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xthreadMuch has been asked about why so much of the country would vote against their own economic interest. But pray, imagine the following...
The recession hasn't been very hard on rural america. The boom was, because the coasts were getting wealthy while they were seeing investment dollars flee to the coasts. And they're children were running off in droves, abondoning the social structure and the traditional safety net to seek their fortunes down in Paree. Many of the rural regions lost money during the boom, because they weren't part of the information flow that would allow them to make good bets and share value was fleeing from their old economy investments, and lost money again when the bust occurred. The net result is that their relative wealth was falling during the boom, unless they were extremely lucky, but has risen significantly during Bush I.
Furthermore, if we accept that 1) most of them will never become wealthy by their own hand, and that 2) their primary economic desire is to work too hard while having a reasonably good, family centric life, the economic structure that Bush is trying to propagate isn't very bad for them. Sure, its a bit more feudal, but they understand loyalty, and this administration is big on loyalty. And, as I alluded to above, It means that they need not fight nearly so hard to keep up with the go-go coasts, which are otherwise going to flat out bury them, or thus they greatly fear.
They already get significant subsidies from the feds. Their cost of living and income levels are substantially lower than the coasts, they're already paying much lower levels of taxation. Unless the coasts are willing to cut off their highway funds, the defense moneys that flow into the rural states, and tear up the new deal and let rural poverty return to pre-WW II levels, which the coasts have not yet been willing to do, it is entirely economically rational for the rural states to work together to milk the coasts for all they're worth, or at least to level the playing fiedl so that the rural regions don't get left
behind quite so badly.
But I have led you on a flight of fancy.
This description clearly in no way describes the current economic or political situation in the US.
I now return you to your previously scheduled lamentations that the rural folk are too foolish to identify their own self-interest and pursue it.
RichardT
The recession hasn't been very hard on rural america. The boom was, because the coasts were getting wealthy while they were seeing investment dollars flee to the coasts. And they're children were running off in droves, abondoning the social structure and the traditional safety net to seek their fortunes down in Paree. Many of the rural regions lost money during the boom, because they weren't part of the information flow that would allow them to make good bets and share value was fleeing from their old economy investments, and lost money again when the bust occurred. The net result is that their relative wealth was falling during the boom, unless they were extremely lucky, but has risen significantly during Bush I.
Furthermore, if we accept that 1) most of them will never become wealthy by their own hand, and that 2) their primary economic desire is to work too hard while having a reasonably good, family centric life, the economic structure that Bush is trying to propagate isn't very bad for them. Sure, its a bit more feudal, but they understand loyalty, and this administration is big on loyalty. And, as I alluded to above, It means that they need not fight nearly so hard to keep up with the go-go coasts, which are otherwise going to flat out bury them, or thus they greatly fear.
They already get significant subsidies from the feds. Their cost of living and income levels are substantially lower than the coasts, they're already paying much lower levels of taxation. Unless the coasts are willing to cut off their highway funds, the defense moneys that flow into the rural states, and tear up the new deal and let rural poverty return to pre-WW II levels, which the coasts have not yet been willing to do, it is entirely economically rational for the rural states to work together to milk the coasts for all they're worth, or at least to level the playing fiedl so that the rural regions don't get left
behind quite so badly.
But I have led you on a flight of fancy.
This description clearly in no way describes the current economic or political situation in the US.
I now return you to your previously scheduled lamentations that the rural folk are too foolish to identify their own self-interest and pursue it.
RichardT
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no subject
Date: 2004-11-20 03:44 am (UTC)One Franklin County resident was amazed at a neighbor's car, "It cost 25 thousand dollars. He got it fully loaded." Brooks notes that he didn't tell the guy that in Brooks' neighborhood, nobody but a kid just out of college would buy a car that cost that little.
Franklin County voted for Bush, but Brooks' county, one of the wealthiest in the country, voted for Gore. But as Brooks notes, in his county, unless you are very, very rich, you are constantly surrounded by things you can't afford.
And I think it's this pervasive sense of status anxiety that causes well-off people to vote for Democrats. So we're getting a strange inverstion of the old economic populism of the Democrats -- rich people still tend to vote for Republicans, but if your neighbors are rich, it tends to make you vote Democratic. In this election, on a county-by-county basis, there's been a correlation between income and voting for Kerry.