Are rural voters the "real" voters? Wisconsin Republicans seem to think so - Polidicks

Quit making things up to stir shit. It's nowhere near as simple as "hurr literally nobody cares, just let them in your house". Why do you think shelters and soup kitchen and other programs exist? If you're so virtuous why don't you open your home to some schizophrenic who's been off their meds for 20 years?

Man good thing there's more empty houses here than there are homeless people. It's almost as if the rich pigs who sit on these unused properties should have their feet held to the fire, and not this apparently much more egregious strawman of hypocritical liberals you've made!

hey, i'm not sure some cletus bible basher racist redneck should count as a real voter too, but opinions are like assholes, everybody has one and they all stink

It's hilarious how posts like this always get rated negatively by some idiots. Apparently being for the democratic process is somehow a bad thing now. Why the fuck should people be expected to just let random people into their homes? That's a good way to get robbed or injured. There's far more adequate solutions like, y'know, social programs to help them get back on their feet.

its been this way since jackson won the vote of the rural farmer. The senate not being elected by popular vote was already an institutional nod towards rural voters as they tend to have more control over legislatures, because you didn't have the dominating city vote like you do today in places like illinois

Next New Deal should exempt any assistance to rural areas. Clearly they don't want it anyway.

The fact that this is still an argument fucking g baffels me. Your vote shouldn't count more, just because you have less people around you. Everyone's vote should have the same weight. Compare a 10 square mile area of rural land, and a 10 square mile area of urban land. The urban areas SUOULD have a bigger impact on the vote, because there are MORE PEOPLE THERE.

Sadly it is going to be an arguement for a long, long time. Rural people and Republicans will simply refuse to concede to this and lose all political power, as they also refuse to change their policies.

I am still waiting to see what Walker does with that bill. He has sat on it so far and with the recent news, it might be in his best interests to his party to sit down and shut up.

That's not true what so ever. Cities like New York have made large strides to improve the lives for the homeless over the years. It's not an issue that has a "Problem solved" at the end of it either. Homelessness will never go away, neither will poverty or people choosing to live like that. So, it's a great way for disconnected people like yourself to point to something as a reason why the liberals are actually the villains. it's very transparent.

the rural and the urban are such vastly different worlds with different cultures that neither should be able to vote on what occurs in the other.

Rich people and poor people live such vastly different lives that they shouldn't be able to vote what occurs to the other.

Well there are much more urbanites with internet connections than there are rural people with and without internet.

It's wrong to disenfranchise people but it's hard to feel as sympathetic for people with ass backwards views, sometimes.

yeah, they shouldn't i'm talking about my experiences living amongst them

Are you suggesting we divide society into demographics that each live in their own independent bubble?

i'm suggesting that ruralites don't care much for urbanites and urbanites don't care much for ruralites, and it isn't fair that one side can write laws that affect the other.

But you they will always affect each other, this is unavoidable.

fighting over state power basically the source of the issue

of course they'll always affect each other, but it is still entirely possible to minimize the amount of legislative power one holds over the other. its a struggle for state power because vastly different people are essentially forced to fight for control or get shafted by the other side. there's plenty of cities in this country that could do quite well as their own states and the people residing in them could govern how they think is best without having to fight against the countryfolk.

This. They use the excuse of "but fair representation!" when they already have representation in accordance with local and state elections.

But the problem with this idea is that you can divide the population into so many different demographics the whole thing becomes one giant mess. There is nothing special about rural/urban divide compared to rich/poor, men/women, straight/gay etc. These are overlapping demographics and everyone is both a minority and a majority in some sense. It is impossible to make it so everyone can only hold legislative power over their own group unless you shut everyone in their own individual bubbles. This idea is simply incompatible with democracy.

It's amazing the amount of TVA-built things in the south that are forgotten about nowadays. Any new infrastructure initiative needs to be damn sure to plaster its name and logo over everything it makes so people don't forget how fucking awful things used to be before they got their handout. The entire stretch from Asheville to Memphis would be akin to a third world backwater without any intact highways or electricity if the Feds didn't specifically target the region.

Oh yeah, the people who have to see and interact with fewer actual people are the ones who should decide things for everyone Fuck off

there is something unique to the rural/urban divide in that there's clear geographical delineation, and with that there is clear cultural delineation. many people can and do live their lives without ever truly leaving the city, as they do without ever truly leaving the boonies. i think it is much more incompatible with democracy for people to vote on laws that affect people that are physically and culturally hundreds of miles away, people who rarely have contact with each other, people who likely have vastly different ideas of how their region should be governed. recognizing the difference between ruralites and urbanites is little different from recognizing the differences between states. why should people who have a literal mountain range between them have a say in how the people on the other side of the mountains live their lives? what benefit does that bring anyone besides animosity? my statement of "yeah, they shouldn't" to your statement of "Rich people and poor people live such vastly different lives that they shouldn't be able to vote what occurs to the other." was more an off the cuff remark out of annoyance because frankly i think that comparison is absurd. you're taking that part and running with it when i believe my primary point is clear: urban life and country life are different and thus should have different representation.

