The kids essay can be summed up as - "no one here has any ambition whatsoever, and no one would even think about leaving the town we live in to find something better and make something out of ourselves. So we voted to bring back the good old days of company towns and getting some kind of a job at the mill after high school so we can stay in debt for the rest of our lives."

Well - good luck with that. Hope he lets us know how it worked out for them in 4 years.

If that's what you're taking away from the article, then we are indeed fucked.

People are not magical creatures. They are not pulling genius out of their asses in some blinding flash of light. They are going to work with the information available to them. There will always be the occasional outlier that people point towards to support their hopes for exceptionalism, but ultimately, if you take a shitload of people and feed them bad information their entire fucking life they are going to behave based on that information and decline competing information that does not fit with the beliefs their mind has built around said original information.

So basically - its the whole "garbage-in-garbage-out" thing?

And yes - that's what I got from the article.

The whole "information available to them" line may have worked back in 1989, but, now that people people everywhere from Sierra Leone Africa to Olinda Brazil have basic access to google and the internets, there really is no excuse for being spoon fed "bad information their entire fucking life." At some point there is a conscious decision made to never branch out, or seek opposite views and slip into comfortable ways of thinking about things, or blame mode, or, whatever mode one is most comfortable with using to make themselves feel better about where they are in life. Interesting that the ones that scream loudest about "entitlements" and "lazy welfare queens" are often guilty of the same behavior they are accusing others of, and then some.

The article itself gets kind of long and wonky after a third of the way in, so the author is definitely doing no one any favors, by turning what could had potential to be a very interesting essay about how middle America has been transformed into a forgotten part of the country, that is miserably losing their competitive edge to the rest of the world, to "let me machine gun a bunch of numbers and links" mode. Could have been a little more interesting if the author didn't slip into "let me show you how brilliant I am" mode.

Yes. Garbage In, Garbage Out.

Sigh. "Decisions." You mean trained behaviors based on that bad information. You wouldn't expect someone to start speaking French with no training and no preparations when they've been taught English all their life. So why would you think these people are suddenly going to do a 180, decry everything ever known to be true, and behave in a way completely opposite to what they've been taught?

It's known as refusing to ever grow up.

It would have helped out immensely, if he tried to find someone -ANYONE in the article from those towns that actually knew of, or even acknowledged, that there are 7 billion other people on the planet, aside from the "damn Mexicans and other assorted brown people taking our jobs." I know that they exist - I luckily have a job that takes me all over the world and into places like these counties that the writer was doing the article on. Unfortunately, he seems to have focused on the ones that don't, and what's worse, they don't seem to care that there is an entire world out there, just their little patch of it. I just thought it was kind of sloppy and unbalanced. He should have probably just interviewed the guys dad, because dollars to doughnuts that's the voice that popped out of the kid's mouth during the interview process.

Believe me - I am pretty much living proof that "trained behaviors based on that bad information" and can "behave in a way completely opposite to what they've been taught." I grew up in a small, impoverished, little rural company town in eastern Tennessee that no one has ever heard of. I also grew up with "what's yellow and black, and funny as hell? Bus full of n****ers driving off a cliff! - hahahahaha" as humor out there. Preceding joke was told to me by neighbor kids dad who was one of the deputy sheriffs by the way. I used to think shit like that was funny. Used to think walmart was awesome even after they drove all of our neighbors out of business etc, etc. etc. What changed, was coming to the stunning realization one day (after leaving that little shithole) that there was an entire planet full of people that thought and acted different than my little enclave-mentatilty allowed me to to, and your brain just naturally sort of starts to process information differently.

The truly sad part about the internet, is that due to facebooking and other social media, I can see that just about every single person I grew up with is still there, still has the same attitudes, tells the same damn jokes, all are white, and all voted for trump.

To me, the whole point of the article seemed to be "this is why they voted for trump, because they feel marginalized and left out." Welcome to the wonderful world of adulthood I guess. There are 7-billion folks on the planet, and those marginalized middle America folks that feel shut out and ignored happen to constitute the upper 5 percent of that world population. Unfortunately, what amounts to a foot stomping temper tantrum by the middle of the country got rewarded by an completely outdated electoral college system that, due to one of the 2 parties figuring out how to game the system, has now twice gone against the will of the people (that's a whole other discussion I ainta getting into right now).

Do you know what that makes you? An outlier! Congratulations. And you know what? If every single person was you and was coming from the exact same DNA, the exact same background, the exact same life experiences, and the exact same exposure to information as you then maybe we'd have a standard for determining how people's behavior should be. But! Since the vast majority of people aren't in your little box of exceptionalism, that would not only be a really bad way of determining standard modes of behavior in a scientific experiment, it would also be a really shitty way to run a political party. Which is basically what the Democrats have been doing, and that didn't turn out so well.

Seriously, if we were talking about racial demographics instead of where you came from, somebody would be calling you out on your privilege right now and nobody would blink an eye.

