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Comment by goodcanadian | Hacker News Reader

I grew up on a farm. Farmers as a class are not stupid, at least no more so than any other group of people I've dealt with. They do have different interests and priorities than city dwelling people which tend to be better represented by traditionally conservative parties, but that is not an absolute. In Canada, historically, farmers were also responsible for the social credit movement (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_credit). It's not a question of being educated/uneducated. It is a question of who is doing a better job of talking to them. "Urban elites" are just as ignorant when dealing with rural issues as farmers are when dealing with urban issues. It would be nice if more people were able to bridge the gap.

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Thank you for saying that.

I see this divide all the time, and I can't bear seeing this used time and time again to make the rural vs. the urban populations angry at each other, which in the end only detracts from trying to see how to make everything work together.

I wish we'd be smarter and stopped just being condescending towards the other group. The only ones actively benefitting from this divide are not well-intentioned people in my mind.

One elaboration on your point: the rural and urban populations aren't mirrors of each other. The urban population generally ignores the rural population. The rural population pays attention to (a select subset of) what is happening in the city.

I think this is an inevitable consequence of population size and density. People are interested in people. The people who generate new culture -- who attract the interest of other people -- thrive in the cities. They have a bigger audience and a bigger community of fellow creatives. They find more variety. They have more to work with. So in both the city and the country people pay attention to what's happening in the city and ignore what's happening in the country. More is happening in the city and it is more interesting.

This isn't everything that makes cities tend to differ in their values and politics from the country, but it's the hotbed malign demagogues exploit to empower themselves. They tell the country, "Hey, the city people don't respect you. They have contempt for your values. Their politics are the reason for your suffering. You are the real people. They are parasites. Be mad!"

The country is primed to rise up. The city isn't. So the demagogues make the country hurt the city. Then the city is mad as well, at people who have genuinely hurt them, whereas the country was fooled into being mad at the city and striking the first blow.

It isn't necessarily the case that the people in the country are dumber. They're just the ones primed for a fight. But the con artists are working over the country people, so from the city's perspective the country people are fools.

I appreciate your insight but this explanation seems overly simplified (or needlessly complicated). It’s very possible that the demagogues are seen for what they are irrespective of city vs country and people across the board don’t like having demagogues in power. You also can’t wash the city people clean for all the frankly hate and vitriol they spew at country folks. It’s not just demagogues.

> I see this divide all the time, and I can't bear seeing this used time and time again to make the rural vs. the urban populations angry at each other, which in the end only detracts from trying to see how to make everything work together.

Personally, I'd love to see more investment into rural and semi-rural areas to stop rural flight (because letting run that one unchecked is the cause for the housing prices in urban areas skyrocketing).

The problem is, it's getting increasingly hard to justify spending money on these areas morally. In Germany, even over ten years ago when I worked in construction primarily in rural areas, outright nazism (like entering a bar and witnessing the bar shout the heil-salute including raising the arm) was already a thing, listening to the "Stammtisch" idiocy outright painful, and today it's even worse because this kind of opinion isn't just utter fringe any more, it's gotten political mainstream.

When we're deciding to send money to rural areas, we're effectively rewarding "going fascist". Just behave deranged enough and you'll get everyone bending over.

> Farmers as a class are not stupid

Yet in my lifetime I have seen them consistently go or vote against their own interests (see Brexit which absolutely gutted British farmers which overwhelmingly voted against "evil EU rules").

The difference between UK farmers voting numbers for Brexit and the general UK population voting numbers for Brexit was ~ 1% .. within the margin of error and shows that farmers overall voted much as the general UK population did.

Given the smaller absolute number of farmers, their vote carried less significant weight than many other blocs.

~ https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fv...

~ https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S074301671...

Face it, the UK population as a whole voted against their own interests, there's no justification to single out UK farmers as being somehow different to the UK population and more deserving of blame.

> and shows that farmers overall voted much as the general UK population did.

Against their own interest.

Sure, but your parent's point is that they did so no more or less than the general population. This is in response to the assertion that farmers are especially stupid.

yes, just like almost every other group that voted for it. It's wrong to single out farmers for this.

That only matters if Brexit was about as bad for the direct personal interests of farmers as it was for the average Brit. If farmers had it far worse after Brexit than the average Brit, then it means farmers were especially dumb for voting against their own interests.

My comment above was written in response to an earlier version of the comment above it.

That original version was phrased as to blame farmers for the plight of Brexit, as if a small group who voted more or less in line with with the nation made any kind of difference.

Did farmers have it far worse after Brexit than the average Brit?

My understanding is the nation as a whole suffered, with the exception of well off Brits with significant off shore assests.

Your understanding is incorrect, but understandable if you read the wrong sources. There was so far no measurable negative impact of Brexit. Go look at graphs of trade balances, economic performance, etc. You can't see Brexit in them.

