6 ms·

An Open Letter to the Democratic National Committee from a Rural Democrat

20 points by protomyth 10y ago

sverige 10y ago
>> That seems like a stark contrast from the rhetoric we hear from many national Democratic leaders who seemingly want to alter our way of life. (Emphasis added) That's the problem right there. It's easy to imagine that everyone lives like you when you are in a city that rarely leave, unless it is to fly to another city. The democrats have little hope of regaining any majorities in the 3,084 counties where Trump won unless they make major changes to their policies that damage the economies in many of those counties and their strategy of trying to shame them into changing their behavior (including calling them "deplorable" and "irredeemable").
- knz 10y ago
  > That's the problem right there. It's easy to imagine that everyone lives like you when you are in a city that rarely leave, unless it is to fly to another city I hope you can see the irony in rural areas being upset that "those city people don't understand us" when they also make little attempt to understand the political motivations of urban voters. They also seem to believe that the world should keep subsidizing their jobs even when there is a long term trend of urbanization etc. Personally I think rural and urban areas need each other but we need more compromise - why are urban areas subsidizing infrastructure spending in rural areas and the farm bill only to get kicked in the teeth when issues associated with urban areas come up? Do we want to go back to rural poverty being the norm? My wifes grandparents grew up in that and it was a hard life. Those people need affordable healthcare and benefit from being able to send their kids off to good universities etc. Rural America doesn't have a monopoly on the "real" America - they are just as out of touch with urban America.
  - protomyth 10y ago
    > why are urban areas subsidizing infrastructure spending in rural areas and the farm bill only to get kicked in the teeth when issues associated with urban areas come up? I'm curious what Urban American has gotten "kicked in the teeth" by? Mainly, the $ figures are from military, power, and agriculture which Urban American doesn't want in their backyard. Pigs and turkeys don't smell so good, and wind farms are noisy, unsightly, and a bit dangerous. Counting military and power spending is pretty poor form. Transportation happens because the low cost raw materials come from the rural areas. No roads, no food for urban folks. > Rural America doesn't have a monopoly on the "real" America - they are just as out of touch with urban America. That's not really true. Rural America is quite aware of the issues Urban America face because that's all the news really covers. When the news covers Rural America it is pretty bad reporting unless the reporter is actually local[1]. The whole debacle of the pipeline in Standing Rock pretty much proved the point. I've seen coverage of celebrities and pieces from major publications that get much of the history wrong[2]. 1) which makes me wonder about reports coming from the rest of the world 2) the whole "rich people in Bismarck" line is beyond insulting and the amount of back story on all the prep for the pipeline is tragically poor.
    - knz 10y ago
      > I'm curious what Urban American has gotten "kicked in the teeth" by? Mainly, the $ figures are from military, power, and agriculture which Urban American doesn't want in their backyard. Pigs and turkeys don't smell so good, and wind farms are noisy, unsightly, and a bit dangerous. Counting military and power spending is pretty poor form. Transportation happens because the low cost raw materials come from the rural areas. No roads, no food for urban folks A local example for my State would be spending on public transportation vs bridges. Elected officials from rural areas are routinely outraged about "wasteful" spending on buses/trains to relieve congestion but then complain that not enough is spent on rural bridges and highways. You are right, we do need roads to bring food in (it's symbiotic too by the way -if urban areas don't buy then rural areas are back to subsistence farming and poverty) but we could do that without four lane highways and overpasses. Personally I amok spending tax revenue on infrastructure but that should include public transportation in urban areas if appropriate. > That's not really true. Rural America is quite aware of the issues Urban America face because that's all the news really covers Seeing coverage is not the same as understanding. Ask someone in a rural area how to solve inner-city poverty and they will give you a different answer than someone who works in the field. The same could be said about rural issues. To be clear, Im not saying urban America understands rural America. I'm just sick of seeing this narrative of "Trump won because liberal elites don't understand rural America". It's way too simplistic.
      - protomyth 10y ago
        I would hardly call public transportation vs bridges a kick in the teeth. Bridges are becoming a huge issue for everyone. Just look at what happened in urban MN when the 35W bridge went because we were not spending the money on maintenance. > Ask someone in a rural area how to solve inner-city poverty and they will give you a different answer than someone who works in the field. I'm not sure urban folks know how to solve it either. > I'm just sick of seeing this narrative of "Trump won because liberal elites don't understand rural America". It's way too simplistic. It is simplistic, but you cannot have a candidate show up and give speeches about putting all the people in a region out of work without a lifeline. Not everything in life is complicated. If someone showed up in SV and said "I don't like this technology and we will be shutting it all down", I would imagine that person is going to get no votes. I'm pretty sure Rubio (or most of the R candidates) would have won, and it would have been on the same basis. The fact that the Republicans won with a candidate with the highest negatives is pretty hard to believe. As a side note, I starting to think polling companies should look at donor lists to get some baseline on candidates. I'm thinking that's the next wave of polling analysis.
