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.
I'll be talking about how to mend the rural-urban rift in Minneapolis on Tuesday, Oct. 5, as part of the Westminster Town Hall Forum speaker series. The series theme this fall is "Healing Our House Divided."
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