Apparently, If You Don’t Live In Urban And Suburban Areas You Aren’t Part Of Real America

According to Excitable Paul Krugman, you’re just part of Senate America

Real America Versus Senate America

Everyone is delivering post-mortems on Tuesday’s elections, so for what it’s worth, here’s mine: Despite some bitter disappointments and lost ground in the Senate, Democrats won a huge victory. They broke the Republican monopoly on federal power, and that’s a very big deal for an administration that has engaged in blatant corruption and abuse of power, in the belief that an impenetrable red wall would always protect it from accountability. They also made major gains at the state level, which will have a big impact on future elections.

But given this overall success, how do we explain those Senate losses? Many people have pointed out that this year’s Senate map was unusually bad for Democrats, consisting disproportionately of states Donald Trump won in 2016. But there was actually a deeper problem, one that will pose long-term problems, not just for Democrats, but for the legitimacy of our whole political system. For economic and demographic trends have interacted with political change to make the Senate deeply unrepresentative of American reality. (snip)

Obviously not everyone lives — or wants to live — in these growth centers of the new economy. But we are increasingly a nation of urbanites and suburbanites. Almost 60 percent of us live in metropolitan areas with more than a million people, more than 70 percent in areas with more than 500,000 residents. Conservative politicians may extol the virtues of a “real America” of rural areas and small towns, but the real real America in which we live, while it contains small towns, is mostly metropolitan.

You can see where this is going, right? The same old whines about those people in Flyover states daring to have representation equal to big states like New York. Say, why do Vermont, Delaware Rhode Island, and New Hampshire (#’s 50, 45, 44, and 41 on list of most populous states, which includes D.C.) have the same representation as Texas, North Carolina, and Georgia?

The hot take gets more hot

I find it helpful to contrast the real America, the place we actually live, with what I think of as “Senate America,” the hypothetical nation implied by a simple average across states, which is what the Senate in effect represents.

As I said, real America is mainly metropolitan; Senate America is still largely rural.

Real America is racially and culturally diverse; Senate America is still very white.

Real America includes large numbers of highly educated adults; Senate America, which underweights the dynamic metropolitan areas that attract highly educated workers, has a higher proportion of non-college people, and especially non-college whites.

None of this is meant to denigrate rural, non-college, white voters. We’re all Americans, and we all deserve an equal voice in shaping our national destiny. But as it is, some of us are more equal than others. And that poses a big problem in an era of deep partisan division.

Right, right, he doesn’t mean to denigrate those damned rubes, guys. Who you can bet understand the Constitution and the entire point of giving each state two Senators. I know you know, so, I won’t hold forth on this.

We may, then, be looking at a growing crisis of legitimacy for the U.S. political system — even if we get through the constitutional crisis that seems to be looming over the next few months.

It’s only in Liberal World that a “crisis of legitimacy” could occur, because they whine when they lose that things just are fair. Stomps foot.

You know, some of these hot takes are so scorching that you have to wonder if they are done on purpose just to get clicks. Because this is weapons grade stupidity.

Save $10 on purchases of $49.99 & up on our Fruit Bouquets at 1800flowers.com. Promo Code: FRUIT49
If you liked my post, feel free to subscribe to my rss feeds.

Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed

10 Responses to “Apparently, If You Don’t Live In Urban And Suburban Areas You Aren’t Part Of Real America”

  1. Kye says:

    Seems to me when the education industry has spent eight decades “teaching” kids K-post grad that America is a democracy rather than a Republic and the reasoning behind that fact it stands to reason the illiterate morons will think this way. Democracy is tyranny whereas a republic is ruled by laws.

  2. Jethro says:

    Krugman:

    None of this is meant to denigrate rural, non-college, white voters. We’re all Americans, and we all deserve an equal voice in shaping our national destiny.

    For rural, non-college, white voters… “denigrate” means “put down”. (Hat tip to Bob Newhart).

    Conservatives advocate that empty land, not American citizens, should have Senators.

    Anyway, what Dr. Krugman is pointing out is just one way a minority rules the majority. Imagine when nearly everyone lives in the growing cities and Wyoming has 17 residents. Should “land” have Senators? If the minority (rural whites commanded by wealthy white elites) continue to abuse their majority brothers and sisters, the majority will rebel. If you want peace, work for justice.

    • formwiz says:

      Idiot Boy denigrates rural, non-college, white people every day. What a racist.

      And, no, the Constitution says that. But Jeffery never read the Constitution, so he wouldn’t know.

