Sorry for necro'ing your post. I was looking for something else about Chris Hedges and came across it...

I just wanted to say that, being from Ohio, and being old by this sub-reddits demographics, I got to watch the rural area I grew up in swing from blue-ish to damn near fully red... So, I have some observations. They're probably wrong and retarded because I am retarded and usually wrong, but whatever.

A lot of this fell on Clinton, as the Walmarts were moving in and the factories were moving out during his presidency. We can argue all day about if it was Nixon, Reagan, and/or Bush era politics that led to these circumstances. I'm amenable to all sides of that debate. But, that doesn't matter too much, because prior to Clinton, Democrats had these peoples backs. Many of these peoples families came down from the Appalachian mountains, leaving coal behind and taking factory jobs on off of the promises that Democratic candidates were making to them. So, they felt betrayed and abandoned.

It's also important to understand that these people were... I wouldn't call them capital-C Christians, because they were not, but they had faith and they believed in community and they were legitimately spiritual with their politics and faith intertwined. As they felt abandoned and betrayed by their political party, the capital-C Christians on the right watched it happen and caught a lot of them in their rhetoric on the way down.

In my lifetime, I saw adults go from mocking people like Newt Gingrinch that fucking ghoul Rush Limbaugh to listening to them and agreeing with them. Because they said things that coddled those people during their big break up with Democrats.

I'm going back to trying to find this thing I saw someone say about Hedges once on here that was thought provoking. Sorry, this is all just one retards take.