but WHY is the comparison absurd? why is this divide more important than any other? 0.1 percenters most have lives unimaginably different from the common man, and with that, different priorities. why shouldn't they govern themselves by your logic? because there's no clear geographic divide?

part of it is that i think the 0.1 percenters have wholly far more power in our system than is good for anyone but themselves. another part is that having the rich only govern the rich and not-so-rich only govern the not-so-rich is an impossible task, mainly due to the legislative, social, and logistical implications such a system would have. would there be separate police departments with overlapping jurisdictions that only police those within a certain income bracket? what about a law regarding minimum wage, which necessarily has an effect on both the rich and the poor? i see this as a separate issue than that of the divide between urbanism and ruralism, one that is much more complex and requires a different approach. my logic is that geography is important, it is inexorably linked with both culture and the concept of state itself. legislation defines the rules for a people of a geographical area, and culture comes from those residing within a geographical area. when there are people who are different culturally and geographically, it makes more sense to me for them to govern differently. trying to force them to govern under the same set of laws when they live under such different geocultural context leads either to one side being an overwhelming force that focus almost exclusively on their own stake at the expense of the other or to both sides being unhappy and nobody being effectively governed.

the rich thing is just one example, so you can see that a group can live entirely different lives and have entirely different priorities, and it doesn't necessarily mean they are separate. you say the rich and poor are too interconnected, but do rural towns not export things? is all the corn harvested in iowa eaten by iowans? do large metropolitan areas not affect trade from other regions? are the cultural and geographical divides really that clear when it comes to urban centers and the satellite towns that surround them? how separate is a town from the city if said town only exists because of the city? and lastly, if you think things are not as interconnected when geography is the decider, why not slice up cities between the poor and rich areas, since it would fulfill both your cultural and geographical criteria?

Ideally people would be voting for what is best for everyone and not just themselves and, through the power of a properly educated and politically conscious voterbase, we wouldn't need to worry about the divide between rural and urban voters. But that's clearly not where we are and IDK how we'd get there or what to do about not being there.

Exactly. Politics is much more of a zero-sum game than most other places in life. Unlike what we normally do with other people, it's less of a trade and more of a battle. In some ways, Marx was right about society being built on subdued social conflict and the city-countryside divide informs it as much as class. This is why growth of government complicates society so much, it raises the stakes. For all the faults with markets, their more chaotic nature can reward niche and local initiative. They more easily diversify. Government does not, it can only regiment and centralize in order to create an orderly place for all parts of society to atrophy as one vehicle and then fight over it. People forget two things that support that same cynicism we apply to international politics. Like the purpose of police is not to actually protect you, the purpose of a republic was less to represent the popular will and more to make the peaceful transfer of power possible. Enfranchisement comes in as a consequence, which is why it was evolved instead of instituted wholesale like our form of government. People also forget moderation is built as much on a balance of power, whether that's between branches of government or parts of society, as it is a consensus. Where that fails is where left-right degenerates into culture war. For example, if one part of society has a differing stake in the left expanding some meaning of democracy to match the scope of today's interconnected society, whether it's small banks losing out under Dodd-Frank or flyover states given the abolition of the electoral college, there is a proportional heap of ideology using the language of struggle to distract from or rationalize the degree that for there to be equality for some, there must be inequality for others. This isn't actually new. Jackson's expansion of the franchise is associated with renewed attacks on those outside of it, and early 20th century progressivism has such a unique authoritarian streak that it probably shouldn't be considered liberal. It's just giving a modern ideological twist to old conflicts based on old divisions, which means they're brought to a head instead of abolished. It leads to the sentiment expressed here: Controversy erupted in 2010 when pollster Frank Graves suggested that the Liberal Party launch a "culture war" against the Conservative Party. "I told them that they should invoke a culture war. Cosmopolitanism versus parochialism, secularism versus moralism, Obama versus Palin, tolerance versus racism and homophobia, democracy versus autocracy. If the cranky old men in Alberta don't like it, too bad. Go south and vote for Palin."[16] This kulturkampf has leaked over into the policy debate, making everything from guns to abortion about identity instead of good policy. It got worse as it became about our future identity since dynamism there translates into a power vacuum thanks to the size of the state. Whenever we fail like this, how politics is dependent on culture will make the former dysfunctional and impossible. That's why legislative deadlock bleeds over into an accordingly more politicized judiciary, or why control of the executive branch is so important. The gap between city and countryside is going to explode in the coming decades given three things 1) regionally uneven economic growth adding another dimension to class inequality 2) conservatives and liberals moving to parts of the country like them while at the same time people are conforming more through those identities 3) uneven population growth that will cause greater antagonism between the house and senate or the two parties.