      And he’s pushing the Demos’ new gripe. States are not created equal and the ones with a lot of Democrat voters (alive, dead, imaginary, cloned) should have more Senators.

      If you ever wonder what the latest Lefty talking points are, listen to Jeffery.

    • Dana says:

      Mr Bodine wrote:

      Conservatives advocate that empty land, not American citizens, should have Senators.

      I s’pose that by “Conservatives” our Missouri munchkin refers to Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Thomas Paine, and John Adams, the primary — though not sole — authors of the Constitution.

      More than just the Senate, those 1787 conservatives also wrote that while House of Representatives districts ought to be assigned by population, they were to be geographically based; it’s almost as though they were trying to prevent a massive Democratic surge in foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia from assigning the Representative from the backwaters of the Sixth District in Kentucky.

      The real problem isn’t the growing cultural divide between urban and rural people, but that the federal government has usurped so much power over our daily lives. No one in the sensible states would care if Massachusetts allowed homosexuals to marry, as long as the federal government weren’t forcing Alabama and Missouri and Wyoming to accept such; normal people wouldn’t really care if some mentally ill people couldn’t tell what sex they were, if the federal government weren’t trying to force normal people to accept the delusions of the mentally ill as somehow being real. No one with any rationality would care that possibly the most beautiful city in the country had become a fetid and festering sewer of homelessness and human feces in the streets if the left weren’t trying to force the same policies which turned San Francisco into a shithole on the rest of the country.

    • Dana says:

      The esteemed Dr Krugman wrote:

      None of this is meant to denigrate rural, non-college, white voters. We’re all Americans, and we all deserve an equal voice in shaping our national destiny.

      Does anyone here believe that Dr Krugman actually believes that?

  3. Nighthawk says:

    From a rural, non-college, white voter to those that live in ‘real America’ and think we need common words defined for us…

    We already have a House of Representatives.

    Our current system has worked well for over 200 years. It has just been in the last two years that ‘real America’ wants it changed because things haven’t gone totally their way.

    We may be held as stupid rubes to the self described ‘real America’, woke, city dwellers and not deserving of equal representation, but we aren’t the ones throwing temper tantrums like a two year old when denied a shiny bauble rebelling.

  4. Jethro says:

    Porter: Apparently, If You Don’t Live In Urban And Suburban Areas You Aren’t Part Of Real America

    Remember way back in 2008 when Sarah Palin referred to rural America as “real America”? Any problems with that?

    Missouri’s odious Senator-elect Josh Hawley talked of preserving “our way of life” that the libs were trying to take away.

    Most Americans are now urban-suburban, with the shift to continue, and the GOP’s only path to power is to suppress that vote and empower rural whites by frightening them with tales of Mexican rapists and Muslim terrorists. Meanwhile, rural America continues to deteriorate – meth, oxy, closing of hospitals, loss of jobs, threatened loss of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid and shifting of the tax burdens to the working classes. How have GOP policies helped rural whites other than to fertilizing their sense of victimhood by Blacks, libs and immigrants?

    How do we actually help rural whites? The GOP has had the House and Senate for 8 yrs, the White House for 2. What is their plan for rural and small town America? Harass immigrants, reward the rich and punish farmers with taxes (tariffs)? How has that helped?

    The GOP is playing rural America. Their plan is to cut Social Security and Medicare to slow the growth of the debt. See if that helps.

    • formwiz says:

      Most Americans are moving away from the Demo-controlled states as fast as they can.

      And nobody needs to frighten people with tales of Mexican rapists and Muslim terrorists. They know about Kate Steinle and Mollie Tibbetts. They know about the San Bernadino shooting.

      What is their plan for rural and small town America?

      Good jobs, better pay, higher employment rates. Damn, how unDemocratic.

    • Mangoldielocks says:

      There comes a time when the talking is over. That point is reaching critical mass. I am tired of listening to people like Jethro twist the truth to make the right look like criminals while making a case for sainthood for his side.

      Talking is almost done. Negotiations are over. America is at a crossroads and the fires of rebellion are burning on both sides.

      The time for compromise has long since abandoned reason. The left wants it, the right wants it and what is really to stop it from happening?

  5. Sabre22 says:

    Here is the Perfect Comeback Instead of apportioning senate and house seats by population and for the senate constitution. We will apportion Senators by the number of cities and towns in a state. Each city regardless of population gets 2 senators. Congressional Representatives will be alotted by the land area of the particular state. Starting with the largest state getting the most and so on. That would make the libtards heads roll. then we will see how the libtards like the Electoral College.

Pirate's Cove