this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2025
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It's become somewhat of a meme now when there is a story on crime, or other bad things happening in a city, people pipe up and say "That's how it is in blue cities!" "This could only happen in a Democrat city!" However, I noticed they never say "... and that's why only want to live in X" or "... that would never happen in Y".

If living in "blue cities" are such a nightmare, where are all these Utopian "red cities" that people are apparently in favor of?

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[–] shalafi@lemmy.world 46 points 4 days ago (3 children)

This explains the rural/city divide and why conservatives view blue cities as hell holes:

How Half Of America Lost Its F**king Mind

Having lived both sides, the whole thing not only resonates with me, it rings my fucking bell. If there was one article I could force all Americans to read, this is it.

[–] InternetCitizen2@lemmy.world 16 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Unpopular things for Republicans to hear:

  • The free market crushed their industries and pressured them over seas
  • Mexico is pretty much what republicans and libertarians wish they were. Particularly in the north.
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[–] Modern_medicine_isnt@lemmy.world 13 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Thats a pretty good read. I often think about a lot of that. But I never come up with a way to help the rural population much. Thier way of life is dying, has been for a few hundred years. But it is still essential. They don't like handouts or even assistance. So how do you help them?

[–] shalafi@lemmy.world 14 points 4 days ago (5 children)

I'd start by taking to top off Fox News and see them dance the hemp fandango. I cannot overstate how they've poisoned America. Had some education in journalism so I'm better tooled than most to spot media manipulation. Sure they come out with in-your-face lies now and again, but they're mostly subtle, which is far more evil. Next, I'd go after our social media overlords. These snakes have to be decapitated, literally.

Lately I've thought that the best way to heal America's rural/urban divide is to point out that the rich are fucking us. It's not the farmer or the blue-haired girl, not the LGBT folks or gun nuts, certainly not the immigrants. If I could hammer a single message into the American zeitgeist it would be this, "The wealthy are hurting all of us. Fight them every step of the way."

I know Bane's the bad guy and straight psychotic, but his speech in The Dark Knight Rises makes we want to fucking cheer.

We take Gotham from the corrupt! The rich! The oppressors of generations who have kept you down with myths of opportunity, and we give it back to you... the people. Gotham is yours. None shall interfere. Do as you please. Start by storming Blackgate, and freeing the oppressed! Step forward those who would serve. For and army will be raised. The powerful will be ripped from their decadent nests, and cast out into the cold world that we know and endure. Courts will be convened. Spoils will be enjoyed. Blood will be shed. The police will survive, as they learn to serve true justice. This great city... it will endure. Gotham will survive!

There is no hope until the rich live in fear of the masses.

[–] emeralddawn45@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 points 4 days ago (2 children)

To people from small towns, everyone in a city is 'wealthy', they must be to afford the insane cost of living right? But thats part of the problem. They don't realize the people spending $2500 a month on rent are spending 80% of their paycheck, or that they can't build any savings or eger hope to own a house or even a car because of it. They make no distinction between the actual rich people who live in cities and everyone else, and the state of America right now IS them fighting back against the 'rich'. Until these people understand the orders of magnitude the people actually fucking us are over the rest of us i don't know what can be done. To them anyone with a college degree is a wealthy elite.

[–] SLVRDRGN@lemmy.world 6 points 3 days ago (1 children)

This in mind, why isn't Trump a wealthy elite to them? How did he become their savior??

[–] shalafi@lemmy.world 2 points 3 days ago

Trump speaks plainly, at a 4th-grade level. Obama spoke at 9th-grade level. Trump makes them feel smart, Obama made them feel stupid. Especially coming from a buh-lack man! The audacity of that <radio edit>!

[–] shalafi@lemmy.world 5 points 3 days ago (1 children)

This post hits in a way I hadn't quite figured out to myself. No wonder they still buy into the welfare queen thing. I've got to think on this a bit, woke me to a thing I hadn't considered.

