversity-- likely to still be a factor given that hispanics don't soon forget insults and attacks on them?

Well, at this point I'm grasping for any kind of hope

Dunno,  C2H5-OH  , the social lubricant.     Paternal granny is from Arkansas.  Perhaps, take up an old family tradition, eh?

The best choice for many Americans will be to sell out overpriced houses in the USA and go elsewhere./ Net migration from the Mexico to the USA is now negative.... figure that many Mexican citizens in California, with its stratospheric housing costs, makes selling a house in California, taking the proceeds, and retiring in Mexico where housing and medical costs are far lower can make sense. One might gain a social notch just by doing so. If I had a Mexican or Mexican-American wife I would do so.

If things get really bad in rural America due to crop failures or farm foreclosures, then huge numbers of poor people making desperate moves to the Big Cities will only accentuate America's civic distress. Some kid who grows up on a farm in rural Ohio, gets a teaching degree in Ohio State and then stays in Greater Columbus will change in culture. After a certain time (30 miles away from a Best Buy/Barnes&Noble/Starbuck's/sushi restaurant? No way!) a return to rural America for any more than a weekend might become unthinkable. But with farm labors and dispossessed farmers going to the big cities in desperate efforts to find such few jobs that might open on occasion for unskilled labor indicates big trouble. That's when people start falling for anything rhetorical as an antithesis to what the people in power have.

I figure that the Trump Administration, both Houses of Congress, and most state legislatures will do everything possible to make liberalism permanently irrelevant to American politics. Such opens America to extremism, both of the extreme Left and Right. Having coarsened the level of political discourse by delving into racist rhetoric outside any part of the Establishment since the 1960s. President Trump has potentially unleashed the whirlwind of genocide if desperately-poor people see race as the menace. On the other side, a combination of extreme poverty, lack of opportunity, economic instability, personal dislocation, a government either unwilling or unable to mitigate mass distress, and the absence of effective democracy while economic elites indulge themselves without restraint makes a Socialist insurrection possible. It may be hard to believe that America could become a sick society fast enough for such to happen, but history can move fast.

Another possibility, one that may be even closer, will be for the United States to splinter into sundry new entities. Some might resemble American states, but some will have strange worm-like shapes that connect big cities that one might not imagine on a current map.  Some will simply be city-states. Most of the territory will be an impressive, still-gigantic state in area, but it will largely be the rural void without giant or even medium-sized cities. In some such places one will need to fly the Confederate flag to show loyalty -- and keeping a portrait of Barack Obama will be cause for summary execution.

This will be an economic disaster. In the chaos of rural areas denying food and energy to urban folks and cities denying port facilities for shipping foodstuffs, people will eventually decide upon some new political order. It will not be what we have now, for it will have failed. A new constitutional arrangement will be necessary to prevent any relapse of  despotism or dictatorship, and people in all parts of what remains of the USA or its successor will need to force radical changes upon the culture.