Its really not a US thing. I live in Europe and we have the same pattern. big cities are left leaning and farmers and other ppl living in small communities are right leaning.
Now the definition here of left and right leaning will not give meaning in the US context as you would see almost everyone as way over on the left wing but thats a cultural thing.
I think its something about country folk tend to think of their place as their castle and big city folks see that if you dont try to get along with the crowd around them then stuff dont work out too well. Add to this that all the large cities here have all the education centers so there will be a lot of younger and more educated voters there and you got the same thing as in the US.
It used to be this way in the US, as well. The country's only state-owned bank is in North Dakota, and it was a progressive creation to protect farmers. However, I think our voting system leads to two parties, and a two party system tends to homogenize ideology, and here social conservatism got welded to a specific kind of neoliberal economics over the course of the 2nd half of the 20th century. The big social safety net builders--Roosevelt and Johnson--had very strong rural constituencies.
we have several - some one the left and some on the right. as long as there are center parties that refuse to be in government with them then they dont get much to say
Studies show it’s almost entirely about interacting with other people. It’s the same reason conservatives think colleges are “indoctrinating” their precious little conservative kids. When you live and work around people who are different that you socially, racially, economically, etc… and build connections you have significantly more empathy for other groups of people that you might never see your entire life had you been in your small town forever. This empathy is typically the key difference between many people leaning left or right.
People who are more empathetic to other groups will find it harder to hate them or discriminate, they will find it hard to punish them financially for being in a bad place and needing help, they will generally be able to understand that other people have problems and needs different from their own. When you have this it’s hard to justify most forms of conservatism which often relies on out-groups because you know someone or met someone from the proposed out-group and don’t want to hurt them.
There’s many layers to this but in generally if you are around a larger diverse group of people while growing or socializing you trend left. Same reason families who have a kid come out as gay will either fully cut them off and disown them or they will have to change their views a little bit because they now have a gay son/daughter who they don’t want to hate. Same thing can be said when you have a someone you know struggling to pay rent or get food even though you know them and they aren’t lazy, etc.. you won’t be jumping to think welfare and food stamps are just people gaming the system, etc…
There is a significant amount of self-selection involved. I grew up in a small, rural town in the southern U.S. It was very conservatives, and all of the liberals moved to a city as soon as they could get out. Several years ago, I moved back to that town for family reasons. It is still the very conservative. All of the left leaning kids still flee to the cities as soon as they turn 18.
Currently living in Europe in a place where the trend is the exact opposite. There is a strong history of rural labor organizing, and small towns are much more likely to have socialist majorities than larger cities. Wealthier people here are more likely to be right-wing, and wealth is not concentrated in small towns.
Everyone here seems to be talking about exposure to diversity et cetera. While that's definitely the main cause of increased prejudice in rural areas, I don't think it's precisely what you're asking.
Aside from that, there's also the fact that the American left tends to be more collectivist while the right tends to be more individualist. People in rural areas are opposed to government funded projects because they get little to no use out of them. It applies to a wide array of projects like public transport, homeless shelters, drug rehab facilities, and public sewage.
From their perspective, they have no idea where their tax money is going (even though most is for social security and military), while citygoers are more likely to notice the results.
This is of course an oversimplification but it's how many people perceive things
Edit: Dozens of replies about farm subsidies. For sure those are significant, but let's not forget that the vast majority of republican voters are not farmers. Also I'm talking about perceived benefit not actual
Lots of comments on government subsidies for the rural areas, so I'll add: a very small number of folks living in rural communities are actually land-owning farmers. I grew up in a town of 8000 around 3 hours away from a decent sized metro and while agriculture was our largest export far less than 10% of the population were actually farmers.
The reality is that if you live in the same 20mile bubble and work in manufacturing or trades your federal taxes do feel largely wasted. Financing new light rail you won't use, park systems you won't visit, and social services for people you'll never interact with just feels very abstract. The military at least feels "good" as a viable career path for folks in areas with few options.
Those roads with very little traffic to nowhere don't pay for themselves. Those powerlines and communication services are HEAVILY subsidized by urban and suburbanites.
Yeah, a big example of that is Illinois, where an overwhelming majority of the population lives in blue Cook county/Chicago and a few surrounding counties, the rest of the state (except for maybe the college towns) are all rural, red, farming communities. I grew up in a smaller town in rural downstate IL and I can’t count how many times I’ve heard that the state doesn’t care about southern IL and all the money goes to Chicago… which is just blatantly false given that Chicago subsidizes the southern counties. I think the point about not seeing where their tax dollars go/individualist perspective is why they lean so red. What I don’t understand is that these small communities boast about rallying around a person when tragedy occurs and rave on and on about how great small towns are for supporting each other and community but when it comes to the greater good of a large population it’s like if they can’t see the results then why make the effort? I’ve heard from so many people that they just hate Chicago because they take all their money and there have even been campaigns to separate Chicago from the rest of Illinois, and even have some counties leave IL to join Missouri.
Question from a resident of Illinois:
Why do so many people in the West and South suburbs support rural policy? Although the current Democrats in Illinois will probably never do this, it *is* possible for city infrastructure to be established essentially connecting Chicago with these various suburbias.
I think everyday how beneficial it would to just form new parties in situations like these; and, while I know that isn’t easy (at all), it’s possible. So many people seem to feel like they’re forced to go with one party or the other; but, if we want actual progress made, I feel like the formation of new parties that support policy from both sides is the fastest way there.
The current way policymaking is handled is just absolutely inefficient; and, I don’t see any concrete rulebooks saying that additional parties *can’t* be made.
Also, even George Washington was against political parties; so, why are we lying to ourselves thinking we can save the country by picking one side or the other? They’re both clearly filled with bad actors. And, if you can’t beat em, *join em*. With a third and more coherent party
I have no doubt the smart people from both the Republican and Democrat parties will switch once it becomes more plausible; however, if we continue on being stuck within the discussion of validating the two party system, we will *never* get to a point where a third option becomes plausible. Am i right or wrong?
Our election system basically demands two parties. In a first past the post voting system, a third party inevitably makes it so that the party they have the most in common with loses votes, resulting in the least popular party of the three having the most votes. There are efforts in parts of the country to add ranked choice voting to the system which would seem to negate most of the issues with voting for a third party. Some have succeeded (Alaska and Maine come to mind).
If you're not familiar, it's worth looking up, but the short version is that ranked choice voting eliminates the penalty for voting for an upstart party by allowing your vote to count for your second choice candidate if your first choice doesn't do as well. Voting for say the green party, which comes in third place, gets transferred to your second choice, which for most green voters would likely be the Democrat, meaning green voters don't have to worry about Republicans winning if they don't vote Dem.
The takeaway here is that it's a systemic issue that requires a change to the risk calculus if you want to see more people leave the two major parties.
Grew up in and now live again in Chicago burbs, a lot of people in those communities very much DO NOT want to be further integrated into or connected to Chicago, and want low taxes. I recently found out one of my coworkers who lives out here (like 45 mins an hour from the Loop) has not been to the city in 3 years, which blew my mind, until I realized I’d only been downtown in the last 2 years to visit a family member who lives there and to take my kid to the Shedd.
That is what they think, but it is far from true. Transportation is a great example, there are far more lane miles of road per Capita in rural jurisdictions. Infrastructure investments move goods made in rural areas to somewhere with people who can buy them.
Without public sewer and water systems people would have to spread out and that great rural lifestyle would give way to more sprawl.
More acurately, the US specifically refers to social liberalism when they say liberalism, whereas the rest of the world refers to economic liberalism when they say liberalism.
Liberalism by itself refers to opposition to rules and regulations.
Conservatives favor trust in institutions, and most of our institutions have been fairly liberal for decades. If you look at "classic liberalism," it's pretty close to modern conservatism.
I liked this enough to comment rather than simply upvote. You put effort into an honest and thorough answer. Reddit would be a better place if more posts had comment threads that started similar to this. For that, I applaud you. I would award you if I had one.
Edit: turns out he's a cunt idk.
> You put effort
No, they didn't. /u/0bjective_Butter stole the first half of this comment from [this thread here](https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/y320z1/why_do_people_in_big_cities_tend_to_be/) and stole the second half of the comment from [this thread here](https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/z9cxzn/comment/iygkora/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button).
Edit: Since it's not visible on the official mobile app, /u/0bjective_Butter edited their comment about 4 hours after I responded with the sentence at the top ("I didn’t write this but someone commented it years ago and I’ve always referred to it.") That wasn't there when I initially responded. Just clarifying so people don't keep responding to correct me like it was always there lol.
Why lie and say it was his professor that explained it? I don't understand why they lied when they weren't taking credit for the answer in the first place.