  - sverige 10y ago
    It's not a matter of understanding. It's a matter of city folks trying to change the way rural folks live.
    - krapp 10y ago
      In what ways? I've heard this rhetoric for a while - that this election was a clash between "city folks" and "rural folks", with the implication being that the former conform to one stereotype and the latter another. I suspect that it might have some truth to it, but it's presented as an attempt at populist mythmaking and propaganda. But I have yet to understand what values "rural folks" exclusively hold that "city folks" don't, and vice versa.
- akytt 10y ago
  It's the key problem indeed. It is not the party leadership who wants to alter your way of life. It's the life that is changing. Automation, solar, energy storage and an increasing tension between finite resources and exponential growth all are altering their way of life. It is ok to want to stick to way things have worked in the past but it is not ok to ignore the world as it changes around you. In twenty years, the world as they know it will be gone. The longer that simple fact is ignored the harder the fall becomes once reality can no longer ignored.
- vermooten 10y ago
  I couldn't believe it when HRC made that 'deplorables' comment. Although (very) appropriate for some of Trump's supporters, it was a great way to alienate people and to guarantee they wouldnt vote for her. A real WTF moment.
PretzelFisch 10y ago
This seems more of just a problem with how the two parties try to win by absorbing every fringe groups crazies cause into a national platform. It is a failing of our country to have hyper partisan politics controlled at a national level and holding all members in every state accountable to the same platform.
- legodt 10y ago
  Naw my guy, the failures of the American left are rooted in its inability to be a party of the working class. Every lost election sees the policy of the Democrats moving further and further to the right, leading to a platform that masquerades as progressive but actually alienates and abandons working class Americans because it isn't actually committed to them. Bernie was the first step (although many argue he didn't go far enough), but since the us Democratic party is held by the same corporate reins as the Republican party, he wasn't given a fair chance. If you look at other developed countries, even America with its most blue government is still to the right of center on economics.
jstewartmobile 10y ago
Back when I did real estate, the rural areas surrounding our city were just eaten-up with meth. People cooking meth. People taking meth. Houses burning down, etc. Coexisting with this meth epidemic were a bunch of loyal old-timers who knew the place in better times. Consider how those old-timers must feel as they watch the mainstream Democratic party make transgender-bathrooms priority #1 while their own hometowns are turning into shit...
- legodt 10y ago
  You say that like the two platforms can't co-exist. I agree with what you are saying overall, the American democratic party has abandoned a lot of people, but with the transgender bathroom issue, that came up because these people were under attack and threat of violence just for existing publically. This is why the issue felt so large and was such a rush priority since empowered socially regressive states were rushing legislation to allow discrimination and implicitly support attacks on these groups. I just want to state this for clarity and posterity, not detract from your overall point which I very much agree with.
  - jstewartmobile 10y ago
    There are only so many hours in the day, and only so many resources available for the cause. You've got to pick your battles. Their bathroom struggle is noise compared to the mayhem we are causing at home and abroad. Just a few examples: > Spending nearly a trillion dollars every year to expand the police state and robot bomb innocent people in countries that have done nothing to us. > Locking people up for minor offenses and not giving them an adequate defense or a speedy trial. > A healthcare system that costs almost double that of its western european counterpart, but with spotty coverage and poorer outcomes--effect being that common injuries and illnesses can be financially devastating, even to the insured. > Once vibrant manufacuring towns up and down the Mississippi that have been gutted by free trade with China, soon to be buried by AI. To the average guy in flyover country, the luxury of having your biggest worry in life be which bathroom you get to use seems every bit as out-of-touch as some guy like Donald Trump flying around in his 747 eating caviar.
niftich 10y ago
There's a lot of fluff in the first part that plays up the caricature of rural America -- this hurts the blog post because it makes it easier to dismiss the entire message. Don't. The oil angle is crucial, although not often talked about. By rallying against projects like Keystone XL -- a Canadian venture to bring Alberta oil sands crude to Gulf of Mexico refineries -- and conflating the legitimate debate over the exact routing of the Bakken formation's Dakota Access Pipeline with a blanket opposition against oil pipelines in general, Democratic voters and leaders are signalling that they're uninterested in supporting a major job producer and the reason for North Dakota's positive balance sheet. Although several years behind, North Dakota has every opportunity to become like Alberta (or any number of states in OPEC), using oil money to prop up the quality of life of its residents. The influx of money and talent can been used to stimulate job creation and ventures that are less dependent on the momentary price of oil and create lasting wealth in an area of the country that could really use some. These ventures have been pursued since the Bakken boom and have resulted in low unemployment, a state budget surplus, and personal income growth, but have a long way to go before they're self-sufficient. Climate change affects us all, but not defending domestic energy extraction seriously hurts the Democratic party platform.

