Grew up in Kentucky, lived in Alabama for most of my adult life. There's two types of rednecks out there. You have the anti establishment, pro worker, fuck the law rednecks......then you have the ultra racist, never left their own town, small minded rednecks. There's a whole lot less of the former and a whole lot more of the latter these days.

Mostly just decades of brainwashing of the culture war. I’m an urban leftist who moved from a big city to a very small one in the rural countryside and the sheer amount of leftist ideals that get spouted by conservative voters I hear regularly is staggering. They have no clue that what they want from life is all left of center.

uhhhh racism? in the united states redneck is === racist asshole. the racism is a part of their identity... not sure how it escaped your entire question.

I completely agree with you and disagree with the dismissal of some of the other comments. I grew up in South Carolina and worked in factories for years. I've met a lot of rednecks of all types. There's this weird tendency on the left to associate rural people with backwards mindsets which is just straight up classist IMO.

Most of them have felt politically abandoned by neoliberal policies sending their jobs overseas and politicians courting city-dwellers. Trump told them he wasn't going to abandon them, that he was going to bring back factory jobs, that elites in business and government have been giving them a raw deal. I can't blame them for taking a chance on Trump when the alternatives were career politicians giving them more of the same. People like to pretend that rural voters aren't voting in their best interest but they knew Kamala, Biden, or Clinton weren't going to do shit for them. South Carolina is filled with small "historic downtowns" that are clearly 50 years past their prime. They've seen what the status quo does.

The good news is more of them are seeing trump for what he is. I know this from actual rednecks telling me this. These people are anti-establishment, anti-government, and often pro-union. I really don't think it would take much to swing them left. The one sticking point is...

Racism is still very much a thing among rednecks. Most have lived a blue collar life and developed a thick skin. As a result, they see "woke" stuff as a bunch of soft people who never really worked demanding everybody cater to them rather than deal with life like they did. Nobody is irredeemable and many of them are quirky weirdos in their own way. I worked with this old trump voter redneck that used to DJ and introduced me to Baby Metal. Another kept a my little pony figurine zip tied to his toolbox. My brother had trouble making friends in high school until he met the rednecks. He later told me "if nobody will accept you, the rednecks will accept you." There is capacity to accept people not like them.

IMO, a politician running on a platform of economic left-wing populism would run the rural ballot. Literally rework Trump's "drain the swamp" narrative except actually mean it. And actually follow through. Invest in rural communities. Go after corruption which is huge in rural areas. Actually listen to their concerns and address them rather than dismissing them. Any worker can be an ally in the working class struggle.

Billions (trillions maybe?) of dollars spent on propaganda.

Racism, religion, mistrust in education, and lack of critical thinking skills have led almost the entirety of them to be the most devout conservatives in the country. Many hold almost anarchistic ideals, but are so misled by generations of propaganda they think the fascists are fighting for freedom.

It's very difficult to get through to someone who has been raised to believe everything you say is a lie.

Great point! That is a big part of what my local DSA chapter is trying to do. Something like a farmer/labor party

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redneck_Revolt

Some are.

( for them-of-us who don't know, "redneck", at root, only means outdoors-work, sunburned, & working-class.

The Republican-identity was programmed-in to them by the corporations which were committed to controlling them, & feeding-on their lives.

I'd not bet 1 single cent on John Deere being innocent of that, & now fighting-against their right to repair ANYthing )

See the yt channels which are people of rural US, some veterans, who're vocal-enough that .. their liklihood of surviving Trump's dictatorship .. isn't great.

FAR more courage than I've got ( aka they have faces, I don't, having never applied to get one, when I left school last-century ; )

But it's all identity, fundamentally.

& when people have been taught, in school, to be insecure, then they hold-onto whatever it is that props-up their identity-security.

John Taylor Gatto, NY State Teacher of the Year Award winner, torched his teaching-career in his acceptance-speech, by telling the truth about what "education" is.

part of that is enforcing insecurity in the students, so that their dependency-on-bestowed-approval gives the institution the leverage it needs, to manipulate them.

Children utterly-certain of their validity, & of being-loved/accepted, cannot be manipulated-through-insecurity the way "education" requires, for its positional-superiority/"authority".

Unfortunately, breaking inherent-validity from entire-populations has consequences, including dependency on identity-anchors, like Republican-party, or confederatism, or nazism, or communism, or whatever.

Ideologies, not specific-ideologies, but ideology-the-whole-category, is trying to highjack our world, & break correct-reasoning from it, for sake of its reacting method.

THAT is the underlying enemy of our world's life.

The specific ideologies are just "makeup" on the underlying-mechanism, the programmed-reacting mechanism, which displaces correct-reasoning from our world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Taylor_Gatto#Main_thesis

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