re: #45 freetoken

I’m not in much of a position to comment on the sitch back in the USA, since I spend 11 months of the year outside its borders. My family, though, seems to lean toward the Democrats — or at least away from Trump — save for a few diehard Republicans who would support a farmyard scarecrow if it had an R after its name. With few exceptions, my family is gainfully employed, or on some kind of pension/support, and not facing the kind of existential crises you mention. IOW no one’s hooked on opiates, joined a white supremacist group or militia, or concluded that immigrants and Muslims will be the death of America. I suppose I’m lucky.

OTOH I know from my occasional Facebook visits that Trump supporters exist among my former high school classmates, who have no real excuse to be Trumpists other than the aforementioned club loyalty. They’re reasonably well off, and not threatened by anything AFAIK.

The folks in those underserved rural areas, who seem to be true believers in The Donald, are not in my circles. I know of them only anecdotally, but your portrayal of their situation is a fair one. The kind of jobs high school graduates (or even drop outs) could once obtain are gone. Now small town folks only have low paying retail jobs to choose from, and we know those wages are not enough for a family of four to survive on, even in the sticks. What puzzles me is their unwillingness to leave their hometowns to look for jobs where the jobs are. Millions of people have done this in China, despite a social welfare system that is stacked against migrant workers. Yet, in the USA, where everyone is entitled to the same access to public services wherever they work or live, rural people stay at home, expecting some miracle to bring factory jobs to their little neck of the woods.

Meanwhile, we’ve got a concomitant problem of education being undervalued in rural areas as a way to get out from the cycle of poverty. Those preachers even deride public education as sinful, and church schools certainly don’t offer the kind of education needed for a skilled labor force.

Sad to say, the federal government is the only agency capable of tackling these systemic problems, but the GOP is adamantly opposed to “Big Government” social welfare programs. Whether a Democratic majority could do a better job is a matter of debate, but at least they would try. The Republicans seems content to line their own pockets and dismiss their rural electorate as mere nuisances.