Thread by @SethCotlar

Highly recommend this story about Democrats in rural America. It's about DuBois, Pa. I grew up about 60 miles south of there in a similarly small town. I know many folks who still live there, and this account rang very true to me. politico.com/news/magazine/…

While polarization is a key part of this story, it's important that we recognize the *asymmetrical* nature of that polarization. I talk about that a bit in this thread about the FB pages of the Dems and the GOP in the County I grew up in.

https://twitter.com/SethCotlar/status/1190682787361091584?s=20&t=vxh3RGyOG4u2P8FNMlZC7g

Irrationally hating Democrats (even when they're their neighbors or friends) has become an increasingly central feature of the identities of many small town white Americans. It's perhaps Trump's greatest gift to the GOP and they have learned the lesson well.

What most angers me about this is that the plutocrats who benefit the most from GOP policies, who love to wax nostalgic about small town American values, are cynically encouraging small town Americans to view their Biden-voting neighbors as satanic villains who must be destroyed.

All small towns (like the one I grew up in) were long riven by various social divisions and tensions. They were never the bucolic Mayberry of popular fantasy. What's new is that the GOP has used social media to exacerbate existing divisions so as to serve their partisan ends.

Here's a thread about how right wing disinformation on FB carved an unbridgeable rift amongst the people in my HS graduating class (who'd recently reconnected thanks to FB) along partisan lines that were ultimately more about epistemology than policy.

https://twitter.com/SethCotlar/status/1075046764418351106?s=20&t=vxh3RGyOG4u2P8FNMlZC7g

Are political leaders encouraging you to hate your neighbors who live in houses that look like yours, the teachers at your school, the young woman serving you at Starbucks? If so, maybe that party doesn't really have the best interests of your community in mind.

The deep asymmetry here is that the Republican agenda is primarily focused on thwarting the efforts of democratic majorities to craft domestic policies that would benefit ordinary Americans. The GOP wins when the federal government fails. Anti-government cynicism is their fuel.

To win, the GOP doesn't really need to get their voters to believe in anything substantive or forward-looking, they just need to stoke resentment, frustration, confusion, cynical whataboutism, etc. Ubiquitous social media plus low media literacy is the perfect recipe for that.

It's important to note that sowing apocalyptic hatreds of one's neighbors has long been a tactic employed by the far right. This is a story about Amarillo John Birchers in 1960 that was recounted in the 1964 book, Danger on the Right.