America is held hostage by flyover states
They either want their country back or they’re tired of being ignored. They regularly blurt the latter as justification for electing right-wing theocrat/closed minds, austerity minded, cultural fascists to office. These are people that use more government subsidy than any segment of the country, but they hate "handouts" to anyone else. They are the largest consumers of SNAP benefits, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.
The flyover states are the main reason Congress is irreparably broken.
In the presidential election of 1968, Richard Nixon won 301 Electoral College votes, despite only receiving 43 percent of the popular vote. Third-party candidate George Wallace siphoned off 13 percent of the southern Democrats, which split from the Democratic Party altogether in 1972, via Nixon’s southern strategy. Virtually the same dynamic propelled Bill Clinton to office in 1992, albeit through different electoral politics. Clinton’s election was due less to racial/cultural issues, more economic.
Since the inception of the term silent majority almost 50 years ago, and all of its iterations since, this block of voters was hardly a majority and never silent. This group has been exceedingly adept at dominating the narrative in virtually every election cycle. They’re proficient at dog-whistle propaganda, and since the mid-1980s, they’ve created their own media echo-chamber which exponentially multiplies the sound of their own voices, with no interference from outside sources. This was accomplished mainly with coast to coast a.m. radio stations broadcasting 24/7 right-wing indoctrination, to conservative patriot and alt-right conspiracy theory websites of the last 15 years which disseminate tragic half-truths and whole fake news.
