A very interesting panel op-ed in today’s New York Times on the rural-urban divide pervading our politics and why Trump appeals to “rural” voters despite being from our largest city. I’ve been meditating more on the rural-urban divide because it’s been coming into starker relief for me lately, not just in the US, but in Puerto Rico, in Europe, in Japan, as I watch and read across media channels. As the commentators note, this “rural” ideal is a nostalgic fantasy (cottage-core gone wild), rather than a reality. I would call it “rural-adjacent” rather than “rural,” because many of the people to whom this fantasy appeals are not living the rural lifestyle with all of its hardships, but are one or two generations away from it (that includes myself). These are the people in small city America driving freshly washed Ford F-150 King Cabs to their office jobs because a pickup truck signifies a certain kind of in-group belonging as well as a certain amount of economic status. (“I may be a dentist but my folks are folks and I have a hunting estate where I my truck does truck-things on weekends.”)
We are seeing this heightened struggle and backlash against modernity because we are at the tail end of a century of wrenching away from rural life that has resulted in the well-known hollowing out of rural towns and farms and their lifestyle. To be sure, much of this urbanization has been for good, particularly in liberating many groups of people (women!) from servitude, but as we know it has also led to industrial farming, destruction of landscapes, fragmenting of families, and environmental degradation. Many of the “rural-adjacent” are angry, saddened, and frustrated about these other losses, but, in my observation, are not always aware of or articulate about these losses because they do not receive as much attention or discussion in the media (or formal schooling) in ways that allow them to properly make sense of and historicize them. Instead, their sense of loss is weaponized by Trump and other politicians in ways that prompt them to lash out at easy targets (immigrants, the raced other, women, gender-nonconforming, etc.) as symbols of and scapegoats for their losses. We see similar issues and patterns not only in the continental US, but in Puerto Rico in nostalgia for the jibaro (as with Bad Bunny’s recent residency on the island) as well as the revival of small-scale farming, in the social media blast of cheap houses for sale (and in disrepair) in Europe and in the US hinterlands, and so on.
Meanwhile, these same angry people do not hesitate to adopt the latest mod cons, to insist on climate-killing energy exploitation, to ship as many goods as possible as quickly as possible on Amazon, that is, they are the very parasite feeding on itself. I have found that it’s very difficult for many people to close the circle on the logic that implicates them in the very things they claim to despise.
Tressie McMillan Cottom: “Appealing to nostalgia will always have political power, especially when people are very anxious and afraid, which is what I would argue people are — for many, many reasons. And that’s why I think Donald Trump reads as rural to some people.”
“I would say that what Donald Trump does [despite being from our largest city] — the way he enters into the rural imagination: He does it through Southernness.
“Now you can talk about the South. The South has plenty of urban places. Atlanta is a major international city. But when we talk about the South the way we would — rural or urban — as an idea, an imagined place, a set of beliefs, what we mean is the South holds this idea of the quintessential past that we can be very romantic about, even when it’s a dark romance. We’re talking about slavery and violence and a civil war and all of that. It is still steeped in a romanticism.”
Emily Keegin: I think when we boil down what a rural aesthetic is, regardless of who is engaging with it, it is about the human hand and showing what humans create — versus the urban aesthetic, which is based in machines and in technology. We think about our urban centers: That is where we produce a lot of our culture, but they’re also the center of our governments and our financial centers.
“All of the aesthetics that we associate with urban life come from those occupations, which are about the mind over the body. This is not where you are toiling and making things with the human hand and with your physical self. And that is the schism. When I look at Trump, I think: Yes, there are a lot of things about him that are very rural — because he’s not slick.”
Jana Giles 