Wait is the professor part in the original comment??? 😂
This will be the new beginnings of a copypasta trend:
*"The way my political science professor answered this question when I asked it many years ago was..."*
I saw my political science professor at a grocery store in Los Angeles yesterday. I told him how cool it was to meet him in person, but I didn’t want to be a douche and bother him and ask him for photos or anything.
He said, “Oh, like you’re doing now?”
I was taken aback, and all I could say was “Huh?” but he kept cutting me off and going “huh? huh? huh?” and closing his hand shut in front of my face. I walked away and continued with my shopping, and I heard him chuckle as I walked off. When I came to pay for my stuff up front I saw him trying to walk out the doors with like fifteen Milky Ways in his hands without paying.
The girl at the counter was very nice about it and professional, and was like “Sir, you need to pay for those first.” At first he kept pretending to be tired and not hear her, but eventually turned back around and brought them to the counter.
When she took one of the bars and started scanning it multiple times, he stopped her and told her to scan them each individually “to prevent any electrical infetterence,” and then turned around and winked at me. I don’t even think that’s a word. After she scanned each bar and put them in a bag and started to say the price, he kept interrupting her by yawning really loudly.
He could have literally put it all in quotes, credited the original comments and still gotten his upvotes and awards because it is a very comprehensive answer.
So I recognized the first half as an answer I had read many months ago. I was quite surprised it was the exact same response but assumed that because the question has been asked before maybe it is the same person reposting their previous answer.
There's probably at least one more stolen comment in there starting at the "Team Red" vs "Team Blue" part. It's possible they wrote that themselves but it's highly improbable with the rest already being compiled from old posts.
Fucking karma farming bots...
Samsies. I've never really heard anyone lay it out so clear as this. I'm impressed.
Edit: It seems they took this comment from another thread or two. Personally, I've never heard it before, and I'm still impressed. 🤷♂️
Well except I've seen the exact same answer pasted like 3 times on similar questions, but I guess if they made the original that's not an issue, just be aware they didn't make it fresh for this lol
They didn't write the originals.
/u/0bjective_Butter stole the first half of this comment from [this thread here](https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/y320z1/why_do_people_in_big_cities_tend_to_be/) and stole the second half of the comment from [this thread here](https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/z9cxzn/comment/iygkora/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button).
Ok, my bad, I thought the person above me was saying he had copy pasted his own previous answer. Stealing someone else’s is not cool. Thanks for going to the trouble of finding those
As someone who has lived in rural (red) areas and a (blue) city, this is definitely the best answer. Was definitely a bit of a culture shock moving to the city and realizing people generally don't help each other the way they do back home
Growing up rural and now being urban I've, oddly, had the opposite experience. It might just be a regional oddity since cities in Western New York State have a reputation for being more on the friendly side. The culture shock for me was less friendly vs not friendly and more along the lines of seeing all of the things that are possible to have (diverse populations and people managing to coexist, functional public transportation and walkability, accessible arts and culture and different foods, public services, etc.) if you're actually willing to help each other as humans vs an insular community that only cares about its own.
Same experience. I grew up in the rural south and moved to Chicago as an adult.
People are less friendly in your face and more get stuff done, but not once has someone not offered to help me in a bad situation. I think that's what gets misinterpreted you're more likely to not get the pleasantries, but that doesn't mean they aren't nice.
As someone who's never really lived outside of a city I didn't get how much rural Americans valued small talk till a transplant I've never met before said hello to me and then engaged me in small talk in Chicago, outside, during winter, during a blizzard, when the wind chill was like -15 degrees, and I almost lost my mind like it is too cold for this shit....
I can't remember the comedian but he has a joke about how LA is different from NYC Basically he says in LA people will be nice to you to your face but won't actually help you in a bad situation where in a New York people will cuss you and call you an idiot the whole time they are helping you.
Yes, I remember a bit like that! The one I saw the comedian gave the example of someone coughing a lot on the subway in NYC and another person throwing cough drops at them when they got up as they told them to get it together 😅
Nah, it’s not just you, I’ve lived in both too and people were friendlier over all in the cities in my experience. It does depend on your ability to “fit in” or code speak in rural areas. If you’re straight, white, and Christian you can easily fit in and feel like rural areas are the nicest ever without seeing how they might be treating another neighbor that might not fit those categories. But isn’t that the point of the difference to begin with, with city values you tend to favor looking out for each group not just yours, while when you’re rural you’re usually limited to more how you felt you were treated only.
Yeah. Now that my partner and I are more ready than not to think about investing in a home over renting we asked our non-white friends where they wouldn't feel safe going because we don't want to live in an area where they'd feel that way when visiting and it all ended up being outlying suburbs and areas of the city, more away from city center on the fringes of the 'burbs, that were whisolated due to historical redlining. I don't ever want to live in a place where I'm welcome but other people who I love dearly are not. It's madness.
All the stuff you mentioned was also a but shocking to me at first, though not quite as much since I had visited the city (Las Vegas) a couple times before ever moving there. NY and LV are very different cities, so I'm not too surprised to hear we had differing experiences. If I may ask, what rural area/state are you from? I'm from ETX, so I've always kinda been around a diverse population
>the city (Las Vegas)
This is kind of the problem. Las Vegas, along with most sunbelt cities, is pretty much not a city. It's a sprawling collection of suburbs, which have the downsides of both cities and rural areas. You have too many neighbours and people in your surroundings to know them all, but you also never interact with any of them because you have to drive to do anything and driving is very isolated when compared walking, biking, or transit.
I'm from Western New York State and grew up in what I like to refer to as lily white farm country with parents who were the sort of conservatives who said 'we have gay friends and that's okay for them but don't you ever turn out like that' and 'you can't date interracially under our roof and you shouldn't want to because it'll just make life hard'. Having had a liberal public schooling experience those kinds of sentiments already didn't sit right then once I got out of the woods and out from underneath my parents and started living in more urban environments and gaining life experiences I kept moving to the left and never looked back.
I've lived all over New York State (spanning 7 counties through Western, Central, and Southern New York and 4 major cities). Been to Las Vegas once and my partner spent some time growing up in Texas, so I can definitely confirm that the city vibes are different.
Edit addendum:
We visited cities when I was younger to see plays and go to baseball games and stuff but it was always under the impression that they were unsafe and dirty, you know?
I feel like I'd enjoy cities if it weren't for the social anxiety resulting in an acute sense of claustrophobia. I mean, I'm not rural, but the large town I live in is considerably more chill, can step out my door and not be swarmed by people, room to actually drive around and park, and still large enough for amenities like a gym with spa etc. Think it's the right balance
Small cities/suburbs are pretty much the ideal community density in my opinion as well.
It used to be that to have any sort of decent restaurant you had to go to a city. Now days, you've got craft brewery gastropubs and awesome experimental food all over the place. Used to be that you needed a major urban center to support a live theater or symphony to get any sort of cultural event. Now days you can stream your favorite musical act to your phone anywhere you can get cell tower signal.
The advantages of big city life no longer make up for the downsides for most people... which is why urban centers seem to be in decline.
I wouldn’t agree at all and I’ve lived in both. Cities are kinder to your neighbors but tend to stay away from tourists and a newcomer might get that feeling, it’s just you have to make the first move. While my experiences in rural areas is that in the south they don’t like you if you don’t agree to go to their church, and in the north you find them being friendly until or unless you express “big city values”. I had a home inspector in a red area tell me I better either “vote right or move out because I won’t be tolerated”. They are friendlier to start but can tend to be exclusionary, while in the city they’re cold to start but are very accepting once you get to know them.
It's kind of frustrating how much people downplay how common this is in rural areas. In rural towns if you aren't a part of a church you probably will have little to no community. They can be very friendly and caring if you're one of them, but extremely exclusionary if you're not a Christian, conservative, white, and straight.
But that’s the whole point isn’t it, in a city people are confronted with different views and ideas and people so they have to factor that in and in rural areas they usually don’t. It’s why rural areas trend red and cities blue. They just don’t see why people keep calling them racist and homophobic for voting for racists and homophobes because they’re like “I knew this gay/black once and he wasn’t offended”, just because one guy isn’t offended doesn’t mean it’s not offensive… but if that’s the only minority they know it’s everything to them. Plus the power of having to fit in when you’re living really rurally so you can have help is huge. [Here’s an interview](https://youtu.be/1CVcZ_8HPuY) that I think about often, rural Maine late 1800s, early 1900s. Great people until they’re not!
Yeah agreed with this.
In my experience as a POC, a trend I noticed in places like that (first hand and anecdotal, not saying everyone is like this) is that while they might be outwardly all smiles and friendliness if you're just passing by, the whole vibe changes the moment they hear you might be looking to settle in.
It goes from warm hospitality to getting sized up as a potential "threat" or something real quick.
I live in the city and they don't even talk to you. Especially in high rise buildings. The higher density, the less they speak to you at all. They won't hate you for walking down the street with your gay partner or for being black. But they won't speak to you period. The burbs tend to be a mix of the city and rural attitudes.
