Socialism becomes a lot more palatable to majority populations as long as minority populations are kept to a minimum. With a reasonable expectation that the recipients of help look like you, helping starts to seem more like an obligation than an imposition.
The loss of the distinction between the deserving poor and the undeserving poor also caused many people who would’ve supported help to one of those to just throw their hands in the air and forget the whole thing.
That's what I'm talking about. The ability to hold back aid from the "undeserving" becomes a lot less important to people who live in relative homogeneity racially and culturally. Absolutely no surprise to me that Utah is relatively socialist internally while being on the extreme right externally.
> Absolutely no surprise to me that Utah is relatively socialist internally while being on the extreme right externally.
Utah is also heavily Mormon, which complicates things. Mormons have a lot of beliefs that sound fairly socialist when you describe them in practice, except that they believe the church should be the administrator of those policies.
Mormons also heavily oppose abortion, which makes them a nearly single-issue voting bloc, making Utah deep red in a purely partisan sense.
If somehow abortion were a non-issue - like, overnight, everyone somehow magically forgot abortion even existed - it's not hard to imagine Mormons being one of the least conservative Christian denominations.
(Yes, I'm aware that other Christians don't consider the LDS to be Christians, but that's beside the point)
Mormon conservatism encompasses a lot more than just abortion. Discrimination by gender and orientation are still doctrine, and to some extent so is discrimination by race.
A lot of hardline religious sects superficially look like socialism if you only examine their in-groups and entirely ignore their out-groups. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is no exception.
> Socialism becomes a lot more palatable to majority populations as long as minority populations are kept to a minimum.
You're getting downvoted, but you're broadly correct. There's a lot of research showing how more homogeneously white populations are more likely to support leftist or socialist policies (policies, not affiliation) than people of the same demographics who live in more heterogeneous places.
How does that concept reconcile with Mississippi having a low homelessness rate and providing housing at a high rate for those that need it despite a non-homogenous population?
The key according to this article is the cost of housing, not implied racism.
