Bit back, but just catching up so whatever.
Look, I want to believe that Republicans have a coherent, rational agenda. But right now, it looks like their entire political standpoint is "fuck liberals!" Does anything else explain calls to repeal the EPA? Does anything else support insulting our allies? Is there any other explanation at all for throwing out the Iran nuclear deal?
Sure. The other explanation is their coherent and rational (in a sense, not getting into whether the ideological basis behind it is anything desirable), but by and despicable (in practice, if not
necessarily intent) and damaging to the country, agenda, that they have pretty blatantly been pursuing for decades. Their goal is not fuck liberals, it's fuck
government. Look at their actions through a lens of someone trying to reduce governmental power and voter confidence in the possibility of capable and beneficial government, and a lot of things start making a lot more sense.
Fair few years back, one of 'em put it pretty succinctly: To paraphrase it, the republican party is seeking to
create a federal* government small enough to drown in a bathtub.
And to do that you have to make it weak and unwanted. The goal of the GOP is to undermine the functioning and concept of government to the point it can be done away with, in practice if not name. They believe (to varying degrees and extent of explicitness) that sort of thing is a net negative for this country. Most everything else they do is either secondary, or based around personal enrichment rather than political ideology.
* And eventually state, but right now all the ways they're fucking those is mostly collateral from the overarching plan to make a non-functioning government in order to ruin voter confidence in US governmental organizations.
I feel if rural areas are to be won over to productivity, they have to been done so on the ground floor. Not from someone postulating from the top, but as someone whose been to these regions and has actively fought to improve conditions in rural areas. Once their lives have stabilized, that's when they can start considering new ideas and real progress can be made.
You can search back in the thread (and/or the previous ameripol one) for rural, industrial/industry, or density/population density for some of my previous comments on this. It's come up more than once and it's actually one of the relatively few things I've encountered in politics over the last few years that approaches viscerally pissing me off. The short form is that there is no amount of ground floor work that can be done that is going to work. About as close to period as you can get. Any and every attempt over the last several decades, which have been persistent, pervasive, and, while not magically successful, able on many fronts to bring whatever degree of succor possible to the regions in question, have been
ignored. Just as persistently, just as pervasively, and with significantly more success. Similarly, all the (myriad, also pervasive, etc.) ways in which republican efforts in rural areas have
fucked any and every one in these areas, are generally downplayed at best, also ignored most commonly, or at the worst occasionally through some goddamn voodoo miracle managed to
increase their support in said areas.
Said it previously. You cannot talk to someone that will not listen. There is no persuading someone that is going to persistently ignore any and every thing you say or do. Internal/cultural changes
can alter how that works, but there is functionally
nothing a liberal can do on the ground that has meaningful electoral effect. Or if there is, I haven't seen it over the past few decades, and I
still haven't seen anyone make an attempt to figure one out, much less succeed at it.
Also, stabilization might actually change that, sure. Problem is you cannot stabilize most of these areas. Period, this one isn't "as close as it gets to", it's
period. It's not physically
possible,
especially in any way resembling what supported them before the inevitable happened. You can offer (re)training/education (if you can get funding and support, good luck when the GOP exists), you can offer welfare and similar support to give them means to better accumulate funds and build themselves a better life there or elsewhere (see previous paren), you can bring in new industries that can function in rural conditions (see previous paren
again, also it's not going to support the same amount of people and they're often going to have to be doing
very different things), but fundamentally what many of the folks in question
want -- what their parents had, what their community was built around, a surety in regards to past and future, and on, and on -- is either gone or going, and there's both nothing that's going to stop it and nothing that's going to bring it back, at the absolute
least to the same extent it was previously. And, again. Just about
everything that could be making that process hurt less, or slow it down, or even arrest or revert it to whatever degree, is either rejected or ignored. So far as democratic/liberal efforts to sway these areas electorally go, the efforts might as well not exist and (at least so far as electoral influence goes) spending resources and effort on it might as well be pissing those resources and effort down a dry well.
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