Why rural Americans are so pissed off
This guy found a handful of the dumbest people in America and concluded people in rural areas are morally degraded and their problems are their own fault.<p>The arrogance of dismissing their contempt for the government is overwhelming.  Just because they don&#x27;t express their hatred of the elite class of people who rule them in just the right way doesn&#x27;t somehow add up to their anger being misguided. They&#x27;re using &quot;the government&quot; as a lightning rod for the myriad elites who do basically dictate the shape of their lives--the media they consume, the state of the market they could never control, and what options for their future they have. It&#x27;s not expressed clearly, but it&#x27;s not hard for someone with an ounce of empathy to suss out.<p>I could come up with a laundry list of the moral failures of the white rural poor, sure. My family tree is full of people just like this. But this researcher and people just like him cannot see past their own ideology. They want to believe they&#x27;re objective, but they&#x27;re not, they&#x27;re caught up in the same sort of scientistic neoliberalism that can&#x27;t help but see anyone outside of their elite class as a curious primitive and any other value system from theirs as a totemic anomaly. They want to know what character flaws led people to do such a horrible thing as to vote for Trump, but cannot for a moment consider how it was that we got to this position. Hint: it&#x27;s not the rural poor&#x27;s fault.