Sarah Smarsh

speaker

73 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Nov 2024 last heard Nov 2024

Sarah Smarsh’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart · Left Behind: Why Democrats Lost the Working Class · 14 Nov 2024 podcast

And what I would say is, well, there are people who could make it there, but they just don't want to. And that's like being completely, completely left out of the conversation about what sorts of aspirations or goals someone would have for a good and fulfilling life.

Yeah, I think it's an important one. And I want to point out, by the way, that that choice that someone might make or that kind of rearrangement of traditional capitalist value sets in deciding where to hang their hat and how to live their lives.

It's important for all of us, including urban and formerly educated folks that people are, you know, something I would like to point out, having grown up in a rural space and living in one again now. Yes, we are a majority urban population now, but 98% of the land of the United States is rural space.

And as someone who sees firsthand what's going on out there in terms of corporations and who's buying that land and what they're doing to it and extracting to it, It's good for all of us if we've got a little bit more of a sprinkle going on, somebody reasonable and sane who has that pride of place that you mentioned, who wants to protect that place. That actually affects all of us.

If you eat, if you put gas in your car, if you care about the earth and the land that we share. People who are, you know, trying to keep the kind of agrarian lifestyle that is days gone by for a lot of families, but it's still alive and well in some. It's the fabric of our country. And I'm glad that some people are prioritizing being in those places.

Yeah, well, what's wild is for all the electoral college privileging those rural states, as you point out, most folks I know in those parts of the country don't feel represented by their governments either. Part of that is due to just not really resonating with either side in this two-party system. And again, the largely rich people that run both of those parties.

Also, if you look at when you strip an issue away from those labels R and D and have a ballot measure for progressive ideas like legal weed or reproductive rights, defending those, Medicaid expansion, all down the list, they often pass in so-called red states. So there's something going on there about the identity has now become we're the red state and that's our majority politics here.

And sometimes that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. In terms of now a heightened sense of desire to belong to your place. But that's not necessarily the same thing as reflecting precisely what you believe and want in the world. And that dissonance between political behavior and what people actually believe, you know, that's for sociologists and psychologists to parse. But I know it firsthand.

I've seen it. Another thing about that kind of wobbly way that we get representation and how the rural folks have more, that red and blue map and that winner-take-all politics that it reflects is so toxic, I think, to our understanding of ourselves, whether you're rural or urban or somewhere in between.

You know, in most you've probably seen before when someone takes the 50 states and instead gives them a gradient of purple rather than just showing who actually won the state in the way that we run our elections, but rather to actually reflect the sizable political minorities that exist in every state. And they're there in red states, too.

Even, you know, a place like my Kansas, I think in, you know, most states. general elections, there's about 40% of people vote for the Democratic presidential candidate. And two out of five people ain't nothing. So here's where, again, that the electoral college and the way we do our elections is damaging, even in those spaces that are disproportionately represented in

whether in the Senate or elsewhere, is that if you are one of those two out of five people in that place, my God, is that demoralizing. And it is so hard to keep hanging. And then meanwhile, if you're being sort of lumped in as though there's this stereotype or homogenization of your place in the cultural idea of it,

And, you know, you're like a kid holding a Black Lives Matter sign in small town Kansas, and I've seen it. That's very brave work. That might be braver work than what's going down in Brooklyn. You know what I mean? Because it's like you're against the grain.

And then meanwhile, you keep seeing this red and blue map. And then meanwhile, you're where is your vote going? My God, does it even matter? And so and that's what I was alluding to about a self-fulfilling prophecy, because then those people might long to leave. And I'm sure that it works vice versa, too, with with folks in so-called blue states choosing to hang their hat somewhere else.

It's a soft sorting. Yeah.

Well, I think it's a manipulation of the way in which we've been handling identity politics. And I don't use that term negatively. It's important that we're talking about racial inequality and gender inequality and the way that those things affect your probable outcomes. But if you're doing that, if your DEI statement isn't also talking about socioeconomic class. Right.

If your definition of diversity is not also acknowledging wealth or, you know, I'm a first-generation college student, so I often find myself in, or college graduate, I often find myself in professional spaces where I'm the only person who has a background remotely like mine, regardless of color and gender. Right.

And and and yet when when I was kind of, you know, crossing that bridge from, you know, one class experience or reality to another, if you will. And I contain both today. But that bridge was on that college campus as that first generation student. There were you know, they were rightly race and gender and other and other aspects of identity were being addressed.

But there was something very specific about what I was that made a really hard go of it for me that was not being discussed. And so if we as a culture and a country are not acknowledging that class is also an identity, then... In that void, in that vacuum where deep pain of a valid sense of not being seen arises.

There, there then comes in swooping, comes in writing on a demon horse Rush Limbaugh. There comes in writing the messages about death. The immigrants. Don't make me conjure up images. And the reason and the brown people. And so there is actually, in my view, a real... Now, I want to be careful here because when I talk about a grievance...

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