I remember, as a kid and adolescent, watching planes fly overhead, far far away. They were just lines, contrails, going from one side of the horizon to the other.

I'd flown a few times. My grandparents lived in Hawaii. They were pretty well off. I'd been there a couple of times. A lot of the folks I knew had never left whichever little town we lived in at the time.

My mother left California for a lot of reasons. Really we couldn't afford it after my parents divorced. The economic pressure of Regan's America destroyed a lot of families and made the (old) American dream unreachable. Rural Oregonians hated Californians because... I don't know... Because they hated a lot of things.

Both of my parents lived in various trailer parks before moving further into the country. We occasionally lived in trailer parks even in the rural area.

Living in the country is different. It stays the same for a long time, generations. The run down grocery store in the middle of town was built in the 1800's when the place was settled. The building was never updated, at least on the outside. The ideology was basically the same. The school taught about how Manifest Destiny made America great, Jim Crow was bad but MLK fixed it, Malcolm X and the Black Panthers were either not mentioned at all or only mentioned as unhelpful in comparison to nonviolence.

I didn't really know any black folks until I was 18 or 19. There was one black guy in the town I went to highschool in. He was adopted. There were a few hispanic folks, but they were generally pretty segregated. I remember one of the white kids breaking up, I assume broken up with, a hispanic girl who spoke limited english. After their breakup, she just disappeared. There were stories that he had called INS (before ICE) and that she had been illegal.

I remember being on the bus once and one of the kids talking about how he finally beat up his dad. His dad had beat him and his mother for years and he finally beat his dad up. He was proud. He was a bully who regularly started fights and intimidated people.

Most of my senior class didn't graduate. I dropped out half way through because I had enough credits to get a diploma. A few folks did this. A lot of people just did meth and went to work at the mill. A kid who was a Sr before I was a freshman robbed the Circle K with an air pistol and went to prison.

Folks who lived on the same street as the police station knew what a patrol looked like. There was only one cop on patrol at a time and response times could be two hours if something happened at the farthest extent of a patrol.

The kid had planned that part out, but, of course, the person working at the store knew exactly who he was because that's how small towns work. I don't remember if he wore a mask or not. It wouldn't have mattered if he did.

People thought that the US should invade Mexico to stop the migration. People thought that the US had the god given right to invade Canada. People thought that indigenous people didn't exist, even though one of our classmates was Blackfoot... But everyone saw him as white, even when he pointed it out.

People who aren't white were "the OK ones," or invisible, or actually the enemy, depending on who you were and who they were. There were really racists, straight up klansman, but they were rare and mostly made fun of. The pervasive racism and misogyny was not the dedicated and explicit one of incels and vocal bigots, but a deep ignorance.

The government was far away. There were cops, sometimes. The local government was wildly corrupt and opaque. You were either in the good-ol-boys club or you didn't know how it worked. There is no electoral integrity in rural America... And that's why all of this is so familiar.

Rural folks voted for what they knew. They voted for what was familiar. The hand of the state is most strongly felt in cities. Trans folks would have been killed, so they were invisible there. Gay folks would have been killed, but that became a bit less of a thing as time went on.

Sex Ed was basically non-existent. The church has all the power. They say abstinence, and that's what kids learn. The idea that abortion should even be legal was something I was debating with people in the late 90's.

Basically, government policies didn't impact people except when "the liberals shut down the mill to save the spotted owl" which collapsed the already weak economy. What government programs didn't help people, or were invisible. Disabled people weren't visible because there was no infrastructure.

What I'm saying is that all the people Trump will hurt are people that rural folks don't think about, are ignorant about, or don't care about. They know that it makes city liberalis mad, and that's all they care about. The system has been fucked for them for generations and Trump was finally an opportunity to make it fucked for everyone. He's the corrupt sheriff of every small town. He's the crooked mayor who's rigging elections and embezzling. He's familiar.

There are plenty of rural leftists. I was a Communist before being an anarchist, and I picked that up partially from my friends. But the dominant culture is strong. Most of the people who voted for Trump have no idea what they did, and no idea how many people around them they will hurt... Including their families and theirselves.

The real hard analysis to accept is that we have failed to help rural America for so long, and it has decayed so far, that it was easy for rich fascists prey in that weakness. Liberalism has failed. It's failed to protect vulnerable people in cities and it's failed to improve the living conditions of folks outside of them. It has failed to offer real hope... And without hope people are vulnerable to revenge.