Although modern politics has changed things, rednecks have historically been anti authority and pro labor. Building a rural/urban alliance like Bill Clinton did would genuinely create an entirely new era of politics that would be friendly to liberal leftist ideologies.
Because they decided their bigotry was more important than their nation’s wellbeing and elevated a pedo bigot to the highest office in the land and now our rights are being infringed upon and our democracy itself is in jeopardy.
You want us to hold hands and sing Kumbaya with them?
They are our enemy. They are the Constitution’s enemy. They are democracy’s enemy.
Those people? Are just like AnCaps. They’re not what they claim to be, that name doesn’t belong to them.
Capitalism cannot be Anarchist, that’s just Murray Rothbard trying to smuggle his Libertarian bullshit further. Oh, by the way, he stole the name “Libertarian” from Anarchists too.
Similarly, actual Rednecks are Union Men that were willing to die for liveable wages. The moment these bootlickers learn the history, they abandon being a Redneck as “woke”.
Hicks and rednecks aren’t the same thing, although there is enough overlap. And no, the hick has usually been on the wrong side of history. In my experience (born and raised in the rural South) they’re stupid, uneducated, cruel, greedy, have very little experience, and are more authoritarian than not.
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.
Not a redneck but a collegue of mine said to me dead serious that a planned economy is not Communist, because big corporations use it.
What are you gonna do with people that seemingly barely manage to find their mouth to put food in it?!
But they only want it for their little group
If you have different colour skin, like the same sex, have a different religion (or none at all), then you’re evil and don’t deserve a damned thing
They’re stupid and hateful and I’m not going to bother to dial back my contempt for them
Never forget they’d’ve rather shut down the public pool than have their kids share it with black kids; the unions were all for class solidarity, so long as the black working class weren’t allowed membership.
Look up “the southern strategy” and you will see how we got here
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.
And both types vote straight R every time
During 2020 I saw political marketing turn all the cool rednecks around me to American cannon fodder grunts.
I agree. Between 2015 and 2020, I stopped socializing with A LOT of people. It’s only gotten more unhinged since.
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 really think it isn’t fair to generalize all rednecks as racist. I grew up in Kentucky and that definitely isn’t how it is.
There’s 3 types of rednecks:
- Not racist
- Ignorant but welcoming (they may say something questionable, but only because they don’t know better and will apologize)
- Racist.
I think most I’ve met have been #1 or #2. If you ostracize a large portion of the population, of course they aren’t going to be on your side
if you vote for racists, youre a racist. theres not a lot of ambiguity there.
that’s a very black and white view of things but real life isn’t so pretty.
some people are intentionally misled or just not informed enough.
you alienate people by assuming they’re racist when they’re often not. I mean, it’s a choice. but it’s not gonna win you an election and I don’t think it’ll move the US forward.
yes, just like religion being an inherent evil taught to impressionable children, so are many racist people they are led down that path blindly and ignorantly follow it til death. the brainwashed masses
we actually fought an entire war over the concept… and the racists still try to pretend it wasnt racism, it was states rights to be racists
its kinda like that old trope about nazis… you let a nazi sit at your table, there is now a table full of nazis. you can blow up all you want about ambiguity, but theres no ambiguity when you vote for racist or pedophile. none. zero.
Yeah, I grew up in Midwestern redneck culture and it’s not the union boys singing solidarity forever and shooting at Pinkertons in the mountains anymore.
They all somehow equate being pro-labor as being pro-capital, like they’ve swallowed the Reagan coolaid so hard they completely switched ideologies.
And they are how of the most horrid, hate filled people’s that exist. They hate for the sport of it.
This is all based completely on my own biased experience, and hopefully is less true with Mango Mussolini betraying them more everyday, but to get to the heart of it as far as I can see ur an leftists are not allies with rural rednecks because the rednecks completely sold out their values for… nothing in return
Have you tried helping them reconnect with their roots? They either abandon that culture as “woke” and basically called me a witch or…
they wake up. Its fascinating to see this one happen.
Yeah… the “rednecks” reserve real comradery for people ridiculously similar to themselves. They’ll befriend whoever they actually have to spend time with as “one of the good ones” but ultimately hold a position that’s deeply corrosive to diverse, leftist community
Working in a manufacturing plant in a deep red county, I can absolutely attest to that
At the Battle of Blair Mountain, whites, blacks, and other immigrants faught side by side as rednecks together for the right to unionize.
this may come as a shock, but things have dramatically changed in the last 105 years
You mean big companies no longer work with the government to interfere with workers trying to unionize?
More like decades of anti-union propaganda, plus culture war bullshit, have conditioned the people of West Virginia (and the US as a whole) to be against unions
Nah they have fighter jets though.
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.
Billions (trillions maybe?) of dollars spent on propaganda.
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.
Exactly! Rural areas have been being shit on and neglected for longer than I’ve been alive. Things just continue on a slow methodical downward spiral with no end in site. At this point people just want literally anything to change. Yes trump draws a lot of racists and biggots for obvious reasons. But for a lot of the folk I know who voted for him who aren’t otherwise raging assholes it was more the equivalent of someone lashing out when cornered. They knew Kamala wouldn’t do anything for them but they didn’t know what trump would do so they went with trump. Those folks now almost universally regret that choice but I’m willing to bet they will make the same choice again if the DNC keeps running do nothing establishment goons. They’ll vote for anyone who believably prommises to change things regardless of of the changes because as most of those folks see it things couldn’t possibly get worse for them so any change at all is at least a chance of things getting better. That thinking is obvously wrong but the DNC also hasn’t given them any decent candidates since Obama who just so happened to win 2 terms.
They’ll vote for anyone who believably prommises to change things regardless of of the changes because as most of those folks see it things couldn’t possibly get worse for them so any change at all is at least a chance of things getting better
This is the reason a lot of people who identify as leftists told Me that they were choosing to vote neutral. They believed that a vote for Kamala was more of the same, and they were willing to risk a Trump presidency to shake things up. They still believe that things haven’t gotten worse since 2024.
Great point! That is a big part of what my local DSA chapter is trying to do. Something like a farmer/labor party
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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