Ya the article is kind of an annoying read (it comes off to me as borderline smug) but the point stand that when you have nothing invested in the system you don't care if it goes to shit. The problem is that with both political parties totally dependent on big business, the democrats can't even draw out enough voters to win against a guy whose message (but not policy) is "this system sucks and I'm going to dismantle it)

And you can blame neoliberals for making that happen. You could argue that they tried but the senate prevented them- and that's legitimate and a valid viewpoint, but we're reaping what could have been prevented by the democrats and it's going to hurt for four years. Eight if we don't get our collective shit together. (Spoiler: I'm betting on eight years.)

I wonder how much our continual shift to consumerism is affecting political views. In today's world, things are made cheaply, and if they break, you throw them away and buy a new one. From that perspective, I can see where someone would think smashing the system is a solution to fixing issues. I still think it's stupid and naive, but that at least makes sense to me.

The concept came up once or twice. ;)

From one of the people who supported that comment:

"Trump, like Obama, or Hilary or Bernie can't do that much in 4 years. There's congress. There's the SCOTUS. There's local and state governments. The president isn't an Emperor- there is still checks and balances."

Now who was being naive?

Anyone who had faith in the Democratic Party, I would say.

I am the one that said that, I think. And I stand by that.

The problem isn't going to be trump. It's going to be the judges and congress and they do respond to pressure. *edit: well not judges

By focusing on trump and not these others you're giving them all a free ride. Look at SE? It's all trump posts. You think that's coincidence? It works. It's been working. It wi continue to work. It how trump will get four more years. Because the people who voted for trump are relishing in it because "now the elitists know how we feel".

There are still states (like California) and government services (national parks) that won't roll over.

And your sentiment here on my comment glosses over all that and focuses on trump and that's exactly what they want; to drown out positive steps and debate. (Edit: an example of this is the post just above this one)

if we as a nation can pull our shit together and field a decent candidate that can formulate a policy that can get enough people out to vote, maybe trump will only get four years.

I assume you have a candidate (or several) you like and have been actively backing? You've posted about them here, surely? I'd love to hear about them.

Meanwhile, let's ignore everything the POTUS is doing along with a Congress and (soon) a Supreme Court that'll rubber-stamp nearly anything he wants and vice-versa. That's not a positive thing to do, so let him get to it. I'll call off the scientist march on Washington and you tell women to just be subservient to the coming laws and edicts.

I do, yes, and they are local. I got them from a useful SE post that wasn't about Trump.

Nothing I said is about ignoring. It's about trying to focus on what we can do to limit damage, resist, or help rebuild a base.

"I'll call off the scientist march on Washington and you tell women to just be subservient to the coming laws and edicts."

If that's your takeaway from what I'm trying to communicate, I'm just kind of sad.

dumb people are dumb and will believe dumb things. this is a surprise because why?

There's a difference between being dumb and misinformed. Writing off everyone who disagrees with you with a derogatory label is why we're in this mess.

is it truly being misinformed when one willfully rejects the information?

"Willful rejection" based on what?

There is no magic quality to factual information. They are still appraising your "correct" information with the methodologies built around the misinformation. Your "correct" information is nothing more than a pebble in a river of misinformation. The river will flow forward with the momentum of the past until a big enough rock diverts the river.

Eh, yet another earnest effort to understand and humanize the 'mainstream' Trump voter that seems well-intentioned enough, but really adds nothing to what we already know.
And while I agree that being dumb and misinformed aren't the same thing, relying on misinformation and living by it- especially to your ultimate detriment, is kind of in opposition to being 'smart' and 'insightful'. I'm willing to accept that most Trump voters aren't bad, ill-intentioned people, but the decision to "send in a wrecking ball to disrupt the system" strikes me as a highly impulsive, irrational, viewpoint, no matter how sweetly it's rationalized.

That's because the system mostly works for you. You're smarter and better informed than Trump voters but you have just as much trouble understanding their position as they do yours.

Perhaps, but this brings us to the essential question-
Sure, the system doesn't work for a lot of people, obviously. Does that alone necessitate them being so ill-informed? Plenty of people whom the system has failed do seem to grasp the greater realities. At the risk of delving into the abyss of identity politics, what's really happening here in the systematic denial of easily obtainable and comprehensible facts is a kind of tribalism. It's no coincidence that the typical Trump voter fits a certain demographic profile.

Honestly this article just seems to make the case for strengthening progressive policies in the states where they can pass and letting these people burn themselves out. They consider themselves the biggest victim, and feel the politics that have ground them down are really the only answer. How condescending would it be for some wonk from the big city to tell them how they're doing it wrong. Their local politics won't accept changes to help them out, and the few who feel the federal government is the answer elect people who push policies that leave them hanging. They live in area where i doubt you'll see economic growth because of the resources they have on offer.

Well you won't see any strengthening of progressive policies in Oklahoma, that's for sure, and the article does do a good job of laying out the consequences. What these people fail to comprehend is that it's not government as a whole, but their own elected Republican leaders who've left them hanging in the wind. It's that vicious cycle of misinformation that keeps them coming back for more.

A great example of this was posed in r/bestof/ where a Texan outlined the "not so fun facts" about Texas and why it stays in the hands of politicians that constantly screw over the populace, even their supporters.