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Nativeridge , (edited )
@Nativeridge@aussie.zone avatar

So this is insider outsiders?! If they win how will they treat everyone outside of the party.

Line them up and do what😬

Because I have lived/travelled to US numerous times now my 92 yr old mother-in-law continuously asks me "Why do Americans adore Trump?

Any help with providing an answer that will make sense would be greatly appreciated.

shalafi , (edited )

How Half Of America Lost Its F**king Mind

This explains the phenomena better than anything I ever read. I’m not being funny, I really mean it. I’ve seen both sides, this rings true. Rings LOUD and true.

FlorianSimon ,

That website is terrible man. I’m not going through pages and pages of ads, no matter how good the article is.

That shit’s fucking cancer.

Sean ,
@Sean@liberal.city avatar

@FlorianSimon
I can read the article without any ads. I'm using Brave browser on my Android phone. Is it that they used to be clogged with ads, like articles were broken up across 16 pages with a ad in between each page? That might have been the case for Cracked awhile ago but doesn't seem to be the case now.

cc: @shalafi

FlorianSimon ,

Same on Firefox Mobile though - but see my other comment to see what bothers me (and what will likely prevent others from reading the article)

wetnoodle ,
@wetnoodle@sopuli.xyz avatar

It’s 2024, get an ad blocker dude

FlorianSimon ,

I have one actually on Firefox mobile, and the ads don’t show up. I still get “advertisement:” with blank space underneath, but nothing shows up. I get ads for their other articles though, and the information density is very very low. You have to scroll for days to read anything. It feels like one of those websites with articles written by LLMs.

Nativeridge ,
@Nativeridge@aussie.zone avatar

That does help me better with understanding situation. thankyou

I’ll just have to keep saying “I’m not sure why” with the mother-in-law though 😅😁

(using Firefox with add-ons no issue with advertising)

urist ,
@urist@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

I love this author. I hope people don’t write it off just because it’s on a comedy site - he’s very thoughtful. I read the monkey sphere a long time ago when cracked was popular and it really gave me a lot of perspective.

I didn’t realize David Wong was a pen name until your article. I recognized his style immediately.

108 ,

Wrote some fun books too

TokenBoomer ,

Dunbar’s number

octopus_ink , (edited )

I’ve read that article. It does to city culture what it claims city culture does to rural culture, IMO. I had a slightly more nuanced objection the last time someone posted it, but I’m not going to take the time to read it again now. IIRC It’s worth a read, but that man paints with as broad a brush as anyone he criticizes in that article, and folks should go in knowing that.

Edit -

By coincidence, here’s an article about a book that takes an opposing view, and the current Lemmy discussion about it. As of this moment I’ve not yet read more than the first para of the article:

thedailybeast.com/white-rural-trump-supporters-ar


lemmy.ml/post/12666394?scrollToComments=true

In the popular imagination of many Americans, particularly those on the left side of the political spectrum, the typical MAGA supporter is a rural resident who hates Black and Brown people, loathes liberals, loves gods and guns, believes in myriad conspiracy theories, has little faith in democracy, and is willing to use violence to achieve their goals, as thousands did on Jan. 6.

According to a new book, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy, these aren’t hurtful, elitist stereotypes by Acela Corridor denizens and bubble-dwelling liberals
 they’re facts.

The authors, Tom Schaller, a professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and Paul Waldman, a former columnist at The Washington Post, persuasively argue that most of the negative stereotypes liberals hold about rural Americans are actually true.

They do not mince words about what this means for the future of democracy in America. “Rural voters—especially the White rural voters on whom Donald Trump heaps praise and upon which he built his Make America Great Movement—pose a growing threat to the world’s oldest constitutional democracy.”

And Schaller and Waldman bring receipts.

In a book filled with reams of data to back up their arguments, Schaller and Waldman show that rural whites “are the demographic group least likely to accept notions of pluralism and inclusion” and are far less likely to believe that diversity makes America stronger.

Asafum ,

It’s 100% because of propaganda. These people wouldn’t feel this way if right wing media outlets weren’t all competing for the “building full of the worst scum on earth” award. They’d have the common gripes we all do about inflation and general life satisfaction, but they wouldn’t be frothing at the mouth and wishing for a civil war so they can kill us.

I don’t talk to him too often and while my dad hasn’t done a full 180 yet, his amount of Democrat/liberal bashing and general anger has dropped quite a bit since he started a new hobby instead of going home and sitting down in front of the two minutes hate programming on Faux News.

Fox News, Newsmax, and the like are the true dangers to democracy. Without their legitimizing of Trump and their willingness to use him to their own benefit we wouldn’t be in this situation where there’s only ever increasing threats of political violence.

urist , (edited )
@urist@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Edit: I’m a dumbass and I did not read your comment very well so feel free to ignore this rant. It probably has nothing to do with your post but it’s too late meow. I’m not deleting it.

Hey I know it’s kind of late to reply to things in this thread but I was just thinking about this article again today and I wanted to see what other people had to say about it.

It does to city culture what it claims city culture does to rural culture

Yes, my friend, this was the point of the article. You yourself may not feel like you stereotype folks who live in rural areas but there are plenty of people who do. Some of the folks who stereotype rural people feel they are justified for doing so because they DO see rural folk as “less-than”, and admittedly it’s sometimes hard not to absorb this view due to the perceived ignorance of these rural people. It is a broad brush, but it’s an appropriate brush. He’s not saying it’s correct, he’s putting the shoe on the other foot.

