This article, written for the University of Richmond Law Review’s 2022-2023 symposium, 'Overlooked America: Addressing Legal Issues Facing the Rural United States', considers and complicates the increasingly hostile sociopolitical relationship between urban and rural America. Our focus is on what we call rural bashing, the harsh and even dehumanizing way that some metropolitan and coastal folks increasingly speak about their rural and 'flyover' counterparts.
We identify and assess three threads associated with the phenomenon. The first is a narrative about our representative democracy that assumes rural people have too much power because of the structure of the U.S. Senate and the Electoral College. The second is that, partly as a consequence of those political structures, rural people and their communities get more than their fair share from federal government coffers, sometimes characterized as 'rural subsidies'. The third thread—and the harshest, most bare-knuckled rural bashing—mingles with these first two: a culture of annoyance, even disdain, that metropolitan dwellers direct at rural people, their cultural trappings, and their intelligence. We pull these threads from common talking points shared by news outlets, pundits, and social media users. After illustrating the rural bashing phenomenon, we challenge the veracity of some aspects of the rhetoric, while also demonstrating the damage it does.
We focus on two recent periods of acute rural bashing. The first arose during the 2008 presidential election and its aftermath, when Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin took on the mantle of small-town America. Because the mainstream media often criticized Palin in relation to her rural roots, rural people and places became collateral damage of the harsh and highly personal critiques. We then look at rural bashing during the 2016 presidential cycle and its aftermath, when the phenomenon exploded in the robust social media landscape of the Trump era, prompted by widespread attribution of Trump’s win to rural voters.
We next debunk the myths associated with narratives of undue rural power by showing that neither rural electoral heft nor government largesse in rural places is as simple or straight forward as most commentators imply. We further argue that, in some contexts, subsidies are appropriate because the market will not meet the minimal needs of rural residents. Broadband is the most obvious example of this, and we argue that it is indispensable in the early 21st century in the way rural electrification was in the last. Convincing urban folks that rural folks are worth these investments likely depends on an understanding that rural and urban are interdependent. Urban folks want—even need—what rural people and places provide, e.g., food, fuel, fiber, military recruits, recreation.
We close with a discussion of some other reasons rural bashing matters. Among these is empirical research showing that rural folks are paying attention to the negative depictions and are deeply resentful of them. Indeed, this widespread disdain, attributed to the left, is influencing rural voting habits. We emphasize that the practice is counterproductive, especially if the goal is building broad coalitions that can solve cross-cutting problems that undermine wellbeing along the rural-urban continuum. A better strategy is to drop the condescension and have respectful conversations based on shared definitions, e.g., what constitutes a rural subsidy, and an understanding of the mutual dependence and shared concerns of rural and urban.
Klein and I toyed with several titles and subtitles in lieu of or in addition to "rural bashing," and the title of this article may yet change. Here are some alternatives we considered:
Rural Bashing: Debunking Rural Myths, Building Broader Coalitions, and Saving our Democracy
Putting an End to Rural Bashing? How to Debunk Rural Myths, Build Broader Coalitions, and Save our Democracy
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