Hallmark’s in style, if painfully corny, Christmas motion pictures, positively have a casting method for his or her heroines: Principally white, clean-cut, and of an in-between age. That’s, younger sufficient to be plausibly in need of center age, however sufficiently old to promote the usual Hallmark plot: City skilled leaves town to get a brand new lease on life, by returning to her dad and mom in small city America and marrying the boy subsequent door. However the ladies who truly watch Hallmark motion pictures are a lot older than the celebs. Over 70% of the Hallmark audience is past 50 years old. This breakdown of the most popular Hallmark Christmas motion pictures exhibits they’re largely successful with the Medicare crowd, with over half of the viewers aged 65 and up.
Hallmark is promoting a fantasy to older, largely Republican viewers: That their wayward daughters will quit on life within the massive metropolis and return dwelling to reside close to their moms.
The viewers for Hallmark motion pictures, in different phrases, would not look fairly like its heroines, however extra like their moms. It is also a really white viewers that’s extra concentrated in Republican-voting areas. As Amanda Festa at Samba TV writes, “Hallmark’s conservative beginnings have been gradual to vary,” and “that is definitely mirrored within the channel’s vacation viewership.”
Numerous the crucial response to the recognition of Hallmark motion pictures assumes they’re promoting a comforting, if reactionary reverie of retreat from city life to small city simplicity. In gentle of those demographics, nevertheless, I would argue the story being bought is even narrower than that. Hallmark is promoting a fantasy to older, largely Republican viewers: That their wayward daughters will quit on life within the massive metropolis and return dwelling to reside close to their moms.
(As I famous on Friday, the precise daughters in query are far more invested within the Taylor Swift narrative: Daughters who’ve flown the coop and are very comfortable dwelling their busy lives with a cat within the massive metropolis.)
Need extra Amanda Marcotte on politics? Subscribe to her e-newsletter Standing Room Solely.
The unhappy irony in all that is that the Hallmark-loving grandmothers of America, by voting for Republicans, are working in opposition to their very own goals of getting grownup kids — and grandchildren — who reside subsequent door. As Timothy Noah wrote recently in a cover article for the New Republic, the more and more authoritarian insurance policies handed by Republican leaders are resulting in what he deems the “Crimson State Mind Drain”: “an out-migration of younger professionals” from GOP-controlled states to the extra welcoming pastures of blue state America.
There are various causes the under-50 set are taking their faculty levels and strong contributions to the tax base out of crimson states into blue ones. The most important issues are for their very own school-age kids. They need their youngsters to go to colleges with out ebook bans, to have entry to reproductive well being care, to be protected from violence and, ought to they determine as LGBTQ (as many in Gen Z do), that they are going to be affirmed as a substitute of bullied. However for folks in professions like instructing, medication, science or the humanities, it is simply more and more laborious to really feel protected and supported in crimson states. So that they go away.
Noah’s focus is on how the mind drain is impacting life in crimson states, that are seeing large shortages in academics, medical doctors, and different needed educated professionals. “And far as Republicans could scorn Joe (and Jane) School, they want them to ship their infants, to show their kids, to pay taxes,” he writes. However, if the recognition of Hallmark motion pictures is any indication, there’s one other loss a number of Republicans have introduced upon themselves by relentlessly electing authoritarian leaders: The lack of their very own kids’s presence.
The primary couple that Noah profiles — Kate Arnold and her spouse, Caroline Flint — are an excellent instance. The 2 have been each medical doctors serving in Oklahoma, which is in determined want of extra medical professionals. They lived within the state as a result of they’ve roots there. However after abortion was banned, the familial connection to Oklahoma couldn’t overcome their anger and concern at dwelling in a spot that makes it so laborious to reside their lives and do their jobs. So that they moved to D.C. They simply named 4 different pals who had left Oklahoma for comparable causes lately. And that is even if, as a result of larger demand for medical doctors in Oklahoma, the 2 ladies might make far more cash of their dwelling state, whereas paying a lot much less for housing.
There’s a number of angst in crimson state America over the lack of younger folks typically, however particularly with these MAGA voters whose grownup kids have moved to far-flung locations. Proper-wing media shops clearly perceive this, as a result of they churn out an limitless stream of propaganda about how all these younger white individuals who go to varsity and transfer to the large metropolis are brainwashed idiots who will rue the day they left their hometowns behind.
In the actual world, your harried city skilled daughter won’t ever come dwelling to Oklahoma or Texas or Florida, as a result of, for one factor, she will be able to’t get an abortion if she wants one.
Fox Information is an limitless drumbeat of tales falsely portray American cities as hellscapes the place residents need to hopscotch over sleeping junkies in between enduring armed robberies by the hands of Black Lives Matter protesters. This narrative has lengthy been a mainstay of the right-wing noise machine, however there’s one main factor that is shifted about it. Up to now, the “scary cities” framework was largely an excuse for blatant race-baiting and thus tended to deal with cities with massive Black populations, like New York Metropolis, Washington, D.C., Chicago, and Philadelphia. That’s nonetheless a giant a part of it, after all, however now a number of the anti-urban hysteria has shifted to cities which might be a complete lot whiter: Seattle, San Francisco, and even Portland.
In these segments, the villains are educated white “elites” — like most of the kids of Fox viewers — whose supposed youthful idealism has allowed crime, drug habit, and homelessness to run amok. One other taste of this hate is available in right-wing scare tales about dystopian police states created by liberal overreach within the title of public well being or environmentalism. To listen to conservative pundits stick with it, one would assume rich liberal cities have vaccine checkpoints on each nook and cameras in your properties to maintain you from ingesting soda. Conservative media is even using urban walkability proposals to drift conspiracy theories that individuals shall be banned from leaving cities. The declare is city residents shall be “imprisoned in our native communities and condemned to forage and eat bugs,” with “no soccer video games, no concert events, no amusement parks, definitely no church.”
And, after all, the more and more loud right-wing warfare on schooling is a giant a part of this.
The Republican assaults on faculty professors, the fear-mongering about “woke” faculty youngsters, and the substantive efforts to run off school and/or deprive them of free speech circulate straight from years of conservative messaging treating faculty itself as a risk. An enormous a part of that is that it is faculty, after all, that freed so many younger folks to get the hell out of crimson state America.
It is messaging that matches with Donald Trump’s “retribution” model of politics. Moderately than asking why younger individuals are leaving and the best way to get them again, it is about lashing out at them and entertaining fantasies of revenge. (Simply wait till that wayward daughter will get mugged! That’ll train her to depart suburbia.) However it’s an extended, ugly act of MAGA America taking pictures itself within the foot. The reality is a number of youthful professionals could be open to dwelling in crimson states if the political state of affairs weren’t so terrifying. The housing is cheaper and infrequently the job alternatives are extra plentiful, particularly in schooling and well being care. And many individuals want to be nearer to getting old kin, to assist them out and have them of their grandkids’ lives.
However by voting for Republicans, crimson state denizens are ensuring their Hallmark goals won’t ever come true. In the actual world, your harried city skilled daughter won’t ever come dwelling to Oklahoma or Texas or Florida, as a result of, for one factor, she will be able to’t get an abortion if she wants one. Or her personal little one shall be punished for saying “homosexual” at school. Or she’s going to fear on daily basis about her child getting killed in a mass taking pictures. Fox Information paints the blue states as crime-ridden hellholes, however college-educated folks below 50, who’ve the privilege to decide on the place they reside, see it very otherwise. The phrase they use for blue states is “protected.”
Learn extra
in regards to the bother of being progressive in a crimson state
