You can have Phoenix
Yeah yeah. It’s the CITIES that are the problem. Let’s all secede to a farm and make America great again.
Rush Limbaugh said on his radio show Wednesday that the U.S. may be “trending toward secession.”
Or just trending away from Trump. One of those.
As Limbaugh talked about liberal cities like New York and San Francisco, he took up a question of whether “we can win the culture.”
By leaving cities like New York and San Francisco? No, because a lot of the culture comes from there. What you would win wouldn’t be the culture, it would be some desiccated fragment of it.
Not that everyone has to live there, obviously, but if you secede from all things liberal, educated, thoughtful, science-supporting, justice-seeking, cosmopolitan, secular, progressive…well what will you have left? Rush Limbaugh and Trump.
“I see more and more people asking what in the world do we have in common with the people who live in, say, New York?” Limbaugh asked.
Other than bodies, needs, thoughts, feelings, jobs, clothes, appetites, hopes, ideas, plans…?
The people who live in New York are not aliens and neither are the people who live in Wichita. We all have a lot in common. Get a grip.
In the segment, first flagged by Media Matters, he said, “A lot of bloggers have written extensively about how distant and separated and how much more separated our culture is becoming politically and that it can’t go on this way. There cannot be a peaceful coexistence of two completely different theories of life, theories of government, theories of how we manage our affairs. We can’t be in this dire a conflict without something giving somewhere along the way.”
That’s rich coming from a guy whose whole career has been hyping up this so-called separation. He’s one of the main creators of it, and this nonsense is just more of the same.
Rush is a nasty piece of work, no doubt about it. I heard him on the radio while I was sitting in our car outside of a story my wife had gone into, and it was immediately clear that he was deliberately straddling the line between truth and outright dishonesty. He feeds off of unhappiness and the discontent of his listeners. He contributes only argument and dissension to American life, and his death will be a major contribution to the country he claims to love, but in fact only exploits for his own profit!
A radio shock-jock like Limbaugh has exactly the opposite social role of say a lama in a Tibetan monastery, whose chanting and meditation is for the purpose of cultivating an inner peace in all who listen. Limbaugh’s money comes from stirring up anxiety in his audience and simultaneously generating in it a feeling of righteous indignation.
The danger with the Tibetan approach is that the Chief Meditator literally falls asleep on the job. (I have heard a first-hand account of this happening.) The danger with the Limbaugh approach is that some listener finds reason to go out in high indigantion and commit murder and mayhem.
But Limbaugh et al also illustrate another problem common in all sewerage farms: that of the ‘floaters’. Gas-filled turds make their way to the top.
There is no reason why two cultures can’t coexist. I mean, liberal city folks aren’t telling country folks they can’t have rodeos and Nascar and beer kegs. But there are plenty of people where I live who think if it is something cultural they don’t enjoy (say, live theatre or opera – I don’t enjoy opera, either), it shouldn’t be allowed to exist. People who enjoy live theatre say live and let live – go watch the drag race, the demolition derby. People who don’t enjoy live theatre say “kill them all”. Strange dichotomy, that.
Funny how the things Limbaugh is saying are all too often iterated in liberal circles, too. We need to “understand” the heartland, “listen to” the heartland, and not ask them to be any different than they are. Yeah, let ’em be racist assholes, right? Let ’em oppress black voters and commit domestic violence against women, things we won’t tolerate in the cities (though they happen).
‘Either run the country the way the South want’s it to be run or the South shall secede from the Union’.
Hmm, where have we heard that one before?
iknklast: The term for the liberal “We needs to understand the deplorables”
memes and the endless road trips into Red State America is “Cletus Safari”. The local rag, the San Francisco Chronicle, published a photo showing a crowd of Trumpalos holding signs, one of which showed a fat, elderly, draft dodging, exercise hating lump of a man as RAMBO for Gawd’s sake. RAMBO. But, the Chron burbled, we have to reach out to them,. They don’t have to make any efforts…they are HEARTLANDERS, after all
Brian M., what really galls me is how these pundits and other accommodationists make a flying trip through the heartland, chat with a few people at the airport in Omaha, have breakfast in a cafe in Wichita, stay at a B&B in Godebo, Oklahoma, and decide they understand. These are nice people, they gush.
