What you can learn in a small town (according to a Brooklyn hipster)

Sam Kahn recently wrote for Persuasion (and his own Substack) about what he, as a documentary filmmaker living in Brooklyn, learned when he visited small towns/the flyover states. The headline is, "A Reckoning is Coming for the Democrats." Here's an excerpt:

I always felt a lot wiser every time I returned to my Brooklyn coffee shop or neighborhood bookstore; I always felt like I wanted to start getting into arguments with everyone around me. It wasn’t that my politics were so different from my coastal brethren, but after even a few days in Decatur or Lubbock or Clovis or wherever I was, it would be clear to me that there was a great deal about the country that liberals and progressives—however well-intentioned they might be—were just missing.

Politics would almost never come up on these shoots, but it would just be screamingly obvious that the people I talked to would have had no chance of voting Democratic. The cultural markers were all off. People liked to drive and to shoot. People liked their chain stores. People hated the feeling of being scolded, which was above all what they associated with the Dems. On one of the very first shoots I ever did, a rancher in Clovis, New Mexico, told me, “People like to have a real independent lifestyle around here” shortly before he urinated right off of the bed of his truck. But that general attitude could have stood in for just about any of the shoots I did. People were friendly and interesting, they were eager to form cultural bridges—those same ranchers really wanted to let me know that they knew every word of Lynyrd Skynyrd and Rolling Stones songs, maybe thinking that I assumed they listened to Gene Autry or something—but I strongly felt myself having to shed anything “Democratic,” anything “liberal,” in order to fit in.

In the places I was visiting, the Democratic Party meant, above all, taxes. It really wasn’t much more complicated than that.

* * * 

In the coastal enclaves where I lived, being an “environmentalist” was something like a candidacy for sainthood, but in the places where I was shooting it was a dirty word—and the environmental advocacy organizations seemed really to not get that.

* * * 

And strike three was wokeism. 

There's more to the essay, of course, including an expansion on what the author means by wokeism, which references racial issues, among others.

Returning to the theme of the headline, the author concludes that, "at the national level, [Democrats] seemed to have lost all ability to communicate simply and clearly to hinterland voters."

Don't miss the essay in its entirety here.