How true is the decay of middle America that I keep hearing of contributed to Trump's victory?
I'm talking about all the smalltowns and industrial cities that are primarily white and used to be the heartland now being filled with closed down factories, worn out roads, alcoholism and drugs, criminality and poverty, obesity (no memes) and general unhealthy living?
I've read that Flint, Michigan is just a drop in the ocean of lead-infested towns
It's true. Go to the immiserated parts of rural Pennsylvania where deindustrialization has really hit towns hard and you'll see Trump signs everywhere.
Trump just managed to wake up all the past's sleeping voters
I'm a stone's throw away from two of them in Florida, and it's pretty bad. The roads are utter shit, meth dens everywhere, and no jobs. Still can't sympathize with those fucking chumps. All jobs are in the city and if you have some education. Their fault they thought squatting land was a good idea
Ye i know they support Trump but I was wondering if it was true that they're actually suffering. Could these places qualify as ghettos?
Yeah they have very high rates of suicide, opiate addiction, and poverty.
I live in Ohio.
There is still wealth in middle America, it's just been more concentrated towards big cities. Cleveland is doing fine, but all the smaller cities around it like Youngstown, Mansfield, Warren, they look run-down with nothing new built in decades.
I think it's just due to consolidation. Instead of an industry having, say, 200 competitors with factories spread in small towns across the country, nowadays you'll have a dozen, with their infrastructure located in large cities only.
You end up with places that logistically should be rural, and the decay of these places is just a correction towards where they belong. Their residents need to realize this and go somewhere else where they can be more useful.
It's sad really. I wonder why we didn't see the same thing here in northern Europe when our industry left.
It's the rural equivalent of inner city ghettos in many parts of America. Entire towns have been fucked over by their representatives/the economy, and it's showing. And pre-Trump the closest thing many Democrat lawmakers were offering to correct this was some last-minute condolence, like offering to retrain entire populations as if that's a viable option
Probaby because Northern European nations are willing to invest in their human capital via free college education and other redistributive programs that promote upward mobility
Lack of an ability to retrain for different jobs is probably a big part.
Because people in Northern Europe actively took advantage of the help available and sought a better life/education (progression)instead of feeling sorry for themselves and wallowing in self pity about everything.
Why not just move out ?
This is true. Flint only got a bunch of recognition because its local politicians and some state politicians tried to cover it up. Another significant contributing factor to the publicity of Flint is that Black Lives Matter activists portrayed it as a racial issue and spread it through social media as such when the issue first came to light at the state level in Michigan. It certainly helps that Michael Moore (the lying slug that puts out socialist documentaries and presents himself as a common man but flies first class and rides limousines) is from Flint and that he spread the news to his Twitter cult. I live in rural California, and because of our drought there are small towns in our rural areas that survive on bottled water brought in on trucks because large corporate farming interests pumped the local groundwater dry. There are towns that, because of corporate interests spraying with banned pesticides (it is often cheaper to pay the fine than to comply with the rules), have groundwater supplies that are no longer potable. Nobody cares about that. This is partly because those corporate interests often have bases out of state or in the urban areas, where people in general seem to think that the rural people are lesser than them. I even had a professor in my urban college describe rural Californians as "less enlightened" because we often skew right wing and as "oppressors of urban 'people of color' " despite the fact that rural California does not benefit equally from state taxes, has lower standard of living, has lower average income, and has poorer quality schools than even the bad parts of LA and the Bay Area. Most of California's prisons are in rural California and are overpopulated with criminals primarily from urban areas. In spite of this, our population contributes over 10x more people to military service. Flint was just a convenient cause for the left. If it weren't black majority and an example of government corruption, it would not be news.
Is the USA a developing country ?
You did, just not on such a large scale. My father grew up in a small town dependent on a steel mill in the boonies of Sweden. He left the country to marry my mother (an American) and got a college education here when it still cost only 1000 USD per semester. I've visited my father's hometown. It's shit. Pure shit, just like the American Rust Belt and just like the small trailer park communities overrun with tweakers in my area. There were rundown drug houses (like a meth den/crack house, but I don't know what the drug of choice is in your neck of the woods, though. In rural America it is meth or heroin), rusted out junkyard shitpiles, and crappy little pizzerias run by Arabs and Yugoslavs nestled between the remnants of old small town "Main Street" shops. The average people there were dressed like a winterized version of poor whites in rural California and Nevada.
