I wouldn’t say that at all. The farm programs and other forms of government welfare that go to rural areas — unfortunately, mostly to large corporations rather than actual family farms — are spearheaded and supported from the Left more than the Right. The Right will vote against them in DC and then go back to their state and take credit for the programs anyway.
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The ideas Republican politicians espouse to ingratiate themselves to conservative voters (anti-minority, anti-reproductive rights, anti-LGBTQ, unrestricted access to weapons of war, etc) are bad ideas and Democrats would do no one any favors by pretending otherwise.
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This is patently false. It gets used as an excuse sometimes, but it’s bullshit. They support horrible politicians because they support horrible policies or because they somehow benefit and don’t care about the people who are harmed.
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It also boggles my mind that anyone should offer that people on the far right don’t really care about child concentration camps or trans genocide, they’ll just support those if they feel slighted, as if it were some somehow a defense. That’s not better. I’m not sure if it’s worse, but it feels like it might be worse to me.
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Many ideas of the far right have been mainstreamed now:
Tucker Carlson promoted the great replacement theory, Trump embraced white supremacy, and now they’re mainstreaming the idea that people in the LGBQT+ community are groomers who need to be destroyed…
And the truth is that the far right has nothing to offer them except oppression. They get to “participate” in hurting others to “save the country” but what they’re really doing is destroying any and all progress made to make this a truly free country. The far right has captured the GOP, and that’s just the facts of the matter. They’ve taken the Reagan era dog whistling, and it’s a fucking fog horn… and far too many people are embracing that, even as it is causing pain to their fellow human beings.
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The reason people cling to the Republican Party is bigotry, pure and simple. Trump openly ran his campaign on naked bigotry and the party has continually pushed harder in that direction ever since his election. I’m sick to death of people making excuses for Republican voters and trying to paint them as mostly decent people. If you vote for someone primarily because they promise to hurt women, LGBTQ and people of color, you’re not a decent person, you’re a monster. If that’s not the primary reason but you vote for them anyway because it’s not a dealbreaker for you, guess what? You’re still a fucking monster. Standing against genocide and fascism isn’t snooty elitism, it’s the basic duty of every person with a conscience.
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MAGA is my fault
I was mean to it once 
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Superb point. In fact, I’d take that thought a step further and say that they aren’t even necessarily predisposed to fascism or hold any authoritarian beliefs, but that their character and identity is malleable enough to easily be bent in that direction when the appropriately charismatic vessel comes along. Growing up in the arch-evangelical Midwest, I am painfully aware of the feeling of being nowhere/nobody and how desperately everyone wants to identify with something… anything. Ford trucks vs Chevy trucks, Mizzou vs Kansas, etc.
This I think merits more exploration, though. As you point out, the right is an easily manipulated identity that inevitably is ever-narrowing as it builds an identity based on exclusion and “true” patriotism/Americanism/conservatism, etc.
If “the left” can be identified as anything, it is a coalition with often-uneasy alliances. Neither group is a monolith, but one is constantly trying to become one and force others into that paradigm while the other has to be ever-expansive and encompass more and more belief systems that are nebulously aligned around the ideals of democracy, justice and freedom for all. There is zero chance that this coalition will ever be 100% aligned about any subject, but are more willing than the opposition to lend each other a little acceptance and temperance. This can lead to the appearance of disorganization (and/or actual disorganization), fecklessness and a lack of progress, but that comes at the expense of ignoring huge swaths of progressive action. I kind of feel like this is largely where the “independent” vote comes from as it is so easy to see the whole world as polar, when in reality it’s mostly aligned those basic principals above, but a select and very loud minority is able to effectively present this as division and dysfunction. Which a lot of it is!
“There are two kinds of people in the world; those who think there are two kinds of people in the world and those who know better.”
-Kurt Vonnegut (or so I thought, but can’t verify it)
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Collecitvism in rural areas was/is done as a matter of survival.
People in the country tend to help each other even if they don’t like each other.
That’s because it works for them, and has done so for generations. They generally don’t notice that they are socialists in practice, and so, cheerfully pull the lever for the likes of Lord Dampnut.
Far more are motivated by their own contempt for those evil Others. Sixty years ago, the GOP made it clear that they would welcome the bigots in the Democratic party with open arms… and today we see the results of xenophobia run rampant.
They have written themselves off.
They have made it clear they have no intentions of ever voting for anyone with a ‘D’ by their name on the ballot.
Why should we?
There’s no point in it.
75% > 25%, so…
Since that portion of the voting population has showed itself to be composed of outright fascists, contempt is appropriate.
Fascists see negotiation as weakness, anyway.
