Here is the map



The blue areas are places where people are demanding socialism because their environment is so locked in when it comes to resources but in a lot of ways, they don't have access to the resources in the red areas due to economic controls, lack of land ownership and the fact that the government is still the largest single employer in the red areas too. They gravitate to the blue areas also because they often have the best social services resources. What is a lot more subtle are the issues of cronyism in the red areas, and those who have gone from the red areas to the blue areas often carry those resentments with them and define the culture in the blue areas. Remember even the early black ghettos of the 1940s and 1950s were urban enclaves populated by Blacks who were no longer safe in a lot of the country areas due to Klan activity. In the late 1990s to early 2000s, a lot of Black Americans feeling pressure from immigrant populations had ended up moving back to the rural south and that population, surprise surprise, is not particularly loyal to Obama but is also at relative peace with leftover elements of the Klan to the point that even the SPLC undercover operatives have not successfully instigated any serious incidents for a long time.

What is true at this point however is the old stopgap against poverty in the old version of the US has been taken away - free land. The Blacks running away from the Mexican takeover in California and the whites running away from nonwhites in general in the urban areas (and California) have had to buy back in, so if they were not relatively well set up in those cities in the first place, the return to the rural areas does not work out so well since there is no more free land, and what land is cheap has so many regulations attached to it that economic survival still has a lot of artificial challenges.

Urban centers in the US of the 1700s were in a lot of ways, the same, except there was always a pressure valve available: head west. the criminally inclined usually had that as an escape route: get the hell out of the city or get caught and hung. Anyone could head out west and seek their fortune. Right now the entire push is "get a job, find your place in society, pay your bills, cast your vote". Then some people quickly figure out that they are not allowed to have career level jobs for whatever reasons, and without career level jobs, they are forced to live on subsistence level jobs. It's not like "hey the fish, the cold, the timber and the open range are out there you lazy fuck, go out there and get your own living". Try living in freedom right now. There are guys going to jail for staking out a little spot in the back end of some BLM land or National park and thinking they can subsistence farm, or worse, cut some timber and mine some ore. Fish or hunt illegally, you are looking at serious jail time if on federal land, and total disenfranchisement from gun rights in a lot of cases.

Those were EXACTLY the conditions that Karl Marx was talking about in his book "Das Kapital". What he got at was the intolerable conditions in late 1800s Europe where industry and rural land were owned and controlled by people other than the common folk.

The early American Revolution, and to a large degree the French Revolution were against a distance aristocracy in the midst of an economic situation where a lot of newly wealthy people were fighting against those who had actually not been very productive for a very long time and were only fighting for their established arrangements. The aristocracy in those countries had stagnated. The poor at that point had the pressure valve of westward and wilderness area expansion. That's why so many people sat out the Revolutionary war in the US, and during the Fresh Revolution, just plain got on ships and left.

The people who remain will want personal liberties and equalities, and assuming a relatively universal level of economic opportunity, just want their rights to their own property. The issue comes up in the next wave of revolutions when those economic opportunities are not even close to well distributed. In the big cities, it is supposedly a "meritocracy" but in reality, it is cronyism in a lot of ways, that third leg of the French thing "fraternity" is an issue of "fraternity" if you are in the right "fraternity". That's why much of today's politics is the fight over which fraternity gets their place at the taxpayer funded trough. The next layer of fighting is over which semi-private group gets allowed to build and feed at their own trough AFTER, the tax man comes and gets his cut.

It is that level a lot of poor people don't fully understand how the 80% to 90% taxation system really works because anyone who has really bucked the system gets their economic opportunities greatly reduced and that leaves them much less capable of accumulating wealth legally.

So in looking at the map, you can see where the Obama supporters and people who actually need levels of socialism end up, but that is very often because they were not surviving particularly well in the red areas either. Those red areas in a lot of ways are the places where you can get shot or arrested for subsistence living, let alone harvesting resources out of "the wild" at a level that would actually represent an accumulation of personal wealth without a hell of a lot of financial favor arrangements made ahead of time to people who expect to do exactly none of the labor. You don't even get to those resources without handing a lot over up front. Back when this country was originally established, that was not the case.

So the political march to socialism is inevitable and that is what has caused me to look back at Europe and how they dealt with these things.

First, the socialist countries of Europe apparently are not all anti-gun. Sweden has legal gun ownership although has reduced that in recent years, Britain went socialist long before they went anti-gun, so in the 1980s, you had lots of guns in the UK, and socialism. What happened was a series of events and covert operations on the part of the government to try and disarm the public, which appears to have mostly worked.

Finland has relatively open gun ownership and low crime I think mainly because they managed to maintain a single culture society. Russia is all fucked up, but realize, they were fucked up for a really long time, at least the last 150 years. Personally, I think those people have a certain evil nature that runs in their genetic code so it is hard to use them as an example of how to do anything right, except in that way they manage to mix crude skill and technological innovation to keep up with more advanced societies, or at leas threaten the advanced societies in some way that scares the shit out of the rest of the world, you know, like savages with nuclear weapons.

All of that said, there are lots of socialists in Europe right now who are still all for traditional values, gun rights, and personal freedom, but they recognize that someone owns everything, and with economic opportunities being limited by that, they will cover just enough basic services with socialism that nobody uses those freedoms to decide it's time to start chopping off fiefdoms from the major countries.

That is with one exception, back to Russia. Now considering those people are basically fucked up and evil in their DNA, a bunch do try hard to be good people, hence some strong religious balance with them, and during their most repressive times, they had this idea of "Shipping people off to Siberia", where supposedly it was a harsh short and brutal life in the wilderness. What we learned though is that those who survived there actually have done not half bad. Repressive laws in the rest of the Soviet states did not apply as much to the Siberians mainly because it was so hard to enforce those laws on people in remote places. Even when the Soviet machine tries to move in hard on Finland, which has relatively similar climate and topography, they got stalled because the Finns were pretty well organized for surviving the climate.

A big difference for us in the US, we can get those levels of freedom within a day's drive of any major metropolitan area. It's as simple as getting land in the red areas as home turf, and then smaller enclaves in the blue areas for access to certain aspect of the economy, but also unlike Siberia, our ability to travel works better.