Editor’s note: This piece kicks off a series of Community Voices essays related to the urban-rural divide ahead of Lisa Pruitt’s speech at the Westminster Town Hall Forum on Tuesday, Oct. 25. Want to weigh in on the discussion? You can submit a Community Voices piece (instructions here) or fill out our form asking both Greater Minnesota and Twin Cities residents to share what’s driving their votes this election.
Urban folks, it seems, have nary a good word to say about rural folks these days.
The opposite is probably true, too, though I’d hardly know because I exist largely in a media echo chamber reflective of my status as what Fox News calls a “coastal elite.” I’m a law professor at the University of California Davis, and I’ve lived more than two decades in a bright blue state, in the capital of the self-important fifth largest economy in the world.
Because of where I live, what I do, and the newspapers I read, the algorithm that decides what surfaces on my Twitter feed seems to think I need (or perhaps even want) to see hateful comments about rural Americans, because I see a lot of them. Comments like Bette Midler’s tweet last year asserting that West Virginians are “poor, illiterate, and strung out” or UC Berkeley lecturer Jackson Kernion’s tweet “unironically embrac[ing] the bashing of rural Americans” who “are bad people who have made bad life decisions.” (For the record, both later offered pseudo apologies).
Social media aside, you’ll also see plenty of assertions of rural ignorance and insularity in response to op-eds about rural America in the left-leaning media.
I cringe at such rural bashing, not least because I grew up and have deep roots in rural Arkansas, what we’ve come to think of as “red America.”
I’m thus a sort of dual national, if you will, with some built-in empathy for both rural and urban, red and blue. But while I’ve got a foot in each camp, in this age of extreme polarization when battle lines are often drawn along the rural-urban axis, I’m no longer entirely at home in either.
This alienation between my two homes isn’t new. Some denigration of rural folks tracks back to the earliest days of our republic. As Steve Berg wrote in MinnPost in 2008:
“From the Republic’s earliest days, Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton presented a town-and-country contrast, with Jefferson’s argument for agrarian virtue winning the American heart. But Hamilton’s cities prevailed in reality, overcoming the crowding, the bad sanitation and the immigrant cacophony to become the generators of American commercial and creative influence in the world.”
Berg wrote that in the context of the 2008 presidential campaign, which elicited a lot of rural bashing as Sarah Palin took on the mantle of Main Street and cast Barack Obama as the cosmopolitan Wall Street candidate. Media backlash against Palin saw New York Times columnists painting rural folks with a broad negative brush, in part because those pundits bought into Palin’s personification of the hinterlands, thus casting all of rural America as “hollow, dim, and mean” and a “rump backwater minority.” The New Republic proclaimed the obsolescence of small towns under the unfortunate headline, “Village Idiocy.”
More recently, we’ve seen a resurgence in rural bashing because Trump’s 2016 victory was widely attributed to the rural vote. This has led to renewed complaints about the Electoral College and the U.S. Senate, which give rural voters more political heft than their urban counterparts, though the imbalance is more nuanced than is typically acknowledged.
While complaints about rural states’ disproportionate power in federal politics are to some extent justified, calling rural residents derogatory names, impugning their intellects, and asserting that they vote against their own interests is counterproductive. In fact, this hateful rhetoric is getting in the way of building the sort of robust progressive coalitions that could solve the cross-cutting problems that afflict both rural and urban folks: rising inequality, soaring inflation, the shortage of affordable, habitable housing, climate change, and myriad others.
[image_caption]Lisa R. Pruitt[/image_caption]
As for how we do this – how we step back from this geographically polarized precipice so that we can listen to one another – some pragmatism arises in me, perhaps because I’m a rural kid at heart. I find myself thinking about the rural-urban rift in terms of, well, other types of relationships. Like marriage.