Then they arrogantly inform those of us who live here that we are wrong…wrong, wrong, wrong…about our neighbors. We don’t understand, because we won’t take off our blinders and see. Except I do see. I live and work and shop and recreate and so forth among these people. I am neck deep in them nearly every day (well, until the pandemic, but even then I encounter them in the grocery store, the classroom, and the newspaper). They are nice…depending on how you define nice (and frankly, a lot of them can’t even make the minimal definition being used by those who refuse to call them deplorable – many of them are just angry, obnoxious, white men…and women, though fewer than men). They are pleasant, they will help you change your tire if you break down, they will wave you to go first at the stop sign (except in Nebraska, where they just sit and wait for you to go first, and so you are stuck in a “Nebraska nice” situation of not daring to go because they have the right of way, and you don’t know if they are ceding it to you or just daydreaming). They know how to behave with at least basic courtesy, and many of them more than that.
But spend time at the cafe listening instead of talking, and you might hear what you don’t want to hear. Or go to the cafe that the locals frequent, instead of the one with the upscale menu where you will encounter nothing but the liberal minority who go in for their morning cappuccino before Pilates. Just…shut up and listen…for at least a month…
But they won’t do that, because they love preaching to those of us who are in the trenches to tell us that the trenches are actually really nice places. But for some reason, they show no inclination to move here.
Hey here’s an odd, totally random and probably not significant observation… an awful lot of those accomodationist pundits sure seem to be male or white or both. Couldn’t possibly be related though.
Unfortunately Arlie Hochschild is now one of those people:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strangers_in_Their_Own_Land
A friend of mine lives in South Carolina, by her own choice (I have criticised this choice before, but she’s an adult and can live where she wants). On a recent zoom call she was talking about how she makes an effort to get to know her neighbours and be friendly with the people she encounters, and like all the other ‘Cletus safari’ reportbacks she says they are nice people, kind people, caring people…but she knows it’s only a matter of time in any given conversation before they say a lie. And not just a difference of opinion, or a non-nuanced understanding of a complex issue, or something you’d need education and time to research to understand, but an outright flat-out lie.
Someone once pointed out to me something I think I was probably already somewhat aware of–this ‘urban/rural’ or ‘liberal/conservative’ divide is artificial, because most if not all of the young liberal urban set actually have, and came from, families living in rural America. They do know them, all too well. And the rural conservatives have family in the cities. It’s not like they’re two completely different groups of people. And I suspect the overlap in individuals is higher than a lot of people like to portray it as–I like opera, and attend it in person as well as watching it on the screen; I have also been to a demolition derby, several rodeos (in which friends have participated) and a couple of truck rallies. Humans can do lots of different things.
guest, that’s so true. My family is Oklahoma, rural, etc, but we have relatives in New York City, Sacramento, and other large cities who fit the urban liberal definition. So, of course, they also have relatives living in the rural ‘heartland’.
The other thing no one wants to talk about is the disparity in who pays for what. The rural states are mostly receiving back more goods from their federal taxes than what they pay, while these urban liberals are receiving less. So, what that means, urban liberals are paying for the rural conservatives to maintain their lifestyle.
During the 2008 recession, my state was not hit nearly as hard as many, largely because of the extreme amount of subsidy money flowing into the state pockets. This came from people in the harder hit areas of the country, who were doing without so that we could have. Very few rural conservatives (and to tell the truth, very few urban liberals) understand this. If the rural conservatives were able to totally divorce themselves from the cities, they would find life much, much more difficult.
Of course, that isn’t really what they want. What they mean when they say things like that is they want things to remain the same that way, while the urban liberals shut up and don’t vote. Sort of like a lot of people in England who wanted Brexit without losing any of the benefits.