The only metric I can think of that was impacted was currency value on the day of the vote, but that dump was driven by predictions of economic problems that never happened so arguably those traders just took a bath due to believing the wrong people. It is anyway not necessarily bad for a country like the UK to have a lower valued currency; economists had for years been arguing it was overvalued and would be better if the currency was cheaper, so this is a bit of a wash.

All the comments being made here about people voting against their own interests start by assuming that voter's interests are exclusively trade-related, and that constitutional issues don't matter to people at all. This is clearly wrong but a required assumption for the whole against-their-own-interests claim to work. And then it goes on to conflate predictions with reality, by assuming that because the NGO-academic class predicted economic doom it must have actually happened when it didn't.

Both of these are fatal flaws to the argument.

The only way I can see to argue there was negative impact is via very indirect paths, e.g. the voters wanted less immigration and Johnson set the thresholds in the new immigration system so low that immigration increased. But that's more accurately blamed on the Conservatives and the general ideological hangover of EU membership on the party itself, not leaving. Voters can at least do something about it now, and the rise of Reform (Britain's new top-polling party) is evidence of that effect in action.

> There was so far no measurable negative impact of Brexit

Uh... Disagree.

> On January 11, 2024, the London Mayor's Office released the "Mayor highlights Brexit damage to London economy". The release cites the independent report by Cambridge Econometrics that London has almost 300,000 fewer jobs, and nationwide two million fewer jobs as a direct consequence of Brexit. Brexit is recognized as a key contributor to the 2023 cost-of-living crisis with the average citizen being nearly £2,000 worse off, and the average Londoner nearly £3,400 worse off, in 2023 as a result of Brexit. In addition, UK real Gross Value Added was approximately £140bn less in 2023 than it would have been had the UK remained in the Single Market.[0]

The whole page paints a picture which is far from "no measurable negative impact". While it's contrasted with some areas suffering and others benefiting, it's hard to have an overall picture that looks either good or bad, but it's far from being overly positive. And this is just on the economic topic, there's another whole hoist of topics which have negative outlooks such as security, politics (i.e. with the Ireland controversy and how difficult this situation is), etc.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_effects_of_Brexit#Imm...

This reply is a perfect demonstration of my complaint:

"[Remainers] conflate predictions with reality, by assuming that because the NGO-academic class predicted economic doom it must have actually happened"

The report you cite it isn't showing a measurable negative impact of Brexit, although you brought it up as a rebuttal to that point. It's a modeling exercise in which the authors imagine a hypothetical world up to 2035, and then pick a long series of unvalidated assumptions which causes the UK's performance to diverge massively from that of the wider EU and prior trends. None of these assumptions are plausible:

• They admit that they did a similar exercise in 2018 which was wrong.

• On page 14 they even admit that they are being deliberately pessimistic.

• They assume an annual GDP growth rate of 4.3% suddenly starting in 2026. That's US levels of growth. Both the UK and the EU only grew at 1.4% last year.

Arguments of the form "I told Excel it will be bad and therefore it's bad" are invalid, but were exactly the strategy the Remain campaign used during the referendum. In the years that followed their predictions were all falsified. Anyone can pay some consultants to write a Word document about the future that imagines whatever the customer wants. Go ahead and imagine 4.3% GDP growth appearing out of nowhere, why not? Such reports aren't independent by any stretch of the imagination, and certainly don't show that anything bad has already happened.

Unfortunately, Sadiq Khan is a manipulator who understands the psychological weaknesses of his supporters very well. So this set of imaginings about the future gets presented in the present tense, with sentences like "London’s economy alone has shrunk by more than £30 billion". It hasn't. Go look at the actual data. It has "shrunk" vs the imaginary numbers in his report, which means nothing.

Predictions are not reality. Reality is reality. And in reality, there has been no measurable negative impact of Brexit, which is why people like Sadiq Khan are forced to make numbers up.

Maybe their actual interests are different from what others think they should be.

Sure, if their actual interests are to suffer devastating economic consequences.

Yeah, I see farmers here in Europe as one of the most educated groups.

They need to be educated in politics and economy in order to navigate all regulations and subsidies.

I know I'm being pedantic, but the parent comment said 'uneducated', not stupid, and while it's certainly true that some use those interchangeably, I do not see them as such.

In any event, the GP’s comment still holds. The narrative that Trump is just a populist for the uneducated masses is really really… toxic.

Toxic? Let’s review:

US withdrawal from Climate Agreement, vaccine sceptic being made secretary of health, US alienating Europe, proposed ethnic cleansing of Gaza, lying about who started the Ukraine war. Cutting funds to USAID. Threatening to take Greenland by force. Threatening to annex Canada. Proclaiming himself to be King. Constantly "joking" about third term.

Does any of this seem toxic to you? Would educated people support these actions?

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