Rural America Conflated Two Separate Issues

I was talking to my friend Mark the other day about the election and stumbled upon a realization.

There are two primary forces that pushed most of rural, white America to vote for Trump.

1. The disappearance of blue-collar jobs.

2. Overzealous political correctness.

The loss of American Jobs ​

The jobs have gone away and aren’t coming back. This has nothing to do with politics—it’s simply progress. American manufacturing output hasn’t fallen—it’s actually increased. Only manufacturing jobs have fallen, and that’s on account of automation. Hiring more humans to do manufacturing work would hurt manufacturing, not help it. This is true because machines are simply more efficient.

This concept of progress being both a) inevitable, and b) bad for human workers is not something middle America understands. They seek an enemy to blame it on, which leads us to the next point.

Too much of a good thing ​

The far left has turned political correctness and outrage into a sport. They’ve taken something good and necessary and morphed it into an extremist spectacle, and middle America cannot stand it.

What happened should have been expected: rural America combined these two things together, and assigned the blame for the first on the authors of the second.

Every single day they’re slapped in the face by a maligned version of political correctness, like 1,000 paper cuts, and at the same time they can’t find work.

It must be them.

I’m sure there are far deeper and more nuanced descriptions of what happened in the election, but I like abstraction to simplicity. They knew for sure that the liberals were responsible for one thing they hate (PC), they couldn’t find the cause of the second one (Job Loss), so they blamed them for both.