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I moved to San Francisco from a very rural area (was working remotely from my father-in-law's farm), and there are a few things the liberals I work with simply

I moved to San Francisco from a very rural area (was working remotely from my father-in-law's farm), and there are a few things the liberals I work with simply do not understand about what's happening in "small-town America" (Disclaimer: I did not vote for Trump, and I don't consider myself a Republican). 1. People hate Hillary Clinton. Haaaate her. No, you think I'm saying they disagree with her politics, but you don't understand; many literally think she is an evil person, and they want her to burn in hell. 2. Most people don't really like Trump. They are bothered by his comments, his style, his bombastic way of living, etc. But they also don't think consider him racist or particularly sexist. 3. They are so fucking tired of identity politics. Oversensitivity, calling everything "-ist" to win an argument, trying to tie racism into everything, debates over "privilege", etc. I would be so bold as to say that if the left doesn't tone down the identity politics Trump will win a second term. Full stop. 4. They are tired of being spoken down to, told that they're not part of the America that matters, and they have a serious chip on their shoulder. It seems to them like they're being told there's only one "right" way to view the world, and it's not theirs. But they like their way of life, they don't want yours, and want politicians to generally leave them alone and let them be. 4a. The worst way to exacerbate that all of these things? To insinuate that people who vote for Trump are doing so because they're -ist or dumb or ignorant. Hillary Clinton did just that, and I saw more on Facebook about Hillary's "basket of deplorables" comment than about anything else in the election. I sometimes wonder if that was the tipping point to Trump for many middle-of-the-road voters in rural America 4. They are sick of "coastal elites" running their lives and pretending like everything is OK. Small towns are hurting. A lot. Realize the median household income in the town I came from is <$30k and the average number of people in each house is 6, and you'll understand why people are livid about Obamacare increasing insurance costs (after so many promised it wouldn't do so). Things are tight, taxes are scary, and when the seemingly rich, out-of-touch people are hand-wavy about increasing the single biggest expense by 50% when you're barely making it (food/housing is cheap) you get the hatred for Obamacare.