With them, it’s their way or the highway… and if you aren’t one of them, your right to exist is questionable.
Talking nice to fascists?
Fuck that!
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I just don’t get this. I don’t see any ‘left’ politicians doing this.
I do see lots of ‘right’ politicians doing this.
So often, these conversations conflate what some left-wing bloggers might be spouting with what actual right-wing elected officials are enacting into law.
HRC held an historic campaign, with listening sessions all over the country trying to hear and respond to working-people’s concerns. But R voters still opted for a silver-spoon man-baby because he promised to “hurt the right people.”
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The distinction between family farms and corporate is a bit artificial. Many of the corporates are family-owned. Agribusiness doesn’t generally boil-down so simply.
For all the subsidies that are ‘spearheaded from the left,’ they only see the land-owners/business-owners.
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Both sides are not equal in their impact on the public. The only case where I’m asserting they are the same is the degree to which their agricultural narratives are fictionalized and detached from history. One acts like food takes no real work or knowledge, that farmers live in some hinterland where capitalism isn’t a factor. The other supports farmers like they support soldiers: with lots of conspicuous consumption and virtue signaling to replace any real need to engage with the topic.
This ain’t an attempt to remove the distinction between the two, just to marvel at how little we actually understand how we feed ourselves.
You do realize that there are plenty of democrats from rural districts, right? And that even representatives from urban districts understand how capitalism works with regards to our food supply? Here is, for example, the list of reps on the house agricultural committee:
This whole “democrats are from cities and republicans are from “real” America” is bullshit, has always been bullshit, and doesn’t remotely help to understand what’s happening in congress… Right now, ONE party is seeking to completely and utterly dismantle the welfare state, and hand corporations total control over the entire economy. ONE party is operating on mindless ideology and refuses to understand basic facts of how capitalism functions. ONE party is pitting their hardcore followers against the rest of us “fake” Americans. I suspect you know what party that is, and putting an equal share of blame on the Democrats for that isn’t helpful.
[ETA: a link] This doesn’t sound like Democrats don’t understand how capitalism shapes farming:
Instead, it sounds like they’re well aware that farming is highly embedded in the capitalist system, and that much of our food comes from larger farms, some of which are indeed owned by families rather than large corporations… 
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I believe that’s why @chgoliz used the qualifier “actual” in regard to family farms. Most of us here know that, for example, the Resnicks in California are not family farmers but a multi-billion-dollar agribusiness dynasty.
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Of course they do! Those elitists keep citing facts and bringing up “science” as if those things really exist!/s
(And I wish very much this wasn’t the reality, but it often is. 
)
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The ‘family farms’ framing is still marked to significant land owners versus… other significant land owners; thus why we’re primarily focusing on capital gains. This isn’t about “Dems don’t care about rural areas” or that rural areas are the “real America”; this is “everyone thinks the farm lobby represents rural areas.” It’s akin to saying that a problem in the restaurant industry over labor and stability should be best addressed by tax breaks for owners. Fundamentally, the approach demonstrated remains a Pro-Ownership, Anti-Labor position locked into a trickle-down approach.
So, yes, the GOP is a group of maniacs who are hell-bent on destroying our governmental structure to procure subsidies for their funders. Yes, the Dems are going to be better, and I have zero interest in making it equivocal.
Our national approach to agricultural policy is fundamentally broken and won’t be solved with our current platforms because they’re currently in a fundamental regulatory capture that focuses first, foremost, and only on farmers. We discuss who we should subsidize, not why our approach always requires subsidy. Our current politics is not equipped to have a rational discussion about it.
I’m really not an expert in that corner of things, but listening to Farm To Taber’s really been an eye-opener about the differences between how we popularly discuss the way farms work versus the actual business and history of farms.
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Just because a family owns a large corporation that runs lots of farm land, that’s not equivalent to an actual family farm…
You seemed to have framed it that way, though… you said for example:
the sheer disregard both sides and regions have about actually understanding where food comes from.
As if Democrats haven’t had a history of the labor movement in the agricultural sector.
Which I think many of us are aware of that being a problem, yes? It’s not like that issue isn’t front and center with regards to migrant workers. Hell, they just busted up what was essentially mass enslavement in the southern part of my state not too long ago. People are aware, including probably more democrats who don’t just focus on the actual family farms, but on the large agricultural firms that run most of the land for food in this country.
And we know why that is, right? Like many other problems, the GOP is the primary impediment to change and a more effective set of policies, not the Democrats.
Again, yeah, no shit. Because we have one side that tries to make everything a culture war, rather than look at the problem and figure out real solutions to those problems…
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Mine’s an LLC rather than a corporation. That’s a common choice.
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