[–] faythofdragons@slrpnk.net 4 points 3 days ago (1 children)

To expand on what @emeralddawn45@lemmy.dbzer0.com is saying, I live rural because I don't make enough to live in the city. My town is rapidly gentrifying and I might not afford to live next to cows any more pretty soon. City folk spend more on rent than I make in a month.

A lot of our 'welfare queen' perspective is colored by the fact that tax-funded services are usually concentrated in the city. I keep petitioning my county transit authority for better rural bus service, but the best they can do is make the city bus lines run every 15 minutes instead of every half an hour. Meanwhile, I'm paying uber $50 just to get to a doctor's appointment and wait to catch a ride home when a friend gets off work. Food costs more for worse quality in rural areas, so food stamps don't go as far as they would in the city. Welfare in the city feels like you could live like a queen off it. It's not entirely true, because the amount you get is scaled to income, but per dollar, you do get more for your welfare in cities.

There's also that city dwellers can get really nasty about rural folk. I've never voted for a republican in my life, but living out here makes people assume the worst of me. I get told that living rural means I'm a bootlicking hick that's too stupid to know what's good for me, so it's hard to sell that they deserve sympathy and we don't.

[–] AA5B@lemmy.world 3 points 3 days ago (7 children)

I’m sure these services are a big part of it - you can’t see all the poverty assistance spread out across a wide rural region but you can see there’s no bus service.

Certainly some services only work with higher population densities, but that’s why some of us prefer cities. Rural areas have advantages too, but either way is a compromise. We each made a choice where to live.

But turn this back to what would you do? As a liberal elite urban snob, i freely agree that my ideas are not likely to work well: maybe you don’t want internet service, education, connectivity to the modern world, infrastructure, fine. But im trying and i dont know what else to try. Step up and propose something. I don’t have any say for your county but if you say you need rural bus service, I’m all for that. And I’ll go further and say we should fund intercity rail, and rural bus service to all the towns it passes, to open more of the world to both of us. Stand up, tell us what you need, and you just might get it and more …. It’s not charity it’s a pooled resource making life better for us all.

This article pisses me off a bit, because it does seem likely, but there is no one that people on the left like, who is so corrupt, spiteful, narcissistic, destructive as Trump. We’d never vote to tear everything down, including the democratic traditions that are the foundation of our society. Plus if your strength and independence is so core to your self-image, where is it? Voting for a tantrum to knock everything off the table is no one’s idea of strength. Instead of denigrating what other people try to do for you, stand up and tell us what you need. Make a proposal we can all get behind. A big difference this article misses is that we want the best for you and will act to improve your life if you meet us half away, we have the entire resources of the country pooled to help all of us, where rural MAGA voted for lashing out, for hurting people

[–] shalafi@lemmy.world 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

As a middle-aged, white, gun nut in the South, I'm definitely not feeling that urban liberals want the best for me. I'm liberal to the left of Obama, many of us are! But social media tells me I'm a racist cunt who should die in a fire.

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[–] InternetCitizen2@lemmy.world 9 points 3 days ago

I know Bane's the bad guy and straight psychotic, but his speech in The Dark Knight Rises makes we want to fucking cheer.

Wft... Bane is a working class hero, and this gives you power over me

I'd also like to point out that the joker burned a pyramid of money. A deflationary move that helps ordinary Americans. What did he get for his efforts? A billionaire takes it upon himself to beat him up.

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[–] Phegan@lemmy.world 27 points 3 days ago

They are blue because studies have shown that proximity to others makes you more compassionate.

[–] technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 3 days ago

Cities are not conducive for fascism, so fash in the USA mostly live outside of cities. They're hoarding their stolen land and screaming into a rural echo chamber. That's the only way they can maintain their delusions.