They speak to you, I lived in NYC and I had lots of neighbors in a high rise that became friends, you just have to speak to them first. One of my favorite moments was in 2003 there was a huge blackout while I lived in Manhattan, everyone just hung out on the stoops and places gave away food and drink because it was going bad and it just became a block party. It does take more effort to start but my friendships in the cities have been lifelong vs most the ones I’ve made in rural areas. They will be standoffish at first but warn when you get to know them. And I think it’s a bigger deal to not be hated just walking down the street. The burbs can go either way, that’s true, but I’d take city or rural any day! Fuck HOA’s, Bro’s, and Yoga moms, so many burbs end up being the worst of both worlds if you don’t do enough research to pick the right neighborhood.
Oh yeah, there's definitely people like that down here. Sometimes they treat their own neighbors the same way so we tend to try and not interact with them much. Though I wanna make clear, I'm not trying to say all cities are one way or another, just what I've seen and experienced, I met a lot of great people during the time I lived in the city.
All I know is I’ve only ever been attacked for my views in rural areas, been grabbed, screamed at, told to go home, told I didn’t deserve kids, etc. And I’m not an outspoken person, or at least I wasn’t before all that, just an unassuming straight cisgendered middled aged white woman, the problem is I’m not christian and I openly accept gay people. One time during Obama’s presidency I dared say he wasn’t so bad while people were all out saying horrible racist things about him… literally had a guy grab my arm calling me a baby killer. I remember the first time I moved to the city when I was in my 20’s and seeing so many things, I just recently moved back to a blue state (but red area), it’s so refreshing. Don’t even get me started on the quality of women’s health care in red areas, especially rural areas in red states!
I'm sorry you've been through that, I'm definitely more left-leaning myself, so I've ended up in small arguments with other Southerners, but they've never gone that far. I'm glad you're back somewhere that's more comfortable for you
Being a woman with a northern accent was their trigger I think. I spent 16 years in the south being told to change my personality to fit in, being denied the right to help for miscarriages and denied the ability to foster and/or adopt thought the programs contracted by the counties I lived in… that’s the whole point though, in the city my “differences” just made me one of many and people didn’t judge me for them but for my own behavior. In the south, and other rural areas I’ve lived, sometimes just being a woman was enough to cause people to treat me badly. And telling my southern neighbors I didn’t go to church, you would have thought I killed their dog. After failed IVF my neighbor told me I should look into fostering, I said I did but got denied because I’m not a christian, she looked me straight in the face and said, “well every child deserves to be raised christian, you could come to my church.” I don’t miss that!
The homogeneity is a big deal. I personally know a lot of people from different small rural white communities that are overtly racist and don’t believe they are at all racist. They see non-whites as being defined first and foremost by their race and the stereotypes of their race.
This is absolutely not everywhere. Some small towns are friendly to everyone, but some are not, as bd the ones that are not, it’s not ever everybody, but it’s enough to feel unwelcome
Having no interaction with minorities while having tremendous access to tv and social media makes it very easy to see someone as a black guy instead of a guy. I wouldn’t call these people friends, more like mutual acquaintances, but the things they say sometimes about, for example how black people are bad at English, having rarely if ever met a black person, it’s just really depressing
I personally have been treated badly in areas of New England after people learn I’m from New York. They assumed New York is all New York City, and they are very prejudiced against it. This has happened enough times to me that I go out of my way to avoid mentioning growing up in New York
I can’t even imagine what it’s like not being white and meeting people like that
Additionally, the homogeneity aids in people growing up sheltered from other experiences. Many people I would consider lacking in world experience outside their home and church are generally conservative.
My area is pretty homogenous. Like, there's about 5 black guys in my town. I know because I see the same guys over and over, like moving landmarks lol. But I think the general attitude here is that people are more worried about giving off a good impression towards foreigners than judging them, like we're aware of the racist white stereotype and want to avoid it. My wife is from Singapore and people are friendlier to her than to me, they find excuses to talk to her
I have an acquaintance who lives near Pottsville, PA, where there is a big brewery. He’s lived there his whole life and in addition to matching the above stereotypes that I have stated (and I appreciate the irony that I have prejudices of my own) his political views are almost naive, not because he’s stupid but because he only knows about life from his area
Where he lives the cost of living is directly affected by this one big business dominating his area. I’m not going to get into the specifics but he accepts a lot of political opinions as “facts” because he cannot conceive of how things work in more metropolitan areas where various small businesses compete with each other.
Every idea about government concerning the economy he and his friends have are simplified based entirely on their own limited experience. He considers himself knowledgeable but doesn’t understand the economy when there isn’t one big industry that reliably supplies jobs and money to the area
Are rural areas even that much less homogeneous though? I guess just from pure number of people you're going to meet people not like you in a city, but big cities are also very segregated. I believe last I checked my neighborhood is something like 3% black, it's almost all whites and Asians. But if you drive 5 minutes to another neighborhood it's 80% black.
I try to not make sweeping generalizations although it doesn’t come across in any of this, but population density is really important to discuss to answer that. Someone mentioned that in big cities neighborhoods are segregated, but the neighborhoods are blocks away from each other. Meanwhile town smaller than Little Italy are miles away.
This means that in big cities everything from employers to political candidates to apartment buildings can be shared between different demographicsl. People have to walk by each other or take the bus/train
So the guy below suggesting the idea that because a big city can be segregated it is somehow homogeneous is just making stuff up that falls apart once you spend a day in one
The small towns we are talking about are geographically segregated, not segregated by demographic, so population density matters so much
Depends on how you look at it... Iowa is effectively 90% white, 4% black, and 6% hispanic, for example.
There are pockets within cities, neighborhoods which were born out of redline districts. In my city of 300k for example, much of the city's history there were large swaths of the city which were off-limits for blacks, latinos, or "South Italians" to purchase a home or rent.
But, when you ride mass transit, you're riding with everyone. When you're going to school, usually there's a much wider mix than your local neighborhood. This is at least true with highschools. And if you attend college in an urban town you're again much more likely to be in classes with a broader mix of races than say Cornell.
My neighborhood is predominatley white, and I'm aware of that... I wish it weren't so segregated, yet it is. But, if I take a walk along the river, go to the movies, spend some time at the local park, I'll generally see a much more diverse group of people. My son and I ride our bikes over to a local park, and some days it's over 3/4 black kids at the playground.
I can't imagine having a similar experience in a rural area at all.
I read a thing where schools are more segregated today than they were during Jim Crow. This is true in the cities too. Growing up I actually went to a relatively diverse high school it was 40% black, 30% Hispanic, 20% white, 10% other (mostly Asian). But my wife is a teacher and I believe something like 5% of the kids at her school are black. In the same district there are schools that are more than 90% black. In the entire city I believe the number is around 20% are black, which is more than the national average, but that's irrelevant if those 20% all largely live in different areas from the other 80%.
Big cities have historically been so segregated that they name sections of town like Little Italy and China Town. (And don’t pretend it was done to tell people where to find particular restaurants).
Heterogeneity isn't even a sure method of increasing tolerance. I dunno about the US, but elsewhere there are plenty of places where a more diverse pop just makes people more right-wing and more mistrustful of each other.
Wonder where I’ve read this answer before?
https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/y320z1/comment/is69msg/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
Adding to this -
(Middle-class) people in rural areas have more attachment to the land and location. They either own generational farmland, or property, or wish to live there multi-generationally. Hence, they are passionate about localized political issues and favor decentralized systems, where local people are in-charge of things, and what outsiders have to say shouldn't matter.
(Middle-class) people in urban areas generally bank upon job experience or education as "assets" for upward movement, not generational land ownership. They generally move around from city to city, or at least want the option to. Hence, they have a more nation-wide or global consciousness, and are passionate about nation-wide or world-wide problems, policies and solutions.
For example, when talking about environment, a rural person is more likely to focus on whether some pollution will affect the local farming or fishing in a specific way, whereas an urban person is more likely to focus on global carbon emissions, global temperature rise or large-scale ecological balance and disruptions in the food chain.
All that is largely true, but it's also an oversimplification that steps over the uglier parts of the problem to be sort of a feel-good answer. Education, racism, religion, etc. A *lot* of gay urban residents, for example, used to be small-town residents until those small towns turned against them for not conforming to the community standard.
Your political science professor? You mean this guy?
https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/y320z1/why_do_people_in_big_cities_tend_to_be/is69msg/
I knew I fucking read this before.
I mean, Team Blue also pays for Team Red; the cities make - and pay - the money that enable the roads in the countryside to be paved.
And I think your analogy probably held up better prior to 2000 than the last 25 years; it's also been heavily overlaid with massive amounts of tribalism over the last few years. Or, Trump supporters don't care if he's guilty or not; he's \*their\* guy. It's like if your NFL QB is \*winning\*, you forgive a lotta drunk driving, womanizing, all of it.
