6 ms·

Progressivism increases with population density (2021)

28 points by lukebechtel 3y ago

malfist 3y ago
It's a lot harder to view a group of people in a 1 dimensional view when you are constantly exposed to multidimensional interactions with them. This is why things like bussing works. Why inclusion is important and why representation is vital.
- FredPret 3y ago
  You like bussing because it creates lefties? I wonder about the premise of this idea as well. Cities are more expensive and cramped and have more fun things going on - the perfect mix for younger people, who also tend to be more progressive. A very large majority of homeowners with babies move out of dense cities. These also tend to be more conservative.
  - mjmsmith 3y ago
    Do you have evidence that it's a "very large majority"? And what percentage leave because they can't afford it with children, not because they want to?
  - foogazi 3y ago
    > A very large majority of homeowners with babies move out of dense cities. These also tend to be more conservative. Where they homeowners that moved out or moved out to be homeowners? Where they more conservative then loved out or became more conservative once they had babies? No one is static
- JieJie 3y ago
  I'm not disagreeing with you, just adding a historical perspective. I grew up in rural Indiana, during the implementation of bussing (https://blog.history.in.gov/tag/forced-busing/ https://blog.history.in.gov/tag/forced-busing/). It generated so much hatred in the people around me, and had a lot to do with my decision (as a queer white person) to get the hell out of Dodge, ASAP. In our middle school, Black boys were put into home economics class with the white girls, while white boys took shop class, where they would learn skills that they'd use to find jobs in the community. There was still segregation, lots of those boys ended up in "Special Education" where they'd be moved to outbuildings built for those "special classes". It was warehousing people, plain and simple. Some of those boys were my friends. They were intelligent, curious, funny, creative young men, who were fully aware their ticket had been punched. It was a waste of human potential that America is right to be ashamed and in denial of. Denial is one of the steps in the healing process. It's ugly, and everyone outside of the sufferer is right to have feelings about it. Sometimes it's frustration, sometimes pity, sometimes it's rage. "How can you be so blind?" we exclaim. I was a victim of the system, same as them, but I'll be damned if I don't have complicated feelings about it. We all do, I expect, though none of us feel quite free to express them in totality these days, if we had the safe space to express and process them. Instead, we have this. We live in a better world, though. Even Indianapolis and the rural towns that spoke and wheel connect to. Even people in Knox, one of the towns I grew up in, where the town's head of the KKK worked at the local Sears. We all grew up a little bit since then, though, maybe not so much as we still need and deserve. HN is best, not because of the articles that get posted, but because we have a place to discuss them, with honest inquiry. I'm grateful for it, and grateful for your comment. It is 100% true and it concurs with my anecdata.
wonderwonder 3y ago
I can believe this. I have been a lifelong Democrat but find myself moving increasingly to the right since starting to work from home ~5 years ago. Work was essentially my only real in person interaction with people that aren't my wife and kids. Interesting point for introspection.
- megabless123 3y ago
  > find myself moving increasingly to the right since starting to work from home ~5 years ago. why?
  - tekla 3y ago
    When the overton window shifts, and you don't shift with it, by definition you head to the right towards the center. I myself find myself careening to the right for a laundry list of reasons, and I live in a major city.
    - wonderwonder 3y ago
      This is my personal view of my rightward shift as well
  - wonderwonder 3y ago
    I feel like the left has moved very far left and I'm still where I started. I don't like most Republican politicians on a personal level but a lot of the policies being put forward by the left involve stripping parental rights and allowing for children to be taken based on political ideals and for schools to keep secrets from parents. I am very much against this. I'm also not a fan of what seems to very much be open discrimination and degradation of straight white men. Respectfully , I post this not to get into an argument or to hear reasons why I'm wrong or a terrible person, so please refrain from the personal attacks those who choose to reply. I'm just answering the straight forward question of "why?" from my personal view of the world.
    - pstuart 3y ago
encoderer 3y ago
I really can’t find anything nice to say about this piece. It is sophomoric at best. Has the author spent any time in rural America or are they just imagining what they think it’s like? Or, in a city for that matter? Have they visited a large church or a county fair? The countryside is full of inequality, drug abuse, drunkenness, etc. Also progressives are trying to solve addiction? Really? My experience is that living in a city just trains you to tolerate it.
- pstuart 3y ago
  You can't "solve" addiction, but you can manage it better than we do today. Addiction is a health issue, not a criminal issue. It should also be noted that the War on Drugs was never about "protecting people" -- it was a tool to oppress the people (people of color, counter culture (anti-war)). We've collectively agreed that it's ok to allow dangerous and addictive drugs (alcohol and tobacco). We need to stop being hypocritical about that. The answer to the problem: 1. Legalize all drugs 2. Tax them 3. Regulate them 4. Educate and assist in minimizing the risks. 5. Treat addicts in a medical context rather than a criminal one. There are challenges in doing this, but they're way better options than the current approach.
  - HydianSnake1 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - pstuart 3y ago
      [flagged]
  - UncleOxidant 3y ago