One of my favorite bits of marital advice asks, “Do you want to be right? Or do you want to stay married?” Sometimes, when I hear what urban folks have to say about their rural counterparts, I get the sense that they’re too interested in being right — in proving that rural folks have too much political power or that rural communities get a disproportionate share of federal and state funds, or even that rural dwellers aren’t as smart as they are. That angry one-upsmanship can cause them to lose sight of the importance of the relationship and the value in preserving it.
So, what do urban folks really want to achieve in relation to their rural neighbors? Or, as my husband asks when I am unduly combative (as lawyers sometimes are): “What’s the goal here, Lisa?” Perhaps, this is the question the metro crowd should ask when they find themselves tempted to rag on the rural. And the other way around, of course.
Because as we say in the rural south where I grew up, you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.
Lisa R. Pruitt is the Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law at the University of California Davis. Her book, “Educated Arrogance,” about what migrating from the working class to the credentialed class can teach us, will be published by W.W. Norton & Co. in 2024.
So all the blame for the rural-urban divide can be laid at the feet of urbanites. That’s a nice, tidy explanation, and one that gets repeated so often as to defy the label that it is merely “tiresome.” Seriously, if the writer knows only part of the story and admits that she doesn’t know what the rural population is saying, perhaps she shouldn’t have written this article.
I can agree with her point that rural and urban populations have many interests in common that can be addressed. Most of these common issues are, however, economic. Focusing on those issues overlooks the intense appeal culture war issues have on voters, and the demagogues they enable. Cultural issues – abortion, same-sex marriage, etc. – resonate deeply and will often override any mere economic concerns (“Don’t talk to me about raising the minimum wage. I don’t want drag queen story hours in the library!”).
How to bridge the culture gap would be a much more interesting piece.
The tribalism would be greatly reduced if rural people stopped voting against their own economic interests.
Why *wouldn’t* they want to improve rural wages?
Why *wouldn’t* they support rural internet?
Why *wouldn’t* they want to improve Highway 65?
Why *wouldn’t* they want to shift tax burdens to corporations and the wealthy elite?
Why *wouldn’t* they want a shift from relatively few mining jobs (where most of the wealth leaves the country) to the much larger pool of tourism dollars (that recirculates within the community)?
No, this point of view is just wrong. It’s optimism searching for a reality that simply doesn’t exist, and negates that a great many of us have the same rural upbringing as the distinguished professor, yet an entirely polar opposite view of the situation. I left rural America not because I harbored some ill will towards the people I grew up with, but because they HATED me and everything I believe. There isn’t some common ground I refuse to acknowledge, they exist in a different reality than that which I, and those whom I consider decent and moral people, inhabit. I want them to lose their influence because virtually every person I met or knew over the course of the 20 or so years I spent in that environment had no redeeming qualities, and existed in a perpetual state of angry self-loathing, expressed in lashing out at any they felt they could threaten and dominate without fear of reprisal. On the rare occasions I return to visit the area in which I was raised, and other rural locales for vacation or business, nothing. at. all has changed. If anything it’s only become more toxic and dangerous. Perhaps the author thinks appeasing those who desire her destruction is some moral imperative, a “high road” to demonstrate some greater level of “righteousness” than the rest of us, but I prefer survival, and will choose that which ensures it vs. my enemies, every time.
I’m sorry you experienced such a traumatic time. I also grew up in a rural area and now live in an urban area. I could never have stayed where I grew up because I definitely didn’t fit the overall culture, despite being brought up there. However, lots of people I grew up with did have plenty of redeeming qualities, so your experience is not universal. I believe your experience, though. Perhaps the difference between my experience and yours is timing (and maybe location). I do think that when I was growing up, there was a rural-urban divide, but mostly because rural folks were afraid to go to the “big cities.” I mean, even Sioux Falls scared the hell out of some of the old farmers. But not necessarily because of crime. Mostly an anticipated disorientation. Yes, there was SOME of that “city folk” disdain, but not like now. Not anywhere close. I won’t be going back to a rural area because I know I’d fit even less now because of it.