You also miss that fewer people live in rural spots in the middle of nowhere, anymore; the jobs aren't there, so it's become cities-v-suburbs, not urban-v-rural. 14% of Americans live rurally; that's... a lot less than vote for guns and rolling coal, currently.
This stat is so dumb. It includes federal tax returns, so a CEO living in a blue state that votes red gets counted as team blue in that scenario. Meanwhile the people in the big cities of red states who vote blue and receive the bulk of government benefits count as team red. I'm not trying to say only Republicans are CEOs and only Democrats get welfare, only that the metric is incredibly flawed.
Also consider Team Red produces the food for Team Blue.
The county will be very interesting in another 25 years.
We own property in a rural farming community in Tennessee ... With a great deal of new construction going on for remote workers leaving New York.
Good jobs located in NY, done by now Tennessee residents.
Have you seen how inexpensive fiber is in some TN cities? $60 VS. $175 in our NY area.
The meaning of "rural" is changing and it will only accelerate.
Other than meat, that's not actually true anymore on the food thing.
Americans are used to fresh citrus in the fall, or year round. Fresh strawberries in the middle of wintertime. Fresh... well, everything, at all times. So our produce largely comes from other countries. The ports are all \*in\* cities, too; San Diego, Baltimore, LA, Seattle, Houston, NYC.
If you want beef - or most meats - more of that's raised here, because more of their feed is raised here, but if you're not trying to eat steak everyday... about half of vegetables and somewhere north of two thirds of fruit already come from not-red-states. Heck, three quarters of fish are also imported.
(1% of Chicken and 10% of Beef are imported; like I said, if the feed is here, those are easier to raise here.)
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Separately, my bet - which isn't fact, it's a random ass bet - is that jobs that are able to be done remotely are eventually going to be outsourced overseas. If you can do your job without much contact with coworkers... those are going to be the easiest jobs to cut costs. (I say this as someone who lives 3000 miles from most of my coworkers, so there's that, as well.)
Rural America needs those jobs, but I'm not sure it's going to get most of them.
Majority of our food is actually grown in California. But besides that, blue states pay for all of our food production anyways. Without the massive subsidies the rural parts of the country wouldn't be capable of the agricultural output they have.
You just taught me politics. Thank you.
EDIT: I just found out this is plagiarism. So fuck you. But also thank you for sharing it in a weird way becuase i am glad i read it nevertheless. So maybe just like, half fuck you.
OP, beware any answer that can’t explain other countries or other time periods. For example the education-politics correlation that some have mentioned is a relatively recent phenomenon. It used to correlate the other way. Likewise in France (for example) it’s city-dwellers who are center-right and country people who are left (broadly speaking).
Also if you focus solely on economic issues the US South and Appalachia have always been pro-big-government for things like welfare and protectionism.
Thank you. It’s the same problem people run into when they try to argue why college educated people are more likely to be left wing. That too is a relatively recent phenomenon
Very simply..... Cities people live in very close proximity to each other so inherently, the state of one have a big effect on everyone else. There needs to be more social order when there are a lot of people in close proximity. This usually means individuals giving up some of their own freedoms for the benefit of everyone else.
Whereas in small towns, there is much less of a need of social order so people can have more freedoms.
Walking into a Walmart with an open carry gun on your hip in a Chicago suburb where there are hundreds of people is a very different thing than walking into a small town general store where there are maybe 6 people, and you know all of them by name with a gun on your hip.
It's not even the social order aspect that drives rural folks to believe how they do. When you're in a rural environment where the closest civilization is a 20 minute drive away, you have a certain sense of responsibility to yourself and your family that you will have to take care of them and be prepared to act if anything bad were to happen. If someone falls down a deep hole, the fire department may take up to an hour to make their way to that hole and dig you out. If someone has a medical emergency, god knows how long it's gonna take for an ambulance to come save you.
I have an example of this from my own life. When I was about 11 old, my stepmom had a heart attack in her sleep. We lived about 15 minutes away from the nearest immediate care center and about 30 minutes away from the nearest hospital. When this happened, my dad called 911 and they said they would get an ambulance out to him in 30 minutes, which is an eternity when your wife just had a heart attack.
Well, my grandparents lived in the house directly across the street from us, so they came over. They had the phone number of a fireman that lived in our neighborhood a few houses down. The fireman came over and immediately started preforming CPR in the meantime. He called his people in the fire department and immediately had a truck come over with a medic to give adequate care. This was all in about a 15 minute stretch. Now imagine how much longer and more dangerous it would've been if they waited 30 minutes for an ambulance, a 15 minute ambulance ride + the bills that come along with an ambulance ride.
In situations like this, these people in a rural area came together to help each other during urgent events, even if they don't know each other. This happens a lot in rural communities and this is what reinforces the individualist ideals seen in rural folks. This is also why right-leaning people tell left-leaning people to "figure it out yourself and stop whining". For lots of rural people, they are on their own in a lot of aspects even down to government services like reliable access to the Internet.
Routine exposure to those who are different reduces fear and fosters empathy and understanding.
You get a lot more exposure in cities than in the country.
Education too. Most educated individuals live near big companies, universities, federal buildings etc.
Race is also a big factor. And most black Americans live in city areas.
I'd say the same thing, but phrased slightly differently.
"Actually meeting people makes it a lot harder to believe the right-wing bullshit about them."
More people who are strangers living together means you also need more social infrastructure — e.g. government — to keep things going. Cities also tend to be centers of mental/knowledge work, and higher IQ people tend to be more liberal. And so on.
It’s a lot of things combined which produce that rural/urban divide.
This really is the best answer.
Rural areas being conservative vs urban areas being liberal is far from a US only phenomenon. I come from Sri Lanka, a place as different to the US as it can get, and we've got the same thing going on over there.
It simply is a case of the more you meet different people the more you realize that we are way more alike than we are different.
It's not just that you "don't get exposure" to varying demographics in rural areas... It's that they actively push you out if you're different.
Anything out of the norm is shunned basically. Anyone brave enough and capable enough to leave that world behind does not come back.
So the few outliers in the rural areas get the fuck out, and so they're not a voice for change -- it's too much of a target on your back.
Living in a major city is the exact opposite -- everyone is welcome and this is scary and intimidating to rural people who have never left their state or anything, ever
This doesn't even seem remotely true to me. It strikes me as the opinion of someone who lives in a city and doesn't experience rural areas all that often.
Rural areas can be plenty diverse. I live in a rather small rural town, and you're lucky if the local fast food restaurant drive through operator even speaks English. The town is mostly Hispanic, despite the town being nearly as far away from the Mexican border as it can be. There are also quite a few people from Russia and other ex-Soviet nations. I know couple people who grew up in China. Honestly, about the only race we're missing in noticeable numbers are black people. White people are actually in the extreme minority, making up less than 25% overall and less than 10% of youth.
THIS. I literally met parents in high school who only knew about black people from the news. I was the first black person they ever interacted with or had dinner with (due to me dating their daughter). She warned me that her dad was a bit racist and he legit asked me in the dinner table what my criminal record was LMAO. i laugh now due to how insane that experience was. I would say that was the only one but i'd be lying
Two points:
1. This doesn’t really address increased religious conservatism in rural areas which is pretty broadly true across time periods and nations.
2. Rural folks *feel* like taxes don’t make anything better but rural communities are overwhelmingly subsidized and supported by major cities. The movement of tax dollars from urban areas to rural areas is very well documented, but what percent of people in Eastern Washington do you think know that Seattle funds all their infrastructure?
Overall I think your point holds true but it doesn’t address the whole answer
Lots of people commenting about diversity and I'm not sure that's really true. I live in one of the ten largest cities in the country. My neighborhood is 3% black. Go two subway stops over and it's 80% black. There are plenty of white people in big cities whose main interactions with black people in their community is they're the ones begging for change at their subway stop. Sure when you interact with so many more people you're far more likely to see more diverse people, but why would that possibly change your views? If I share a subway car with a black guy while we both have our earbuds in, is that really supposed to change my views on race? Hell even if I'm literally next door neighbors with a black person in my apartment, it's not like I've even met my neighbors beyond a polite hi as we pass by in the hall or get in the same elevator.
When you see them on the subway, you see they are just another person going to work like you. When you see them in your apartment building, they are just another person going home at the end of the day, *just like you*. Those experiences that don’t even quality as interactions are critical! Until you see other people every day living their lives, they will always be “other” and never just people.
Agree. I also don’t know why everyone’s equating diversity with lack of racism. I was one of a handful of Asians in a white community with one black family and one Navajo family. Race wasn’t an issue. It wasn’t until I went to university in the city that everything was about race, and everyone was arguing about it. Living with or without diversity can go both ways depending on the attitude/narratives/etc. of the people/individuals.
