The Rural Way
City-dwellers and suburbanites get a hard lesson in human nature, common sense, and the value of self-reliance.
Almost every
national Election Night reveals the same old red/blue map. The country
geographically is a sea of red. The coasts and small areas along the southern
border and around the Great Lakes remain blue atolls.
Yet when the maps are
recalibrated for population rather than area, the blue areas blow up, expanding
to smother half the country — a graphical metaphor for the dominant cultural
influence of city over country.
Ideological differences are now
being recalibrated as rural-urban on issues from guns and abortion to taxes and
foreign policy. Red/conservative is often synonymous with small-town and rural.
Blue/progressive is equivalent to urban/suburban.
Gone are the old New Deal
Democratic coalitions of New England and the South, or the 19th- and
mid-20th-century Republican alliances between the farm belt and the
mid-Atlantic states.
Instead, globalization has
become a worrisome force-multiplying effect of geography, culture, and ideology
— not seen since the political differences of the pre-Civil War mapped out two
potentially different Americas, north and south of the Mason-Dixon line.
On Election Night, news
analysts and talking heads matter-of-factly cite returns as if there is no need
to explain that the red areas are more rural and conservative, while the blue
cities and suburbs are more progressive. A few small adjustments are made for
Republican-run cities in mostly red Florida, Oklahoma, and Texas, and some blue
or purple rural states such as Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine that serve as
rural retirements and refuges for the nearby blue states of Massachusetts, New
Jersey, and New York.
The media figures who report on
the election are urban denizens. Few have any idea of why half the country
votes as it does. So they just assume that pollsters, like themselves, are better
educated, smarter, and of greater value to society than those whom they often
to fail to find in their surveys.
The cities since antiquity been
considered cosmopolitan and progressive; the countryside, traditional and
conservative. In the positive appraisal, Western literature always thematically
emphasized the sophistication and energy of cities, balanced by the purity and
autonomy of the country.
More darkly, in the pejorative
sense, the former of the cities were all too prone to Petronian decadence and
excess; the latter outside the walls, to Aristophanic parochialism and
rusticity. Aristotle adjudicated the divide in his Politics by arguing
that the “best” type of democracy was in a sense the least — and thus the most
rural (farmers by necessity would have less time to walk into town, loiter
about, and as “agora-lounger” busybodies cram the assembly).
Much of these eternal radical
differences transcend time and space. Even in the age of a mobile and transient
population — and our omnipresent Internet, social media, cellphones, and
telecommuting — the material landscapes, population densities, and need for
physical work still explain radical differences in outlook and mindset. That
eternal divide guided our gentry Framers. In classical terms, they took for
granted that their farms and urban lives balanced each other and remedied the
limitations of each.
That fact of the rural/urban dichotomy is underappreciated, but it remains at the heart of the Constitution — to the continuing chagrin of our globalist coastal elite who wish to wipe it out. The Electoral College and the quite antithetical makeup of the Senate and the House keep a Montana, Utah, or Wyoming from being politically neutered by California and New York. The idea, deemed outrageously “unfair” by academics and the media, is that a Wyoming rancher might have as much of a say in the direction of the country as thousands of more redundant city dwellers. Yet the classical idea of federal republicanism was to save democracy by not allowing 51 percent (of an increasingly urban population) to create laws on any given day at any given hour.
Few city dwellers realize that
half the country probably always found the increasingly hyped burlesque
half-time shows of the Super Bowl buffoonish, boring, and a time to wash
dishes, make a beer run, or shut off the television. The old network anchors
never grasped that plenty didn’t appreciate their snarky frowns and their
eye-rolling. Articles written under the masthead of the New York Times mean no
more to someone in North Dakota than posts from a blogger with a well-viewed
website.
Live in Portland, Seattle,
Washington, D.C., or New York, or watch news generated from there, and an
American might think that what BLM and Antifa wrought this summer was America’s
collective future — until one paused and thought, “Why don’t they try all that
across the small towns of Kansas or in the midsize cities of Utah or the
suburbs of Oklahoma City?” And, “Why isn’t Antifa taking hold in Tulare County,
Calif., or Arkansas?”
The Western exegeses of these
differences was often simplistic. Rural people, with or without proximity to
the frontier, had to rely more on themselves for their own defense, for
obtaining their water, for disposing their sewage, for feeding themselves. What
they did not make or grow themselves, they saw produced by others living around
them — minerals, metals, fuels, wood — to be sent into the city.
Nature for them was not
distant, not a romance, but a mercurial partner to be respected, feared, and
occasionally with difficulty brought to heel and for a while harnessed. When
you see, firsthand, wondrous life born around you, from the barn to the woods,
and rural underpopulation not overpopulation is an ancient worry, abortion is
not just a moral crime, but a tragic loss of a precious resource, a needed
voice, another ally in an eternal struggle.
