Oh God, I hate these comments and the poor white-hating done.
Yes, absolutely. This is plain ignorance. This is why Democrats have no hope of winning West Virginia. This is why Matt Bevin is governor of Kentucky. This is what is the matter with Kansas. This is why George W. Bush won in 2000.
The fact that someone calls themself a "progressive" would make fun of Appalachians the way people in this thread did is pretty amusing. It goes to show how tribalistic much of our politics is.
Yes it's like the so called "tolerance" crowd who tolerates everything until someone disagrees with them. Democrats doing this and name calling should be ashamed.
I had to grow up around this. NPR and MSNBC were the news 24/7. Poor whites who voted Republican were "those stupid, stupid people", "the Republicans have lied to them so much that they vote against their own interests and don't even realize it", "there are just a lot of bigoted, backwards people in this world" and other such things.
I'm sorry to hear you had such a childhood. May I ask how you saw the light and weren't scarred for life? It sounds like you came around to realize rhetoric for what it is my good friend.
If you're being serious, it was all the identity politics that really turned me off from the left as a group or personal identity (I always questioned individual foreign and domestic policies and tuned out extreme rhetoric). The left started going deep into "Republicans are racist, sexist, homophobes, whereas we democrats will agree to whatever any activist group promoting race/sex/LGBT issues demands of us" in 2012. I started noticing, for example, that The Daily Show wasn't making fun of racist hicks in Mississippi or the Westboro Baptist Church anymore, it was making dishonest arguments against normal people or blowing up non-issues to try to burn down a strawman. People were posting things from Salon or other left-wing sites on my Facebook feed that were totally misleading or attacked me (mostly as "doomed to ignorance") just for being a straight white man. I ran two public-speaking-related organizations on campus and in 2013 freshmen started coming in who would try to make these ridiculous, dramatic arguments about how they were shaken to their core by some man at the grocery store who said "work hard, play hard, that's the American way" (I remember this speech vividly) or other such things (they weren't called "microaggressions" yet).
After a while, anything I heard out of left-wing sources I automatically started to reject, and I started seeing things from the other side's perspective. Sometimes I found myself agreeing with the right on issues, other times I would reject the left initially, think about it a while, and then find myself agreeing with the left. For the most part my positions on issues I've put thought into never changed, only my perspective and the way I took the positions of the democratic party for granted.
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