That's not been my experience regarding suburbanites disliking people who are not rich. If you can pay your mortgage or rent in a suburban neighborhood, you keep up the exterior of your home and lot, and you are considerate of neighbors, you are welcome anywhere.
Ok so when I get off the factory floor from 3rd shift, and my pants and shirt are full of oil, and my coat is ripped, I am not going to be walking down the street of some perfectly manicured, multi-story mc-mansion area without feeling like a rat. That's what I mean by 'suburbs' here in the midwest, I mean areas with extremely large, multi-story, single family housing. The HOA in those places probably makes it so everyone has to buzz-cut their lawns all the time, and I guess pressure wash their very plain, but large houses. No wildflowers allowed, no abstract art, nothing like that seems to be there
Regarding a culture of conformity, that's what a culture is and does. It unifies a people by giving them a common language, a common cuisine, a common style of dress, a common history, and the like: "the customs, arts, social institutions, and achievements of a particular nation, people, or other social group."
I'm not going to say you're wrong, and least not until I think about what you said a little more, but I'm interested in where you're rooting that theory. That's a very broad assertion. It seems like variance can be allowed, or, maybe in different parts of american history, it maybe was 'more allowed' in different places, maybe before the rise of the suburban mansion concept
Now there may be multiple different subcultures living side by side, but withing each of these smaller groups, conformity is what they want and what binds them together.
And that maybe seems a little more normal to me. I don't know. But to break with that, I can see that in the midwest we aren't exactly a cutlure with that has much direct, sustained, social contact between people in our neighborhoods. We don't have many normative '3rd places,' besides bars, which aren't that inclusive really. And church membership is probably still probably continuing to go low, as some of these really old church buildings near here are getting converted to other things
There's a major cultural divide - sophisticated, educated, people of means and a culture that embraces ignorance and poverty.
And I know you're responding to what I said, but I hesitate to agree, as I'm not sure how much of a generalization that is.
Let's look at those people a bit closer. Here are two graphics that give us a feel for which subsets prefer Trump and which prefer Harris. The first only looks at Harris. She's referred by white college grads, whereas Trump is preferred by white nongrads. Harris is preferred in cities and Trump in rural America:
I really prefer explanations to graphs, and this is nothing against people who like them, but I read this book on homelessness recently that was chalk full of graphs... and each one was compeltey different in style. It was like I needed a differnet engineering degree to figure out each one.. ick. But from what you wrote, I can get your point
So the consummate Trump supporter is a non-college graduate white male veteran living in rural America, and the rest prefer Harris. These two groups are about the same size. And they don't like one another.
Trying to figure out more about that is worth more discussion in and of itself, if it is true. Well you know in america we usually don't believe in class theory, like maybe they do in the UK for example. That's probably part of it, and I think sometimes that maybe not believing in it makes things worse
The Trump side contains a lot of people not benefitting from the American dream. That's what you see in rural Georgia and Alabama, for example -people living lives of quiet desperation stuck in dead-end jobs with no realistic hope of rising above lower middle class and subsistence living. The white ones are listening to conservative indoctrination media, which have convinced them that immigrants and "DEI hires" are stealing the good jobs from them, and that liberals, the well-off, and intellectuals are effete snobs and their enemies, and they want all of these people punished, which is why so many are drawn to MAGA bigotry, anger, bitterness, and grievance.
Ah... see this gives us a clue about something very, very important. Or at least I feel it's that way. What is a 'dead-end' job? Who in the world invented that, as a concept? Who views it that way - it seems like an american 'pop-media' way of seeing it. Is it a concept held in esteem by the rich suburbanite, or the blue-collar worker? In the over 10 years I've worked in the factory, the immigrants don't seem to view the job as a 'dead-end' job, they raise families on it, and get married. We americans, who don't make enough for the suburban mansion, are told that it is a dead-end job