In the silence of the Civil War’s Antietam battlefield on a winter day, bucolic hills give way to rows of small, white gravestones in the nearby cemetery. Wandering over the deadliest ground in American history, a melancholy visitor may be excused for wondering if this November’s presidential contest poses the greatest threat to the nation’s future since the election of 1860.
After his victory in Iowa, Donald Trump is the favourite to become the Republican nominee. Leading commentators on the Left warn that, should he get re-elected, he will become a dictator and end democracy. On the Right, meanwhile, the belief is unshakeable that Joe Biden is mentally incapable of fulfilling the duties of president and won’t survive a second term.
These raw emotions are not simply the quadrennial outbursts of partisan feeling that emerge in an election season. Rather, they are portents of a much deeper dislocation in American society. For over two decades now, Americans have been battered by non-stop crises at home and abroad — from the long War on Terror to Covid and the George Floyd protests — leading to what feels like national exhaustion and a deep pessimism about the future of democracy.
Our pessimism has resurrected the once-unthinkable idea of disunion, or in today’s parlance, “national divorce”. In a 2021 poll conducted by the University of Virginia, more than 80% of both Biden and Trump voters stated that elected officials from the opposite party presented “a clear and present danger to American democracy”. Most shockingly, 41% of Biden voters and 52% of Trump voters stated that things were so bad, they supported secession from the Union. Two years later those numbers remained essentially the same in an Ipsos poll, with a fifth of Americans strongly wanting to separate.
For those who believe that such concerns are simply hysteria, we should remember that America’s road to the Civil War took decades. In March 1850, southern statesman John C. Calhoun gave a prescient warning to the Senate: “It is a great mistake to suppose that disunion can be effected by a single blow. The cords which bound these States together in one common Union, are far too numerous and powerful for that. Disunion must be the work of time.”
There's a quote from the movie Vengeance that I think sums it up well.
It's not necessarily that people in rural areas are dumb. It's that they're creative people who don't have any outlets, so they get so caught up in the conspiracies because they're better than the alternative (nothing).
Which of course itself is a byproduct of anti-intellectualism, I think it is something that could be solved with support for education and extracurriculars, but it's very much a cultural issue that needs to be addressed by propping up citizens intellectual interests instead of tearing them away.
I think it is simply that they don't have a lot of contact with people who are different, which most humans need to see others as people, and the main broadcasters in rural areas are conservatives that use the right terminology to convey their message. It became a feedback loop, where the few people they interact with share the same fears that they are all bombarded with, so their fears of the unknown are reinforced.
Then shit like Facebook allowed them to dial the whole thing up even further.
People in more densely populated areas are more likely to catch on that different people are just people, which is why they end up more liberal. Just like college education tends to correlate with being liberal.
Liberals could counter this with tailoring some messaging to the rural context, but they have a huge hurdle with the conservative promoted anti-intellectualism. So I kind of agree with you, but personally think the targeted messaging of conservatives is a far bigger influence than just the reception of conspiracies.