There's a painful truth here that Democrats need to understand. Seventy four million people didn't vote for Trump because they are all racists or because Fox (or OANN or Newsmax) told them to vote for him. They voted for Trump because they feel that they have no voice in America. You can't escape the reality that the map above represents. The rural/urban divide is real and it is based on the real sense that people outside of major urban centers have that the have no voice in their own country. Trump promised to be their voice. The fact that he was nothing like them didn't matter. They needed someone who at least pretended to share their sense of being outsiders looking in at a country that no longer shared their values.
It really does feel like the worst of both worlds: all the ravages of poverty, but none of the sympathy. "Blacks burn police cars, and those liberal elites say it's not their fault because they're poor. My son gets jailed and fired over a baggie of meth, and those same elites make jokes about his missing teeth!" You're everyone's punching bag, one of society's last remaining safe comedy targets.
They take it hard. These are people who come from a long line of folks who took pride in looking after themselves. Where I'm from, you weren't a real man unless you could repair a car, patch a roof, hunt your own meat, and defend your home from an intruder. It was a source of shame to be dependent on anyone -- especially the government. You mowed your own lawn and fixed your own pipes when they leaked, you hauled your own firewood in your own pickup truck. (Mine was a 1994 Ford Ranger! The current owner says it still runs!)
The rural folk with the Trump signs in their yards say their way of life is dying, and you smirk and say what they really mean is that blacks and gays are finally getting equal rights and they hate it. But I'm telling you, they say their way of life is dying because their way of life is dying. It's not their imagination. No movie about the future portrays it as being full of traditional families, hunters, and coal mines. Well, except for Hunger Games, and that was depicted as an apocalypse.
Both political parties have been exploiting this cultural divide. People of good will on both sides actually struggle to understand why those on the other side behave the way they do. The cynical, like Trump and many Republican politicians, realize that it is in their political interest to use cultural/religious issues to widen our national divide. Yet, historically both parties have the same center of political gravity - catering to the rich, both individuals and corporations. Whether the policy is free trade, tax breaks or coddling petrochemical companies, the result on rural American has been equally devastating.
In a city, you can plausibly aspire to start a band, or become an actor, or get a medical degree. You can actually have dreams. In a small town, there may be no venues for performing arts aside from country music bars and churches. There may only be two doctors in town -- aspiring to that job means waiting for one of them to retire or die. You open the classifieds and all of the job listings will be for fast food or convenience stores. The "downtown" is just the corpses of mom and pop stores left shattered in Walmart's blast crater, the "suburbs" are trailer parks. There are parts of these towns that look post-apocalyptic.
I'm not sure I buy this analysis completely, but I do think it fit the picture of division that the 2020 election projects. We have a large cultural divide in this country that requires leaders willing to bridge that divide and reach out to those on the other side. That leadership needs to come from both political parties and, so far, on a national level Republicans seem to be more than willing to follow Trump's lead in creating more division and animosity not less.
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