Quick and Dirty: An explanation of Blue Urban and Red Rural

L'état c'est moi

Day Six:   A week without mentioning You-Know, a week without reference to the man who is the center of gravity, heat, and light in American politics.  The one whose influence makes everyone adjust and react.   The Sun King.  Our Sun King.   

French King Louis 14th was called Louis the Great, or the Sun King.    "I am the nation," he said.  The power came from his role--King--but also because he asserted it.  The forces of constitutionalism, of checks and balances, of multiple and diverse sources of power, were not yet in place--or were in place, but did not push back.



A quick observation about urban and rural.  Some things are so obvious they are easy to overlook.

1896:  That was then.

The map of red and blue counties is startling.   I have seen examples of it dozens of time used to make the point that America is Republican.  Look, there's so much red.  The map shows the R-D vote by county, so a more careful understanding of the map is that rural America votes Republican, urban America votes Democratic.

It has not always been that way.  In the time of McKinley vs. William Jennings Bryon the voters in manufacturing states were Republican and southerners and other rural people were Democrats.

It is different now.   This is the county by county map of the 2016 election:

2016 Election, by County

City thinking/rural thinking.   I have lived in cities, but I own a farm.  There is a difference between city thinking and rural thinking, and the policies of each political party align with a point of view.

Cities put people in close proximity to one another.  If your neighbor swings a bat or plays loud music it effects your life.  In rural areas your neighbor--and you--have more elbow room and can swing a bat or make noise with less effect on others.   It is over-simple, but true:  city people tolerate regulations because they need them while rural people value freedom from regulation more.  (Democrats are aligned with environmental and labor regulations; Republicans stand up and cheer at their removal.)

Urban people need shared services including mass transit, water and sewerage systems, police systems, and they have the wealth to support high culture like symphony orchestras and universities.  Rural people are more self reliant with their own wells and septic tanks, county sheriff patrols rather than city police, and if they required living near a symphony hall they would move into town, not live outside one.  (Democrats are aligned with governmental systems, Republicans cheer "small government.")

Urban people are confronted with diversity in workplace and shared systems.  Rural people are more homogenous.  (Democrats, especially as Hillary Clinton defined the coalition, emphasized inclusion.  Republicans have become the party of traditional demographics and cultural symbols.)

Urban people live primarily indoors and they receive goods which have messy externalities. Rural people more likely earn their livings outdoors and they produce things with messy externalities.  Beef is raised on farms that have smells, trees are cut down leaving slash and stumps, energy is drilled with heavy equipment and methane leaks--all of which happens in rural areas.  It is delivered to urban supermarkets in cellophane wrapped packages, as bound stacks of plywood, and as gasoline at a pump.  Urban people don't confront the costs and reality of externalities, so they want to reduce or eliminate them, while rural people producing those goods consider their expectations unrealistic, and therefore resent them.  (Democrats want to regulate negative externalities; Republicans campaign against those externalities.)

Urban people tend to see guns as a threat.  Rural people tend to see them as a way to protect against threats.  Urban people have police close at hand while rural people do not, so they are more inclined to self-help.   (Democrats, especially Hillary Clinton after Sandy Hook murders, present themselves as the gun-regulation party; Republicans present themselves as the gun-freedom party.)

That's it.  You don't need a Ph.D. in political science or psychology.  You just need to have paid attention to the difference between city thinking and rural thinking.   KISS: Keep it simple, stupid.

Solution for a Democratic candidate for president or a rural congressional district:  complicate and interrupt the partisan lineup.   Subtle nuanced details will not suffice.  Hillary Clinton repeatedly asserted that she only wanted to regulate guns with background checks for felons and people with documented mental disease.  Details did not matter.  She was perceived as anti-gun because she said bad things about guns.   

1.  Openly and boldly say that guns are a reality in rural areas.  Say the 2nd Amendment is in the constitution, period.  Say that people who want to kill mass numbers of people can do a better job of it with a car or truck than with a gun.  You do not have to praise guns but you need to observe that your respect the reality of them.  (This will shock some people and give the candidate some news coverage as a "new kind of Democrat."  Good.)

Rural and Urban.   Foreground farmland, industrial White City and Medford in background

2.  Say that you think timber cutting is a darned good thing.  We have suppressed fires and therefore caused a grave problem.  Plus wood is a renewable resource.  (Environmentalists will protest the word "harvest" and some will support your Democratic primary opponent.  Good.  You will get some news coverage for that, too.   You would be positioned as a "realistic Democrat."  In fact, people who live and work surrounded by conifers consider them a resource, not a tree museum.  Let the environmentalists who live in adobe houses cast the first stone.)

3. Say you respect the right to farm.  Everyone says they agree with this, but you can make it a clear point of advocacy for recognition of the reality of externalities.  I live downwind from a cattle ranch.  Corn silage stinks--worse than cow manure, which also stinks.  There you have it--an inevitable externality of eating beef.  Say you understand this and support the farmer, when grown on EFU lands.  

Note that one does not need to be a rural resident to make these points.  A city person can do it.  Indeed, a city person may be able to be a more aggressive defender of rural values than a rural person because it would appear less to be an attack on people who live "in town", because you yourself do so.  What is important is the tone: it is OK to express the notion that you, too, resent city people who don't understand rural reality.