    I live in Oregon and that 5 step plan isn't working out. I agree that addiction is first and foremost a health issue. However, relying on addicts to voluntarily enter treatment isn't working. We're seeing very few enter treatment - last I heard it was well under 10%. I think in the case of highly addictive drugs like opioids/fentanyl, and meth they should be made illegal again (Remember, Oregon essentially did your #1 above) however, instead of incarceration in a prison, we need some kind of treatment hospitals that are involuntary - something between a prison and a hospital with emphasis on treatment. We need to take a much more nuanced approach: some drugs are highly addictive (fentanyl, meth) - people can get hooked on them after only 1 or 2 uses, you want to prevent that as much as possible and that requires that they be illegal. Other drugs are not addictive: marijuana, LSD, shrooms, etc - making those legal is fine, but in the cases of the psychedelics you really want to encourage people to have guidance as much as possible.
tehjoker 3y ago
[flagged]
- MightyBuzzard 3y ago
  [flagged]
foogazi 3y ago
a big thing for me was being exposed to different cultures and lifestyles And connecting the dots: “of course Bob’s not going to hell for <insert thing here>, what else are my sacred books wrong about“
realjohng 3y ago
Fantastic post exploring the physical environmental differences of city vs rural as cause, not correlation, of different political viewpoints
lapcat 3y ago
(2021)
asdfman123 3y ago
The real causality is more like "urban areas have different needs and cultural norms than rural areas/exurbs, so they tend to form separate political coalitions." Tangent: my biggest political pet peeve is thinking of the country as red states versus blue states, when it's really cities versus surrounding areas.
- one_level_deep 3y ago
  [dead]
- jfengel 3y ago
  Politically, states play important national roles. They are winner-take-all in both the Senate and the Electoral College, and gerrymandering makes them nearly so in the House. Sociologically there are bigger differences within the state, but viewed from the outside, a state's main effect on you really is very close to all red or all blue. Only a small number of states play a significant "purple" role, where differences in individual opinion might matter to somebody from outside the state.
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    > They are winner-take-all in both the Senate and the Electoral College Well, except for 2 that aren't in the EC. > and gerrymandering makes them nearly so in the House. 10 out of 41 states with two or more reps have a single-party delegation.
    - jfengel 3y ago
      By "nearly so" I meant that gerrymandering could pack all of other party into a single district. There are another 12 states with only a single representative from the minority party. The most egregious might be my home state, Maryland, with only a single Republican representative out of 9, despite 1/3 of the state having voted Republican in 2020. Similar ratios occur the other way in Tennessee and Alabama. Which is to say, winner-take-all and winner-take-practically-all happen in about half of the state Representatives with more than a single member delegation.
tekla 3y ago
[flagged]
- encoderer 3y ago
  It’s cringe-worthy. I have family members who live in the country who literally spend 100 hours in the fields of somebody they hardly know helping out because the guy had an accident and couldn’t pull his own harvest. Rural America is full of person-to-person direct action often brokered by a church.
didibus 3y ago
At a high level: Progressive - a person advocating or implementing social reform or new, liberal ideas Conservative - a person who is averse to change and holds traditional values And now if we drill in, we get a problem. Traditional values - long-standing beliefs, customs, and practices passed down through generations within a particular culture or society, often reflecting moral, ethical, or religious principles Problem number 1, different conservative hold different set of traditional values. To be conservative kind of requires some level of social hegemony, where everyone holds the same traditional values. Liberal - 1. a supporter of policies that promote social welfare. 2. a supporter of a political and social philosophy that promotes individual rights, civil liberties, democracy, and free enterprise. Problem number 2, there are now two definition of liberal ideas. One are geared towars social welfare. The other towards democracy and individual liberty. This makes it that, all conversation that stays high level, and talks about clusters as conservatives and progressives, to me, is misconstrued, and confusing, because the subject could dramatically be different. Are we discussing Judeo-Christian values, gender roles, etc. ? Are we discussing the need for social welfare, the importance of democracy, the value of individual rights? It all gets conflated in a way that simply divides people based on labels, not substance.
- jpadkins 3y ago
  Good point. Also Liberal != progressive. progressive policy in the last 20 years has in no way championed ideals of individual rights and free enterprise, and they have curtailed certain civil liberties (speech and self defense). The hallmark of traditional liberal ideals are now mainstream conservative thought (at least in the US). That is why you see a lot of people saying they are 'classical liberal' when describing their political beliefs.
_yb2s 3y ago
This seems like a really shallow analysis, and the examples are just popular cliches rather than realistic human experiences. It also does not ring true with my personal experiences or observations. I grew up with progressive politics but in a rural area, and when I came to live in urban areas where these ideas dominated, I was disappointed to observe that they just don’t seem to work as well at solving real world problems as I had imagined they would.
didibus 3y ago
The final conclusion is pretty interesting and food for thoughts: > In low-density areas, quality of life depends on not being interfered with; in high-density areas, it depends on the effective management of inevitable interferences. > As population density increases, residents increasingly depend on governmental authority to manage the impact of others’ lives on their own.
daltont 3y ago
Is the ideology of people living in a certain area really that much of a factor in the economic success of that area? Or is is the more the other way around. A location that has attractive geography or abundance of some resource leads to people wanting to live there. Once population reaches a certain density, there is desire for more rules and regulations to prevent a "tragedy of the commons". Progressive policies are more a result of "success" than a cause. In the US, the state Mississippi get stereotyped as failing area. Progressive policies can't do a whole lot there. Maybe higher taxes on the wealthy, but that could only go so far until companies and wealth can just go to other another state. Mississippi is more of a victim of geography than ideology.

