Word: ruralism
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...social blocs in America have been all at once so mythologized and so misunderstood as rural voters. Nor have many been so cynically manipulated into voting against their own interests. The last 30 years of American politics have witnessed an extraordinarily duplicitous—and, unfortunately, extraordinarily successful—program by conservative politicians and commentators to annex small-town America by shamelessly pandering to ugly stereotypes that paint rural voters as religiously minded, gun toting, nativists. Now that tradition can count amongst its ranks another prominent practitioner in the form of Hillary Clinton, who, in the face of increasingly...
...past week, the Clinton campaign has seized on Barack Obama’s suggestion that rural voters “cling” to religious fundamentalism and anti-statism because they have seen no real governmental redress for their economic woes, turning it into a blanket charge of elitism against Obama. Copping her lines almost directly from 30 years of Republican smear literature, Clinton assessed Obama’s rhetoric as out-of-touch with supposedly authentic heartland values. Her surrogates quickly jumped into line to help paint Obama in the political poison-cloud of liberal snobbery...
What’s particularly tragic about this situation is that this myth of the “heartland” ethic is by and large a phantasm constructed by conservative elites in order to frighten liberals away from drifting towards populism. In reality, rural America has been the site of some of the nation’s most radical political movements. Eugene Debs, the prominent socialist of the turn of the century, was a proud resident of Terre Haute, Ind. Lyndon Johnson, the architect of the century’s most far-reaching liberal programs, was born a poor...
...drawn us into. The fact that the Democratic Party cannot even have an open discussion on the Second Amendment out of fear that they will be crippled by a cultural bludgeon is indicative of the extent to which we have all collectively bought into this cultural trap. Certainly many rural Americans have a wide variety of reasons for opposing gun restrictions. But to claim that there exists a single “rural America” that universally rejects such proposals and considers suggestions to the contrary as a cultural affront is not only wildly incorrect, it?...
...surprising that they get bitter," Obama told a group of wealthy Californian donors at a closed San Francisco fund raiser, referring to rural blue-collar workers who have been hard hit by outsourcing and declining wages. "They cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations...