Post by Old Badger on Jun 14, 2023 23:13:47 GMT -5
North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum did not announce his bid for the GOP presidential nomination by grabbing a guitar and crooning out the chorus to John Mellencamp’s “Small Town,” but he came awfully close. “I grew up in a tiny town in North Dakota,” he says at the opening of the video meant to introduce him to voters. After touting his business success, he concludes, “A kid from small town North Dakota: That’s America.” Burgum is practicing a version of small-town identity politics. “Small-town values have guided me my entire life; small-town values are at the core of America,” he says. “And frankly, big cities could use more ideas and more values from small towns right now.”
www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/06/13/small-town-values/
www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/06/13/small-town-values/
That's how WP columnist Paul Waldman opened his piece on Tuesday. And then he launched into something I've been dying to read from some opinionator for years:
Imagine how refreshing it would be to hear a candidate touting their “big-city values” and explaining how important and useful the things they learned in the city can be...If you grow up in a city, you’ll learn to navigate a complex world. You’ll deal with people of diverse backgrounds, languages and religions — just like America. You’ll negotiate with their desires and interests, because when you’re all packed together, you have no choice. And you’ll learn to react to change...In the small town, by contrast, the slow pace of change is precisely what many people value. The rural ethos is saturated in nostalgia, the desire to hold on to or recapture the way things used to be. That nostalgia is often about simplicity, a yearning for a time when the world wasn’t so complicated, change didn’t happen so fast and you could count on life being pretty much the same for you as it was for your parents and grandparents. Which might be fine for a person to value, but it won’t help you navigate the complexities of policymaking in a dynamic nation of almost 335 million people. For that, you’d do better to cultivate big-city values.
Growing up in Northern New Jersey, with a view of the skyscrapers of Midtown Manhattan from one of my schools, and subsequently living in such medium-to large metro areas as Washington, Philadelphia, Detroit, Dayton, and Madison has equipped me to deal with all the major changes that have swept the US (indeed, most of the world) over the past 78 years: the biggest technological shift since the Industrial Revolution, modern communications systems, the rise of the global economy, the "rights revolutions" (civil rights, women's rights, LBGTQ+ rights), the sexual revolution, the decline of religious belief, modern then post-modern art movements, non-European immigration and demographic change in general, etc.
Adjustment to all of that has been predominantly an urban phenomenon, while rural America has changed far less. And this is reflected in our voting patterns. The map below shows the county-by-county vote for Biden (blue) or Trump (red). Even in "red" states you can find where the cities are most of the time if you just look for the patches of blue; and even in the "blue" states often most of the counties are red because so much of the land mass is rural. This is the modernity vs. nostalgia divide perfectly captured by the MAGA vs. anti-MAGA debate.
Walsman concludes: "Democrats are constantly asked why they aren’t doing more to “reach out” to rural and small-town voters, to approach them with open ears and respectful hearts. Nobody ever asks Republican presidential candidates to do the same with urban voters. Maybe if they did, they’d learn a thing or two about the country they aspire to govern." Bravo!
