this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2024
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Huntsville, Alabama is not rural. It's the most highly populated city in Alabama. I'm not claiming that there are not intelligent people who are full of hate that support Republican policies, nor am I claiming there are no cities which support Republicans. The question was why do rural areas typically vote Republican.
Then why does it have a Republican mayor? Urban + Educated should equal Democrat, right?
I would argue that it isn't simply rural areas that trend Republican but mineral rich areas with exceptionally large wealth gaps that tend to have powerful GOP fundraising operations.
Your example describes about one percent of rural America. How does your theory hold up when applied to areas that are predominantly a service or agricultural economy? Where are these powerful GOP fundraising operations, because the party has been pretty notoriously hemorhaging campaign funds for awhile now.
While those conditions do allow for authoritarian regimes to maintain strength in third-world countries, they do not apply one to one to the U.S. In fact, they don't apply at all, because our economy is structured very differently to those countries.
The Nevada service sector is the heart of the Democratic vote in that state, just as one data point. Similarly, if you go out to California or New York, you'll find far more service sector democrats than white collar professionals. And where do you think all those Mississippi Democrats are coming from if not the agricultural industry? Millions of African American and Latino ag workers turn out for the Ds every year.
Wyoming, Idaho, Montana, the Dakotas, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Utah, Kansas, Colorado, Texas - show me a mineral rich state and I'll show you a right-wing mega-millionaire (maybe even a billionaire or four) bankrolling the bulk of the conservative political scene.
The US is a hodgepodge of municipal and state authoritarian regimes and has been practically since its founding. With the exception of the Lincoln-era Abolitionist movement, it took us until the Great Depression to get a popular brand of politics meaningfully decoupled from some sponsored industry. Even then, its flaky and hesitant and prone to being co-opted.
But you're fooling yourself if you think we haven't brought our imperialist practices home to the core. Every dirty trick and bloody fist you've seen employed abroad has a parallel back home - often with an individual or organization that tried it first in one place before importing or exporting it to another.
Come on man. They literally said:
in the comment you're replying to