Quote Originally Posted by inumbra View Post
That's um great... You wanted to show people you won't go out without a fight by electing someone who only cares about himself and other super wealthy people. The "dirt people" are busy working right now and it is killing them. And our illustrious idiot in chief is just fine with that. He doesn't care about you. You are worthless to him. If you are a "dirt fucker" you are especially worthless to him. It's your job to toil away for people like him and die doing it while getting paid nothing. That's how it is for the "dirt fuckers" and it doesn't matter which state in the country. It's sick and wrong. I can't stand these people in power. Trump ran on some fake populist campaign, newsflash, he was lying. At least half of what comes out of his mouth is a lie because he's a pathological liar.

And yes I think the neoliberals have failed us too.

ETA: That said there is a disparity with COVID (and everything) between rural and urban areas. These differences affect how people vote (before COVID and after). When there is a higher population density in an area people start looking for policies that will take care of as many of those people as possible (it's a different kind of social management). So I agree the urban/rural divide is intense and that increasingly we are becoming two Americas. Trump's admin doesn't speak to "my people" (it's like we don't exist) and I think a lot of people in rural areas don't think Democrats speak to them (see H. Clinton's awful put down about the "basket of deplorables" which is basically, no matter how she intended it, a broad class put down to the working class in less urban or population dense areas, though I took it as a put down to the entire working class personally because it's coming from someone sitting on her high horse talking down to people a lot poorer than her while she sucks up to the banks).

My problem is that both sides are classist in their own way, though Democrats are more sensitive to class issues in more population dense areas because they need the vote from those people. The only politicians I see who seem to care about the working class are progressives, however they are far left and their sensitivity to people in rural areas is probably lacking (so they are in danger of repeating the same problem).
All good points, @inumbra.

I've been thinking for a long time about how our government could be made to better represent everyone's interests, and not just those interests of some special groups.

I don't think the answer to the problem of achieving full representation rests in trying to bring two politically disparate groups together. Research has shown that Conservatives and Liberals place different emphasis on different moral values. Personally, I think that this is a genetic difference, not a learned one, since it seems to originate in a person's fear response level. People who instinctively fear out-groups are going to self-sort into areas where the population density is low, and people who don't care where you came from are not going to have bad reactions to high density levels of strangers in cities and hence can make use of the greater opportunities available there. This is not to say that one response is better than the other. Disease spreads faster in cities, and strangers sometimes really are dangerous. But these differences are not something that I think are going to change anytime soon.

A better way of correcting the poor job that both parties are doing of representing the interests of average people would be to reduce the level of wealth and income inequality, since money = political power. Both parties seek money from groups that have it, since elections are presently expensive, and both parties try to appeal (by deed or by lies, whatever) to the largest number of voters, regardless of whom they actually represent.

If you make it impossible or unnecessary for a political party to gain wealth predominantly from any small group (and right now, Republicans serve the mineral extractive industries like mining and oil, while the Democrats serve the financially extractive industries like finance and high tech), then they would both be forced to appeal to the vast majority of US citizens whose needs are being completely ignored.

You could either change the laws to prevent parties from getting money from a few big donors, or you could change the law to reduce the wealth of the big donors. Either one would work.

My personal preference would be to do both, because I like living in more equal societies, and because I think that the campaign contribution law could operate as a backup for the more equal society.