28 points by lukebechtel 3y ago

It's a lot harder to view a group of people in a 1 dimensional view when you are constantly exposed to multidimensional interactions with them. This is why things like bussing works. Why inclusion is important and why representation is vital.

FredPret 3y ago
You like bussing because it creates lefties? I wonder about the premise of this idea as well. Cities are more expensive and cramped and have more fun things going on - the perfect mix for younger people, who also tend to be more progressive. A very large majority of homeowners with babies move out of dense cities. These also tend to be more conservative.
- mjmsmith 3y ago
  Do you have evidence that it's a "very large majority"? And what percentage leave because they can't afford it with children, not because they want to?
- foogazi 3y ago
  > A very large majority of homeowners with babies move out of dense cities. These also tend to be more conservative. Where they homeowners that moved out or moved out to be homeowners? Where they more conservative then loved out or became more conservative once they had babies? No one is static
JieJie 3y ago
I'm not disagreeing with you, just adding a historical perspective. I grew up in rural Indiana, during the implementation of bussing (https://blog.history.in.gov/tag/forced-busing/ https://blog.history.in.gov/tag/forced-busing/). It generated so much hatred in the people around me, and had a lot to do with my decision (as a queer white person) to get the hell out of Dodge, ASAP. In our middle school, Black boys were put into home economics class with the white girls, while white boys took shop class, where they would learn skills that they'd use to find jobs in the community. There was still segregation, lots of those boys ended up in "Special Education" where they'd be moved to outbuildings built for those "special classes". It was warehousing people, plain and simple. Some of those boys were my friends. They were intelligent, curious, funny, creative young men, who were fully aware their ticket had been punched. It was a waste of human potential that America is right to be ashamed and in denial of. Denial is one of the steps in the healing process. It's ugly, and everyone outside of the sufferer is right to have feelings about it. Sometimes it's frustration, sometimes pity, sometimes it's rage. "How can you be so blind?" we exclaim. I was a victim of the system, same as them, but I'll be damned if I don't have complicated feelings about it. We all do, I expect, though none of us feel quite free to express them in totality these days, if we had the safe space to express and process them. Instead, we have this. We live in a better world, though. Even Indianapolis and the rural towns that spoke and wheel connect to. Even people in Knox, one of the towns I grew up in, where the town's head of the KKK worked at the local Sears. We all grew up a little bit since then, though, maybe not so much as we still need and deserve. HN is best, not because of the articles that get posted, but because we have a place to discuss them, with honest inquiry. I'm grateful for it, and grateful for your comment. It is 100% true and it concurs with my anecdata.

