cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/66479569
Nationalism, the rightwing, racism - they are all returning full force in Europe. Trumpism and Russia are using all their powers to destroy European democracies; through open and covert propaganda. You, the voter, can never claim you weren’t warned.
Not necessarily. Rural people are typically farmers or large landowners.
The problem is that a lot of rural people are more dependent on (fossil) fuels due to having to drive by car to a station, stop, or destination.
While they do tend more conservative, the other issue is also that farming isn’t yet fully automatised. Sure, there are tractors and the like, but a human still needs to drive them. If we want less land usage for farms, we’d need to shift to producing veggie and lab meat, as then we don’t need to use a lot of land for feeding cattle. So we need to help financing farmers to switch over, and be less dependent on fossil fuels.
With the freed up land, we then can build more housing, and reforest. On top of that, since more people might move toward the city, or congregate into small hamlets, that will make expanding public transit easier.
The problem is that the agriculture economy only needs a few people, so everyone else is standing around trying to find a way to live, and there is no way, so they work as entertainment for the rich and powerful.
Your observations are correct, but they won’t change the bigger economic point of rural society being economically non-viable.
It’s really similar to mining towns, mining also got heavily mechanized and automated, it’s just that there’s no cultural traditionalist fantasy to reproduce for entertainment, for performance, within the mining economy.
There is a different strategy of repopulating rural lands, but that is not going to happen within the current economy and goals. That would require much more organized sacrifice, plus exceptional logistics and transportation (not cars.) Otherwise, rural life always will mean a lack of access to education, healthcare, civic life and democracy, and even good plant-based food.
Right now we’re suffering from the failure to modernize fully, the process is uneven and exploited by the privileged. We either need to finish building modernity or we do something totally different. Fascists and conservatives use these stranded masses to gain power, and that leads to collapse. It’s all very unsustainable, this middle-ground, this incomplete transformation, like a bird that didn’t fully get out of its egg.