According to Colin Woodard, Terry McAuliffe won in the Tidewater region of Virginia (as he defines it) by a 52-41-7 margin, and lost in the Great Appalachian region (as he defines it) by a 36-57-6 margin. That’s interesting because it’s a different measure than north and south or urban vs. rural. In fact, McAuliffe did pretty well in some of the Tidewater’s most sparely populated counties, but he was absolutely crushed in the sparsely populated areas of Appalachia. The only places where McAuliffe did reasonably well in Appalachia were college towns.
I keep hearing that the people of Appalachia prize self-reliance and personal liberty, but I also keep seeing statistics that they have a level of reliance on federal anti-poverty programs that is comparable to our country’s worst ghettoes.
It’s like a whole region has been conditioned to say “Keep your government hands off my Medicare, I need this scooter to get my food stamps.”
I’m tired of listening to their hypocritical bullshit. It’s long past time that these morans get a brain.
And you can’t blame this on McAuliffe being black. Or on his being a Socialist.
Sniffing too much coal dust? Drinking moonshine distilled in soldered truck radiators? Inbreeding? (Struck a nerve there, didn’t I?)
Honestly, I’m waiting for TarHeelDem to comment because those people are as alien as Martians to me.
Your vote matters, always.
Well, that area has been immersed in the right-wing propaganda since 1980. So much so that they have almost permanently compartmentalized the fact that, without the helpful hand of government, many would be living like beggars in the streets of Calcutta.
The ones who actually lived through The Depression and World War 2 are almost all gone. What’s left are their children, grandchildren and great grandchildren, who have swallowed the kool-aid that was first served up by Ronald Reagan, and has been a staple of the only politics they have come to know since that time.
Of course, this mental disconnect is not present only in Appalachia. It can be seen in virtually every poor Red state in the country. I’m not sure what you do to combat it. My experience is that it’s almost impossible to get people to even admit that Medicare and Social Security are government programs that they love, and which are the closest things to socialism we have ever tried in this country. They simply refuse to allow that thought to enter.
They still seem able to do the mental contortions which allow them to conclude that they are somehow more deserving than all those “others”, who only want a free ride at their expense. It seems like when the phrase “cognitive dissonance’ was coined, it was a result of direct observation of these very people.
It may seem a stretch but I blame this in part on the FCC regulation changes in 1986 that also killed the Fairness Doctrine and opened the floodgates to allow as few as 4 companies to own all broadcast and cable media.
Why? Because of Public Service Announcements (PSAs). When the FCC was created they recognized that radio stations were using public airwaves and in return for protection of their frequency they had to meet certain standards, including airing of qualified PSAs a certain percentage of the time for free.
Most people today don’t remember PSAs but as I worked in a small town radio station as a teen I remember the PSAs and what we had to do to track them for FCC credit. There were all kinds of pre-recorded PSAs available and typically whatever news service you subscribed to would provide you with a radio-ready PSA tape.
PSAs, among other things, would tell people about services available to them and how to access them, or how to register to vote, or precautions for winter driving, or reminding people to vaccinate their kids. When traveling to Canada or Europe I find that PSAs are are omnipresent there. Even at bus stops a portion of the advertising is devoted to PSAs, such as telling people who to call to get the maximum government benefit.
Well, one obvious benefit of frequent PSAs is that people are made aware of all the government services available to them. Instead, not only are the last two generations of Americans ignorant of a lot of these services, they often think they are privately run services because the GOP has “outsourced” (at a higher cost) a lot of the user interface, as they’ve done with the various Medicare programs.
If the Democrats ever regain the House a simple PSA bill would be a great investment in the long term.
Odd isn’t that they have no difficulty signing up for and receiving those government benefits?
Pre-ACA, West Virginia had the 2nd best record in enrolling Medicaid eligible residents. (Maine was number one.)
“A 2008 poll of 1,400 Americans by the Cornell Survey Research Institute found that when people were asked whether they had “ever used a government social program,” 57 percent said they had not. Respondents were then asked whether they had availed themselves of any of 21 different federal policies, including Social Security, unemployment insurance, the home-mortgage-interest deduction and student loans. It turned out that 94 percent of those who had denied using programs had benefited from at least one; the average respondent had used four.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/20/opinion/our-hidden-government-benefits.html
Even many of those who are aware that they benefit from government programs are opposed to those programs. Some believe the lie that they are jobless or poorly compensated for employment because of the size of government; they are bitterly resentful that they need assistance. Many more are opposed to Others getting those benefits because those Others are unworthy in some way(s). Of course, each Appalacian Deserves and Needs and Paid For their benefits, though.
