In many small liberal towns, you can still live a "1950s" lifestyle

Forgot a link:

daily.jstor.org

The Forgotten Temperance Movement of the 1950s - JSTOR Daily

Livia Gershon

Despite the repeal of Prohibition, alcohol consumption was an enormous political issue for many white American Protestants.

Open link

Is this why most college towns are so conservative... oh, wait.

Traverse city is far from liberal. There are plenty of progressive people there but the ones with money and power are not. They want to keep it a nice peaceful good ole boys area.

By small liberal towns do you mean New England hillbillies working for the post office, teaching school, or selling firewood or bushels of apples along the highway? Or, do you mean wealthy enclaves where most everyone is an pro humble braggart?

You think more about gay people than gay people think about themselves. Get help.

Yea, it is so much better now. I wish you good luck with that.

Please refrain from making things about about a time when you didn't exist and the authors of articles depicting those times are also young and clueless.

Is this before or after white flight? Are we also still doing destructive gay aversion therapy? Single income households with 4 children but still have a car and house paid off.

That is exactly what liberal is. I'm guessing you're trolling but there are people as clueless as you appear to be.

When my dad retired, he moved to a small town in Vermont that should meet the OP's standard for an idyllic 1950s small town where everyone is happy. Instead, the town is highly segregated by class. The local "townies" are generally working class/low income earners who just try to get by and drive beat up diesel trucks with a straight pipe to blow black smoke and live in a double wide in the middle of the woods. Then, there are the wealthy retirees and second home/weekend-vacation home folks from the big eastern metro areas. They pretend like they fit in with the locals and will go to the church dinners, summer county fairs, etc. But underneath the pleasantries is a lot of tension. There are dust ups over hunting, with locals wanting to roam freely and wealthy owners not wanting to be woken up at 5 am to the sound of ducks getting blown out of the sky or a deer getting dropped. There is a lot of meth, which then causes locals to break into rich people's property. My dad got broken into a couple of times and had to buy a big tool box that could be bolted to the floor to keep the meth heads from stealing tools out of the garage. People who try to keep their family in town with little kids and commute into the big cities for a couple of days a week invariably end up putting their kids either into boarding school or just give up and move back to the coast because the local kids are pretty rough and even though VT public schools are very good, they are not turning out national merit scholars like the east coast suburban schools and private schools. And that is the big difference between today in the 1950s for these towns. Back in the 1950s, the middle class was the vast majority of the population and there were a small bunch of rich people and a small bunch of people down on their luck. Now, people in these towns are either somewhere between comfortably affluent and independently wealth or barely getting by.

As a black person, I agree it would be a downside for my and my children to live surrounded by the sort of person who describes "low diversity" as an upside.

It also makes sense because these are relatively expensive places to live, and we as educated professional high income earners are more likely to be liberals than conservatives.

Disagree. Proximity and exposure to diversity makes one much more liberal.

The people that tend to be conservative these days have not been exposed to diversity. Think rural USA, including small towns in those locations. The population is overwhelmingly lily white and tends to be more religious. They tend to only know and accept the people and values they grew up with, and tend to want to ostracize those that are different (minorities, LGBQT, foreigners).

The small towns that tend to be more liberal became that way because some of their residents were exposed to diversity in other areas/places and moved to those towns making them more liberal. They moved to those towns because they were attracted to desirable amenities in/near those towns (skiing and outdoor recreation opportunities that attract tourism).

There are still many small towns that lack those desirable amenities and are still very conservative.

Seems like a major downside.

Bigotry totally sucks. Sorry you had to go through that.

And does this mean Jim Crow laws per the 1950s exist as well in these towns. This constant harking back to a supposed bucolic time that never existed is so tiresome.

Biden's summer resort is similar. The locals hate Biden, but the rich outsiders who have flocked to Southern Delaware from Washington, suburban, MD/NJ/PA/NY love the guy. The locals long for the days when the tourists came in the summer and then left. Now they are there all year. I imagine this pattern is repeated all over the country wherever well healed boomers are retiring.

Yes, I'm sure the locals in Rehoboth Beach just hate all the extra tourist dollars flowing into town, and the older folks in Henlopen Acres and North Shores are irate at high prices they're getting for their houses.