Few pages late, but you might be interested in this here think-piece on a former manufacturing town and its voting habits, particularly the bits about church-reinforced social mores. They had a good run-up to this long before modern social media.
(Oh, to be alive now, in this, the Time of Think-pieces. Such surfeit of choice!)
Hell, their run up so far as that went started the second the GOP started actually managing to get their small government shit through on the local level (which was quite a ways back). Article pointed pretty well about lack of jobs, lagging retraining or new education, and so on. What might have actually done something about that, and damn well tried, was government initiatives in education, job outreach (such as subsidizing green power investment, as a more recent example), and things of that nature. Stuff that GOP-aligned budgeting, lobbying, and political maneuvering steadily undercut and disrupted.
There's not going to be succor for an area that's lost an industry if someone can't get something else in or help get the people out, and the major thing is (as plenty of folks have been pointing out for years in relation to what manufacturing jobs even potentially
could come back)
business damn sure ain't going to do that. What incentive or excuse there may have been to build away from urban or heavily developed areas in the past just isn't
there anymore, and with the decay that's been occurring there's a hell of a lot of reasons for a startup or expander to avoid the hell out of them. And anyone that
doesn't do that avoiding is almost certainly going to be outperformed by folks that
do and don't reap the disadvantages of trying to build up in an area that's riddled with the problems these post-manufacturing/rural communities are, at best pushing the problem down the road a few years as they struggle and then collapse or get bought out and moved.
And so you need a non-business actor to do anything about it. Something that
doesn't have profit or competition necessarily informing a lot of their decisions. Charity (ha) or government, state or federal, something along those lines. And, y'know. The former has never really managed much on that front -- others, definitely, but not redevelopment or retraining of substantial note, though definitely more the latter than the former. Problem with rest was, of course, that one of our major political groups were undermining the government possibility, making sure that any efforts that did exist just weren't enough, making sure the reality was failure and the situation worsening, even if it was trying to get slowed down or reversed.
Not to be a horrible liberal, but it sounds like one of the better long term solutions is better education in rural towns? Won't solve anything short term like the 4k lost factory jobs mentioned in the article, and TBH, I have no idea how we'd solve that because those factory jobs aren't coming back.
The problem with that? Is you need cooperation from the political forces in power to get better education in those towns. Charities can't manage enough and anything profit motivated is going to be dubiously effective at best. Cooperation where the major or at least sufficiently minor forces are republicans, that have an ideological and/or functional opposition to a functioning government. You can't get better education without funding, either more or at least the same and better allocated. You can't get that funding when huge chunks of the people deciding how that funding is made and used are intentionally refusing to give it. Folks've been trying to bring better education to rural and ex-manufacturing towns for at
least the last couple of decades and working bloody close to miracles with the resources they have a lot of times, but even with disproportionately effective effort (which isn't everywhere anyway) there's only so much you
can do with the resources available. A thousand time multiplier only helps so much when you've got a ten thousand point problem and three points of resource to allocate. And the support to really do it, get the funding and the expertise and the legal/procedural/etc. resources needed, just ain't there. And it's pretty doubtful it's going to suddenly show up anytime over the next few years, ha.
Basically, it's a good idea. It's a good idea people thought of before either of us were born and have been trying to implement the whole time. It's a good idea that's impossible to implement because the logistical necessities behind it cannot be reached, due in no small part to the flat fact it's being actively opposed. It's not going to work as a long term solution until those problems are solved. And the chances of that happening while the GOP is still a significant political force (never mind the majority one) is slim to none, unless they make some pretty drastic shifts in policy and implementation.
Author
Topic: Doc Helgoland's Asylum for the Politically American: T+0 (Read 1419804 times)