One thing the last several elections in the US have revealed is the stark contrast between the way city folk vote and rural folk vote. Cities vote blue. Rural areas vote red. Places with a lot of people vote blue. Places with hardly any people vote red. What’s going on?
Let’s take a look at a few observations about city life and country life to give us some insight.
Worldwide, more people live in cities now than in rural areas. It was a mere 15 years ago that the global population tipped from mostly rural to mostly urban. There’s no universal definition of what constitutes a city, but whatever they are, more people live in them now than ever before. The UN estimates that by 2050, 70% of the world’s population will live in cities.
The US has passed that percentage already if you accept the US definition of rural. In the US, you’ve stopped being rural once you’ve got more than 2,500 people in your town. By that measure, a little less than 20% of Americans supposedly live in rural areas these days. 80% don’t.
The US constitution deliberately tips the scales toward rural voters via the Electoral College and the Senate. People who don’t live near very many other people are over-represented in the US system and people who live near lots of other people are under-represented. One effect of that lately has been a fairly consistent thwarting of the desires of the majority.
It’s not just when the US president doesn’t win the popular vote (which didn’t happen in the last national election), it’s that American elected representatives are not governing in accordance with the desires a majority of Americans express when polled on various issues. Not surprisingly therefore, large portions of the American electorate have been in a pretty bad mood for a pretty long time.
But the people in a bad mood are not just under-represented people in cities. Rural folk have been majorly pissed for a long time too.
So again – what’s going on?
Traditionally, around the world, people in rural areas tend to be more conservative than people in cities. Traditionally also, cities concentrate wealth and power. People in cities vote blue because Democrats have become the party of the economic status quo, a status quo that has served the people in cities pretty well. People in large-ish American cities are wealthy compared to people in less densely populated areas.
Rural Americans have figured out, for various reasons, that cities are where the wealth and power is, and they have been trying to wrest both away from city dwellers. As you can imagine, city dwellers are not thrilled with this.
The propensity of red rural folks to vote for Republicans has in no way tilted the playing field of wealth and power from the cities to the rural areas. If anything it has increased the disparities. This is partly because people in rural America have a deeply-rooted historical tradition of voting to keep themselves as poor as possible given the fact that they live in the richest country on earth.
The reason the Republicans have courted rural voters and their propensity to vote for poverty is because the poverty of the masses increases the wealth and power of those at the very top – the billionaire capitalist class. Thanks to education, opportunity, and ambition, Democrats in cities make good money in spite of the billionaire class. Rural Americans don’t.
Republicans have, in effect, marshaled a coalition of two groups who like to keep ordinary Americans poor – billionaires and rural or small-town Americans. It’s worked out all right for Republicans, in spite of the fact that many (if not most) of their voters are seething with hatred toward all kinds of things – including Republicans.
Interestingly enough, during and after the pandemic, comparatively wealthy city dwellers started high-tailing it to more rural areas. The wealthy are in effect voluntarily un-concentrating themselves a bit and spreading themselves throughout the country. This of course will make rural folk even poorer as the influx of city money will help price them out of their own small towns. It also opens up the unlikely possibility that the concentration of wealth and power in the US will accidentally stray from the coasts and high population density areas to a greater swath of annoying enclaves of wealth, privilege and excess throughout the country, including unlikely places like Alabama.
So why are city people doing okay in Bad Mood America and how are rural people not doing okay? We’ll start with some characteristics of cities.
Cities tend to do okay over the long term because they often have the resilience of diversity and a large population base. New York City, for example, has Wall Street, fashion, publishing, higher education, high-end retail, healthcare and media companies concentrated there. One sector hits hard times, others don’t. A million people could leave in a year and 7 million would still be left. And boatloads (or busloads) of folks would come in to replace them. Three years after the pandemic fucked it up big time and New York City is back to pre-pandemic levels.
Now admittedly, cities that become overly dependent on a single industry, like Detroit and the auto industry, can get knee-capped pretty bad. And cities without good housing options in their cores can see a lot of attrition. San Francisco has been suffering post-pandemic from a combination of unaffordable housing and over-reliance on tech.
But San Francisco suffering means a population loss on the order of 1 or maybe 2 percent. When a rural area goes belly up due to lack of opportunity, it often goes belly up for good. Rural areas can and do get hollowed out. There’s not enough population or economic diversity to weather a serious downturn.
Contrast the fate of many a small town or village across with the world with a city like Alexandria, Egypt. It’s not the center of the civilized world like it once was but it is still a big city and it has survived for literally millennia. Thousands of years.