20 points by protomyth 10y ago

>> That seems like a stark contrast from the rhetoric we hear from many national Democratic leaders who seemingly want to alter our way of life. (Emphasis added) That's the problem right there. It's easy to imagine that everyone lives like you when you are in a city that rarely leave, unless it is to fly to another city. The democrats have little hope of regaining any majorities in the 3,084 counties where Trump won unless they make major changes to their policies that damage the economies in many of those counties and their strategy of trying to shame them into changing their behavior (including calling them "deplorable" and "irredeemable").

knz 10y ago
> That's the problem right there. It's easy to imagine that everyone lives like you when you are in a city that rarely leave, unless it is to fly to another city I hope you can see the irony in rural areas being upset that "those city people don't understand us" when they also make little attempt to understand the political motivations of urban voters. They also seem to believe that the world should keep subsidizing their jobs even when there is a long term trend of urbanization etc. Personally I think rural and urban areas need each other but we need more compromise - why are urban areas subsidizing infrastructure spending in rural areas and the farm bill only to get kicked in the teeth when issues associated with urban areas come up? Do we want to go back to rural poverty being the norm? My wifes grandparents grew up in that and it was a hard life. Those people need affordable healthcare and benefit from being able to send their kids off to good universities etc. Rural America doesn't have a monopoly on the "real" America - they are just as out of touch with urban America.
- protomyth 10y ago
  > why are urban areas subsidizing infrastructure spending in rural areas and the farm bill only to get kicked in the teeth when issues associated with urban areas come up? I'm curious what Urban American has gotten "kicked in the teeth" by? Mainly, the $ figures are from military, power, and agriculture which Urban American doesn't want in their backyard. Pigs and turkeys don't smell so good, and wind farms are noisy, unsightly, and a bit dangerous. Counting military and power spending is pretty poor form. Transportation happens because the low cost raw materials come from the rural areas. No roads, no food for urban folks. > Rural America doesn't have a monopoly on the "real" America - they are just as out of touch with urban America. That's not really true. Rural America is quite aware of the issues Urban America face because that's all the news really covers. When the news covers Rural America it is pretty bad reporting unless the reporter is actually local[1]. The whole debacle of the pipeline in Standing Rock pretty much proved the point. I've seen coverage of celebrities and pieces from major publications that get much of the history wrong[2]. 1) which makes me wonder about reports coming from the rest of the world 2) the whole "rich people in Bismarck" line is beyond insulting and the amount of back story on all the prep for the pipeline is tragically poor.
  - knz 10y ago
    > I'm curious what Urban American has gotten "kicked in the teeth" by? Mainly, the $ figures are from military, power, and agriculture which Urban American doesn't want in their backyard. Pigs and turkeys don't smell so good, and wind farms are noisy, unsightly, and a bit dangerous. Counting military and power spending is pretty poor form. Transportation happens because the low cost raw materials come from the rural areas. No roads, no food for urban folks A local example for my State would be spending on public transportation vs bridges. Elected officials from rural areas are routinely outraged about "wasteful" spending on buses/trains to relieve congestion but then complain that not enough is spent on rural bridges and highways. You are right, we do need roads to bring food in (it's symbiotic too by the way -if urban areas don't buy then rural areas are back to subsistence farming and poverty) but we could do that without four lane highways and overpasses. Personally I amok spending tax revenue on infrastructure but that should include public transportation in urban areas if appropriate. > That's not really true. Rural America is quite aware of the issues Urban America face because that's all the news really covers Seeing coverage is not the same as understanding. Ask someone in a rural area how to solve inner-city poverty and they will give you a different answer than someone who works in the field. The same could be said about rural issues. To be clear, Im not saying urban America understands rural America. I'm just sick of seeing this narrative of "Trump won because liberal elites don't understand rural America". It's way too simplistic.
    - protomyth 10y ago
      I would hardly call public transportation vs bridges a kick in the teeth. Bridges are becoming a huge issue for everyone. Just look at what happened in urban MN when the 35W bridge went because we were not spending the money on maintenance. > Ask someone in a rural area how to solve inner-city poverty and they will give you a different answer than someone who works in the field. I'm not sure urban folks know how to solve it either. > I'm just sick of seeing this narrative of "Trump won because liberal elites don't understand rural America". It's way too simplistic. It is simplistic, but you cannot have a candidate show up and give speeches about putting all the people in a region out of work without a lifeline. Not everything in life is complicated. If someone showed up in SV and said "I don't like this technology and we will be shutting it all down", I would imagine that person is going to get no votes. I'm pretty sure Rubio (or most of the R candidates) would have won, and it would have been on the same basis. The fact that the Republicans won with a candidate with the highest negatives is pretty hard to believe. As a side note, I starting to think polling companies should look at donor lists to get some baseline on candidates. I'm thinking that's the next wave of polling analysis.
- sverige 10y ago
  It's not a matter of understanding. It's a matter of city folks trying to change the way rural folks live.
  - krapp 10y ago
    In what ways? I've heard this rhetoric for a while - that this election was a clash between "city folks" and "rural folks", with the implication being that the former conform to one stereotype and the latter another. I suspect that it might have some truth to it, but it's presented as an attempt at populist mythmaking and propaganda. But I have yet to understand what values "rural folks" exclusively hold that "city folks" don't, and vice versa.
akytt 10y ago
It's the key problem indeed. It is not the party leadership who wants to alter your way of life. It's the life that is changing. Automation, solar, energy storage and an increasing tension between finite resources and exponential growth all are altering their way of life. It is ok to want to stick to way things have worked in the past but it is not ok to ignore the world as it changes around you. In twenty years, the world as they know it will be gone. The longer that simple fact is ignored the harder the fall becomes once reality can no longer ignored.
vermooten 10y ago
I couldn't believe it when HRC made that 'deplorables' comment. Although (very) appropriate for some of Trump's supporters, it was a great way to alienate people and to guarantee they wouldnt vote for her. A real WTF moment.

