Liberal economic populism's diminishing appeal to rural voters

[Liberté]

All of you are wrong. I say this as someone who lives in a Blue Dog area and who is related to voters who, if they knew what a 'Blue Dog' was, would surely self-identify as such.

Rural voters are just as populist as before. If anything, they have become more populist. But the direction of that populism has changed in the decades since the New Deal was put into place: it has turned, not only (and not primarily) against cultural 'outsiders', but against cultural and economic elites.

Left-wingers too often mistakenly believe that the 'conservatism' of the poor rural voter is something like Burkean conservatism - a philosophical conservatism that prefers the rule of the traditional elite. This is not so. When the rural conservative sees a conspiracy in high places against conservatism, as in the 'liberal media', what he is really complaining about is the centralization of the media within narrow and scarcely-competitive conglomerates who are most assuredly 'liberal' in a bland American Consensus sense but which are neither Left nor Right.

I've mentioned it in a post already today, but I highly recommend liberals watch Adam Curtis' documentary The Century of the Self, and especially the segment There Is A Policeman In All Our Heads. The anti-authoritarian Hippies of the 1960s became the Yuppies of the 1980s - and they still saw themselves as anti-authoritarians, even if the cause of their ire (the liberal establishment in both cases) remained the same. So, too, do many rural voters feel themselves oppressed by an elite and intend to do something about it. It's just that, this time, you are the elite.

The problem is structural. Americans today are "individualists", they are so anti-establishmentarian that every day in every way they buttress the establishment they claim to protest. And they certainly have legitimate grievances: if liberals were Marxists, they'd understand that capitalism is essentially progressive in nature and thus that it is natural that liberals are well-represented within the ranks of its intelligentsia and media. But they lack a depth analysis of the situation.

What could be done about it? Quite a few things. I've been fighting for them my entire posting career. Not one of you have listened to me.