Americans have been offered the opportunity to be stupidly ignorant of basic civics, and they have taken that opportunity.
Maybe governments should do better PR for those benefits.
Hell, anyone with a bank account has a continuous benefit from FDIC insurance.
Well, that’s really my point. I think I even recall PSAs about savings accounts and FDIC way back when.
I mean, one benefit of government was amazing finance industry stability for almost 50 years. The major problems that have occurred in the last few decades were all directly caused by “deregulation” – from the S&L debacle to the leveraged buyout crisis to the bank crises to of course the big one in 2008.
Damn right people need to be more aware of the proper functions and benefits of government. But this is a very US-only problem – as I said when I travel to other countries I quickly learn about the benefits of their governments because the governments are running frequent PSAs to tell people.
The Recovery Act did that with signs. I saw those all over. And then local Republicans were yelling about wasting money on signs and advertising lol.
A tax deduction is not a social program. If you want to define it that way, than 90%+ of taxpayers are in a social program, but you are just bending definitions to suit your conclusion. You might as well say that the graduated tax system and exemptions are a social program so that all but the highest bracket are in a social program and since the overwhelming majority of those use deductions, then 100% of taxpayers are in a social program.
It’s legitimate to count public schools as a social program, though.
That’s the point, tho: we stupidly fund our social programs through the tax code. Often without the tax deductions being refundable tax credits, there only benefiting the wealthier people. Like college. Can’t afford it? Well here’s “some help”: deduct $4000 from your taxable income! Most people don’t have four grand lying around to pay anyway, so they can’t take advantage of it.
There are situations where tax credits/deductions are appropriate, but often they just add unnecessary complexity.
Consider the Electric Vehicle tax credit of $7500. Cool, right? Now, one possible way to do this would have been to reimburse the manufacturer for every car sold. In fact, this is how it works with car leases – the car lease company (usually a subsidiary of the manufacturer) discounts the lease by $7500 and takes the credit themselves.
But, NOOOOO, we have free market ideology so we have to do it the hard way and force people to claim it on their returns. Look at the problems this causes:
The net is that while these savings are nice they add a lot of administrative cost and greatly reduce the intended incentive because they are so hard to understand.
Oh well.
And the response to the ACA Medicaid expansion is “huge“.
… they often think they are privately run services because the GOP has “outsourced” (at a higher cost) a lot of the user interface, as they’ve done with the various Medicare programs.
Bill Clinton/Al Gore did a lot of that too. It was truly a bipartisan affair.
The change at the federal level was under Clinton/Gore. States could still manage their Medicaid programs as they saw fit. However, that change required allowing Medicaid beneficiaries to choose their providers and they could no longer be restricted to using public hospitals and clinics. It know that it significantly hurt revenues for LA County-USC Medical Center and guess that it did most public health care facilities.
Woodard’s analysis all (well, much of it) goes back to David Hackett Fischer’s magisterial, award-winning “Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America”. Fischer argues that:
*The Puritan migration from East Anglia to New England (1629-40);
*The Cavaliers (and indentured servants) migration from the south of England to the Tidewater (1641-60);
*The Quaker migration from the Midlands to the mid-Atlantic(1660-880?); and,
*The Borderlands (northern England, southern Scotland, northern Ireland) migration to the backcountry of Appalachia (1680-1745?);
represent four geographically, socially, politically, culturally, religiously distinct strands of British society, and that those strands have persisted throughout American history.
(Not disagreeing with Booman’s sentiments, just making the observation.)
Hmm didn’t someone bring up “defeated peoples” when we last discussed Appalachia? Like how if someone gets a respectable job they are worse off for loosing the benefits than they are now, shame for it etc.
Fischer’s analysis is striking for historical work. But even the Appalachian region reflects his demographics and culture less and less over the past century. In ways not as dramatic as but similar to trying to account for Massachusetts voting patterns without considering the Irish, Italians, Greeks, and Eastern Europeans — not mention Asians and African-Americans.
It is not uncommon to come on a Chinese restaurant or a Mexican restaurant in some random Appalachian town. In the northern Valley of Virginia, the closeness of DC means that there is a good Bulgarian restaurant in Winchester. And Winchester was not in McAuliffe’s column.
