Big City Blues

 Hitler famously lit the German Reichstag on fire to create an emergency to seize control of the government, despite not having a majority in the German parliament. There is some thought that he's using the carjacking of Big Balls in DC to create martial law there. As both Richardson and Krugman point out, Washington DC is near a 30 year low in crime. 

Today, most of my family and I drove through western South and North Dakota. It's beautiful. No, really, gorgeous. It's also incredibly barren of people. We drove for two hours or more where I don't think one person could see their neighbors houses. These were mostly ranches. After a while, we got into grain country and eventually, it got so that houses had sightlines to each other. Still, when we got to Dickinson, ND (population 25.695) the place felt really crowded. The town we come from in CT is roughly the same size and is completely unremarkable in any way, shape or form. Dickinson is the anchor town for roughly 50-100 miles in every direction.

So, Dickinson - population: not that many - felt bustling. No wonder the few residents who may have gone to Chicago or (gasp) NY think of it as anarchic. If you live in rural America, the big cities are noisy, crowded, smelly and aggressive. That means that when Faux News starts talking about the crime there and Trump wails about American Carnage, those attacks make a certain amount of sense to fearful people who just can't grok a big city.

The other thing that crops up is how these idiots constantly show a precinct or county map of the election that is saturated in red, because the Big Empty is GOP country and the Big Cities are Democratic. For all the apparent anarchy of these big cities, they work. Really well! They are the centers of America's wealth, enterprise and innovation. Big Cities are what makes America Great!

For all the nonsense about Democrats needing to reach "real Muricans" and other Trump voters, there is simply no way to reach these deep rural voters. They live on a different planet. Your best bet is that they just quit the political system out of frustration when Trump invariably craters the economy and kills their farm subsidies by accident.