Firstly I'm not a supporter of this Nationalist America First agenda, though the fact that simply because I'm willing to non-judgmentally listen to their side a

Firstly I'm not a supporter of this Nationalist America First agenda, though the fact that simply because I'm willing to non-judgmentally listen to their side and hear their complaints and say yeah, those things are a problem causes you to react with hostility kind of shows my point well, so thanks. Secondly, this is not "hurt feelings," not that something -just- being emotionally abusive and nothing else should be an excuse for pretending it isn't a problem, but we'll go with that anyways. No, this is the fact that the middle state's economies have been struggling for years, and that was before the 2008 housing crash, which the cities and coasts have recovered fairly well from, but has left everyone else largely in the cold. Now, it's true that a lot of those issues can be fairly directly traced to the local governments and their bad decisions; some cities, for example Chattanooga, have done extremely well at modernizing. But to pretend that the constant drumbeat of the culture that being in the flyover states (itself a term of derision) is terrible, that everything they believe is dumb, that they're uneducated prudes and all the rest of it has caused an incredible cultural scar between the rural and urban portions of the nation. And successes like Chattanooga are in spite of, not because of, that divide.