A friend of mine asked me to read a piece entitled What Liberals Don't Realize from the website Quora. There were definitely chunks of it that made me roll my eyes. Slog through it because there is also some good stuff in there.
The general lack of interest of left-of-center folks in the realities of rural and small town America strikes me as not just ignorance, but willful ignorance. This comes across to folks who live in places lke my hometown as outright contempt. This is an issue I've been calling attention to for a long time.
Progressive discussion is so urban-centric that it makes itself seem irrelevant at best or alien and hostile at worst in much of the country, even though many of those policies would help people in places like where I live.
People in rural and small town America aren't stupid. But if only one side is engaging them, no wonder the other side gains no traction there.
Progressives need to stop treating this part of the country like an afterthought and speak directly (and listen to) rural and small town Americans if they ever want their policies to gain traction.
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The prairies - now solidly red - used to be a hotbed of rural activism. Witness Thomas Frank's book What's the Matter With Kansas?
In the Midwest, the fusion of the urban labor movement with the interests of rural farmers was a key coalition that made the progressive movement so powerful in the early 20th century. In fact, the blue outfit in Minnesota is still known as the Democratic-Farmer-Labor party.
I was looking at the 1912 presidential election, at the height of the progressive movement. There was a Progressive candidate (Theodore Roosevelt) AND a Socialist candidate (Eugene Debs). The pair did very well in more rural states: South Dakota (55% combined), Washington (48%), Nevada (44%), Montana (41%).
Because of progressives' self-defeating tunnel vision, such numbers seem inconceivable today.
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