istorical 10y ago
I think your point about insurance premiums is spot on. A $100-200/month increase isn't much when you live in a high cost of living area with higher salaries, but when you live in a low cost of living area with lower salaries, that $100-200/month might be a huge percentage change in your monthly expenditures. People who are on employee-sponsored health plans don't understand how expensive healthcare is for low-income self-employed and low-income self-insured people.
- gizmo 10y ago
  It's still misplaced anger, because the GOP refuses to expand medicare or to allow collective bargaining to push costs down. Voting GOP because Obamacare is mediocre makes no sense because the GOP has no intention (and literally no plan) to fix any of the problems with Obamacare. Besides, the towns with 30k average income didn't vote for Trump, they voted overwhelmingly for Clinton. Trump did well in middle America among 70k household income families. There is also a large gap between how angry people are at Obamacare and at the American Care Act. They're the same thing, of course, but only Obamacare makes people seethe with rage. So clearly the GOP has been successful in poisoning the healthcare debate.
  - splintercell 10y ago
    I bunch of things you talk about show all the symptoms of the bubble effect. People don't believe in things because they personally analyzed everything and came to a conclusion. You don't believe that a fossil in a museum is 5,000 years old, or a painting is truly made by Da Vinci 500 years ago, you trust 'experts', even though your own intuition would be against it. So for instance, if I showed you a painting and asked you if you believe that it was painted by Da Vinci, you may agree with the statement, but once you hear from the experts, you realize that it is a fake, then you'd change your opinion. It would be patently dishonest for me to go out and perform survey of people by showing them a fake da Vinci and getting a 75% affirmative answer that it is a real da vinci and then claiming "75% of the people believe that it's a real Da Vinci painting, but because 'experts' say that it's fake, nobody wants to come see it in my private museum". Same goes here, when asked, most conservatives might be ok with the individual Obamacare mandates like "Would it be better if your kids are allowed to be on your health insurance until they are 26", once they hear from the people they trust that this means health insurance premiums would go up, then they would be oppose it.
    - gizmo 10y ago
      I totally agree that my observations are symptomatic of a bubble. That doesn't change that there are a meaningful differences between bubbles. People who blindly trust scientific consensus live in a bubble, but it's the best kind of bubble. The Obamacare scenario you describe doesn't match up with reality. It's not true that they oppose Obamacare on rational grounds (e.g. I don't want my insurance to go up). Obamacare is the republican solution to health insurance, it's a federal version of Romneycare. Republicans should love it, because it's their own program, but they hate it. This hatred for Obamacare is the product of relentless fear-mongering by the right wing press and talk radio. What's going on here is much more serious than just groups of people living in their own bubble and consuming their own kind of media. Bubbles aren't a new thing, embracing a fact-free worldview is.
saeranv 10y ago
Thanks for sharing. Can you elaborate on #1. I never really understood the level of hatred Hillary received. To me she seemed like any other politician.
- austenallred 10y ago
  I'll be honest; I don't entirely understand it, either. The general sentiment is that she's a crook and corrupt to a much, much greater degree than other politicians.
  - mikeash 10y ago
    Conservative talk radio, and other similar media, have spent decades vilifying her. According to them, she has helped her husband prey on women, has had people killed to cover up crimes, is trying to push for a takeover of the US by the United Nations, and much, much more. Not much of this is connected to reality, but that just doesn't matter.
    - Arizhel 10y ago
      The part about her helping her husband prey on women has at least some truth to it. There's no shortage of women over the decades who have accused Bill Clinton of sexual assault; I think it's rather silly to claim that Billy is completely innocent. So just as with any rapist, a woman who insists on staying married to such a man and backing him up in public can be seen as "enabling" him. Honestly, I don't think all this anti-Hillary stuff is unfair either. There's no shortage of Democrat politicians who do NOT have all the baggage that either Bill or Hillary have accumulated over the years. What kind of dirt does anyone have on Al Gore, for instance? Conservatives might disagree about his environmental claims, and some people might still be mad about his ex-wife's record lyrics labeling campaign (but he and Tipper got divorced some time ago, so I think it's unfair to hold him to that now), but that's about it. I've certainly never heard of him sexually assaulting women. And I can say the same about most Democratic politicians, famous or not. So why did the DNC insist on picking a candidate with so much baggage? They're really the ones to blame for losing this election.
mildbow 10y ago
1. Why do they hate her? 2. Do they consider him not racist/sexist because they are a little bit too? (Not trying to be inflammatory) 3. I hate it too. 4b. Why are they hurting? Why is median household income so low?
- ameister14 10y ago
  4b.Why are they hurting? Why is median household income so low? Well, in the small town I grew up in, cheap imports and exported labor coupled with automation killed the main sources of jobs. Retraining is incredibly hard and requires a willingness to uproot everything and risk it all as well as the ability to not get paid for a while to move forward.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - evilduck 10y ago
    Uprooting is harder than it seems too. House and property valuations plummet shortly after the company propping up a "company town" departs. Finding a potential home buyer in a dying town becomes quite difficult, for adults, leaving becomes equivalent to walking away from everything, including a mortgage.
- kevando 10y ago
  re: 1 I think it's 2 fold: a) A really successful propagation of lies regarding her. I live in Ohio and get junk mail all the time, some of it is just absurd. They make claims about the terrorist attacks she allowed while "in office" as sec of state. Makes no sense. b) They are quite possibly right and she is the worst. Look into the death of Vince Foster, whitewater, her suspicious reasons for hiding her email from the us government. There's A LOT of circumstantial evidence that she is beyond corrupt.
- joncalhoun 10y ago
