Couple things.
Joe keeps referencing that cracked article. I keep hoping Joe finds a better reference to serve as a jumping off point, because it's not the greatest article, but the main takeaway (and something I've come to understand these last few years through other sources) is this:
The rural folk with the Trump signs in their yards say their way of life is dying.... It's not their imagination....So yes, they vote for the guy promising to put things back the way they were...
And this is true. I understand that, and I empathize with that. The question then becomes, what's to be done about it besides having empathy. What do we do to address this reality? Part of it is having more people recognize that that way of life is fading away, not because of any political plot to end it, but because things change. They always do. I understand that people that value that way of life are going to be upset about it being minimized. The answer isn't putting things back the way they were though. I don't know of too many historical examples moving back towards a more antiquated mode of existence being a promising path forward. The question is really how to adapt so that we're all (or the vast majority of us) moving forward together. How do we retain a small town feel while acknowledging it won't be exactly the same small town we're used to?
I think part of the answer is infrastructure, mainly energy generation and distribution combined with improving our networking infrastructure. If we could get high speed internet and reliable energy to run our technology out to "everywhere", then everywhere becomes a viable option in terms of residence, as we'll be better able to work remotely most of the time, without sacrificing advancement of vocational goals. You could live in the country and still work in the city. I think lots of people would choose that option were it available, and if so, it would revitalize small towns (not all of them probably, but a decent amount of them). How do we sell that to the people who currently live there? Because, like it or not, that intial last mile work isn't going to get done by for profit corporations. There won't be money in it for them until the work is already done. It means government would have to either do the work or subsidize it. And that leans towards socialism. And the people in those towns seem to have gotten the notion that socialism in any form is pretty much evil, even though you could probably make the case that it is full throated capitalism that has resulted in a lot of the problems those towns are facing. Barring that I can't see a way forward for those towns unless they happen to be located near some resource needed for future production / advancement. The money just isn't going to land there, and we'll have to figure another way out for people in that situation.
I think an interesting connection that the cracked article fails to make, but is really important, is that in terms of not being seen, not being heard, not being felt, the complaints of the people discussed in the article have some similarity to the complaints of other minority groups. That these groups (black lives matter, all lives matter, etc.) are feeling the same things, probably have a lot in common. Yet, they're currently placed as at odds with each other and blame each other for their problems. All these groups would benefit from lower cost health care, lower cost education, improved mental health services, job training and placement, etc. Yet they are cast as diametrically opposed for many superficial reasons, like location, ancestry, etc. How do you break down that divide?
But there's another issue that
@Ministry of Pain brings up. The Trump supporters aren't restricted to rural communities, they're in the big urban centers as well. Not as much as liberals, but they're there. They have to be, as 80% of the U.S. population is urban, and you don't get over 70 million votes in this country strictly on a rural constituency. And those Trump voters don't share the same concerns as the people the cracked article is talking about - they're not getting left behind to any greater degree than the Democrat voters in their area. Those Trump supporters are coming from a different place. I've tried to have empathy for that too, tried to understand it, but the conclusions I come to there aren't as charitable as the ones you can draw about the folks who are in those towns that are getting left behind. I think some analysis needs to be done in that area as well - what's the appeal of Trump brand Republicanism to this cohort? What's the connection that needs to be made there that might bend things somewhat away from buying into a candidate like Trump?