TAP alum Ezra Klein is having an interesting discussion over at his place about rural America. He made some not-at-all-inflammatory comments in a post about the value of cities, in which he noted in passing that we subsidize rural living in a lot of ways, and Tom Vilsack, America's secretary of agriculture, got peeved. "I took it as a slam on rural America," he said, and he then allowed Ezra to interview him about it. In the interview, Ezra pressed him on his repeated claim that those subsidies -- not only for agriculture itself, but also for things like broadband, roads, etc. -- are justified because of rural people's "values," and particularly the fact that they send a lot of their own to the military. The discussion has continued, and you should read the whole thing.
Culturally speaking, I think both rural and urban folks have legitimate gripes. Rural folks feel like they're looked down on by those sophisticated urban elites who consider them uneducated rubes. They look around at a culture that is created somewhere else and glorifies those other places and their ways, and they feel minimized. That, I think, is why much of the culture rural people are attracted to -- things like country music -- is inflected with a kind of antagonism toward urbanites and liberals. Urban hipsters don't listen to music that explictly talks about how great it is to be an urban hipster and says "Screw you, farmer!" But there are a thousand country songs about how great it is to be country, and how those elitists in the cities just don't understand, and also, screw you, hippie. Is it overly defensive? Sure. But it comes from a place of genuine feeling, a desire to assert that even if there aren't a dozen sitcoms that take place on farms, it's still a way of life that has value.
If rural folks are victimized by cultural snobbery, however, urban folks are the targets of moral snobbery. Particularly in politics, we're constantly told that rural areas and small towns are morally superior to cities and suburbs, that the people who live in the "heartland" are the real Americans, the ones who have "values," while the rest of us just have opinions. It is perfectly acceptable for politicians to pour derision on cities and places where lots of liberals live, but no politician can get away with doing the same to rural areas or claim that people who live in cities are better people than people who live in small towns.
This accusation of moral inferiority is particularly maddening to those who live in cities when they look around at where they live, and see a culture with strong values that are actually being lived. "Hey," they say, "my neighborhood doesn't have three meth labs in it. Eighteen boys and men didn't rape an 11-year-old girl in a trailer in my town. Stop lecturing me about 'family values,' when you're the one with all the teenage mothers."
Can we all just get along? I doubt it. American politics seems to be growing more tribal all the time, and even if we stopped using the urban/non-urban divide as one of our central factors in determining which tribe you belong to, something else would just take its place.
