Comment by lateforwork
20 days ago
GOP has long pursued a strategy of getting rural whites to vote against their self interest. This is why they play up cultural issues such as trans people using women's bathrooms and such other topics that uneducated people can readily grasp.
It’s easy to say that. I grew up in a dairy county in upstate ny. Solid democrats. The board room of the local farm bureau had photos of FDR on the wall.
The party really abandoned rural voters and farmers. Money in politics didn’t just affect Republicans — the democrats abandoned the traditional party structures and followed the money. There’s no more democratic picnics, etc.
I’m not defending the GOP. They’ve embraced evil imo. But people followed their message because nobody else is talking to them.
> The party really abandoned rural voters and farmers.
Not to defend the Dem party (only the lesser of two evils, at least lately), but in what way? Because farm subsidies seem fairly consistent regardless of which party was in power[0]
[0] https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/farm-commodity-...
There's literally zero platform coverage for rural issues. The hotbeds of liberal politics weren't NYC and Boston 50 years ago -- it was Iowa and Wisconsin. Subsidies today are mostly about stabilizing a few commodities.
Dairy is the best example, it's an industry that scales down just fine with a regulated market. That was thrown away and massive dairy producers have literally destroyed the supply side of the market. 90% of dairy operations in New York have shut down since 1980. I worked on a farm as a teenager in the 90s that has been in continuous operation since the Dutch colonial period in the 1600s. Almost 200 years of that was significant dairy operations. They probably had 50-100 cows in the 1970s, but that business was gone by 1990-1992. Today, the family boards horses to pay their taxes and work for the government.
Dairy is important because it supports a large ecosystem of business. Vet practices. Laborers. Dairy processing and cheese making. The remaining producers in New York are usually captive producers for vertically integrated businesses like convenience stores, co-ops or scaled operations in Western NY. All of that is dead, and that pattern repeats everywhere.
Even in big agriculture states like say Iowa, the "farmers" are mostly tenants and employees now. All of these Trumper idiots who are going bankrupt will have their land purchased by PE, foreign capital or other funds and will become workers.
I suppose they've successfully instilled the fear that "our way of life" will be destroyed if they don't vote for Trump, despite 1) being a lie, and 2) a vote that will make things worse for them. It's amazing how powerful these relatively minor cultural issues can be. It certainly makes for interesting case studies for future political science and sociology university (if the humanities survive).
> instilled the fear that "our way of life" will be destroyed if they don't vote for Trump, despite 1) being a lie
You may find this hard to believe, but there are a lot of people old enough to see how rapidly "our way of life" has gone down the toilet. It's not a myth, it's happening.
in what ways has "our way of life" "gone down the toilet"?
yes, the world as a whole has changed, and society with it, but I'm nearly 60 and don't see a "way of life" being "destroyed"
Are you talking about manufacturing jobs going away, or something else?
Can urban liberals please tell us how to vote? You can come and help our fingers push the buttons.
Seriously, do you think this works? Do you think urban people living in poverty vote against their interests as well?
You should read "What's the Matter with Kansas?" by Thomas Frank [1] that discusses this topic at length. Yes, I do think it works: It is possible to persuade people to vote against their material or economic self-interest by inflaming passions around simple, emotionally charged "hot-button" topics that are easy for most voters to understand and react to instinctively.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Whats-Matter-Kansas-Conservatives-Ame...
I’ve read Frank and this framing assumes there is an objective definition of self interest usually economic and that other priorities like culture autonomy or distrust of institutions are just manipulation. What stands out is the asymmetry where rural voters are described as being worked while poor urban voters making similar tradeoffs are explained through structure or lived experience.
Frank himself later pulled back some of the book’s claims and shifted more blame toward party strategy and elite failure rather than voter pathology. Everyone is influenced by elites and narratives but only some voters are treated as lacking agency when they choose differently.