Cities also attract the educated and educate their residents in the ways of the wider world. This also increases the resilience of cities because educated citizenry tend to have the skills and flexibility to adapt to changing economic conditions. Wall Street jobs getting scarce? How about a job in new media? Or green technology? And so on.
Cities also tend to attract the young and the ambitious. If you want to change society, you go to where the people are. If you want a better job, you go to a city, where there are more opportunities. If you want to learn from the world-renowned, you go to the cities where they live. If you want to prove yourself, you go to the cities where you can test your mettle. If you want to become wealthy, you go to where the wealth is. Not to even mention the shopping and dining opportunities that cities present their residents.
To put it another way, cities concentrate wealth and power because people who value wealth and power want to live in them.
Cities by their nature also accidentally encourage empathy. They encourage it by exposing people who live in them to people of different backgrounds and cultures. People in cities encounter diversity, whether they like it or not. They can see that others in their city have needs that differ from theirs. They are become aware of the emotions and differing circumstances of strangers, and they have to learn how to manage that.
It’s probably possible for a city-dweller to live in a bubble that protects them from exposure to conflicting perspectives – but it’s not likely. City dwellers have to learn how to calm situations that could become volatile and unpredictable. They have to deal with the stress of being around many, many people. They have to learn how to do this just to get around their city.
People who live in cities come to expect change – and dynamism and activity and opportunity, big fresh horizons and novelty. They expect stimulation and for stuff to be happening. And stress. City people tend to be more tolerant of certain environmental stressors because they have learned to adapt to noise and crowds and pollution and the possibility of crime. City dwellers have to figure out how to deal with things like the existence of Skid Row or slums. Even city birds are more stress-adapted than rural birds!
So if cities are where the money and excitement and opportunity are – why do people live in rural areas? What are the advantages of rural areas?
Well, first we have to acknowledge that, given a choice, the majority of people (as confirmed by statistics) don’t choose to live in rural areas. But those that do can and do point to certain perceived advantages. Such as:
Rural Advantages
Lower perceived crime rate. Unfortunately, gangs can and do infiltrate small towns and illicit drug use is a problem everywhere. Including and sometimes especially in small towns. But a low population density area can go years without a murder. Although most areas of most large cities in the US are not at all lawless, no large city in the US can go for years without a murder.
Less perceived pollution and stress. Farming is actually a fairly polluting, toxic, and stressful occupation. But not everyone in rural areas farms (or ranches) and the pollution and stress are qualitatively different. The stress of not being around people is considerably different than the stress of being around too many people and too much noise and light and sensory stimulation.
Less perceived income inequality. It’s not that there isn’t income inequality in low population density areas. There is. There can be a big gap in power between one group and another. But the majority of people in a rural area are not on the high end of the scale and therefore, paradoxically, don’t have the stress and anxiety that city people who see homeless encampments do. Everyone in a rural area, even the powerful, has to put up with the realities of life in the middle of nowhere. Which means the contrasts between one group and another are not so great. City people, on the other hand, witness tremendous contrasts between insanely excessive wealth and abject poverty – sometimes on the same daily commute.
Different values. Here’s where the rubber hits the road. Rural folk who stay rural by choice often simply do not value the same things that city folk. They vote for poverty because they do not value wealth.
This concept is utterly incomprehensible to city folk. Blue voters often wonder why red voters so often vote against their own economic interests. They shake their heads in disbelief. It’s because red voters don’t value their own economic interests.
Wait, what?! What!? What?! Everyone is supposed to value their own economic interests. Not valuing your own economic interests is literally against the laws of economics. Still, voters in both parties often don’t value their own economic interests above other things that are very important to them. Rural voters vote for the things that are their top priorities.
What are those things?
Well, according to conventional wisdom those things are: grit, self-reliance, conservatism, religion, work, insularity (distrust of outsiders), and fatalism.
Rural Values
Grit. As far as grit goes, city dwellers have plenty of it by necessity. City living provides lots of challenges and city dwellers have to learn to navigate them. But country dwellers, being closer to the land than to gobs of other people, have a specialized type of dealing-with-the-natural-world grit.
Self-reliance. Rural folk aren’t any more self-reliant than city folk and they don’t venerate it any more than city dwellers do – in spite of the conventional wisdom. In fact, one of the attractions of rural life is that rural people rely on each other – especially during occasions when that dealing-with-the-natural-world grit is called for. Or when disasters or family tragedies strike.