wonderwonder 3y ago

I can believe this. I have been a lifelong Democrat but find myself moving increasingly to the right since starting to work from home ~5 years ago. Work was essentially my only real in person interaction with people that aren't my wife and kids. Interesting point for introspection.

megabless123 3y ago
> find myself moving increasingly to the right since starting to work from home ~5 years ago. why?
- tekla 3y ago
  When the overton window shifts, and you don't shift with it, by definition you head to the right towards the center. I myself find myself careening to the right for a laundry list of reasons, and I live in a major city.
  - wonderwonder 3y ago
    This is my personal view of my rightward shift as well
- wonderwonder 3y ago
  I feel like the left has moved very far left and I'm still where I started. I don't like most Republican politicians on a personal level but a lot of the policies being put forward by the left involve stripping parental rights and allowing for children to be taken based on political ideals and for schools to keep secrets from parents. I am very much against this. I'm also not a fan of what seems to very much be open discrimination and degradation of straight white men. Respectfully , I post this not to get into an argument or to hear reasons why I'm wrong or a terrible person, so please refrain from the personal attacks those who choose to reply. I'm just answering the straight forward question of "why?" from my personal view of the world.
  - pstuart 3y ago

encoderer 3y ago

I really can’t find anything nice to say about this piece. It is sophomoric at best. Has the author spent any time in rural America or are they just imagining what they think it’s like? Or, in a city for that matter? Have they visited a large church or a county fair? The countryside is full of inequality, drug abuse, drunkenness, etc. Also progressives are trying to solve addiction? Really? My experience is that living in a city just trains you to tolerate it.

pstuart 3y ago
You can't "solve" addiction, but you can manage it better than we do today. Addiction is a health issue, not a criminal issue. It should also be noted that the War on Drugs was never about "protecting people" -- it was a tool to oppress the people (people of color, counter culture (anti-war)). We've collectively agreed that it's ok to allow dangerous and addictive drugs (alcohol and tobacco). We need to stop being hypocritical about that. The answer to the problem: 1. Legalize all drugs 2. Tax them 3. Regulate them 4. Educate and assist in minimizing the risks. 5. Treat addicts in a medical context rather than a criminal one. There are challenges in doing this, but they're way better options than the current approach.
- HydianSnake1 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - pstuart 3y ago
    [flagged]
- UncleOxidant 3y ago
  I live in Oregon and that 5 step plan isn't working out. I agree that addiction is first and foremost a health issue. However, relying on addicts to voluntarily enter treatment isn't working. We're seeing very few enter treatment - last I heard it was well under 10%. I think in the case of highly addictive drugs like opioids/fentanyl, and meth they should be made illegal again (Remember, Oregon essentially did your #1 above) however, instead of incarceration in a prison, we need some kind of treatment hospitals that are involuntary - something between a prison and a hospital with emphasis on treatment. We need to take a much more nuanced approach: some drugs are highly addictive (fentanyl, meth) - people can get hooked on them after only 1 or 2 uses, you want to prevent that as much as possible and that requires that they be illegal. Other drugs are not addictive: marijuana, LSD, shrooms, etc - making those legal is fine, but in the cases of the psychedelics you really want to encourage people to have guidance as much as possible.

tehjoker 3y ago

[flagged]

MightyBuzzard 3y ago
[flagged]

foogazi 3y ago

a big thing for me was being exposed to different cultures and lifestyles And connecting the dots: “of course Bob’s not going to hell for <insert thing here>, what else are my sacred books wrong about“

realjohng 3y ago

Fantastic post exploring the physical environmental differences of city vs rural as cause, not correlation, of different political viewpoints

lapcat 3y ago

(2021)

asdfman123 3y ago

The real causality is more like "urban areas have different needs and cultural norms than rural areas/exurbs, so they tend to form separate political coalitions." Tangent: my biggest political pet peeve is thinking of the country as red states versus blue states, when it's really cities versus surrounding areas.