  I live in a small deep-red town, so I'll try to give my take on a few here. 2. Imagine you lived in a town where 99% of the population is not racist, but that 1% that is racist is blatantly so. They don't do thing subtly, but they openly use racial slurs and make it known that they don't like or trust people of a certain ethnicity. Now imagine someone comes into town and when they happen to see someone of color they subtly walk to the other side of the road, or quickly double check to make sure their wallet is still there after they pass by. To many (most?) people in the town, they likely wouldn't perceive this as being racist at all. Racism to them is walking into the passerby intentionally and saying something crude like, "Watch where you are going, *!" When you spend your entire life thinking that this is what a racist is, Trump can seem incredibly tame by comparison. Now we can get into a completely different discussion about whether those people truly are racist for not recognizing racism, not ostracizing the few blatantly racist people, etc, but in my experience nearly all of those people are making a genuine effort to be accepting of others and aren't intentionally racist. They have just grown up in a completely different environment/culture than what you would get growing up in a city, and their opinion of what is racism isn't the same as yours. 4. Where I grew up, something like 75% or more of the jobs were at factories. Toys, factory equipment, bicycles, fiberglass, metal, etc all came out of the town. And the people working these jobs weren't lazy - they would work 60+ hours every week, often working Saturdays, long overlapping shifts, and the factory would run 24/7. They even dealt with dangerous equipment (it isn't uncommon to see people missing fingers here) where they needed to pay attention to what they were doing all the time without any additional compensation. But they were happy. They could provide for their family. They could make enough to pay for a $100k house and their wife could stay at home and watch the kids because he likely was working and couldn't help out. Wages were never amazing, but they got by. Now for whatever reason - automation, outsourcing, immigration, or whatever else - many of those jobs are gone, and now these people who previously would bust their asses to get by are still trying to bust their asses, but they are all fighting for the few jobs remaining. Wages are down (more workers than are needed by jobs). Spouses are working to try to help pay the bills. Despite all of that, things just don't look like they are getting better anytime soon. There simply aren't enough jobs available for them. In cities service jobs can often help fill this gap, but in small towns it typically isn't enough. And many people don't want to, or can't afford to move. They are already barely able to pay their $400/mo mortgage and nobody would want to move to their prospect free town, so who are they going to sell their house to? They have grandparents in the area who need their help. They have kids 6 years into school with friends they don't want to uproot. So they do what they can, take what work they can, and get by hoping and praying that someone will take notice of their struggle and try to help them out. And the median income continues to decrease.
true_religion 10y ago
> They are so fucking tired of identity politics. Oversensitivity, calling everything "-ist" to win an argument, trying to tie racism into everything. I've thought of this and wondered is it actually possible that racism and sexism is rampant? In Eastern Europe, racism is utterly rampant (dismissal of achievements of people based on their ethnicity, wide spread belief that people of a certain ethnic type are 'bad for the country', casual disdain to out-group members). However racism is also utterly accepted, and thus invisible to the casual eye because in practice many people constantly make exceptions to their world view. They're racist in general and chant slurs when drunk, but polite to their neighbors from Nigeria because "those are the good ones". Perhaps the same is true in the US. Just look at companies like Uber, and how institutions can be warped to protect sexual harassers. Those individuals aren't some great 'other'. Those are our friends, colleagues, brothers, sisters, and yes sometimes they are even 'us'. Yet outside of smoking gun situations, we don't see them as even potentially 'sexist'. So sexism could be rampant. Racism could be rampant. However, calling people out on said fact, is not useful for anything except for fostering feelings of self-righteousness. What is most effective, as we can see from the US Civil Rights movement of the 60s, is focusing on common ground, and using that as a motivator toward egalitarianism. In my very own state, the KKK was utterly destroyed by the fact that they wanted to beat up elementary-school children, and whilst some people might have been casually racists they drew the line against beating up 7 year olds and thus could be motivated to repudiate even less extreme positions simply because the KKK was also for them. What brought us all together was the feeling that 'we are all human beings who value our families, and love our children'. What I see with current day liberals (and conservatives actually too) is that the platform lacks unity. Thus rather than being able to build bridges, bridges are often burned pre-emptively by more 'extreme' segments of the group.
- gizmo 10y ago
  Organizations like Black Lives Matter also draw inspiration from the 60s Civil Rights movement, but they have concluded (correctly, in my view) that relentlessly opposing and calling out racism is enormously effective. Black Lives Matter is so successful that their message has reached almost every single American.
brianpgordon 10y ago
> Things are tight, taxes are scary The economic angle is what I understand least about the Republican voter base. A core part of the Republican platform is that we should be cutting government services and programs in order to lower taxes. But these cuts disproportionately affect the poor. The whole point of these programs is to provide a social safety net for the most vulnerable. So I understand why the rich would vote Republican but I'm confused by the groundswell support for Trump among those struggling to pay their bills. It seems like they're voting against their own interests. How did the pro-business, small-government faction gain such traction among the people who have the most to gain from the redistribution of wealth via higher taxes? Is it purely because of the parties' positions on abortion, immigration, defense, marriage, etc?
- austenallred 10y ago
  My experience is that Republicans generally don't view it through the lens of "what will I get back from the government." At least in the town I was living, there's "what I make" and there's "what the government takes" and that's the end of the equation. Most people I knew who qualified for government assistance wouldn't even apply for it. Partially out of pride, occasionally out of ignorance, partially out of a fierce independence.
- nec4b 10y ago
  It's called morality. Not taking what is not yours to take, when you can earn it yourself.
tzs 10y ago
> They are sick of "coastal elites" running their lives and pretending like everything is OK. Small towns are hurting. A lot. Realize the median household income in the town I came from is <$30k and the average number of people in each house is 6, and you'll understand why people are livid about Obamacare increasing insurance costs (after so many promised it wouldn't do so). Things are tight, taxes are scary, and when the seemingly rich, out-of-touch people are hand-wavy about increasing the single biggest expense by 50% when you're barely making it (food/housing is cheap) you get the hatred for Obamacare. Why aren't they on expanded Medicaid?
cr0sh 10y ago
> But they like their way of life, they don't want yours, and want politicians to generally leave them alone and let them be. Umm - they want to be left alone, let be, let them live their lives where they are, yet they are complaining about not being heard... ...can you have it both ways?
LyndsySimon 10y ago
All of this. I too came from a very rural area[1], and my analysis exactly coincides with yours. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boone_County,_Arkansas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boone_County,_Arkansas