The USA is a country where a wealthy suburban and urban left wing champion the rural and urban "common man," romanticize rural life, and push for "social progress" but still look down on him because he doesn't conform to their ideal of a latte-sipping, Jon-Stewart-loving "intellectual" and treat him like shit. My brother calls them the "red wine left" because they like to discuss Marx and talk about overthrowing the current system over wine while sitting in their suburban townhouses protected by private security companies' alarms. So yeah, we are basically like every other country in the world. I wouldn't say "developing" because we are nowhere near as shit as Brazil or Mexico, but there are still lots of problems. The irony of ironies is that the people most concerned with economic inequality (knowingly or unknowingly) promote actual inequality in terms of the allocation of taxpayer dollars and then justify it by saying that the poor rural population (mostly white and Mexican where I live) are all ignorant white trash anyways. Naturally, they don't believe that their actions have anything to do with the animosity of the average rural person towards urban liberals. One recent Californian issue is the "twin tunnels project." Liberals in the state legislature have been pushing for saving the Sacramento River Delta for years (a great thing, actually!), and now they are pushing for two tunnels to be built to divert its water all the way down to LA. In my area, we call the state legislature the "LA State Legislature" rather than the "CA State Legislature" because the LA area has more representatives than the entire eastern portion of the state combined. Of course, they deny that that has anything to do with their decision to abandon the Delta restoration project and instead channel much of the water southwards...
Voter turnout for the presidential election was low as fuck, like lower than it usually is
It's there. Personally I only see it badly east of Chicago. The plains seem to be doing okay all things considered.
Also these.
It's the same in the UK where Thatcherite policies turned whole towns into desolate, jobless deserts with absolutely nothing to do there.
some parts are rough, and they aren't that white.
basically you hear about gentrification right? Paco moves into a city, prices all the niggers out? Guess what, those niggers don't disappear. They move to shitty little suburbs like ferguson and continue on with the nigger lifestyle.
Drugs are a huge problem, 2 of my classmates from h.s. are dead from fentanyl, one from a motorcycle, and one from suicide.
as for the "left" in america, it doens't amount to shit. Its just community college adjuncts, diversity hires , hr directors etc who spend all day fucking around on facebook demanding butthole rights. After trump won, they spend a little bit of time roleplaying as "leftists", so now its "the first step of the socialist revolution will be... recognition of butthole rights!"
>butthole rights
What
Look up the Rust Belt. Essentially the departing of blue collar jobs and the auto industry really fucked over a lot of people. I go to school in central Indiana and it's rather depressing to see towns that 20/30 years ago would've fit the bill for stereotypical small town USA.
Probably going to cap this for future reference. You rather accurately summarized much of the urban/rural divide in this country. I'm technically a resident in Illinois but I consider myself rather lucky that I went to school in Indiana because otherwise I more than likely would've went to a much more left-leaning institution in Chicago. Even so, there's people at my uni that do the whole sjw shit, but never leave campus to explore the local community or confront real issues facing Hoosiers not living in urban areas.
>he doesn't know his butthole rights
fucking gommie
What are my butthole rights, sir?
I live in the midwest most of the decaying industrial cities seem to be mostly black, white people went to suburbs. The big shift happened in rural areas.
Even now, most poverty/obesity/"criminality" is people of color. There are poor white people, but there has always been poor white people. No "decay".
Most good working class jobs are outsourced. Its bullshit but true. So now working class people have to work at McDonalds etc. It sucks. Trump promised that he would bring good jobs to USA but so far I don't know if he's done anything like that. Its true working class white people did shift Republican this election. Before they used to be Democrat. But the Democrats have been sucking and doing nothing. Republicans aren't better. I am tired.
Democrats: Want to make money and do fucking bullshit.
Republicans: Want to make money and do fucking bullshit.
Flint for example is 54% Black.
I didn't vote for Trump either but I could see the appeal. He was going to tell China, NATO etc. to fuck off. Not give a shit about what is politically expedient. Put "America First" as it is, instead of dumping all our money and resources into ungrateful countries. I hate how Europe is getting fat off of our own military money.
But no, so far he's done nothing at all. Tried to replace Obamacare with something even stupider than Obamacare (very hard to do). Tried to block Iraqis from coming in for 90 days and then people shit their pants, even though it was temporary. Lot of bullshit Russia scandal (who cares).
>it's black peoples' fault
lights out alt reich
I don't think that's what he meant at all
Yes, but more because the Democrats basically openly mock and demean those people rather than Trump's specific policies.
This
American Liberals constitutively hate the poor and justify this reactionary position with ad hoc "muh privilege" talk
I never said anything was "black peoples fault". But Flint is mostly black. sorry if that offend you.
I'm a centrist. Don't care about labels or what is left vs. right. I care about what is true. Oh wait I forgot, culture wars is all "post truth" now.
Rich (and even middle class) people regardless of political affiliation hate the poor. Its not exclusive to liberals.
There was a time when Democrats would stand up for working class and that time is fast fading. Money talks.
sorry I misunderstood.
I went to a high school in Chicago and the teaching wasn't really politicized. The history teachers made it a point to be as non-biased as possible. If they did mention politics (during election) they didn't give an opinion or say who they were voting for. This was almost ten years ago though, before the SJW stuff really exploded so maybe it's different now.
Great post
My brother goes to DePaul and leans further to the left than me, but even he decries the amount of sjw bullshit he has to put up with on a daily basis.
Good fucking riddance. Fuck w*ite people. I hope they get bred out of existence.