When posters from rural areas complain about "coastal elites" (often a dogwhistle for PoC) stealing from their hard-earned living via taxes, this is one of the things that flashes through my mind. So many - SO many - of America's small towns cannot sustain themselves through honest business and labor.

https://texasmonitor.org/in-small-town-texas-speeding-driver...

These are the people who erase the visceral horror of slavery from textbooks, who detest cosmopolitanism, who advise hard-up city-dwellers to simply "move to where the jobs are" (nevermind that they denigrate immigrants). But god forbid you suggest that these small towns aren't solvent, can never be so, that they have to move. That the future for America is a progressive urbanism with higher population density (and the advances in public infrastructure policy that will have to come with it). That's socialism. But dragging travelers out of their cars for a protection bribe (if you're lucky enough not to get Sandra Bland-ed) is a-ok. /s