I work in customer service in a very unique part of the country (Near Chicago but not inside) so I interact with a lot of different people with very different backgrounds. Some people take the train to visit my workplace and rarely drive or visit our part of the state unless they’re showing up where I work. Some people don’t leave their hometown of literally 500 people unless they’re visiting my workplace which is a mere 40 minute drive for them.

I almost never hear open racism where I work (though I’m certain there are plenty of legit racists, they just keep it quiet). We occasionally have to describe people by their appearances, and “basic-ass old white dude” has been both a physical description and a personality description I have heard and nobody pressed back against. It’s a stereotype, people hold it. And, my coworkers are left-leaning (me too) so it does just become shorthand for “this guy probably voted for Trump and is scared of my nosering”. It isn’t a healthy way to view your neighbors, nor is it an assumption you can make about people.

I noticed your last quote:

In a book filled with reams of data to back up their arguments, Schaller and Waldman show that rural whites “are the demographic group least likely to accept notions of pluralism and inclusion” and are far less likely to believe that diversity makes America stronger.

It’s not a race to see who holds the least stereotypes or the least offensive stereotypes. It’s important to identify your biases, which is what this article is asking you to do. It’s not an us-vs-them thing.

The authors, Tom Schaller, a professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and Paul Waldman, a former columnist at The Washington Post, persuasively argue that most of the negative stereotypes liberals hold about rural Americans are actually true.

Most? Okay which ones are wrong? Does it mean all rural people are closed minded bigots? There probably is at least one rural american who isn’t a close-minded bigot, but it doesn’t matter because they’re mostly all the same right?

Don’t think for a minute I think rural folks are justified for their ignorant and fearful bullshit, I’m just pointing out that stereotyping people doesn’t actually do anything but hurt the people who don’t suck.

octopus_ink ,

I’m a dumbass and I did not read your comment very well so feel free to ignore this rant. It probably has nothing to do with your post but it’s too late meow. I’m not deleting it.

It actually seems like a mostly reasonable rebuttal from someone who might have different opinions than I do, but I’m not going to argue with you about most of it because of this disclaimer. 🙂

I’m just pointing out that stereotyping people doesn’t actually do anything but hurt the people who don’t suck.

Which is why I object to, or at least would want people to be aware of, the fact that the article promotes stereotypes of (for lack of a better word) ‘city folk.’ Writing an article about the dangers of stereotyping, but predicating it on stereotyping a different group, seems firmly in the “two wrongs don’t make a right” category to me. Especially because, with as often as I see this article referenced, I’m sure plenty of the folks he’s trying to “explain” for the rest of us have read this article and found within it someone who “gets” them - and so will be primed to accept every one of his swipes at urban dwellers as confirming exactly the stereotypes they already had.

He closes by implying anyone who disagrees with him “have gotten angry, feeling this gut-level revulsion at any attempt to excuse or even understand these people. After all, they’re hardly people, right? Aren’t they just a mass of ignorant, rageful, crude, cursing, spitting subhumans?”

My father grew up on a single-family private farm, lived in a farmhouse with a partial dirt floor that used the same fireplace for heating and cooking, attended a one-room schoolhouse, and had to walk to the outhouse to take a shit. To this day I doubt there are even five thousand people living in the town he grew up in. The author is not the only one who has had a foot in both camps, he doesn’t speak for everyone who has, and I think it’s reasonable to point out that he was at pains to paint a very fair picture of rural folks while doing absolutely nothing but promoting stereotypes of urban folks.

Bottom line - we’re pretty far past it mattering on a personal level why maga is tearing down our democracy, rolling back anything resembling equitable treatment of LGBTQ+, rolling back women’s rights, suppressing education about slavery and diversity, etc. They are doing those things. I might care about their plight, but I care about stopping them from further fucking up the country more.

EnderMB ,

There was a great article called The Sociology Of Brexit that discussed how Britain made the choice to leave the EU. The TLDR was that it was because for many years, despite some prosperity, there were large parts of the country, especially white, uneducated, working-class people that felt things weren’t going well. A strong economy didn’t translate to a better life for them, and all they saw was others in a totally different world prospering.

The reason I mention it is because it was written before Trump came to power, but it accurately predicted that Trump would beat Clinton. It said that there were similar groups in the US that felt the same, and that they are often a much larger demographic than you’d think. The main point of the article is that these people don’t care if the radical in charge will fuck the economy, or do things “incorrectly”, because those things are so detached from their life that it won’t change anything. It’s the political equivalent of giving yourself chemotherapy to get rid of a cold.

While many of these people are justifiably criticised for their extreme views and actions, they’ve been radicalised through inaction. If you ignore a problem like the racist assholes that moan about foreigners taking their jobs, in several years someone will combine those voices and have a platform to exploit.

Exploitation is the right word here, because what many conservatives are now finding is that the shift towards the right is often at odds with their parties core beliefs. In the UK, Boris Johnson gutted the party of anyone that disagreed with one of the core tenets of the party (unionism) to push Brexit along, and if that party loses the next election, they will arguably have no one left outside of right-wing nutjobs. The US will likely find the same, in that MAGA have replaced what their party stood for, with none of these leaders planning for the future. If you are a traditional conservative in the Republican party, you’ll probably struggle for the next 5-10 years, and a presidential campaign is highly unlikely. If Trump loses to Biden, it might mean a generation of inaction and inability from the Republicans, in the same way that Conservatives around the world are being wiped out

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