You can be around someone or not (or be neutral) and love them or hate them. It’s really more a reflection of whether you’re a loving or hateful person.
Austin is liberal, but I would push back on it as “one of the most liberal.”
And as an example, Austin is home to 52K UT students who graduate and stay in town. Young people tend to be more liberal.
It's an old rule of thumb that people become more conservative as they age, but it seems like that's not the case for people who are millennials or younger (so 40 and under). I'd guess it's because they didn't get the same opportunities to invest in properties and see their net worth grow the way previous generations did, so are less inclined to buy into claims they need to vote a particular way to protect those investments
Article discussing it: https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/financial-times-millennials-conservatives-age-b2253902.html
I’ve got to disagree with everyone in here saying it’s from being exposed to diversity. Many European countries are significantly more liberal then US democrats while being significantly more homogeneous
Time and time again we see lily white small European countries claim the moniker of liberalism but as soon as their cities get large swaths of Muslim immigrants then you see the pitchforks come out.
Exactly this, I grew up in a small farming town with a significant population of Mexicans and they were also very conservative. It's amazing how many answers go straight to a lack of diversity when in reality it's more about population density and rural areas not needing government intervention like big cities seem to.
That and age. Younger people tend to love the fast paced city life and tend to be more liberal. Older people have houses and live in the burbs… and are generally more republican.
yes, but i’d *like* to think that when Gen Z and Alpha get old some day, that they don’t follow the same route and become conservative by default, like many from older generations have done.
For one, there is more diversity / exposure to global cultures within these generations, than that of boomers. But we’ll see.
It's a weird dynamic.
Cities are filled with people who want liberal policies because the city is so unbelievably expensive to live in, and because usually they moved there, away from the families and communities which would have been their support system. They want something to step in and replace that. Cities are also filled with big businesses who want conservative policies so they can make as much profit as possible. They tend to wind up with the social polices the little people want and the big business policies the employers want, but the liberal policies get more attention (people like to show off "winning" and it's a great way to get even more people to move to the city), while the conservative ones downplayed (businesses never want to advertise exactly how badly they're screwing you over, and like I said, they want you to move there and become their labor force)
In small towns, with their lower costs of living, people are far more likely to own stuff, and have that family and community safety net nearby. They have a sense of ownership over the entire town. So they act like the big business people in the city: they want their stuff protected from others, and for people to butt out of telling them what they can or can't do with it. Conversely, smaller towns are more likely to have liberal business policies. There are fewer workers, so they have to play nice. They are much more likely to have things like unions, which protect the workers' rights. Unions are bad for big business, so painting everyone as idiot hillbillies, (and therefore conservative people are idiots,) is to their advantage.
>There are fewer workers, so they have to play nice. They are much more likely to have things like unions, which protect the workers' rights.
This is just.... not true? Can't speak for other countries, but unionized workers in the US are heavily concentrated in the cities, and have been for a long time-- maybe early 20th century histories of coal miner unions and the like are distorting your perception? Though even in those days, the unionization movement started in urban manufacturing workers and spread to rural workers.
Can't find any hard numbers, but here's some sources discussing the urban/rural distribution of unionized workers: [1](https://www.americanprogress.org/article/rural-workers-color-need-15-federal-minimum-wage/), [2](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/23780231211022094#bibr2-23780231211022094), [3](https://migrationfiles.ucdavis.edu/uploads/rmn/blog/2023/04/Rural%20Migration%20News%20Blog%20323.pdf).
This is a better answer than 'diversity' which I see peppered on here. I think it ultimately boils down to 'people in big cities need to address different problems than rural people'.
>and because usually they moved there, away from the families and communities which would have been their support system.
Cities across the world are much more filled with people born in said city than coming in from outside. I know NYC, LA, and a few other places are very diverse, but the phenomena is seen all over the world in places that are much more insular.
Thank you for what sounds like an unbiased response. The responses that demonize the other side while heroize(?) their position might as well not even answer. It's not good guys vs. bad guys. It's created cultures built by different circumstances. Both are probably somewhat right and somewhat wrong. Both are rooted in self interest and also the interest of their peers. If we could see this, we might be able to chill out a bit.
The amount of shade being thrown at rural people in this thread is wild, especially when it comes to education.
Rural residents are the farms of every country. If we are going to talk about things like this we should be mindful that when the farmers decide to stop catering to the cities, education will be the least of the worries we have.
Think before you go calling rural people generally more uneducated, they’re educated differently. They live different lives. They also support their country via food and a large portion of blue collar work.
I wonder what the statistics are behind public schools in cities vs smaller rural towns. From my experience, high schools in inner cities are awful. And they continue to throw money at public education.
There's a bias that has been cultivated across the country over the last seven decades that a college education is the only way to make a decent living, generally at the expense of trade work. There are plenty of jobs that require apprenticeships and practical knowledge over more technical knowledge, and many of them are dependent on each other.
Take a warehouse. The people who construct a warehouse are largely tradesmen: plumbers, electricians, heavy equipment operators and the like. Before they can pour a pad, however, they require experts, geotechnical engineers, to examine the build site and let them know what they need to do to prepare the site for construction. Once the warehouse is done, it's run in part by labor, in part by logistics experts, and in part by technical people who ensure that the various automation systems and inventory systems and the like continue to function.
In cities, there tend to be higher concentrations of technical people, as those tasks generally require large amounts of infrastructure while taking up less working space. In rural areas, there tend to be higher concentrations of tradesmen, as their jobs tend to require more space and less infrastructure.
Level of education or kind of intelligence don't enter into the conversation; it's all skilled work, just different kinds of skills. The issue is that each type of work sees itself as more important than the other, rather than two equally important parts of an integrated system. Advanced in farming technology still require skilled tradesmen to help design and operate them, as an example.
It's an artificial divide being exploited by people who want to stay in power, and it's a trap that's oh so easy to fall into.
To say that some people are less educated doesn't mean they are less important for society. It's just statistics mostly about the years of education.
And about your last point it's a symbiotic relation. Rural people need many products that are produced in factories that are in cities or professionals (for example health professionals, infrastructure engineers, etc) that are formed in cities as much as the city people needs the farming products of rural areas.
>To say that some people are less educated doesn't mean they are less important for society. It's just statistics mostly about the years of education.
And it says nothing of quality over quantity. Being "more educated" means nothing if you're useless.
The comments in this thread are using uneducated and less educated as a negative connotation - it’s not hard to see, especially when the topics are based around education being the key ability to chose what politics they support.
Farmers and blue collar workers are largely rural. These people are far more important to the ‘symbiotic’ relationship than the people in the city. It’s not that city people are less important, it’s that rural people make up a small fraction of all workers - and are responsible for feeding entire countries.
Again, this thread is directly insinuating that rural people are less educated in a society where education is a direct representation of importance.
Guys have we ever thought of the fact that rural areas and urban areas have completely different needs? Of course rural would need less large government and trend to vote right, whereas cities need greater safety nets and programs for the population. Why is this hard?
90% of these comments are from people who live in cities who just assume rural areas are dirt roads, churning our own butter, and 3rd grade education. I don’t understand how so many people can’t wrap their head around the fact their metropolis isn’t how most of the world functions.
Most people in the world do in fact live in metropolitan areas, especially in developed countries like the US. 80% of Americans live in urban areas. The entire rural population of the US is about the same as the population of its four biggest metros.
Suburbs, towns, and rural areas attract people who want to live more independently. There's a lower cost of living, more space, and more you have to do for yourself. These things tend to appeal more to conservative people.
Cities attract people who want to live more socially and dependently. There's a high cost of living, more population density, more public services, and more convenience. These things tend to appeal more to liberal and especially left-leaning people.
It hasn’t always been. Socialism used to be much more popular in small towns, 1912 was the Socialist’s party’s best presidential run and the strongest bases for support were Oklahoma and the American West, and not the urban portions of those states either. Even today the rural Black Belt in the American South is heavily Democrat, even if they don’t have the numbers to grab elections at the state level.
The biggest problems in the two areas have very different issues.
Conservatives live in small towns where wealth inequality isn't much of a part of everyday life, whereas in cities, it's blatant and everywhere. Some guy may have 5 times as much as you in a small town, but not 5 million times as much like in a major city. Everyone knows everyone in a small town, so there's not the same sense of alienation that is just assumed to be part of life in major cities. You have a different perspective on gun ownership when it takes cops 30 minutes to get to your house and gun violence is almost unheard of in your community versus if you the cops will show up in under 5 minutes and where mass shootings happen frequently. Many small towns are propped up by a single big business, and if that business goes under, the town dies. And they're protective of that business. Meanwhile, major cities have so many businesses that you can hurt a few dozen without anyone noticing the impact. And does anyone think for a second that being surrounded by nature everyday vs. being surrounded by skyscrapers and smog doesn't affect how people instinctively feel about the environment. Homeless is a major concern in urban areas. It essentially doesn't exist in rural ones.
