Wrong Again, Commie

As good Marxists, let’s state up front that the primary function of rural areas within the larger national economy is as a supply source of raw materials: food, oil, natural gas, coal, timber, and other resources. To keep these goods flowing out of rural areas —and profit flowing into capitalists’ pockets—freethinking dissent within the extractive regions must be squashed at all costs. Compare this with urban areas, where a greater productive capacity and larger middle classes can absorb and dilute a great deal of dissent. In rural areas, those impulses have to be stamped out before they can really take off; nothing less than the unchallenged flow of profit and resources is at stake. Conservatives understand this, and it’s why one of their foremost political strategies in rural areas is that of social control.

If you live in a rural community, extractive or not, you are likely confronted every day with an onslaught of images, dogmas, and various cultural reinforcements regarding your role within the national social structure.
(Skipping the obvious joke about what constitutes "a good Marxist.")

I am not confronted, on a daily basis or even regularly, with "images" or "dogmas" or "various cultural reinforcements." Most days I don't see anyone who isn't blood kin, except my wife. I don't watch television, I almost never see a cop, and I can't remember the last time somebody tried to push a dogma off on me. They wouldn't enjoy it much if they did.

He goes on to criticize school systems in a way that makes some sense, but I don't see that as a rural problem. Public schools are awful in many ways, but one of them is that the basically fail at their mission of training free Americans to be free Americans. As Aristotle says, education should help shape the citizen for the polis. Somehow we've evolved a public school system that trains people to shut up, do what they're told, be subject to constant authority and discipline, be disarmed and controlled... and then somehow, when they graduate, they're supposed to know how to be an American.

What happens differently in rural America isn't that the schools do this more than they do in the cities, though. It's that there aren't overlapping systems of control everywhere you go. There aren't closed circuit cameras everywhere, or police, or often even other people. You can go for a hike and not see another human being, and that's great. You can do whatever you want when you're alone; you're really free.

When you get to be free, you like it. The reason progressive social programs aren't attractive to us is that they're all systems of control. The author passionately argues against control as exercised by school boards and principals, and if you listen to their podcast they've got several "All Cops are B*stards" shows, but he wants to impose Marxist degrees of control on the whole nation.

Yeah, you can keep all that.

3 comments:

Christopher B said...

Grim, I think we are confronted with "an onslaught of images, dogmas, and various cultural reinforcements" unless you actively choose to avoid accessing information media in any of it's various forms because they quite openly discuss what they think the role of 'flyover country' is "within the national social structure."

That's how we got Trump.

Gringo said...

The Atlantic recently had a map of political prejudice. Rural area were more likely to tolerate opposing political views than urban areas.
IIRC, Suffolk County MA, a.k.a. Boston, had the highest degree of political prejudice. .

Ymarsakar said...

Dogma is best pushed on people before they reach an age in which their mind is capitalized by the intelligence of spirit.

For example, in the earliest days of school children are told the dogmas of science as truth not as models.

For example, the Southern generations continue to believe CW1 was fought for state rights. This is not due to people reading the primary documents but in believing their ancestors. However their ancestors had gotten a dogma pushed on them. This was then orally passed along with the Blood and Milk.

Tradition is a most powerful and reliable way to push dogmas on people successfully. When people grow up, they become ornery or stubborn.