[eli_gottlieb]

I was referring to Massachusetts voters and urban voters being "second-class": we can support X at essentially arbitrarily high levels of support, but the more rural states and regions of the country get more voice than us in the federal government. So when certain rural people want economic policy rewritten to "save their jobs", a whole party shifts its dominant ideology to accommodate them, even if it's not actually a good idea for everyone. However, when we (urban, coastal) want our lifestyles or preferences accommodated by policy, we're not only out of luck, we get insulted for our efforts.

[Inconel]

Don't coastal urban voters, particularly if they're white, skew relatively wealthy compared to their rural counterparts though?

On the one hand I agree that bad policy is still bad even if it does end up saving some jobs, but it seems the economy is already so tilted in favor of white coastal urban voters that I find it somewhat hard to sympathize.

>we get insulted for our efforts.

While this is certainly disappointing, it is so prevalent on both sides I can't take it seriously unless you're willing to call out similar denigration of the rural poor by coastal urbanites.

[eli_gottlieb]

>On the one hand I agree that bad policy is still bad even if it does end up saving some jobs, but it seems the economy is already so tilted in favor of white coastal urban voters that I find it somewhat hard to sympathize.

The economy is tilted in favor of white coastal urban voters. The government is tilted in favor of white rural landlocked voters. All voters skew more relatively wealthy than non-voters, and indeed neither of our political parties tilt in favor of non-wealthy non-white people.

>While this is certainly disappointing, it is so prevalent on both sides I can't take it seriously unless you're willing to call out similar denigration of the rural poor by coastal urbanites.

While I do call that out, I think there's a difference: one kind of denigration comes from the permanent minority party, and the other comes from the permanently dominant party. I cannot name one time in my life when the Republican Party and its base of rural white landlocked relatively wealthy people did not set the national agenda, and I'm 27 years old.

Even when they "lost" elections, in the theoretical sense of no longer holding majorities, they used various procedural tactics to maintain their chokehold over the actual mechanisms of policymaking.

So as much as the economy has inflicted horrible suffering on that base, those rural white landlocked voters still maintain the actual power. They've been supporting policies that hurt people like them, but as they tell it, those are their moral values and their notion of dignity -- if people suffer, so be it.