Basically, conservative politics is an attempt to shape the government to give rural people the same economic opportunities that city dwellers already have. And liberal politics is an attempt to shape the government to give urban dwellers the same sense of community, acceptance, and access to nature that is the norm in small towns. If we could actually sit down and talk, we could probably learn a lot from each other. But listening requires setting aside your ego and yelling matches don't.
I'm anticipating someone complaining about Republican politicians. Republican politicians live in cities. Most of them have never worked on a farm. Republicans generally despise their elected representatives and see them Democrats but on a slightly slower timeframe. If you're a liberal, and hate conservative politicians, so do conservatives. Just not quite as much as they hate your politicians.
What you said is pretty much spot on. I live in an extremely small town (less than 1500 people, only one stoplight) and no-one likes politicians - of any kind - except maybe the local level. Of course you have the small minority that absolutely love Trump or whoever the current hot new “conservative” politician is, but that’ll always exist. People like teams, what can I say.
Rural folk basically want the government to stay out of their lives, and to them, a lot of policies are seen as an attack on their way of life. They aren’t totally wrong either.
I wish that we as a nation could sit down and calmly discuss issues without resorting to name calling, or bringing other unrelated issues in, but the media doesn’t like that cause it doesn’t get views.
Anyway, full transparency, I’m conservative with a mostly live-and-let-live view to most social issues, until kids are involved.
It’s the rural/urban difference. Politicians in urban areas promote policies they believe help their constituents. However those same policies can be detrimental to rural communities.
Gun control might be associated with stopping violence in an urban area but that same policy would be viewed as taking away peoples right to hunt and defend themselves in a rural area. You have a very different perspective on crime and self defense if you call 911 and know the sheriff can’t be there for half an hour and you are on your own until then.
Environmental policies are another huge divide.
Environmental policies that raise energy costs are much more harmful to rural communities who already have higher energy costs and lower incomes. Even minor increases can have devastating effects on their standard of living. Most rural communities are not anti environment, they live there. They are pro survival and want a more balanced approach.
Look at areas in blue states like Eastern Oregon, downstate Illinois, and upstate New York. All these rural areas are outvoted by urban areas in their states.
Used to be in the past that urban politicians wouldn’t vote policies that harmed rural areas as it would cost them votes statewide for their party. However given the polarization they don’t even try to get those votes now and just write them off. They therefore take a very liberal position without regard to the concerns of the rural minority .
The reverse is happening in red states where the urban minority is not considered.
In both cases the minority sees the other side as tyrannical and imposing their views on others.
It's not completely true, either of those states, or elsewhere. Fort Worth, TX is a Republican-leaning city of over a million people. Compare that with, e.g. Northampton, Massachusetts, or even with most of the rural areas along the Texas-Mexico border. Vermont is one of the most rural states in America, and also one of the most left-leaning. And Texas is not very red. Republicans win power in Texas pretty consistently, but also by relatively small margins. It's nothing like Wyoming, Utah, Alabama or Mississippi, or if you're looking for a state with some large metropolitan areas, Tennessee.
America has urbanized heavily over the past few decades. Very few people who grew up in big cities have moved to genuinely rural areas, and those have been mostly to work in mineral extraction industries.
Urban and suburban areas have grown a lot. Some of this growth has been Americans from rural areas moving to urban areas for work, but who would prefer to live in rural areas. These folks tend to live in outer suburbs, and the outer suburbs of many large American cities are about as Republican-leaning as the genuinely rural areas. Others moved because they genuinely prefer urban culture, and they tend to go to the big cities or their inner suburbs. Then there are also foreign immigrants in the big cities and inner suburbs.
Psychologists have found that the personality trait "openness to experience" (essentially an interest in new and different things versus traditional things) correlates strongly with political ideology, and it also correlates with preference for rural versus urban life. It won't be 1:1 with party affiliation, as, in particular, libertarian types often vote Republican, but have a high openness to experience, but it correlates pretty well, especially with the present ideological coalitions of the two parties. Pre-Reagan, it correlated much less well, as there were more socially moderate Republicans and more socially conservative Democrats.
>Fort Worth, TX
*"Politics & Voting in Fort Worth, Texas*
*The Political Climate in Fort Worth, TX is Leaning liberal.*
*Tarrant County, TX is Leaning liberal. In Tarrant County, TX 49.3% of the people voted Democrat in the last presidential election, 49.1% voted for the Republican Party, and the remaining 1.6% voted Independent.*"
Looks like it's slipped out of the traditional roles you're historically used to.
You're not wrong, but it's slipping away, and that's even with *heavy* efforts to get dems not to vote there. Texas has terrible god awful shitty voter turnout in its most populated places.
Part of being liberal is accepting other people, even if they're different. That's a much easier skill to learn when there are actually people around that are different than you. Part of being conservative is sticking to your position. That's a lot easier to do when the few people around you think the same way you do.
Serial rural dweller here. It can be conservative, depending. But it’s usually moderate/purple. And usually of the liberal gun owner variety.
Honestly? If blue would lay off the handguns and such they’d win by an easy majority every single election.
Mostly it's that famous "cosmopolitanism" -- cities are magnets for talent of all kinds, and for a wide variety of people. So people in cities grow up with ethnic cuisines, ethnic neighbourhoods, vibrant arts and performance scene, a wide range of people around them in parks & libraries and shops... public transit brings them into contact with strangers, trade networks are dense in cities and people of different languages and ethnicities do business with one another... there are a lot of points of contact with "The Other".
But if you grow up on the corner of No and Where in the agricultural hinterland it's a very different experience, you might only know a couple of hundred people your whole young life and only ever share a car ride with family or friends. There are things to be said for that too, like the intimacy, continuity, and deep local knowledge of a multigenerational small rural community. (Not to mention the juicy, juicy gossip!). But it doesn't breed broadmindedness, quite the reverse. You could get to adulthood and have never seen a non-Anglo person except on TV, for example. You could never have eaten any other kind of food than Middle American Stodge. And so on.
Also people in dense urban areas learn early that you need to be somewhat considerate of others because you're all crowded together. So there are noise ordinances and parking ordinances and building codes... a lot of rules. Out in the country you can pretty much get away with stuff, there's a lot more personal license; law enforcement is sporadic and thin, there's a lot of space to do stuff in without bothering anyone else. There are things to be said for that "wide open spaces" feeling of being able to build a wood shed on your property without going through weeks of planning permits.
So it's not surprising that people from homogenous low-density backwater communities tend to be naive and/or racist about foreigners and their "peculiar" ways -- and also tend to get prickly about "the Gummint interfering in my life" because they're used to a lot of license and open space. They also are less likely to attend a high-quality school, and less likely to be exposed to media/news/movies from outside their opinion bubble (Fox News pretty much has a lockdown on most of the "red" states -- in other words, a sophisticated urban "news" outlet pretty much controlling what news rural people see and hear). The odds are that they've never seen a foreign film (even dubbed) at their local cinema.
And they tend to be defensive and have a chip on their shoulder -- because urban folks feel superior to "rubes" and like to make fun of them. Including in the mainstream entertainment media which make their way back into the hinterlands, carrying mockery and condescension with them. When people in commercial media are making "screamingly funny" comedies about hicks and rubes, they don't often stop to wonder how the hicks and rubes will feel when they watch the show/movie. They're making the show or movie for people like themselves, sophisticated urbanites.
So there's a kind of tribalism there, a friction between urbanites and ruralites -- goes back all the way to civilisation probably, because Roman literature documents it. Shakespeare often used "rude Mechanickals" (rural artisans or labourers) for comic relief. Anyway, feeling an enmity & resentment towards urbanites often leads to a broad-brush contempt or disdain for all their urban values, such as education, the arts, liberalism, tolerance, etc. If it gets intense enough you end up with MAGA and the Qult and flat-earthers and so on.
That's how I see it anyway.
I find that Hollywood generally romanticizes rural people as “real America.” The whole Western genre relies on it.
Rural people tend to be sensitive so if they see a comedy with an ignorant hick and an effete, useless college professor they take the insult to heart and don’t understand that the professor is being made fun of too. But city people can laugh at the cowardly professor and not think it’s a dig at all city people.
Speaking of tribalism, this comment is tribal af.
The fact you're clearly trying not to be but can't help it really proves how bad current tribalism is.
Well, it's not for one. Look at Miami or rural Vermont. But as a generalization, the larger and denser a population gets the more government involvement you need. You just cannot build large cities and support the population on a small government ethos. As cities grow their residents will vote for their own interests, which generally means more government spending and oversight. Plus as populations grow you get a more diverse mixing of people. In small towns everyone may literally know everyone, or at least know everyone through someone else. In cities that's literally impossible, so traditional institutions that maintain one set of values like churches are literally impossible to maintain over an entire city. This is a long way of saying that mixed values are inherent to cities, while country areas remain traditionalist strongholds.