one_level_deep 3y ago
[dead]
jfengel 3y ago
Politically, states play important national roles. They are winner-take-all in both the Senate and the Electoral College, and gerrymandering makes them nearly so in the House. Sociologically there are bigger differences within the state, but viewed from the outside, a state's main effect on you really is very close to all red or all blue. Only a small number of states play a significant "purple" role, where differences in individual opinion might matter to somebody from outside the state.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > They are winner-take-all in both the Senate and the Electoral College Well, except for 2 that aren't in the EC. > and gerrymandering makes them nearly so in the House. 10 out of 41 states with two or more reps have a single-party delegation.
  - jfengel 3y ago
    By "nearly so" I meant that gerrymandering could pack all of other party into a single district. There are another 12 states with only a single representative from the minority party. The most egregious might be my home state, Maryland, with only a single Republican representative out of 9, despite 1/3 of the state having voted Republican in 2020. Similar ratios occur the other way in Tennessee and Alabama. Which is to say, winner-take-all and winner-take-practically-all happen in about half of the state Representatives with more than a single member delegation.

tekla 3y ago

[flagged]

encoderer 3y ago
It’s cringe-worthy. I have family members who live in the country who literally spend 100 hours in the fields of somebody they hardly know helping out because the guy had an accident and couldn’t pull his own harvest. Rural America is full of person-to-person direct action often brokered by a church.

didibus 3y ago

At a high level: Progressive - a person advocating or implementing social reform or new, liberal ideas Conservative - a person who is averse to change and holds traditional values And now if we drill in, we get a problem. Traditional values - long-standing beliefs, customs, and practices passed down through generations within a particular culture or society, often reflecting moral, ethical, or religious principles Problem number 1, different conservative hold different set of traditional values. To be conservative kind of requires some level of social hegemony, where everyone holds the same traditional values. Liberal - 1. a supporter of policies that promote social welfare. 2. a supporter of a political and social philosophy that promotes individual rights, civil liberties, democracy, and free enterprise. Problem number 2, there are now two definition of liberal ideas. One are geared towars social welfare. The other towards democracy and individual liberty. This makes it that, all conversation that stays high level, and talks about clusters as conservatives and progressives, to me, is misconstrued, and confusing, because the subject could dramatically be different. Are we discussing Judeo-Christian values, gender roles, etc. ? Are we discussing the need for social welfare, the importance of democracy, the value of individual rights? It all gets conflated in a way that simply divides people based on labels, not substance.

jpadkins 3y ago
Good point. Also Liberal != progressive. progressive policy in the last 20 years has in no way championed ideals of individual rights and free enterprise, and they have curtailed certain civil liberties (speech and self defense). The hallmark of traditional liberal ideals are now mainstream conservative thought (at least in the US). That is why you see a lot of people saying they are 'classical liberal' when describing their political beliefs.

_yb2s 3y ago

This seems like a really shallow analysis, and the examples are just popular cliches rather than realistic human experiences. It also does not ring true with my personal experiences or observations. I grew up with progressive politics but in a rural area, and when I came to live in urban areas where these ideas dominated, I was disappointed to observe that they just don’t seem to work as well at solving real world problems as I had imagined they would.

didibus 3y ago

The final conclusion is pretty interesting and food for thoughts: > In low-density areas, quality of life depends on not being interfered with; in high-density areas, it depends on the effective management of inevitable interferences. > As population density increases, residents increasingly depend on governmental authority to manage the impact of others’ lives on their own.

daltont 3y ago

Is the ideology of people living in a certain area really that much of a factor in the economic success of that area? Or is is the more the other way around. A location that has attractive geography or abundance of some resource leads to people wanting to live there. Once population reaches a certain density, there is desire for more rules and regulations to prevent a "tragedy of the commons". Progressive policies are more a result of "success" than a cause. In the US, the state Mississippi get stereotyped as failing area. Progressive policies can't do a whole lot there. Maybe higher taxes on the wealthy, but that could only go so far until companies and wealth can just go to other another state. Mississippi is more of a victim of geography than ideology.