istorical 10y ago

I think your point about insurance premiums is spot on. A $100-200/month increase isn't much when you live in a high cost of living area with higher salaries, but when you live in a low cost of living area with lower salaries, that $100-200/month might be a huge percentage change in your monthly expenditures. People who are on employee-sponsored health plans don't understand how expensive healthcare is for low-income self-employed and low-income self-insured people.

gizmo 10y ago
It's still misplaced anger, because the GOP refuses to expand medicare or to allow collective bargaining to push costs down. Voting GOP because Obamacare is mediocre makes no sense because the GOP has no intention (and literally no plan) to fix any of the problems with Obamacare. Besides, the towns with 30k average income didn't vote for Trump, they voted overwhelmingly for Clinton. Trump did well in middle America among 70k household income families. There is also a large gap between how angry people are at Obamacare and at the American Care Act. They're the same thing, of course, but only Obamacare makes people seethe with rage. So clearly the GOP has been successful in poisoning the healthcare debate.
- splintercell 10y ago
  I bunch of things you talk about show all the symptoms of the bubble effect. People don't believe in things because they personally analyzed everything and came to a conclusion. You don't believe that a fossil in a museum is 5,000 years old, or a painting is truly made by Da Vinci 500 years ago, you trust 'experts', even though your own intuition would be against it. So for instance, if I showed you a painting and asked you if you believe that it was painted by Da Vinci, you may agree with the statement, but once you hear from the experts, you realize that it is a fake, then you'd change your opinion. It would be patently dishonest for me to go out and perform survey of people by showing them a fake da Vinci and getting a 75% affirmative answer that it is a real da vinci and then claiming "75% of the people believe that it's a real Da Vinci painting, but because 'experts' say that it's fake, nobody wants to come see it in my private museum". Same goes here, when asked, most conservatives might be ok with the individual Obamacare mandates like "Would it be better if your kids are allowed to be on your health insurance until they are 26", once they hear from the people they trust that this means health insurance premiums would go up, then they would be oppose it.
  - gizmo 10y ago
    I totally agree that my observations are symptomatic of a bubble. That doesn't change that there are a meaningful differences between bubbles. People who blindly trust scientific consensus live in a bubble, but it's the best kind of bubble. The Obamacare scenario you describe doesn't match up with reality. It's not true that they oppose Obamacare on rational grounds (e.g. I don't want my insurance to go up). Obamacare is the republican solution to health insurance, it's a federal version of Romneycare. Republicans should love it, because it's their own program, but they hate it. This hatred for Obamacare is the product of relentless fear-mongering by the right wing press and talk radio. What's going on here is much more serious than just groups of people living in their own bubble and consuming their own kind of media. Bubbles aren't a new thing, embracing a fact-free worldview is.

saeranv 10y ago

Thanks for sharing. Can you elaborate on #1. I never really understood the level of hatred Hillary received. To me she seemed like any other politician.