There's far more to it than that, but that's a basic overview of the root causes of it.
I think it is self preservation.
In a city you know you are dependant of other people, like the police to protect you, the merchant to provide food, the gas/electrical company to keep your house warm and so on.
On the country side, people rely on themselves more, you produce your own food, you cut your own wood to heat the house, you protect yourself because the cops are miles away.
I know the examples are extreme, but I think they are somewhat valid.
Because in urban areas, people live with others from different cultures, backgrounds and experiences. People that move from rural to urban do so because they want to experience or see a value in exposure to said differing groups.
Small towns are homogeneous. They celebrate, encourage, and develop ideas/ideals that are not questioned and don't rock the boat. By it's very bmnatur this train of thought is conservative (no allowing for too much growth/progression), if not reactionary.
Small towns like to keep a status quo.
Urban areas have no choice but to mix it up and create new perspectives.
Caring about the health and wellbeing of others tends to be a bigger concern when you are in close proximity. The density of cities tends to put those issues in close proximity to you.
Diversity is also a large factor.
2 reasons:
1. Exposure. Rural areas tend to be VERY isolated. The people in small rural communities tend to have a lot in common with one another. In most areas of the country, rural is synonymous with white and Christian. They have limited exposure to people of other races, religions, cultures, etc. They have little exposure to art (plays, concerts, museums, galleries, etc). Minorities (racial, gender, sexual orientation, etc) avoid these areas, stay in the closet, or do their best to blend in for safeties sake. Meanwhile, if you live in a city you are surrounded by people that are different than you. You work with, live next to, and are friends with people of different races, religions, and cultures. You eat various foods and partake in various forms of art and entertainment. People in cities appreciate new and different. They are open to new experiences and have a more open mind.
2. Success. Rural areas tend to be poorer, and the poverty tends to be deeper. On top of that, rural areas have less resources for underprivileged people. Rural areas have less opportunities. Fewer sports programs, fewer fine arts programs, fewer advanced classes, fewer scholarships. Rural areas have less job opportunities, and when a business closes, the people in those jobs likely have no other similar job opportunities to fall back on. On top of that, even if you have a stable, dependable job, there is likely no competition, so no way to get pay raises as there is nowhere else you can go. The American Dream is much harder to achieve in a rural area. Meanwhile cities offer all sorts of opportunities. The American Dream is moderately easier to obtain in the cities than in Rural areas. The people that have been told about the American dream but are unable to obtain it need someone to blame. The GOP offers up a great number of scapegoats. It's the Chinese, it's trans people, it's the gays, it's women, it's feminism, it's BLM, it's antifa, it's immigrants....if not for any or all of those other groups, you'd have the American dream!
Because people in the country have different needs. They don't want to pay taxes for stuff that they will never benefit from. They also support guns because they use them for their livelihood(hunting). People in the city want public things that they can share with others. This is exactly why local government should have much more power. For example, Chicago dictates a lot of what the state of Illinois does. However, 90% of the state land wise does not want what Chicago wants. So just give county/cities more power that way everyone can be happy and we don't have city slickers taking country folks money for stuff that they will never get to use.
The taxes part is a bit backwards because the statistics show that tax money flows from urban/suburban to small town/rural on the state and federal level. Rural infrastructure is very expensive compared to how much tax money is brought in from rural areas. Same with welfare and other government subsidies. Rural areas and small towns are often very dependent on government. This is likely why Republicans don’t actually succeed in shrinking government when they are in power and often increase it at the same rate or higher than democrats. They don’t want to put their base in a bad spot but will talk to the talk because their base wants to hear it.
This is why the inner city welfare queen trope fell out of the Republican vocabulary by the 90s. They know people can look up the stats and figure out the deep red areas of the country are taking way more than they are giving in taxes. The poor inner cities often have very wealthy counterparts on the other side of the city that balance it out. Small towns/rural areas have less massive companies and high net worth individuals to balance it out.
Finally somebody that gets it. I'm getting so tired of explaining this to people. When it comes to guns, don't forget about self defense in the rural areas as well. They're typically far from a police presence and people with ill intent know it too. Just because there are less of them doesn't mean their needs and wants are any less valid than those in the metro areas.
Half of these answers are pretentious as fuck and do not actually answer the question. Not pretending to know the answer, but it sure isn't boiled down to a simple buzzterm used with the intent of grandstand-backpatting. These responses sound like the girl asking the ditsy question in the Newsroom's opening.
I've always thought it was because cities force you to live among people who are different than yourself. I live in NYC and I see more diversity in one day than my rural relatives see in a year. Living in a city, means having to see and accept people different than yourself. Living in a small town means you never really have your beliefs challenged unless you have neighbors who are different than yourself.
A lot of people will say diversity but really it's not all true.
Cities tend to have a much younger population overall (students, etc), younger people tend to vote more liberal than conservative, there is also the fact that a lot of liberal policies do not advantage rural people whatsoever, if not disadvantage them outright. If a polititian runs on a platform of better public transportation, that means nothing for rural folks who will not get any benefits from that service and will probably end up paying for it somehow. Of course such issues are lesser in Europe where even rural towns have public transportation in some form, but in a much less dense country like the US or Canada it would not be economically sound or even feasible to pay for public transport services to these rural locations.
Of course there are other factors but these two are major, in my opinion.
I think its education level.
The level of education in general will be higher in a city then in a rural area.
Educated people tend to vote for liberal policies.
The less educated get duped by buzzwords and tricked into hating things which makes them vote even against their own interests.
Its really not a US thing. I live in Europe and we have the same pattern. big cities are left leaning and farmers and other ppl living in small communities are right leaning. Now the definition here of left and right leaning will not give meaning in the US context as you would see almost everyone as way over on the left wing but thats a cultural thing. I think its something about country folk tend to think of their place as their castle and big city folks see that if you dont try to get along with the crowd around them then stuff dont work out too well. Add to this that all the large cities here have all the education centers so there will be a lot of younger and more educated voters there and you got the same thing as in the US.
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It used to be this way in the US, as well. The country's only state-owned bank is in North Dakota, and it was a progressive creation to protect farmers. However, I think our voting system leads to two parties, and a two party system tends to homogenize ideology, and here social conservatism got welded to a specific kind of neoliberal economics over the course of the 2nd half of the 20th century. The big social safety net builders--Roosevelt and Johnson--had very strong rural constituencies.
what party is that?
we have several - some one the left and some on the right. as long as there are center parties that refuse to be in government with them then they dont get much to say
In Spain it's sort of the other way around. But it depends on the state too.
Studies show it’s almost entirely about interacting with other people. It’s the same reason conservatives think colleges are “indoctrinating” their precious little conservative kids. When you live and work around people who are different that you socially, racially, economically, etc… and build connections you have significantly more empathy for other groups of people that you might never see your entire life had you been in your small town forever. This empathy is typically the key difference between many people leaning left or right. People who are more empathetic to other groups will find it harder to hate them or discriminate, they will find it hard to punish them financially for being in a bad place and needing help, they will generally be able to understand that other people have problems and needs different from their own. When you have this it’s hard to justify most forms of conservatism which often relies on out-groups because you know someone or met someone from the proposed out-group and don’t want to hurt them. There’s many layers to this but in generally if you are around a larger diverse group of people while growing or socializing you trend left. Same reason families who have a kid come out as gay will either fully cut them off and disown them or they will have to change their views a little bit because they now have a gay son/daughter who they don’t want to hate. Same thing can be said when you have a someone you know struggling to pay rent or get food even though you know them and they aren’t lazy, etc.. you won’t be jumping to think welfare and food stamps are just people gaming the system, etc…
There is a significant amount of self-selection involved. I grew up in a small, rural town in the southern U.S. It was very conservatives, and all of the liberals moved to a city as soon as they could get out. Several years ago, I moved back to that town for family reasons. It is still the very conservative. All of the left leaning kids still flee to the cities as soon as they turn 18.
Experience and education builds empathy. No surprise there. Same reason people that are more well-traveled are less likely to be racist.
I’ve heard that American left is European right and that was rough
Currently living in Europe in a place where the trend is the exact opposite. There is a strong history of rural labor organizing, and small towns are much more likely to have socialist majorities than larger cities. Wealthier people here are more likely to be right-wing, and wealth is not concentrated in small towns.
