100 years ago, rednecks were badass. If their boss didn't pay them enough or treat them right, they'd burn down the factory and destroy their means of distribution. If the police or government didn't like it, well, they're dead cops.
Now rednecks are all like "b-b-b-back the blue..." What the fuck happened to rednecks?
In my area there were no factories to burn down anymore. All of big tobacco pulled out leaving nothing but retail/fastfood and self-employment. It's hard to unionize around a shitty factory job when there's no factory. And even within the redneck community, there was a class stratification. There were several wealthier families who owned large farms. They had no real reason to dislike their jobs because they owned the production. They would have the Mexican migrant workers come through every season and do work. So no real impetus for class issues there. Capitalism worked out well for them.
Everyone else was just stuck working retail or commuting to the nearby cities. So everyone in the county who grew up together and went to high-school together broke apart. No real community unity. Meaning anyone can come in and threaten it without having to worry about a group effort to oppose it. Walmart came in when I was in high-school and planted a supercenter. There's some jobs but also edging out smaller businesses. Lowe's Hardware too. There are no small-town hardware stores here. The only small retailers are like antique shops that somehow stay in business. Downtown is the pictureesque small town thing just with rundown buildings and littered with national/regional chains.
There just is no place for the redneck. None of those older traditional institutions exist anymore. Everyone is atomized and stretched thin. The only kind of revitalization happening is the town trying really hard to get gentrification to happen. They came in, put in two traffic circles, removed the confederate statue, replaced it with modern art. They went through the black neighborhood that the main street runs through and replaced all their mailboxes with new ones and redid the sidewalks. Meanwhile the actual houses are in disrepair. They repaved the main street and put in fancy brick inlays at crosswalks. Painted the town's logo on the roads. Built a small farmers market. Hoping that some hipsters would drive away from the nearby city to come get an authentic small-town experience and build a artisan coffee shop I guess. That's what every place wants these days I suppose. Fuck the people who live there and always have. They want the 20-40 year old urbanites who will raise the prices and property values with their boutique, bespoke capitalism.
I used to live in a medium/large city that (very) successfully gentrified itself, and now that coronavirus and the resulting effects is discouraging urban life (not to mention that things were declining before this last year), a significant amount of the population is going to move not just to the suburbs or wherever, but probably "back home" or to Denver or wherever the New York Times travel/lifestyle sections start hyping up next. That's the thing that happens when you fill your city or town with people that have no roots or connection, they're just gonna leave you in the dust when times get tough. The economic boom that happened during the 2010 recovery is going to reveal itself for what it was (insubstantial and temporary), and the city might end up an overbuilt husk of what those of us who have roots in the city/region imagined it would be.
Not totally related, but your comment about trying to gentrify reminded me of that. Liberals will talk about these sorts of project as "community investment" or something, when they're really just investing in outsiders, further weakening their community.