What rural people mean by self-reliance though is part of the key to understanding their values and worldview. Rural people rely on people they already know. City people rely on people they don’t already know. A city person gets on the bus and relies on the bus driver to get her safely to work. The bus driver is a stranger.
Rural people don’t do that – rely on strangers. Or institutions or infrastructure or the fruits of massive projects of cooperative labor. Rural people rely on the relatively small circle of people they already know. Not being hemmed in by large numbers of people and ideas and rules and projects and ambitions and other elements of bigness – that feels like freedom to rural people. Not having to get along with people they don’t know feels like liberty to rural people.
Going to their own church, ignoring all its supposed precepts in their daily life, and not having to get along with a bunch of people who don’t go to that church feels like liberty. Not being ‘beholden’ to anyone else feels like liberty. Not feeling obligated by law or conscience to anyone else feels like liberty. The essence of liberty involves not having to get along with and cooperate with a bunch of other people because necessity demands it. If a rural person liked other people all that much – they’d live where there were more of them!
In this context, it is fairly easy to see why rural and small-town voters might vote for non-cooperative people. Again, this is mind-boggling to city residents who cooperate with each other without even thinking about it.
Conservatism. Around the world, rural people are poorer and more conservative than urban people. Being poorer goes along with the stingy don’t-spend-money element of political conservatism. Wealthy people spend money to make money because they value wealth and money and what it brings! Poor people tend to be stingy by habit, necessity, training and outlook. They don’t have the money to spend to make more money. They’re not looking to get rich. They’re not looking to experience affluence. They’re looking to make do.
Resistance to Change
The other element of conservatism, around the world, is resistance to change, or an orientation toward the past. Rural people value stability, continuity, and staying put. If they didn’t value staying put, they wouldn’t have stayed put!
In this context, the appeal of Trump and similar Republicans lies precisely in the resistance to change. If immigrants mean change, then a rural person doesn’t want to deal with them. Especially if they mean that things will be more crowded and there will be more people to deal with and things will cost more money!
If transgender stuff means things will change, a rural person doesn’t want to deal with it. A rural person has enough to deal with, enough to think about, and no they don’t have the mental or emotional bandwidth to be worrying about pronouns or being generous to people who are different. Go away! Shut up! Leave the rural people alone! It’s all too much to deal with. Can’t you see that they are already very very busy being poor! What about that is so hard to understand?!
But which is better? Are city folk or rural folk healthier mentally and physically?
THEY’RE EXACTLY THE SAME.
(Forrest LN, Waschbusch DA, Pearl AM, Bixler EO, Sinoway LI, Kraschnewski JL, Liao D, Saunders EFH. Urban vs. rural differences in psychiatric diagnoses, symptom severity, and functioning in a psychiatric sample. PLoS One. 2023 Oct 5;18(10):e0286366. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0286366. PMID: 37796886; PMCID: PMC10553337.)
No! That’s not fair. Whichever you like better should definitely be better. Clearly [your group here] is definitely better. All the stuff above proved it.
Nope.
City people and rural people have exactly the same mental health problems in exactly the same proportions. Rural people may be ever so slightly more likely to take action on their suicidal thoughts. But just barely.
City people aren’t any more crazy than rural people. Or more disturbed. Poor rural people aren’t any more alcoholic or drug-addicted than city people. Neither group wallows in despair any more than the other one does. They have the same kinds of traumas at the same rates. People are people. People in the two different environments may prefer different things but they’re still just people.
People in cities may have to get along with a lot of strangers. People in rural environments have to get along with their families, neighbors, and people in their church. Both tasks are complicated and stressful. Just because you prefer one or the other doesn’t mean it’s easier. Or harder.
As for physical health – well that’s where rural people do get the short end of the stick.
They die more often and younger. Mostly this is because they don’t have access to health care. They don’t have insurance or nearby hospitals and providers. They’re not near places that can offer specialty care. They have more disability and chronic disease.
And they don’t like this. A lot of them live in red states that have refused to expand access to Medicaid since the Affordable Care Act was passed in 2010. They don’t like that either. Two-thirds of these residents want their states to expand Medicaid. But their representatives won’t.
Why? Well, remember that Republicans are pro-poverty and I guess Medicaid might somehow or another mitigate some of that poverty. Can’t have that!
The red state residents don’t look at it that way. They look at it as health insurance. And being able to have a doctor.
But as noted before, American politicians are NOT doing what the people in America want them to do. So good luck with that rural Americans! Maybe you should vote blue in your state elections. Blue states may or may not do a whole lot right, but at least they do that. And for all I know, next time you get a chance, you will vote blue.
Peace out.
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