Real America

By now, the liberal refrains are pretty clear and obvious. Hillary won by over 2.5 million votes in the popular vote. She won an overwhelming share of our economy, in terms of counties and productivity. She won the majority of demographic groups. She won a majority of our tax base. I could go on and on.

I proudly identify as a "coastie." I live less than 75 miles from downtown Philadelphia and New York. I go to them regularly. I can drive to the beach in a minimal amount of time. I am as East Coast as East Coast can get.

One of the things that is supposed to happen in the globalized economy is that the skills and the jobs end up clustering in the big cities. The truth is that Americans hate that, and it's a huge contributor to why trade is unpopular, and Trump won the election, even though i'd guess that most of these voters haven't thought of it that way. For a lot of people, they wanted to be left alone, in their small towns, mostly left alone from the outside world. I'd call it isolationism, except that is probably making it too ideological. Call them parochial, but people want to exist in the same town as their parents and grandparents, and many of them don't want to be bothered with the big city, the "newcomers," or frankly anything to do with the life that this new economy has brought them.

It's not so much about the factory or the mine, but rather the life that the factory or the mine gave their family's past. It's not about them being racist, necessarily (though it is in some cases), it's about the feeling that their life is being ripped away and given to someone else. It's about feeling like the businesses took away their way of life, and their government is actually encouraging it. It's about feeling as though the very policies they don't understand are the ones tilting the playing field away from them. They don't like the world they're in, and they don't understand it. You can explain it through economics. You can explain it through drug addiction. You can explain it through politics. However you want to explain their situation, you come to the same conclusion.

The reality is that more and more successful young Americans are ending up in and around the big cities. The reality is that the high paying jobs are finding their way there too. There are huge problems there, namely that housing is too scarce for demand in some of these places, and therefore too expensive. There is an underpaid service sector. There is racial inequality in all areas of life, from police relations to job opportunities. There are budget crunches. Life is not all flowers and sunshine in urban America, but the opportunity is there. It's not in rural areas, and those who remain in their ancestral towns are making the conscious choice to do so, and give up the opportunities for higher earnings. This reality is laid bare for anyone to see.

I'm not justifying some of the backward positions that are held in rural America, positions I don't agree with. I'm not saying we should change our public policy to try and bring back the factory we closed 25 years ago. I'm just saying that treating them all as a bunch of racist hicks is an over simplification of an actually complex world within our world. Surely, progressive politics have something to offer the rural and suburban poor in America. Surely we haven't become so cold as to forget them yet.