Winning Conservative Rural voters requires understanding and appreciation.

Jonathan Haidt's analysis of the differences in values between Conservative rural voters and Liberal urban voters is spot on.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/video/conference/2007/haidt


We need to respect rural values for sustaining resource driven communities and keep them intact. It would be great for them to understand the importance of liberal values to surviving in an urban, merchantile communities.

It is like a Mexican stand-off, everyone waiting to pull the other to pull the trigger or put their gun down.

First, not much mention is made of conservative authoritarianism and its obvious unsuitability for moral governance.

We can respect rural values, but we need to realize that all rural values are not positive. I do not uncritically accept all tenets of modern American liberalism. I am even less inclined to accept the tenets of traditionalist, indeed frankly Luddite segments of the population when our very existence as a species is threatened by divinely sanctioned excess.

The values of community and interdependency are more sophisticated than the bond of kinship or even affinity groups. And they have been since the days of Aeschylus.

The values of tolerance, justice, and equality are cornerstones of social life in the west since the days of Athens. Rigid orthodoxy, rigid normative social control, and aristocracy are all facets of the same blood diamond.

I grew up in that world. Its cardinal virtue is the ability to maintain under poverty, ignorance, and ill-health by focusing the suffering and anger from the quasi-familial abuser to the other.

Further, many of us are the sons and daughters who fled this model of morality for something that respects the universality of human experience. We don't eschew it because it is alien, we eschew it because its scars are burnt, beaten, and spat into our flesh and our souls.

But the core weakness is the simple binary presented here. We win by showing that we understand the fears they cannot even express. Because those who stayed behind as their friends left truckstopville did so out of fear.

I live in the most rural corner of a rural state- Vermont. Rural values here in the Kingdom are strong. There's the rural values of maintaining our landscape, and the rural values of small farming. And yet we are not "conservatives" in the repug sense. Maine is another rural state. Wisconsin and NY have very rural areas. It's just not all the same.

Hmmmmmmm