That's sorta the thesis of David Fontana's piece in the Washington Post Magazine this summer, "America's Hidden Crisis of Power and Place," though he draws the line between rural and urban less than the line between sorta' important urban places and all other places. Fontana writes here about Plattsburgh, New York, where grew up:
The North Country is more rural, and less diverse, than much of the United States. But it is emblematic of one of the most disconcerting, least-discussed aspects of our national political life: America is experiencing a political crisis rooted partly in the concept of place. Our political elite in both parties are disproportionately connected to a few neighborhoods in a few metropolitan areas that are distant and different from the places they are supposed to understand and govern. For too many of these people, the road to political influence involves effectively defecting from the places they know to the places where there are people it is important to know. That leaves many places in our country governed by strangers rather than neighbors—with disastrous consequences for American democracy.
His illustration of this phenomenon: Elise Stefanik, congresswoman for that district, who grew up in nearby Albany but made her name in Boston (where she attended Harvard University) and Washington. This is in contrast to her predecessor, a Democrat, who raised his children in the north country, where he lived for 30 years. So, in a sense, this is a story of rural brain drain--of going to the city not only to make one's fortune, but to get the credentials the wider world will respect. In Stefanik's case, coming home with those credentials gave her a certain credibility--both "at home" in rural New York to get elected, but also back in Washington, DC, as a congresswoman.
The phenomenon Fontana is grappling with and his use of Stefanik's association with Harvard to illustrate it reminds me of this from Marilynne Robinson, Pulitzer Prize winning novelist, in which she criticized the press for "speaking of elite universities as if there are only a dozen or so institutions in the country where an excellent education can be had." She continued, "there are literally hundreds of colleges and universities in this country that educate richly and ambitiously. Many of the latest of them are public, a word that now carries the suggestion that the thing described is down-market, a little deficient in quality."
So, how do we see congresspersons who have "just" state school credentials? Also, are they sometimes seen more favorably by rural and quasi-rural constituents? These same questions could be asked of Tom Cotton, Harvard educated U.S. Senator from Arkansas. I've often wondered why his Harvard credentials don't hurt him in a state that is increasingly anti-university, expressing antipathy to higher education.
Returning to Fontana's focus on place, he continues:
The power of place persists in politics as well. Yes, people are heavily influenced by political and media figures they do not know — from cable pundits to Donald Trump. But people’s political engagement is shaped in important ways by those they know. Many studies have demonstrated that hearing our neighbors have voted or want us to vote increases the likelihood that we will turn out to vote. In the survey Hunt and I conducted, 63 percent of students reported that most of the people they talked to most frequently about politics live close to them.
This whole piece is worth a read in its entirety. It relates to a bigger scholarly project of his, which I heard about recently at the Law and Rurality workshop hosted by the University of Nebraska College of Law. It also helps explain rural disillusionment from urban centers of power, whether within a state or within the nation more broadly.
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