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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023

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1.) This is true, but they also support common sense reforms the GOP opposes. Like, a lot of working class white people, especially in rural areas where there are basically no minorities have had run-ins with terrible cops.

2.) I've seen no actual evidence of immigration support based on income.

3.) Sure, everybody is selfish. OTOH, I'm sure if I looked into local ordinancs and bonds and other things, I'd actually bet lower-income working class voters consistently support increasing taxes on themselves far more than rich people do.

4.) Again, depends on the specific policy. Yes, coal miners in West Virginia are going to continue to support coal mining, but is a construction worker in Sheboygan? Probably not so much. Of course, everybody is selfish, but I guarantee you the vast majority of working class people do not want to go back to the pollution level of even the 90's, even if it meant working class jobs.

local ordinancs and bonds

Voting to tax yourself and have those taxes administered and spent in your local community, is very different than sending taxes off to the blackholes of statehouses or DC.

If there's in recent news to show that #4 is true, we only have to point to the train derailment in East Palestine. It's definitely a white working class area, and there's no love lost for Norfolk Southern having to foot a large cleanup bill, and people are still concerned about the water despite tests repeatedly coming back without showing any increase in pollutant levels. Contrast this with the days when companies would have dumped chemicals of a similar hazard level in an open pit and not told anybody about it, the residents not knowing anything until people started suffering adverse health effects decades later. Republicans can be a little more proactive about this than in the past since environmentalists are now almost exclusively concerned with climate change, but my guess is there would be broad conservative opposition to new environmental regulations if they weren't connected with a specific incident. I have a friend who worked for an environmental contractor and he said that the EPA turned into a joke under Trump, with operators totally unconcerned about being dinged with Federal violations. State environmental agencies had more teeth in those days, and in Pennsylvania, that's saying something, since DEP is viewed as notoriously dysfunctional among people in the know.

and people are still concerned about the water despite tests repeatedly coming back without showing any increase in pollutant levels.

That or they're savvy enough to recognize that the feds are almost certainly lying about the true extent of the damage