Still, you’re right Matt. This piece IS trash. I’ve lived in both worlds, and I have only recently seen disdain for rural folks showing up in our discourse. However, it is IN RESPONSE to long-term, ongoing, and open disdain from rural folks. While I still think it’s wrong to put every rural resident into the “urban haters” group, the percentage of those who aren’t is shrinking. And the hate is growing. And the political fallout is getting more extreme. Ultimately, the rural-urban divide is a political tool that works only to keep dividers in power, and it really is a one-way issue. It ain’t the city folks.
The unfortunate “politics of grievance” that Donald Trump has capitalized on shows an almost entirely rural-against-urban slant: country folk repeatedly claim that some vague “urban elite” has been bashing them unfairly for not being well-educated (not the same as being unintelligent) and for voting ignorantly on some important issues. No statewide candidate anywhere in the U.S. would utter such a thing–they all need urban and rural votes–but Trumpite candidates routinely bash city folk, just for being city folk (and thus probably people of color).
This piece pretends that there’s some equivalency, that urbanites are rhetorically unfair to rural people. The author fails to prove her case, especially since she ignores the right-wing, rural, politics of multiple grievances that portray the City, any City, as the Source[s] of All Evil and Snobbery.
Complaints about the greater power given by our system to rural voters is not the same thing as bashing those voters. No one should have their vote count for so much more political “heft,” and rural voters know that. Rural America, with its outspoken “grievances” against the cities that are the economic engines of our country, is now a ruling minority, anti-democratic to the core. That’s the problem.
What are we urbanites trying to achieve? How about equal representation and tax fairness, for a start? Urban counties are makers, rural counties are takers, yet low density rural areas have greater representation.
Then, I’d also enjoy if rural folks would focus on their own crime and poverty issues.
Why do the urban elites get the teflon treatment? There is a reason political representation is defined in our Constitution.
If you’re trying to assert that “elitism” is solely the purview of city dwellers I would suggest you never spent a good deal of time in rural America. The most stuck-up, snobbish, unabashedly arrogant people I’ve ever met were “Boss Hogg” types in small rural communities, their odious interpersonal relations only surpassed in intensity of distastefulness by their ultra-entitled offspring.
Correct on all counts, though if you think the bars are bad, you should try the churches. Had the unpleasant experience of enduring the sort of call and response hate filled bromide one might expect in a Southern Baptist revival at a funeral of all things. That was fun.
Would somebody please show us the “Teflon” Mr. Weir speaks of as applying to soft treatment of urban dwellers? We get regularly raked over coals just for living in cities, even though a gigantic majority of Americans live in cities. Our country has changed from rural to urban.
And, as for the Constitution’s built-in inequities? Way back in the 1780s there WERE reasons for giving rural areas more ballot power than their population would warrant under one-man-one-vote rules. But several of those reasons had to do with keeping slave states in the Union (same goes for the infamous Second Amendment), and even then, there was no great disparity between the value of a vote in Massachusetts versus a vote in Virginia. The U.S. was a rural country for the most part.
Now, it’s not. And it’s time our votes started counting the same, rural or urban, so that our country finally goes to majority rule. Not a rule by a few underpopulated states. And Presidents who can’t get a majority of Americans to vote for them, but get in because of the Electoral College imbalance.
She, the author starts that we have urban folks have nary a good word to say about rural folk.
Not in my experiences. Go into a bar, almost any watering hole in the cities and strike up a conversation about how dumb rural folks are. You might get a bite or even a nibble. But some folks will move away from you. Then go into a rural bar and talk about how stupid city folk are and you’ll get more than a few replies and even a spirited conversation going, and they will draw closer. My opinion is that the author is engaging in projection.
Could it be because we urban folk have tried again and again to bridge the gap to no avail?
First – a young lady hired and sent to my department from the outstate area whom when I stated in passing that some family members used the MTC to get to work had her replying that – She knew, knew that only drug addicts and criminals used the bus and that – I must not care about them if I let them ride the bus. Actually, it was much stronger language than that (You really must not give a s**t about them if you let them ride the bus.) and I eventually had to send her over to HR for counseling.