From that autonomy or autarchy
came a distrust of larger government redistribution and dependence on anonymous
others. Self-sufficiency was an impossible luxury for dependent city-dwellers
in a dense Athens, Constantinople, Rome, Paris, Venice, or London, whose
sophistication, talents, and scientific knowledge came at the cost of being
entirely reliant on the extramural activities of those with less impressive
speech, appearance, and manners.
For the ancients, living in the
same place as one’s parents was not proof of parochial mediocrity (although
Jefferson thought that a farm was a refuge from failure elsewhere), but an
obligation to allow the next in line to have the same chance to live apart from
the city. And indeed, even in our increasingly urbanized world, the lessons of
vestigial agrarianism still can echo and permeate our society in the most unexpected
ways.
In our time, savior-designate
candidate Michael Bloomberg blew $1 billion without winning one delegate. He
poured $100 million into Florida and Ohio to see both states go for Trump far
more easily this year than in 2016.
Bloomberg could ridiculously
lecture an audience of Oxford sophisticates that farming was just a simplistic
matter of dropping a seed in the ground and watching it sprout automatically
(“You dig a hole, you put a seed in, you put dirt on top, add water, up comes
the corn”) — without being laughed out of the lecture hall as a dunce. Imagine
if a farmer had said of stocks, “You just make a call, place your buy, and up
comes the dividend.”
In other words, Bloomberg was a
man unaware of his own limitations. The ability to navigate Wall Street, or the
financial markets of communist China, or A-list dinners, or the New
York–Washington media, or to be courted by Aspen and Davos did not mean that he
had any appreciation for the tenuousness of his own existence, that all his
billions could not guarantee him water, food, or sewage removal during a COVID
lockdown, or that in extremis he could secure his family without the NYPD. Had
Bloomberg in 2010 just taken care of the snow first, and fatty foods and
super-sized drinks second, he might have avoided the disastrous effects of the
blizzard that paralyzed New York.
We can see this incidental
dichotomy between pragmatism and accepted authority almost everywhere today. In
the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court confirmation hearings, crusty old farmer emeritus
Chuck Grassley drew on common sense and a knowledge of human nature; urban
sophisticate Dianne Feinstein, on ideology and current fad. Missouri’s Josh
Hawley recently sliced and diced the masters of the Silicon Valley Universe,
because he was able to reduce all their arguments from authority and esoterica
about social media into the pragmatic: These billionaire modulators of
influence had no defense of their own power to adjudicate the free expression
of millions of Americans. Read dairy farmer Devin Nunes’s final memo concerning
the Russian collusion hoax and compare it to that of his counterpart Adam
Schiff. The former is blunt, truthful, and logical; the latter rhetoric is a
dishonest mess masquerading as an exposé.
In other words, there is still
much value in vestigial Americans countering the increasing legions of
apartment-living, densely packed, and mass-transit-community urban dwellers, as
we saw during the COVID epidemic and subsequent quarantine. A Governor Noem of
South Dakota, despite a media hit campaign, radiated steady and consistent
confidence in her own people, Andrew Cuomo and Bill de Blasio were a maze of
contradictions and policy incoherence, as their yesterday’s gospel became
tomorrow’s heresy.
A balance between real and
urban, Homo rusticus and urbanus is, of
course, needed. But in our currently globalized and bifurcated society, the
influence and power of our coasts have vastly overshadowed those of the
interior. We have measured worth by money, credentials, and titles and inordinately
been awed by the veneer of cosmopolitanism that surrounds them. Losers never
learned to code, winners thought mere coding was quaint. Welding and plumbing
were drudgery; a barista with $100,000 in debt from her women’s-studies major
was considered the next angry Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Few pondered whether a
good welder might make a far better congressman than an indebted sociology
graduate, angry that the word had not appreciated his singular college-branded
degree.
So much of the absurdity of the
modern world relates to a culture entirely divorced from the commonsense audits
of 2,500 years of rural pragmatism. Antifa is the ultimate expression of tens
of thousands of urban youth, many deeply in college debt, many with degrees but
little learning — and oblivious of how they are completely dependent on what
they despise, from the police to those who truck in their food and take out
their waste, to those who make and sell them their riot appurtenances and
communications gadgetry.
Listen to the automaton Mark
Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey masquerading as a bewildered Robinson Crusoe, and one
shudders that elites like these massage what millions think and how we
communicate. The current fear is not just that America is becoming an urbanized
and suburbanized nation — in the manner that many of the Founders feared would
make our nation a European replicant. Rather, what is strange is that so many
who are not rural are becoming fearful of their cannibalistic own, and what
they have in store for the suburbs and cities — and thus are becoming desperate
either to graft the values of the countryside onto the urban sprawl or leave
the latter altogether.
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON is a
classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and
the author of THE
SECOND WORLD WARS: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and
Won.
Source: https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/11/the-rural-way/