All good points. One of Fischer’s arguments is that these folkways/cultures have persisted up to the current day (1989, when the book was published), and that we can still see their effects in contemporary politics and culture.
Fischer says that as much as 19th and 20th century immigrants have made their marks on the places where they live, they’ve also (to some degree) adapted to the cultures and folkways laid down by those 17th and 18th century British immigrants.
In one chapter (or appendix) he uses electoral college maps from presidential elections to illustrate the endurance of those regional differences.
There are two geographic regions in the “Tidewater” that went for McAuliffe: the Tidewater proper, home of a lot military and government contract work, and the traditionally Democratic Southside Virginia. Seeing Southside Virginia return to traditional voting patterns was encouraging.
McAuliffe lost in the Piedmont regions outside of towns and cities as well. But took most independent cities not named Lynchburg.
Colin Woodward’s regionalization of America is interesting but is too broad-brushed. There are a lot of different political and cultural realities under each of his regions. So his Tidewater and Appalachia are not what locals would recognize as being areas of similarity. And I’m sorta local enough for this to be a criticism.
What’s going on in Appalachia is absolute and total despair as best I can tell. It was on the edge of that in the late 1970s and early 1980s when I lived there. Not just the coal industry has been destroyed. The furniture industry has been offshored. A lot of the hosiery mills that dotted some of the towns have disappeared. Burley tobacco industry that occupied a lot of the small farms in the bottoms has been weak for a couple of decades. The timber industry has been hit by the housing recession and the pulpwood industry is experiencing weakness of demand for paper. They are surviving by taking in each other’s local business, selling crafts on Etsy, arbitraging yard sales, and helping out family and neighbors. The only thing that holds them together is church. And there is where the issue is.
Bob Jones University, Liberty University, and Regent University draw heavily from this area–always have. And graduates in ministry go back to start entrepreneurial churches in these areas. Accountants and some other professions with degrees from the universities also go back to where they came from (unless they are trying to get out of the valley). The personal networks are tightknit and generate their own talking points. So enter evangelistic media and rightwing media (with Falwell fils, Robertson, and the most recent Bob Jones, they are sort of the same). All three of these got their anti-government stance from their strong defense of segregation, not from any weird religious doctrine. And onto that they grafted during the 1970s a John Birch kind of anti-communism and anti-socialism.
A lot of these areas were either Unionist Democrat or Republican during the Civil War and were early to become Republican in the 1950s. (In the county I lived in in the early 1980s, the shift from Democrat to Republican came around 1970 when the Democratic boss of the county was arrested for moonshining. That gave the Republicans their chance and they have been there ever since.)
If there were federal anti-poverty programs to speak of anymore, these areas would not be so down on the government. The irony of Republican cuts from Reagan onward is that it has made these areas more intensely Republican.
As far as McAuliffe is concerned, how much of this area did he effectively write off in order to spend more time in NoVa and Tidewater areas? How much Democratic presence is left to counter a completely GOP framing of issues in these areas?
These areas indeed have a level of reliance on federal anti-poverty programs comparable to urban ghettoes. There is probably less economic opportunity in these areas now than there is in urban ghettoes. In urban ghettoes there is geographical isolation and transportation issues but the primary barrier is racial discrimination. And most cities have make-do public transportation systems. In Appalachian areas, poverty means depending on hiring other people to transport you at their convenience. And you get to hear their political opinions and listen to rightwing radio in their car while you go to pick up your Food Stamps. Doesn’t that just make you want to rush out and let your neighbors see you voting?
The merchants and the employees of companies that do have jobs are very puffed up with their self-reliance and personal liberty. The folks on government programs either imitate to hide their status or are mostly silent.
The folks who are the morans are generally the better-off family who travel 60 miles or more one-way into the nearest city of any size Roanoke, Staunton, Harrisonburg, Bristol, Winchester, Charlottesville to work and feel the pressure of both the job and the commute. Or the guy who used to have a job but now barely gets by with a saw sharpening business or auto repair. Both of these notice the taxes that have been passed from the wealthy to them without noticing more than that the taxes have gone up and incomes have stagnated.
The bigger issue is McAuliffe didn’t win VA by a large enough margin to finally dissuade the teabagger mob from their “strategy”.
VA governor is one term, right? wondering what he’s going to accomplish, especially if the state house is full of teabaggers.
