Curiously enough, the only parts of the country that have ever approached anything resembling "failure" are (heavily progressive) urban areas like NYC and Detroit.
I think we need to set some terms here. What do you consider "failing"? Not that I'm really looking to jump into the mud and wrastle on this one, this seems like a perfect point for a -citation needed-
I put the word in quotes to indicate the tendentiousness of any potential definition. I personally don't think of any part of America as having "failed," but if you force me to pick, I'd choose any area that suffered from breakdown in law and order and severe de-population. NYC in the late 70s and Detroit's long-running (but hopefully interrupted?) decline especially come to mind. A number of other urban centers could potentially fit too.
Fair enough, and I agree with your sentiment. I think I can point to some rural states economic downturns, criminal problems and terrible literacy rates and draw similar conclusions.
I think the best move here is to agree that either side (rural vs urban, left vs right, whatever vs it's opposite) could cherry pick items to point to and say "these bad things prove my point".
I'm not inclined to think that slow demographic decline constitutes failure. Even if you disagree with that, my preferred definition has the additional "law and order" requirement, and I've never seen a rural example of a "Bronx is burning"-type event.
You are playing really fast and loose with definitions so it’s hard to know what you consider a failure case but rural areas now have higher crime rates than the national average.
Incarceration rates are also now led by rural areas[0]. Anyone who has spent time in Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio or West Virginian rural areas have driven through areas that easily could be called ‘failed’. And that’s just from my personal experience.
I’d say your position that only progressive places have failed I’d just your bias showing and doesn’t have any basis in fact. And that’s before you dig into whether it was progressive policies that led to the 2 failures you do mention.
I earlier acknowledged the difficulty of coming up with a reasonable definition of "failed." I will say that I don't think it's enough to be simply below-average in literacy or above-average in crime or whatever; you really want a multivariate outlier in the space of social pathologies. I suspect that most ways of operationalizing "failure" will capture primarily urban decay, like the examples I brought up.
Does rural West Virginia rise to that level? Having been there myself, I don't think so, though I could be convinced otherwise. Can you point to large-ish rural areas that match the dysfunction of, say, south-side Chicago? Preferably along with some (crude) quantitative comparisons. I'm genuinely curious here; not trying to pick on progressive policies.
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