From an interesting article by Victor Davis Hanson. (Warning: It is to be found at City Journal, and there is a paywall.)
Quote:
The nation’s urbanites increasingly govern those living in the hinterlands, even as vanishing rural Americans still feed and fuel the nation. At the nation’s birth, it took nine farmers to feed one city dweller. Today, one farmer supports 99 urbanites—evidence, supposedly, that almost everyone has been freed from the drudgery of agricultural work.
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The urban draw seems counterintuitive, given the spread of high-speed Internet and smartphones that offer everyone the same access to global culture, whether sitting on a tractor in Mendota or finding a space in the Yahoo parking lot. But the attractions of urbanization are not always strictly logical. Having a zip code in Silicon Valley and living in a 600-square-foot studio apartment apparently are preferable to enjoying a 3,000-square-foot, spacious ranch home five miles outside Bakersfield. One cannot put a price on popular culture—sit-coms, hip-hop, blogging, nightclubbing—and its message of being and staying cool. Wanting to live out what’s dramatized hourly on computer and television screens is a powerful inducement.
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This trend of an America becoming more urban, more uniform, and more liberal, at least in presidential races, can best be appreciated by looking at election maps broken down by county, rather than by state. At first glance, the United States appears as a sea of red, excepting the rather geographically small (but demographically huge) areas along the Eastern and Western coasts, a few big cities around the Great Lakes, the Southern and Mississippi River urban clusters, and a few others in Colorado and New Mexico. Yet when the maps are enhanced not just by county election results but also by population density, the resulting cartogram reflects blue balloons expanding over shrinking red space. What’s happening in California—a rather narrow but densely populated blue coastal corridor adjacent to a far larger but emptier red interior—is happening to the nation at large.
But what, exactly, causes city and country people to become so opposite politically, culturally, and socially?
Rural living historically has encouraged independence—and it still does, even in the globalized and wired twenty-first century. Other people aren’t always around to ensure that water gets delivered (and drained), sewage disappears, and snow is removed. For the vast majority of Americans, these and other concerns are the jobs of government bureaucracy and its unionized public workforce. Not so in rural areas, where autonomy and autarky—not narrow specialization—are necessary and fueled by an understanding that machines and tools must be mastered to keep nature in its proper place. Such constant preparedness nurtures skeptical views about the role and size of government, in which the good citizen is defined as someone who can take care of himself.
Note how the urban ideal tends to be just the opposite. Looking to cement his lead among urban unmarried women during his 2012 reelection campaign, Barack Obama ran an interactive web ad, “The Life of Julia.” Its dependency narrative defined the life of an everywoman character as one of cradle-to-grave government reliance—a desirable thing. Julia is proudly and perennially a ward of the state. She can get through school only thanks to Head Start and federally backed student loans. Only the Small Business Administration and the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act enable her to find work. Though unmarried, Julia has one child—but no health-care worries, thanks to Obamacare. And in her retirement years, only Social Security and Medicare allow her security, comfort, and the time and wherewithal to volunteer for a communal urban garden, apparently a hobby rather than a critical food source. The subtext of Obama’s message was the assumption of a demographically shrinking, urbanized country, where liberated women find parity only through government dependence. The president was not appealing, as some of his predecessors did, to a confident young married woman who, along with her husband, was struggling to make a family business in farm equipment while raising four kids and saving to build a ranch house on three acres.
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The cursus honorum of the elite that runs the country in politics, finance, journalism, and academia is urban to the core—degrees from brand-name universities, internships at well-connected agencies, residence in New York or Washington, power marriages. The power résumé does not include mechanical apprenticeships, work on ships or oil rigs, knowledge of firearms, or farm, logging, or mining labor—jobs now regulated and overseen by those with little experience of them.
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Urbanites now prefer natural granite counters to tile, wood floors to nylon carpets, and stainless-steel appliances to artificial white enamels. But these supposedly natural tastes don’t lead to a greater appreciation of the miner, the logger, or the fabricator—much less of the abstract idea that before there exists a polished floor or counter in the city, lots of messy operations are needed to force nature to give up its bounty. Like bored Hellenistic court poets who romanticized shepherds’ lives in never-visited Arcadia, Silicon Valley techies like to wear heavy-duty hiking boots and flannel and drive four-wheel-drive SUVs with mud tires. The cause of the delta smelt or the San Joaquin Valley salmon fills a spiritual need for the Sierra Club activist; the livelihood of the Hispanic grape pruner in Caruthers and the poor children of the field irrigator in Five Points do not.
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How did the new Californians deal with the drought? Not as in the past. Water projects like the huge Temperance Flat reservoir on the San Joaquin River were canceled. Millions of acre-feet of precious stored water were released out of rivers as urban environmentalists hoped to increase the population of three-inch delta smelt and to restore nineteenth-century salmon to the upper San Joaquin River. Despite millions of acre-feet of released water, both fish projects have so far failed.
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The twenty-first century may at last see the end of a venerable consensus that rural citizens prizing liberty and freedom provide a necessary audit on the democracy of urbanites who prefer uniformity and demand equality at all costs. We have left for good the world of Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower and entered the age of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump—and likely with worse to come.
Comment:
“Wanting to live out what’s dramatized hourly on computer and television screens is a powerful inducement.” What predominates in screen entertainment fiction? Murder, massacre, torture, terror, silly fairytales, sex, car chases in impossibly empty cities such as New York and San Francisco, one-man-kills-hundreds-of-crooks. Who buries all those corpses? What do people say of the dead monsters? Does all that really reflect life - urban or rural - in America? Are the women really all alike, the men too according to their roles - stock puppets? Where is character, thought, anxiety, struggle to live, despair, boredom, perseverance?
The last sentence of the article is deeply disturbing. Worse coming? Worse than a Trump age? We are expecting it to be good.