Every Movie is Set in New York
what urbanites misunderstand about rural discontent
It’s easy to feel dismayed about the level of polarization in our country. As our media landscape continues to expand, we have few common cultural touchstones and can’t even agree on many basic facts. Culturally and geographically, it seems we’ve Big Sort-ed our way into complete ideological segregation, with college degree-holding Liberal atheist urbanites on one side and rural, working-class Christian Conservatives on the other.
Of course, the real picture is never that simple. Cities and rural areas alike host people of all racial, economic, and religious backgrounds. (Movies like Minari and The Search for General Tso do a great job complicating our oversimplified narratives around immigration.)
But one thing the media seems to have correctly pinpointed is the rural aggrievement that’s fueling the rise of the MAGA movement, to the bafflement of many urbanites. It’s easy for us Coastal Liberals to paint all of rural America as a bunch of ignorant racists and leave it at that, discounting any of their complaints. But we do this at our own peril.
As I reflect on my upbringing in a rural red state, as I talk to people who stayed after I left, and as I read the work of rural authors, what comes back to me, again and again, is the bait-and-switch that’s taken place in the past thirty years. The future that was promised to many Americans has vanished before their eyes. Many parts of rural America have been hollowed out economically. Free trade screwed the working class, shuttering factories across the country and shipping union jobs overseas. In exchange, we got goods so cheap that they’re disposable, but at a high cost to our personal financial stability.
It’s not just factory workers who’ve been affected. As farms and ranches have consolidated, money has shifted away from local owners and towards corporations. Nowadays, the service sector is the biggest employer in most rural communities, with a single school district or hospital being the largest employer in a given area. If you’re a doctor, nurse, or teacher in one of these communities, you’re probably doing alright. But if you’re working the majority of service-sector jobs, living wages are hard to come by and the cost of housing is astonishingly high compared to average local income.
Once rural kids earn a degree, they often have to choose between staying in their community after college or pursuing their profession. “Brain drain” and declining population are serious problems for upwards of thirty percent of rural communities. Many rural parents no longer want their kids to attend college because they don’t believe they’ll ever come back.
For many of us, the ability to move away from our hometowns felt like a badge of honor. After all, nobody ever says, “North Dakota—if you can make it there, you’ll make it anywhere!” Instead, it’s “look how smart and successful I am! I can afford to move to a city where a hamburger costs $20!” (That’s 1.5 hours of work if you’re making federal minimum wage.)
This depopulation can become a death cycle for the community—fewer young people sticking around means fewer babies being born in hospitals and fewer children going to school. In rural areas, closing a school or hospital isn’t a minor inconvenience, it can kill a town economically and cause real hardship on families who must travel hours for routine medical care.
Speaking of medical care, did you know that those living in rural communities are more likely to suffer from chronic diseases than those living in cities? That’s not even counting the awful toll that drugs like meth and opioids have taken there.
So imagine your community is in a death spiral of job loss, depopulation, and rising rates of disease and drug addiction, and then you turn on your TV to hear almost everyone mocking you. As Barbara Kingsolver (herself an Appalachian) says:
“I understand why rural people are so mad they want to blow up the system. That contempt of urban culture for half the country. I feel like I’m an ambassador between these worlds, trying to explain that if you want to have a conversation you don’t start it with the words, ‘You idiot.’”
Growing up, it felt like we were constantly being reminded of our rural inferiority. Often this came in benign but annoying forms, like out-of-staters asking, “do you ride horses to school?” or late-night talk show hosts expecting viewers to get references to specific NYC subway lines, meanwhile the cable company couldn’t even be bothered to let us know when shows came on in Mountain Standard Time. We’d get commercials for stores that were hundreds of miles away so that we could see what the rest of the country had while we, ourselves, had no access. I remember being THRILLED when an Applebee’s finally opened in my hometown, thinking I was finally going to get to taste the sizzling fajita skillet that had been paraded in front of my eyeballs for years. The FOMO was strong.
But this urban superiority isn’t always so benign. It can come in the form of populous cities passing state legislation that doesn’t take into account the factors of rural life, such as their dependence on gas-fueled cars. It’s wealthy out-of-staters buying up vacation homes in a housing market already squeezed within an inch of its life, then giving off the vibe that while they absolutely love #Montanalife, they’d love it more if there weren’t so many Montanans in it.
And the current political climate has only made things worse. The rise of MAGA meant a broadbrush approach to politics. Either you were a perpetually anxious Liberal wearing a safety pin and posting your “Black Lives Matter” sign, or you were a tiki torch-wielding racist—there was no room for nuance or for people to grow and change. I fear that by labeling all Trump voters as racist, Liberals may have pushed many “hold your nose” voters further right.
I feel a bit torn writing about this, because racism is definitely a huge problem, both in rural and urban communities. And I don’t think we should sweep racist language or behavior under the rug. Maybe the difference is between labeling an action as “racist” versus a person or group of people. It feels like most times that we’re content to sort people into one of two categories, we’re oversimplifying. I mean, if we can acknowledge that voting for Obama doesn’t automatically make someone anti-racist, can we say that a vote for Trump, likewise, doesn’t make someone a racist?
The first step to solving a problem is agreeing that it exists. For the vast majority of Americans, the pie is shrinking and living wages are harder to come by than they were two generations ago. America’s history of racism has been buoyed by an owning class that feeds this division so that the working class doesn’t point the finger their way. Instead of sneering and heckling, can we learn to listen to one another? Can we take each other’s concerns seriously?
How do you think about people who voted differently than you? Do you find yourself labeling large groups of people as this or that? How do we escape these oversimplifications? And rural folk, tell me what I’m missing in this article, I haven’t lived in Montana in a looooooong time.
BONUS MATERIALS, understanding rural life edition:
Educated by Tara Westover, memoir
Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver, novel
The Sum of Us by Heather Mcghee, nonfiction
If you have other recommendations, I’d love to hear them! Please leave a comment!
Hi, red-stater here! I was shocked to find out that “city people” sneer at places like Applebee’s and Olive Garden. Where I’m from is too small to have either one so we thought these restaurants were a special treat.
We’re easy to make fun of. I mean, we laugh at each other all the time, but it hurts coming from people who have never met us. It’s like a different kind of laughter. You probably know what I mean, being from a rural area yourself.
I appreciate the post.
An excellent book you might like is called "I Never Thought of It That Way," by Monica Guzman. It's about bridging the political divide through curiosity. She also has a podcast called A Braver Way. Monica's local to Seattle! You may have heard her on KUOW in the past--she's a journalist who used to participate in Bill Radke's Week In Review conversation.