'They can't afford to live here': Deep red Montana town faces DOGE fallout

[Prairie Gates]

3. The "dirty" secret that Trump and his supporters fail to understand: the US is essentially a socialist economy

So much of the US economy is simply held up by government spending. Without a trillion dollars pumped into red states in the form of defense spending, they would have economies like many third world nations. Without various federal programs, some of our states would look like failed states in Africa and elsewhere. All these "blue collar" residents of Hamilton, Montana think they are rugged Western individualists and vote GOP every time, but their lives and economy are completely supported by federal tax dollars, most often yanked from New York City and Los Angeles and Chicago and other places they proclaim to hate. They are not self-sustaining places. They collapse without massive infusion of federal and state funds. The secret is this: capitalism has never worked, any more than communism has. All modern economies that are not utterly failed are some version of a mixed (socialist) economy. There are differences in degree, and differences in how they represent themselves (ideology - the imagined understanding of one's real material conditions), but they are all socialist in character.

The US has been seduced by its ideological illusions. It will now have to learn the hard way.

Hey, Hamilton, Montana. Welcome to the Desert of the Real.