McMansion America: Douchebags vs Rednecks

One of the reasons I think ethnonationalism makes little sense for a country like the United States is the majority population is really at least two factions already. If I were making an America Wars game, I wouldn't have a "white people" category. There are at least two major white people groups--the douchebags and the rednecks. I'd say it's "city" versus country, but it's really McMansion America versus the country people. Even within those factions, the groupings blur--there are McMansion dwellers who are really rednecks and vice versa.

Of course that division isn't peculiar to the United States, it spans the globe and crops up from time to time in history. Athens and Sparta is one instance of it. Plato points out that posterity will think Athens was very impressive and powerful because of its fancy buildings, and won't realize that Sparta was the superior power.

There's some inherent problem in building out infrastructure in cities. One of the problems is it adversely affects the people--it makes them weak and stupid by taking them further out of nature. Another is it's really like a ponzi scheme.

A typical pattern with infrastructure is that the initial build out and long term maintenance is too expensive for the original population to shoulder, so the city seeks to expand. Residential water systems often follow that pattern. As long as they're expanding--building more subdivisions and adding new customers it keeps working. In old cities where the population has declined, the infrastructure starts falling apart immediately.

In the country, people have more of their own infrastructure. The further away from population centers you get, the more infrastructure people provide, or do without. There's even a third case where rural communities build and maintain their own infrastructure without relying on incorporated governmental entities to do it, which is probably the winning combo. That retains the best components of the infrastructure, the skills of cooperation and community, and the knowledge of how to build and maintain a thing.

The douchebags are like the corporations they work for. They're apparently "strong" and wealthy, but are actually very weak and effeminate as individuals and are also actually poor. They have $100,000 in cash in a bank account and $1,000,000 in debt. The rednecks look weak because they have no corporate organization, but are stronger and more well rounded individuals. A redneck household, for example, will be stacked with tools and weapons. It's a masculine trait to hoard capabilities. A douchebag household might not even have a single screwdriver and will have zero weapons. It will rely on contractors to do even the simplest repairs and household tasks, and might pay for all those things with credit.

The rednecks also look "poor". Avoiding credit purchases will make a person look "poor" compared to a peer who leverages their income. Waiting to put a roof on your house to pay in cash and do it yourself, for example, might make the house look run down, but will put you way ahead compared to the fool who paid for a roofing contractor with a home equity loan.