This post sort of piggybacks on Miguel’s post And the real reason the Left does not want Campus Carry…
The important takeaway from. His post is just how savagely Conservatives are treated in Blue zones.
Now I present you will two articles:
The first from Politico.
Barbershop Confrontations, Profane Signs and Despair: Pro-Biden and Alone in Rural America
Barrels of ink have been spilled over the past seven years examining Donald Trump’s appeal in rural places like Clearfield County, an old timber and coal region situated along Interstate 80 on the western edge of central Pennsylvania. Blue-collar “diner stories” about disaffected Democrats and independents who crossed over to support Republicans are so common they’ve become their own media subgenre. And the reasons for that massive defection have become familiar from repetition—the erosion of manufacturing and energy jobs, the withdrawal of private-sector labor unions, an explosion of technology and expanding cultural divisions.
What those tales often leave out is the other side of the same coin. In these towns and counties, there remain thousands of Democrats like Fitzpatrick who are faithful to their party—and feel that they are paying an increasingly steep price for that loyalty. Nearly 30,000 people in Clearfield County voted for Trump in 2020, roughly three-quarters of the ballots cast. But the other 25 percent who voted for Joe Biden—9,673 people—find themselves in an unusual position: They supported the ultimate winner and yet a relentless and toxic campaign to delegitimize his victory and overturn the election makes them feel somehow as if they’re under siege.
Read that last part again from the perspective of a Trump supporter watching the media go on and on about Russian Collusion and Peepee Tapes and how every Trump supporter is a Nazi who should be exiled from polite society and probably killed.
Reluctant to provoke arguments, or worse, local Democrats say there’s little incentive for them to promote their positions and even less to try to persuade the people who are slipping to stick with the party. During the 2020 election, a friend stopped by after the Foulkrods defiantly stuck a Biden lawn sign near their house. “She had a Biden sign up,” too, Kathy says of the woman who visited them. “And she said, ‘I just came to tell you I had to take my Biden sign down because I was too afraid.’”
Companies in California were actively telling employees that of they were Trump supporters they should quit or would be fired.
People were being confronted in restaurants and on the street and being beaten up for wearing MAGA hats.
“Part of this is a failing of Democrats generally over the last year and a half,” says former Montana Gov. Steve Bullock, a red-state Democrat who has been sounding alarms over the party’s struggles to reach rural voters. “Where you are—presumably in rural Pennsylvania and in Montana, $65 billion for internet connectivity is significant. The infrastructure bill is significant. But that’s not what ends up talked about on the ground. And what people see is Washington fighting either over things that don’t matter directly to their daily lives or is [the legislation] going to be $3.5 trillion or $1.5 trillion, and not even the details of programs.”
That’s the most condescending sales pitch I’ve heard.
Look rural voter. The price of gas as may have tripled in a year. Food has gone up 40%. Your wages are worth less than they were in 2017. Your job shut down for a year because it was deemed non essential and your kids not allowed to go to school for two years. But you have better internet connectivity than ever before so you can learn to code and work from home.
I can’t see why that isn’t working.
For Carol Lieber, a Democrat in DuBois, the trends and accompanying social disruption make it tough not to despair. She and a close friend didn’t talk for more than a year. Neither had much to say to the other that they wanted to hear. She blames Trump for spreading misinformation and stoking animosity. She holds her neighbors responsible for allowing themselves to believe it all. It got to a point where people she’s known casually for decades and thought she respected no longer seem decent. Around town, “there is a lack of graciousness and kindness and consideration,” Lieber says. A virus that for nine months kept her from hanging out with her adult daughter who lives four houses down, combined with the politics around it, managed to ruin even small pleasures. Lieber decided to boycott her favorite cosmetics store because the owner was so belligerent online.
“Trump changed so much here,” she says. “He brought out the worst in people.”
Sure, but calling Trump supporters fascist, Nazis, white supremacists, and MAGAts is fine because they are deplorable and deserve it.
Carol is a paragon of virtue.
This article is an obscenity of a lack of self awareness.
Pity the poor Democrats in rural America who feel under attack for having to see “Let’s go Brandon” signs on their neighbors’ yards.
If only their conservative neighbors weren’t such awful people brainwashed by Trump and Fox News they would understand that Democrats are just better.
Then there is this article from Salon.
Dear Joe Biden: We don’t want “unity” with fascists — that’s why Democrats lose
Despite tremendous obstruction from the Republican fascists (and their “centrist” allies embedded within the Democratic Party) — a group of sadists determined to cause maximum harm to the American people as a way of obtaining, keeping and expanding political power — Biden has accomplished a great deal as president. This includes slowing down the coronavirus plague, resuscitating the economy, taking long-overdue steps to fix the country’s infrastructure and restoring America’s leadership role in the world.
In a moment of great crisis when Vladimir Putin and Russia are waging war on Ukraine, to know that America has a leader who, unlike his predecessor, is intelligent, experienced and patriotic, as well as mentally and emotionally stable, brings no small amount of relief. Moreover, one does not have to ask the obvious questions that circled around Trump like flies around manure on a summer’s day: “Is the president of the United States merely a useful idiot and stooge for Russia, or is he actually an agent and saboteur?”
Joe Biden is a career politician who is now the leader of the free world and arguably the most powerful person on the planet. And like all politicians, he is a disappointment. Biden is far too quick to seek “compromise” with the Republican fascists — which mostly means outright capitulation.
His State of the Union speech was one more example of that failure. In several key moments, Biden signaled that he is temperamentally unable to do what is necessary to stop the Republican fascists’ attempt(s) to end multiracial democracy.
Biden repeatedly spoke of the need to “unify” Democrats and Republicans. That means seeking “unity” with those who actively tried to nullify the 2020 election and supported a violent coup to prevent him from becoming president. Moreover, the Republican fascists have in no way ended their campaign to end American democracy and terminate Biden’s presidency.
Biden and too many other white liberals and moderates continue to believe that compromise with the Republicans is still possible, and that finding “common ground” can redeem this moment of democratic crisis. That kind of white racial innocence may well be America’s undoing.
This is so unmoored from reality and so unhinged that if it weren’t from a regular Salon writer it could be confused for a Poe’s Law parody.
See, all Republicans are fascists and Joe Biden’s biggest problem is treating them like fellow citizens to work with rather than crushing them under the boot heel of Progressive government.
I can’t stress enough that this sort of cultural divide cannot be bridged peacefully.
Show me a point in history where it has.
Progressives like the ones above are essentially practitioners of a secular political religion and history is full of religious wars.
The Secession of West Virginia from Virginia was relatively peaceful.
The Partition of India was not.
I think these are our options because the alternative I don’t think is feasible from history.
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