[chooseaname]

Exactly this. I'm in the South (U.S.) and a lot of people here would benefit from national healthcare, but they continue to vote against it (rather, for politicians who are against it) because "if you don't work for it, you don't deserve it." They're so afraid of the few who would take advantage of it that they're willing to let the many who need it not get it.

[saiya-jin]

Yes it sounds like common mentality in US - "you need to deserve your spot under the sun". This mindset can push society to achieve great things rather effectively (as seen numerous times in the past with US), but it can also mean cruelty to fellow citizens because... usually money, power, status.

Everybody for themselves ain't a good model for a healthy society in long run. Way too many predators out there.

[logfromblammo]

I'm a Midwestern transplant into the South, and a significant proportion of the anti-welfare sentiment around here seems to me to be incredibly racist, plastered over with language that has been carefully scrubbed of any mention of race. And that poisons federal politics.

The fear is there, but to me it looks like white people afraid that some black people or brown people might earn the same money for the same work, or get equal representation in government. And it's all apparently justified in the politically segregated religious congregations.

There's that "if you didn't work for it, you don't deserve it" attitude, but it also combines with "whatever you have, you got because you deserved it" attitude. It's very fatalistic, and completely discounts the possibility that injustice exists in society, and that some humans actively create it for their own personal benefit.

It also seems like more of the social bonding activities are inherently organized around pre-existing in-groups and clique-sorting than I remember from more northerly cities. I had been accustomed to events organized around public schools, their intramural organizations, public libraries, chambers of commerce events, and city sports leagues in public recreation facilities--one thing, open to all residents--but in the South, they have entirely different networks organized through churches and private clubs, which are heavily segregated by political views, if not by race.

This leads to a lot of information asymmetry, and irrational beliefs or disinformation propagated through channels that are difficult for outsiders to monitor. So white blue-collar workers get propagandized against unions and democratic socialism. They are constantly being lied to, and subjected to rhetorical distractions. Black people go to different churches, so they aren't as politically self-defeating, but they get institutionally disenfranchised instead. Having lived in Chicago, Illinois, I recognize political corruption, and they definitely have it here.