[–] originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com 173 points 5 days ago (10 children)

the funny thing is... getting people to live closer together encourages empathy.

living in the middle of nowhere reduces empathy... this is why people living in bumfuck are empathy-lacking tools calling themselves 'conservatives'

[–] yarr@feddit.nl 44 points 5 days ago (6 children)

It seems like a lot of the time they are like "boy, crime is higher".... but if you live in a city that's just a fact of life. It's pretty obvious that there will be less crime out in the sticks. I wouldn't really attribute this to any "blue" policies.

[–] tburkhol@lemmy.world 53 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (5 children)

Part of "less crime in the sticks" is a population effect. The rate of violent crime in New York City is 494/100,000 people. The rate of violent crime in the whole state of Alabama, from its stickiest sticks to the 225,000-resident Huntsville metropolis, is 404/100,000, which isn't that different, in my book.

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[–] fodor@lemmy.zip 12 points 4 days ago

We also see that rural crime is undercounted, underreported. Many studies show that (sometimes) rural areas have more crime. Of course it varies by time and location and depends how you define everything.

[–] Demonmariner@lemmy.world 15 points 5 days ago

I wouldn't say there is less crime out in the sticks. But there's less detected crime out in the sticks.

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[–] friend_of_satan@lemmy.world 24 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I was biking a dirt road near my rural neighborhood and saw a sign at somebody's driveway that said "if you can read this you're within range" and wondered how country folk got the stereotype of being friendly and kind. I really miss living in the city.

[–] Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 12 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

propaganda from the movies and shows. probably they need economic businesses to thier area, so they make up an image so people would go there, but NOT LIVE THERE. Yellowstone being one of those shows, and many other shows make reference of "southern hospitality"

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[–] nickwitha_k@lemmy.sdf.org 61 points 4 days ago

where are all these Utopian "red cities" that people are apparently in favor of?

They do not and can not exist. Conservatism is an antisocial and anti-intellectual, authoritarian ideology. This pretty much rules it out of success in most conventional metrics.

[–] Chainweasel@lemmy.world 90 points 5 days ago (7 children)

Staying afloat using tax dollars from blue states

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[–] captainlezbian@lemmy.world 20 points 4 days ago (4 children)

Well there's Dayton Ohio which is a successful red city if you look at how they vote and literally nothing else. Jesus fuck their crime rate says magnificent things about the democrats

[–] Yaky@slrpnk.net 9 points 4 days ago (3 children)

With the new gerrymandering 2.0 Ohio is proposing, soon all of their cities will be "red" (on paper)

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[–] Flax_vert@feddit.uk 6 points 4 days ago (1 children)
[–] Horsey@lemmy.world 5 points 4 days ago (1 children)
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[–] StrawberryPigtails@lemmy.sdf.org 38 points 5 days ago (2 children)

From what I've noticed, cities tend to be more liberal than rural areas. I can't think of a major city off the top of my head that is a republican stronghold. I've got to go to work but I found these two links which may help.

https://townsoftheusa.com/most-conservative-cities-in-usa/

https://www.insidermonkey.com/blog/15-most-conservative-major-cities-in-the-united-states-883419/

[–] Godort@lemmy.ca 18 points 5 days ago (4 children)

Miami, maybe. But I think they're still pretty left in comparison to the Rest of Florida

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[–] Jackcooper@lemmy.world 25 points 5 days ago (4 children)

I think San Antonio is about as red as it gets for a city its size

Salt Lake City obviously but that's a different story

[–] Brunbrun6766@lemmy.world 19 points 5 days ago

And to be clear, San Antonio may be more red leaning, but is not red still.

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[–] Yaky@slrpnk.net 13 points 5 days ago

A small town, or a suburb of a city that is described as "a great place to raise a family". From what I have seen, that usually means one of two things:

  1. The town/suburb is closer to the city, but is wealthy, real estate is expensive, usually very car-centric, which excludes anyone poor (or even middle class, sometimes).

  2. The town/village is far away from the nearest city, not necessarily wealthy, but usually ran by a group of people that know each other (good old boys club), probably heavy on religion or other "traditional" values.

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