PretzelFisch 10y ago

This seems more of just a problem with how the two parties try to win by absorbing every fringe groups crazies cause into a national platform. It is a failing of our country to have hyper partisan politics controlled at a national level and holding all members in every state accountable to the same platform.

legodt 10y ago
Naw my guy, the failures of the American left are rooted in its inability to be a party of the working class. Every lost election sees the policy of the Democrats moving further and further to the right, leading to a platform that masquerades as progressive but actually alienates and abandons working class Americans because it isn't actually committed to them. Bernie was the first step (although many argue he didn't go far enough), but since the us Democratic party is held by the same corporate reins as the Republican party, he wasn't given a fair chance. If you look at other developed countries, even America with its most blue government is still to the right of center on economics.

jstewartmobile 10y ago

Back when I did real estate, the rural areas surrounding our city were just eaten-up with meth. People cooking meth. People taking meth. Houses burning down, etc. Coexisting with this meth epidemic were a bunch of loyal old-timers who knew the place in better times. Consider how those old-timers must feel as they watch the mainstream Democratic party make transgender-bathrooms priority #1 while their own hometowns are turning into shit...

legodt 10y ago
You say that like the two platforms can't co-exist. I agree with what you are saying overall, the American democratic party has abandoned a lot of people, but with the transgender bathroom issue, that came up because these people were under attack and threat of violence just for existing publically. This is why the issue felt so large and was such a rush priority since empowered socially regressive states were rushing legislation to allow discrimination and implicitly support attacks on these groups. I just want to state this for clarity and posterity, not detract from your overall point which I very much agree with.
- jstewartmobile 10y ago
  There are only so many hours in the day, and only so many resources available for the cause. You've got to pick your battles. Their bathroom struggle is noise compared to the mayhem we are causing at home and abroad. Just a few examples: > Spending nearly a trillion dollars every year to expand the police state and robot bomb innocent people in countries that have done nothing to us. > Locking people up for minor offenses and not giving them an adequate defense or a speedy trial. > A healthcare system that costs almost double that of its western european counterpart, but with spotty coverage and poorer outcomes--effect being that common injuries and illnesses can be financially devastating, even to the insured. > Once vibrant manufacuring towns up and down the Mississippi that have been gutted by free trade with China, soon to be buried by AI. To the average guy in flyover country, the luxury of having your biggest worry in life be which bathroom you get to use seems every bit as out-of-touch as some guy like Donald Trump flying around in his 747 eating caviar.

niftich 10y ago

There's a lot of fluff in the first part that plays up the caricature of rural America -- this hurts the blog post because it makes it easier to dismiss the entire message. Don't. The oil angle is crucial, although not often talked about. By rallying against projects like Keystone XL -- a Canadian venture to bring Alberta oil sands crude to Gulf of Mexico refineries -- and conflating the legitimate debate over the exact routing of the Bakken formation's Dakota Access Pipeline with a blanket opposition against oil pipelines in general, Democratic voters and leaders are signalling that they're uninterested in supporting a major job producer and the reason for North Dakota's positive balance sheet. Although several years behind, North Dakota has every opportunity to become like Alberta (or any number of states in OPEC), using oil money to prop up the quality of life of its residents. The influx of money and talent can been used to stimulate job creation and ventures that are less dependent on the momentary price of oil and create lasting wealth in an area of the country that could really use some. These ventures have been pursued since the Bakken boom and have resulted in low unemployment, a state budget surplus, and personal income growth, but have a long way to go before they're self-sufficient. Climate change affects us all, but not defending domestic energy extraction seriously hurts the Democratic party platform.