[counterpoint1]

Literally everything about this post isn't just wrong, it's like 180 degrees away from the truth.

Far from 'outsized amount of hand-wringing over the fate of rural America' the truth is rural America has been somewhere between ignored to outright attacked for the past 50 years. 99.9% of social justice efforts have been focused on the inner-city, targeting the problems of poverty, crime, drugs, discrimination facing those group while completely ignoring the poverty, discrimination and drug abuse of rural America until we realized the rural opioid epidemic is worse today than the urban crack epidemic of the 80s.

Far from being a result of deregulation, our economy is so over-regulated that only the mega-corps with armies of staff dedicated to compliance can stay in business, pushing all the smaller competition out of the market.

A more accurate summary would be: "After 50 years of regulation consolidating power in a handful of urban areas, while only providing social services and affirmative action for the urban poor, the people who live outside of those areas have suffered on both ends of the spectrum"