yolland
Forum Moderator
- Joined
- Aug 27, 2004
- Messages
- 7,471
I travel by car quite a bit, and I see pro-life billboards in cities and suburbs all the time. There are probably more overall in rural areas, but I'm genuinely surprised if you consider pro-life billboards to be a uniquely rural curiosity. I was under the impression that OC has quite a few megachurches; do they never fund signs like that?There were billboards will pictures of babies with Bible verses railing on about abortion. As I saw these all over the place, I realized how conservative parts of America are and how they want the exact kind of president Diemen is describing. There was still a restaurant serving "freedom fries."
They do question people's patriotism the same way McCain and Palin are.
I've never personally seen a restaurant serving "freedom fries," and really don't have the impression that that is or ever was commonplace anywhere in the US. The only example Wikipedia offers of a place that still serves them is a restaurant in Philadelphia.
What did you see to make you say "They do question people's patriotism"?
To me, when McCain and Palin refer to "real, smalltown, pro-America America," they're invoking an archetype that appeals to social conservatives in all kinds of locales; they're not just, or even primarily, addressing actual "real smalltown" voters. A flattering stereotype of hardworking, self-sufficient, unpretentious people who aren't easily swayed by pretty words or trendy ideas and are neither greedy narcissists nor self-pitying defeatists...the pioneer spirit lives on in the suburbs, blah blah yadda yadda. For many voters who do live in rural areas and certain types of urban ones, Rust Belters for example, the rhetoric also plays to an aggrieved sense that their concerns have been ignored by the government for decades, and a growing suspicion that everyone else is just pointing and laughing at them for being 'stuck' there. You've heard of inferiority complexes masquerading as superiority complexes? Something like that. Greater social conservatism enhances the sense of alienation but it's just that, an enhancer.
The 'beware-the-human-sewer-that-is-rural-America' attitude is poison for the Democrats, and it's not just the 20% who actually fit that description who take offense.