What a bunch of middle class, entitlement bullshit. Use the “moron” epithet carefully. Ask not for whom the moron word tolls. It tolls for thee, motherfucker!!!
Go read Joe Bageant. Who’s he? You ignorant, self-indulgent middle class assholes!!!
I repeat: “…no American publisher is yet interested in a book by a redneck socialist — and that says a lot about American culture and the US book business.” It says a great deal about the aims of the Permanent Government and its media satraps as well.
Joe…he was a friend of mine…treated these broken people as human beings. He didn’t call them schoolyard bully names…”You morons!!!” He understood that they had been taken off by the same monstrous Permanent Government that has waged war on most of the rest of humanity for 50+ years,. The Kissingers, the Bushes, the Reagans and Romneys of this world. And yes, the Clintons and Obamas too.
These white rural people want to work, just like inner city minority people want to work. In the ’80s and ’90s the Permanent Government sold American labor down the river to minimum wage foreign workers because the profit margins were higher. Way higher. Ross Perot had it right all the way back in 1992.
Perot was demonized by the Government Media Complex just as the Paulists are being demonized now, but his point stands for anyone with an ounce of common sense left.
Wake the fuck up.
The so-called “white conservative working class right” is just another bunch of ripped-off motherfuckers who are panicking and thus blindly lashing out at completely misunderstood groups of so-called “enemies.” Everybody is “the enemy” when you don’t have a decent education and you can’t get a job that will put sufficient food on the table for your children.
“A giant sucking sound…” The sound of their dreams and the dreams of their forebears vacating the premises.
Don’t call them “morons.” They are not high IQ clones…neither are most of us and neither were most of our ancestors…but they are some of the same people who built this country by the sweat of their brow for 300+ years. They are also potential allies if you know what you are doing.
Which you most obviously don’t.
There is an alliance coming though, Booman.
Watch.
An alliance between the disenfranchised of all races and cultures here in America.
Watch.
When it really finds its legs it is going to change everything!!!
Watch.
Meanwhile…wake the fuck up!!!
You’re next.
We are all “next.”
Bet on that as well.
AG
P.S. Rural Virginia people? They see through a glitz-encrusted suckup to power like McAuliffe in a country minute. They’ve been dealing with mortgage gougers and revenuers for generations. It’s the media-blinded middle class that’s voted him in. Shame on all of you. Shame!!!
I expanded this comment into a stand-alone post. Go read it if you care enough to do so.
And if not?
No surprise.
Appalachia. It Ain’t What You Think It Is, Leftinesses. Bet On It.
WTFU.
AG
There’s a point or three in here worth taking very seriously, IMO. Rednecks too often have reason to feel patronized and mocked by the self-congratulatory generosity of lordly liberals come to hack off their chains for them.
Nevertheless, the southern enemy of progress isn’t poor white people anyway, any more than it is poor black ones, even if poor whites may seem too willing to blame their troubles on “the blacks” and “the gays”. They are surely less likely to vote Republican than not to vote at all.
I’m pretty sure most of your Tea Party activists, though, the ones with the leisure to travel cross-country in their three-cornered hats and Medicare scooters, aren’t actually poor or anywhere near it; they’re well-off and mean-spirited retired petit-bourgeois–with a contingent of frat-house bullies and mean girls representing their entitled children–and they are kind of morons of spite, with a deficiency of understanding that goes along with their deficiency of feeling. I don’t normally use the word “moron” but these are people who actively wish harm to others and they should be loudly mocked. As should Perot. Liberals are not the lesser of two evils, more like the most hopeful of the not-good-enoughs, which is pretty much the best we miserable humans can do.
about the VA AG Race:
VA changes vote count rules while counting
Max Smith, reporter for WTOP News Radio, talks with Rachel Maddow about the close A.G. election in Virginia and questionable new vote counting rules.
http://on.msnbc.com/17QGlKf
So, are ALL of you trying to be ironic by misspelling “morons”? Are you going for definition 2?
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=moran
Otherwise, you’re making us look like a bunch of tea partiers.
You realize that with 29 separate mentions of the non-word, you’re adding to the google weight of the misspelling and increasing the likelihood that it will eventually be adopted in common usage.
It’s probably not possible to make me laugh harder than by questioning my desire to see morans included in the OED.
Reckon they’ll cite your usage as a separate case?
Well, I’m sorry my son, but you’re too late in asking, Mister Peabody’s coal train has hauled it away.