We say very clearly that rural America is hurting. But we refuse to justify attitudes that some scholars try to underplay.
Something remarkable happened among rural whites between the 2016 and 2020 elections: According to the Pew Research Center’s validated voter study, as the rest of the country moved away from Donald Trump, rural whites lurched toward him by nine points, from 62 percent to 71 percent support. And among the 100 counties where Trump performed best in 2016, almost all of them small and rural, he got a higher percentage of the vote in 91 of them in 2020. Yet Trump’s extraordinary rural white support—the most important story in rural politics in decades—is something many scholars and commentators are reluctant to explore in an honest way.
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What isn’t said enough is that rural whites are being told to blame all the wrong people for their very real problems. As we argue in the book, Hollywood liberals didn’t destroy the family farm, college professors didn’t move manufacturing jobs overseas, immigrants didn’t pour opioids into rural communities, and critical race theory didn’t close hundreds of rural hospitals. When Republican politicians and the conservative media tell rural whites to aim their anger at those targets, it’s so they won’t ask why the people they keep electing haven’t done anything to improve life in their communities.
It’s weird how the radicalized right wing took umbrage to the notion of retraining with their sneering use of “learn to code”. Of course, not everyone can write code (and those jobs may dwindle, too) but the notion of doing anything other than mining coal just seems to really, really, really offend a certain type of person.
“Learn to code” is just the 21st century version of “pull yourself up by your bootstraps”.
The idea that someone should just “learn to code” shows a huge lack of understanding of what “learning to code” entails. It also doesn’t help that they’ll need to earn a living while they’re learning to code, and that they’ll have to move from a dying town to find a job where they can code.
They weren’t offended by the idea of learning to code. They were offended by the dismissive nature of the major life change that switching careers and moving to a different state entails.
And, as someone who learned how to code, I’m offended by the dismissive nature of the technology industry as just “learn to code.”
Agreed, I started in electronics repair in the 90s, and began learning to code in 2004. 20 years and over a dozen languages later and I feel I am still learning to code.
People say that programming jobs are going to go away because of LLMs, but I don’t see it, at least not any time soon.
They have been trying to eliminate programmers in my primary language since before I started, and I still have steady work.
The thought that a large number of people from non-tech backgrounds can just become proficient programmers in a reasonable amount of time is of course insane. I’ve known many very talented techs who burned out and gave up trying to learn to program.
Something has to be done, and I don’t pretend for a moment I have any answers. I have traveled through many small towns all around the US, and the decline in the past 10 years or so is really depressing to see.