austenallred 10y ago
I'll be honest; I don't entirely understand it, either. The general sentiment is that she's a crook and corrupt to a much, much greater degree than other politicians.
- mikeash 10y ago
  Conservative talk radio, and other similar media, have spent decades vilifying her. According to them, she has helped her husband prey on women, has had people killed to cover up crimes, is trying to push for a takeover of the US by the United Nations, and much, much more. Not much of this is connected to reality, but that just doesn't matter.
  - Arizhel 10y ago
    The part about her helping her husband prey on women has at least some truth to it. There's no shortage of women over the decades who have accused Bill Clinton of sexual assault; I think it's rather silly to claim that Billy is completely innocent. So just as with any rapist, a woman who insists on staying married to such a man and backing him up in public can be seen as "enabling" him. Honestly, I don't think all this anti-Hillary stuff is unfair either. There's no shortage of Democrat politicians who do NOT have all the baggage that either Bill or Hillary have accumulated over the years. What kind of dirt does anyone have on Al Gore, for instance? Conservatives might disagree about his environmental claims, and some people might still be mad about his ex-wife's record lyrics labeling campaign (but he and Tipper got divorced some time ago, so I think it's unfair to hold him to that now), but that's about it. I've certainly never heard of him sexually assaulting women. And I can say the same about most Democratic politicians, famous or not. So why did the DNC insist on picking a candidate with so much baggage? They're really the ones to blame for losing this election.

mildbow 10y ago

1. Why do they hate her? 2. Do they consider him not racist/sexist because they are a little bit too? (Not trying to be inflammatory) 3. I hate it too. 4b. Why are they hurting? Why is median household income so low?

ameister14 10y ago
4b.Why are they hurting? Why is median household income so low? Well, in the small town I grew up in, cheap imports and exported labor coupled with automation killed the main sources of jobs. Retraining is incredibly hard and requires a willingness to uproot everything and risk it all as well as the ability to not get paid for a while to move forward.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- evilduck 10y ago
  Uprooting is harder than it seems too. House and property valuations plummet shortly after the company propping up a "company town" departs. Finding a potential home buyer in a dying town becomes quite difficult, for adults, leaving becomes equivalent to walking away from everything, including a mortgage.
kevando 10y ago
re: 1 I think it's 2 fold: a) A really successful propagation of lies regarding her. I live in Ohio and get junk mail all the time, some of it is just absurd. They make claims about the terrorist attacks she allowed while "in office" as sec of state. Makes no sense. b) They are quite possibly right and she is the worst. Look into the death of Vince Foster, whitewater, her suspicious reasons for hiding her email from the us government. There's A LOT of circumstantial evidence that she is beyond corrupt.
joncalhoun 10y ago
I live in a small deep-red town, so I'll try to give my take on a few here. 2. Imagine you lived in a town where 99% of the population is not racist, but that 1% that is racist is blatantly so. They don't do thing subtly, but they openly use racial slurs and make it known that they don't like or trust people of a certain ethnicity. Now imagine someone comes into town and when they happen to see someone of color they subtly walk to the other side of the road, or quickly double check to make sure their wallet is still there after they pass by. To many (most?) people in the town, they likely wouldn't perceive this as being racist at all. Racism to them is walking into the passerby intentionally and saying something crude like, "Watch where you are going, *!" When you spend your entire life thinking that this is what a racist is, Trump can seem incredibly tame by comparison. Now we can get into a completely different discussion about whether those people truly are racist for not recognizing racism, not ostracizing the few blatantly racist people, etc, but in my experience nearly all of those people are making a genuine effort to be accepting of others and aren't intentionally racist. They have just grown up in a completely different environment/culture than what you would get growing up in a city, and their opinion of what is racism isn't the same as yours. 4. Where I grew up, something like 75% or more of the jobs were at factories. Toys, factory equipment, bicycles, fiberglass, metal, etc all came out of the town. And the people working these jobs weren't lazy - they would work 60+ hours every week, often working Saturdays, long overlapping shifts, and the factory would run 24/7. They even dealt with dangerous equipment (it isn't uncommon to see people missing fingers here) where they needed to pay attention to what they were doing all the time without any additional compensation. But they were happy. They could provide for their family. They could make enough to pay for a $100k house and their wife could stay at home and watch the kids because he likely was working and couldn't help out. Wages were never amazing, but they got by. Now for whatever reason - automation, outsourcing, immigration, or whatever else - many of those jobs are gone, and now these people who previously would bust their asses to get by are still trying to bust their asses, but they are all fighting for the few jobs remaining. Wages are down (more workers than are needed by jobs). Spouses are working to try to help pay the bills. Despite all of that, things just don't look like they are getting better anytime soon. There simply aren't enough jobs available for them. In cities service jobs can often help fill this gap, but in small towns it typically isn't enough. And many people don't want to, or can't afford to move. They are already barely able to pay their $400/mo mortgage and nobody would want to move to their prospect free town, so who are they going to sell their house to? They have grandparents in the area who need their help. They have kids 6 years into school with friends they don't want to uproot. So they do what they can, take what work they can, and get by hoping and praying that someone will take notice of their struggle and try to help them out. And the median income continues to decrease.

