Leopards Ate My Face

This is their main issue. They always complained about paying property taxes in New York or some other northern state, but then also complain about the cost of housing, driving distances, car prices, and insurance. You also have to deal with politicians taking away your rights and passing shitty laws constantly that hurt you. So glad i don't work retail anymore, hated hearing them complain about that crap.

Did they vote for Trump?

Yeah, know there's variation even with where I live. Fair enough though, just that it'd be nice to have better job access than I do now. As well as generally better social safety nets. Had a friend be let go from a position in the area and while it took a while, his unemployment was like 80-90% of his income. Here, 40% is the best you get. The states I live in or nearby rely on a revolution of unemployment and employment for many people.

They're not gonna kill themselves, just sayin

It's the one-two punch of poor education and the propaganda of our media environment.

Their racism is ancillary and it’s not that simple. MAGA exploits several rotten elements in rural American society; racism is just one of them

I think the simplest explanation is that they have been conditioned to hate and fear first and do not consider any person innately equal until that person has proven themselves to be worthy of value. To enter the American south, you walk into a minefield of social faux pas and a mire of shibboleths. You fucked up just by driving in with “Yankee” license plates. Hell, you can fuck up by having the wrong county on your plates (which is a thing in the south). For a group of people who hate anything “woke” or involving critical theory, they are a textbook example of intersectionality; their identity is complex and why they don’t like you is even more complicated.

They have been conditioned to distrust anything they don’t immediately understand, dwell peacefully in contradiction, be selectively empathic, and ignore their own self-interests whenever it does not exclusively benefit them. This is the “temporarily embarrassed millionaire” and “my true reward awaits in heaven” crowd. You can’t reason with them because they answer to a higher power and it’s all part of god’s plan. And if you make the mistake of quoting scripture at them, they write you off as a know-it-all who has read the Bible but hasn’t read it with your heart.

They are generationally impoverished, both financially and intellectually. The south suffers from massive brain drain and financially successful people are just those that God has blessed. There’s no charity for those outside of their immediate social circle. There’s no such thing as southern hospitality, just public manners. Bless your heart, they’re talking shit before you walk out the door.

Southern society craves authoritarianism and aristocracy because blind respect for authority and power are deeply rooted in their culture and religion (and that’s exactly what the antebellum south was; that’s their “heritage”). Trump promises to make it all great and lift them back into their rightful place because they all think they will be the plantation master.