Same young lady later saw a house sales brochure that I left on my desk. It was of the Hyland Park area of St. Paul, a dream home, and after glancing at it she almost screamed out that – Why you could see into the neighbor’s houses they were so close, and what were we city folk – all a bunch of pervies! After she talked about this on and on to our other staff and they mentioned it to me, or rather complained about it to me, another visit with HR.
Second – An in-law living in the Mankato area that ranted and raved about buffer zones for farms along rivers. (Damn no-good government thinking they know it all! Confiscating land from honest hard working good farm folk for no good reason.) When it was pointed out that these rivers had phosphate levels dangerous to infants and old folks, and the buffer zones along the river reduced the run off, he did not care. Wasn’t old and his kids were much older, so it did not affect him or his kids.
When it was pointed out that Mankato’s water system needed updating anyway, – Don’t raise his taxes! Get it! DO NOT raise his taxes! Now that the state is paying for it – problem solved from his POV. At a gathering this summer he was gloating, guess now you smart city people are now gonna pay for it for us! Then added – See how clever we country folk are?
I could go on – Decades ago when I worked out in Hopkins for a firm, a rather large part of our secretarial pool (mostly answering phones) was populated by young women from a rural town west of Hopkins. Miracle of miracles, almost all of these women very soon became pregnant after they passed the then probationary period that many businesses used to have.
We had great insurance, something I and other mangers had spent some time researching. These new secretaries once a new mother would then leave employment permanently. After several years and perhaps two or three dozen babies, we got a visit by the insurance rep. They no longer wanted us as a customer, because of all these birthing costs.
The head of the secretarial area talked to the person hiring them and she confessed – the small town she came from and still lived in, she had made some changes to the insurance plan so that the birthing of babies were free under our insurance plan, and so she would hire the young women from her town. We then made the necessary changes to keep that insurance company – a modest copay – and she left in a huff. I think that was the first time I heard the words – city idiots.
Also – the correct term regarding marital advice and being right is I believe more commonly stated as – Most people who always get in the last word are either single or soon to be.
I do not hate rural folk, however after all of this over decades, I think I have had it with reasoning with them. They just do not seem to care. Honestly. They would rather cling to the three G’s.
In my experience they will take Country Smarts over a reasoned conversation any day.
Of all the response here, yours most mirrors my experience.
The difference in small talk at an up-north dive bar vs the small talk at a Mpls dive bar is spot-on.
I don’t hate the people from the up-north community where I was raised; I’m just getting apathetic to their pathetic self-owns, all to somehow “own the libs”.
I agree with most of these comments. The article is facile and shallow, and the hostility between urban and rural populations is not at all symmetrical. We in urban America don’t hate rural Americans, we just find them puzzlingly irresponsible and unaccountably hostile.
Ms. Pruitt doesn’t seem to understand that California’s rootless, confused and annoying culture and politics are distinctly different, and not typical of the rest of urban America. I grew up there, and I couldn’t wait to get out.
California has lots of agriculture but unlike the midwest (or most of the U.S.) it has hardly any history of family farms. This is for hitorical reasons. Before the U.S. took it over in the 1840’s the land had already been parcelled out in enormous tracts (ranchos). Since then, farms there have remained mostly enormous, mostly corporate and largely worked by immigrant labor and sharecroppers. They have no concept at all of the kind of small, functional agricultural community that remains in the collective memory here in flyover land. It just isn’t part of their history.
Nor do they have much history of stable working class communities. The transience, rapid growth and brutally volatile real estate markets are just too disruptive to maintain multigenerational communities. In the California suburb where I was raised, the average house was sold every 2 or 3 years, and nobody (literally) that I went to school with still lives there, despite a thriving local job market. Until I came to the midwest I had no idea what a community was, or that a city could be anything more than a giant HOA.
If the sum of Ms. Pruitt’s urban experience is the wierdly disconnected bubble milieu of a California academic community I’m not surprised that she has a distorted impression. Maybe she just needs to get out more often.