I remember in the 2000s, when the whole red state/blue state thing was still relatively new, I would occasionally read some nonsense about how rural conservative religious people had some demographic advantage because they tended to have more children than urban liberal secular types. I would see it from some people on the right gloating about it, and from some people on the left wringing their hands about it. It always seemed transparently silly to me because, as you all have pointed out, children don’t magically grow up to parrot their parents’ lifestyle and beliefs, and the net flow of “children of conservatives who end up liberal” minus “children of liberals who end up conservative” is more than sufficient to compensate for the difference in birth rates. (I also always found it creepy, especially the occasional liberal person who would suggest that we all need to have more kids to “solve” this issue — like your children are just little soldiers in some multi-generational ideological struggle.)
Yeah, Screechy, my parents are staunch conservatives (Trump voters), but out of their six children, three of them grew up to be at least moderate liberals, and one of them a solid liberal (you can probably guess which one).
Religion is sort of the same thing; while religious people normally raise religious kids, there are a lot that will desert the fold and become that “lost sheep” – atheist, or at least agnostic. And that seems to be happening a lot right now.
The US is trending toward succession from what?
Absurd.
Medal of Freedom winner, pfft.
I wonder how much of this city-dwelling white liberals attitude toward the ‘heartland’ come from some degree of guilt. Not guilt toward the ‘heartlanders’ per se but toward themselves. People reared up on Westerns and tales of the Frontiers who cannot help but think that they are not ‘real’ Americans like these folks, merely interlopers in their own country. People who have no interest in NASCAR or Country music or whatdoyoucallem… Tailgate parties but enjoy the opera or the theatre or the arts. Who are not that interested in sports but in any case would rather watch baseball than the NFL. People who keep asking themselves “Why am I saving money and time to spend a month in Europe and not spend my holiday in Nashville or whatever the fuck it is that Yahoos do? What is wrong with me? Am I even a real American?”
Not being a US citizen myself, maybe I am wide of the mark but I have encountered something akin to this attitude in many of my Australian friends in London who, to a man or woman, still like to cultivate that Crocodile Dundee persona of “You call that a knife? THAT’s a knife” even when we all know that 90% of them all inhabit a handful of cities on the coasts…
As they say, foundation myths are a hell of a drug!
I think there’s a LOT of truth in that. One could add Thoreau to the mix, too. Walden Pond was kind of his frontier, his Wild West, his Great Plains, his homestead, his Dakota Territory, etc etc.
Rob, you do have quite a bit of insight. Many people out here in the heartland think it is wrong to drive a compact car – they mostly have monster trucks. Guns are everywhere, and Confederate flags. They swagger and act like they are tough and “manly” (this is often true even for the women; feminine isn’t as common here as people think. There are a lot of swaggering tough ladies). They reject tofu, sprouts, or anything but red meat.
They portray themselves out here as John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, Rambo, and…whatever that guys name was in that TV show about torture (24?) all rolled into one. They shout and bully and swagger to prove how tough they are, but they really can’t live up to their own ideas of macho.
You mean Arnaud, yes? The Tocqueville de nos jours.
Hey, I’ll take Arnaud’s credit, but sadly not me.
Hardly Tocqueville, OB! I had to google “where do rednecks go on holiday”!
It’s the insight, not the information!
Ah, yes, Walden. Fond memories of it. We used to go swimming at Walden Pond. It’s not off the beaten path these days, and even in Thoreau’s days it wasn’t far from it.
Anyway, we grew up in a very liberal suburb of Boston (a couple of my sisters went to school with Chomsky’s daughters), but my parents were both from upstate New York, from longtime Republican families. Both left the gop, though, and mostly voted Democrat (though my father voted for the Socialist candidate in ’68). My father wasn’t close to his family, so we mostly spent vacations with my mother’s family, in an old mill town outside of Syracuse. One time when I was about 12 or so my aunt took me to dinner at the house of a family friend around the time of the Boston busing crisis, and the father said something about “the niggers in Boston”. I was shocked–I had never heard anyone use that word in casual conversation before–and my aunt (who lived in Queens and taught in Great Neck) must have noticed me staring at him, mouth agape, because on the ride home she tried to excuse him as, basically, an ignorant yokel (not her words).
I wasn’t buying it.