Contempt for Rural America

The Daily Yonder responded to a column by Joe Klein the other day and I think it’s worth printing here in full:

Joe Klein of Time Magazine wrote Thursday that so-called “teabaggers” are “primarily working-class, largely rural and elderly white people.” (We should note here that the first teabag town hall was in Austin, Texas; we saw one in St. Louis. Both are cities of note.) Klein goes on and then writes:

“Finally, I should say that the things that scare the teabaggers–the renewed sense of public purpose and government activism, the burgeoning racial diversity, urbanity and cosmopolitanism–are among the things I find most precious and exhilarating about this country. And even though the teabaggers’ pinched, paranoid sensibilities are now being stoked by Boss Rush and the leaders of the Republican party, I take comfort in this: the racists and nativists have always been with us, and they have always lost.”

So, all the good stuff in the country is urban and cosmopolitan while the “racists and the nativists” with their “pinched, paranoid sensibilities” are “largely rural.” We learned this in a column Joe Klein wrote to warn everyone about the dangers of prejudice.

Y’know, I understand all the resentment that liberals have towards certain people in rural areas. The Bush years deepened the rural / urban divide by playing on the faith-based cultural tendencies of rural folks and fanned the flames of the culture wars. As a result atheism has become almost a badge of honor for a lot of liberal bloggers and there’s a general sense among the Left that the explosion of minority populations is rendering whites (especially those outside of urban centers) increasingly irrelevant and that is a good thing.  I’m not sure where white liberals view their place in this new landscape but certainly they believe they will be more relevant because they have always been supportive of minorities.

Fair enough.

The trouble with this attitude is that it’s not even remotely accurate. The backlash against the Obama administration in the form of protests and discontent across the airwaves and internet is not based out of rural areas. It’s based in big cities, small cities, suburbs and urban landscapes…and in rural America.

This administration ignores rural America at its own peril. This I can promise. I’m not asking for small towns and farms to get more attention that they deserve, but to relegate them to racist, uneducated hicks and to rely solely on urban-favoring liberal policy makers is also short-sighted. What this country desperately needs is policy makers that see both.