true_religion 10y ago

> They are so fucking tired of identity politics. Oversensitivity, calling everything "-ist" to win an argument, trying to tie racism into everything. I've thought of this and wondered is it actually possible that racism and sexism is rampant? In Eastern Europe, racism is utterly rampant (dismissal of achievements of people based on their ethnicity, wide spread belief that people of a certain ethnic type are 'bad for the country', casual disdain to out-group members). However racism is also utterly accepted, and thus invisible to the casual eye because in practice many people constantly make exceptions to their world view. They're racist in general and chant slurs when drunk, but polite to their neighbors from Nigeria because "those are the good ones". Perhaps the same is true in the US. Just look at companies like Uber, and how institutions can be warped to protect sexual harassers. Those individuals aren't some great 'other'. Those are our friends, colleagues, brothers, sisters, and yes sometimes they are even 'us'. Yet outside of smoking gun situations, we don't see them as even potentially 'sexist'. So sexism could be rampant. Racism could be rampant. However, calling people out on said fact, is not useful for anything except for fostering feelings of self-righteousness. What is most effective, as we can see from the US Civil Rights movement of the 60s, is focusing on common ground, and using that as a motivator toward egalitarianism. In my very own state, the KKK was utterly destroyed by the fact that they wanted to beat up elementary-school children, and whilst some people might have been casually racists they drew the line against beating up 7 year olds and thus could be motivated to repudiate even less extreme positions simply because the KKK was also for them. What brought us all together was the feeling that 'we are all human beings who value our families, and love our children'. What I see with current day liberals (and conservatives actually too) is that the platform lacks unity. Thus rather than being able to build bridges, bridges are often burned pre-emptively by more 'extreme' segments of the group.

gizmo 10y ago
Organizations like Black Lives Matter also draw inspiration from the 60s Civil Rights movement, but they have concluded (correctly, in my view) that relentlessly opposing and calling out racism is enormously effective. Black Lives Matter is so successful that their message has reached almost every single American.

brianpgordon 10y ago

> Things are tight, taxes are scary The economic angle is what I understand least about the Republican voter base. A core part of the Republican platform is that we should be cutting government services and programs in order to lower taxes. But these cuts disproportionately affect the poor. The whole point of these programs is to provide a social safety net for the most vulnerable. So I understand why the rich would vote Republican but I'm confused by the groundswell support for Trump among those struggling to pay their bills. It seems like they're voting against their own interests. How did the pro-business, small-government faction gain such traction among the people who have the most to gain from the redistribution of wealth via higher taxes? Is it purely because of the parties' positions on abortion, immigration, defense, marriage, etc?

austenallred 10y ago
My experience is that Republicans generally don't view it through the lens of "what will I get back from the government." At least in the town I was living, there's "what I make" and there's "what the government takes" and that's the end of the equation. Most people I knew who qualified for government assistance wouldn't even apply for it. Partially out of pride, occasionally out of ignorance, partially out of a fierce independence.
nec4b 10y ago
It's called morality. Not taking what is not yours to take, when you can earn it yourself.

tzs 10y ago

> They are sick of "coastal elites" running their lives and pretending like everything is OK. Small towns are hurting. A lot. Realize the median household income in the town I came from is <$30k and the average number of people in each house is 6, and you'll understand why people are livid about Obamacare increasing insurance costs (after so many promised it wouldn't do so). Things are tight, taxes are scary, and when the seemingly rich, out-of-touch people are hand-wavy about increasing the single biggest expense by 50% when you're barely making it (food/housing is cheap) you get the hatred for Obamacare. Why aren't they on expanded Medicaid?

cr0sh 10y ago

> But they like their way of life, they don't want yours, and want politicians to generally leave them alone and let them be. Umm - they want to be left alone, let be, let them live their lives where they are, yet they are complaining about not being heard... ...can you have it both ways?

LyndsySimon 10y ago

All of this. I too came from a very rural area[1], and my analysis exactly coincides with yours. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boone_County,_Arkansas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boone_County,_Arkansas