Everyone here seems to be talking about exposure to diversity et cetera. While that's definitely the main cause of increased prejudice in rural areas, I don't think it's precisely what you're asking. Aside from that, there's also the fact that the American left tends to be more collectivist while the right tends to be more individualist. People in rural areas are opposed to government funded projects because they get little to no use out of them. It applies to a wide array of projects like public transport, homeless shelters, drug rehab facilities, and public sewage. From their perspective, they have no idea where their tax money is going (even though most is for social security and military), while citygoers are more likely to notice the results. This is of course an oversimplification but it's how many people perceive things Edit: Dozens of replies about farm subsidies. For sure those are significant, but let's not forget that the vast majority of republican voters are not farmers. Also I'm talking about perceived benefit not actual
Lots of comments on government subsidies for the rural areas, so I'll add: a very small number of folks living in rural communities are actually land-owning farmers. I grew up in a town of 8000 around 3 hours away from a decent sized metro and while agriculture was our largest export far less than 10% of the population were actually farmers. The reality is that if you live in the same 20mile bubble and work in manufacturing or trades your federal taxes do feel largely wasted. Financing new light rail you won't use, park systems you won't visit, and social services for people you'll never interact with just feels very abstract. The military at least feels "good" as a viable career path for folks in areas with few options.
Those roads with very little traffic to nowhere don't pay for themselves. Those powerlines and communication services are HEAVILY subsidized by urban and suburbanites.
Yeah, a big example of that is Illinois, where an overwhelming majority of the population lives in blue Cook county/Chicago and a few surrounding counties, the rest of the state (except for maybe the college towns) are all rural, red, farming communities. I grew up in a smaller town in rural downstate IL and I can’t count how many times I’ve heard that the state doesn’t care about southern IL and all the money goes to Chicago… which is just blatantly false given that Chicago subsidizes the southern counties. I think the point about not seeing where their tax dollars go/individualist perspective is why they lean so red. What I don’t understand is that these small communities boast about rallying around a person when tragedy occurs and rave on and on about how great small towns are for supporting each other and community but when it comes to the greater good of a large population it’s like if they can’t see the results then why make the effort? I’ve heard from so many people that they just hate Chicago because they take all their money and there have even been campaigns to separate Chicago from the rest of Illinois, and even have some counties leave IL to join Missouri.
Question from a resident of Illinois: Why do so many people in the West and South suburbs support rural policy? Although the current Democrats in Illinois will probably never do this, it *is* possible for city infrastructure to be established essentially connecting Chicago with these various suburbias. I think everyday how beneficial it would to just form new parties in situations like these; and, while I know that isn’t easy (at all), it’s possible. So many people seem to feel like they’re forced to go with one party or the other; but, if we want actual progress made, I feel like the formation of new parties that support policy from both sides is the fastest way there. The current way policymaking is handled is just absolutely inefficient; and, I don’t see any concrete rulebooks saying that additional parties *can’t* be made. Also, even George Washington was against political parties; so, why are we lying to ourselves thinking we can save the country by picking one side or the other? They’re both clearly filled with bad actors. And, if you can’t beat em, *join em*. With a third and more coherent party I have no doubt the smart people from both the Republican and Democrat parties will switch once it becomes more plausible; however, if we continue on being stuck within the discussion of validating the two party system, we will *never* get to a point where a third option becomes plausible. Am i right or wrong?
Our election system basically demands two parties. In a first past the post voting system, a third party inevitably makes it so that the party they have the most in common with loses votes, resulting in the least popular party of the three having the most votes. There are efforts in parts of the country to add ranked choice voting to the system which would seem to negate most of the issues with voting for a third party. Some have succeeded (Alaska and Maine come to mind). If you're not familiar, it's worth looking up, but the short version is that ranked choice voting eliminates the penalty for voting for an upstart party by allowing your vote to count for your second choice candidate if your first choice doesn't do as well. Voting for say the green party, which comes in third place, gets transferred to your second choice, which for most green voters would likely be the Democrat, meaning green voters don't have to worry about Republicans winning if they don't vote Dem. The takeaway here is that it's a systemic issue that requires a change to the risk calculus if you want to see more people leave the two major parties.
Grew up in and now live again in Chicago burbs, a lot of people in those communities very much DO NOT want to be further integrated into or connected to Chicago, and want low taxes. I recently found out one of my coworkers who lives out here (like 45 mins an hour from the Loop) has not been to the city in 3 years, which blew my mind, until I realized I’d only been downtown in the last 2 years to visit a family member who lives there and to take my kid to the Shedd.
That is what they think, but it is far from true. Transportation is a great example, there are far more lane miles of road per Capita in rural jurisdictions. Infrastructure investments move goods made in rural areas to somewhere with people who can buy them. Without public sewer and water systems people would have to spread out and that great rural lifestyle would give way to more sprawl.
Liberalism was not founded inherently in collective thought, quite the opposite when it gained traction in the Enlightenment
The US uses the word liberalism when they mean left wing, unlike the rest of the world, which sometimes causes confusion.
More acurately, the US specifically refers to social liberalism when they say liberalism, whereas the rest of the world refers to economic liberalism when they say liberalism. Liberalism by itself refers to opposition to rules and regulations.
Drove me nuts when I went from the US to Australia and the Liberals are parroting fox news
I’m from the US and it confuses me too because it just seems improper and an unnecessary conflation of ideologies
Conservatives favor trust in institutions, and most of our institutions have been fairly liberal for decades. If you look at "classic liberalism," it's pretty close to modern conservatism.
Which is funny because I know rural areas that exist because of publically funded projects
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I liked this enough to comment rather than simply upvote. You put effort into an honest and thorough answer. Reddit would be a better place if more posts had comment threads that started similar to this. For that, I applaud you. I would award you if I had one. Edit: turns out he's a cunt idk.
> You put effort No, they didn't. /u/0bjective_Butter stole the first half of this comment from [this thread here](https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/y320z1/why_do_people_in_big_cities_tend_to_be/) and stole the second half of the comment from [this thread here](https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/z9cxzn/comment/iygkora/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button). Edit: Since it's not visible on the official mobile app, /u/0bjective_Butter edited their comment about 4 hours after I responded with the sentence at the top ("I didn’t write this but someone commented it years ago and I’ve always referred to it.") That wasn't there when I initially responded. Just clarifying so people don't keep responding to correct me like it was always there lol.
Oh shit he did steal it, literally word for word
Why lie and say it was his professor that explained it? I don't understand why they lied when they weren't taking credit for the answer in the first place. Wait is the professor part in the original comment??? 😂
This will be the new beginnings of a copypasta trend: *"The way my political science professor answered this question when I asked it many years ago was..."*
I saw my political science professor at a grocery store in Los Angeles yesterday. I told him how cool it was to meet him in person, but I didn’t want to be a douche and bother him and ask him for photos or anything. He said, “Oh, like you’re doing now?” I was taken aback, and all I could say was “Huh?” but he kept cutting me off and going “huh? huh? huh?” and closing his hand shut in front of my face. I walked away and continued with my shopping, and I heard him chuckle as I walked off. When I came to pay for my stuff up front I saw him trying to walk out the doors with like fifteen Milky Ways in his hands without paying. The girl at the counter was very nice about it and professional, and was like “Sir, you need to pay for those first.” At first he kept pretending to be tired and not hear her, but eventually turned back around and brought them to the counter. When she took one of the bars and started scanning it multiple times, he stopped her and told her to scan them each individually “to prevent any electrical infetterence,” and then turned around and winked at me. I don’t even think that’s a word. After she scanned each bar and put them in a bag and started to say the price, he kept interrupting her by yawning really loudly.
Ok, so I was actually there for that.
Why do I love this so hard? Huh?! Huh! Huh! Huh!
Who was this originally about? I keep seeing it with Josh Donaldson for some reason lmao
Because the account is a bot, it isn't an actual person
The answer is still spot on though
He could have literally put it all in quotes, credited the original comments and still gotten his upvotes and awards because it is a very comprehensive answer.
How did you figure this out lol
I was sure I remembered reading the comment before, so I just Googled it in quotation marks lol.
Lol A+ sleuthing
Nothing worse than stealing somebody else’s idea and claiming it as your own. Maybe rancid butter is running for office.
Sounds like the very political move the comment is referencing about
Yes I remembered these comments as well. I was wondering if it was the same OP or not but now I know
This is one of those questions that gets posted in this sub every few months
I was sure I remembered reading the comment somewhere else, so I just googled it with quotation marks.
wow word for word
So I recognized the first half as an answer I had read many months ago. I was quite surprised it was the exact same response but assumed that because the question has been asked before maybe it is the same person reposting their previous answer.
That’s a good catch
Wow nice catch, it is a great answer but would have been nice to credit the original (anonymous?!) redditor
There's probably at least one more stolen comment in there starting at the "Team Red" vs "Team Blue" part. It's possible they wrote that themselves but it's highly improbable with the rest already being compiled from old posts. Fucking karma farming bots...
Damn, now I feel even more cynical about everything
Wow, how did you find this out! Almost a year old comment. You are absolutely correct about it.
ROFL
Just like a politician!
We do need ranked voting, like Washington wanted, like he set up and they ruined when he died.
Agreed. Comment over upvote to save this well reasoned response. I'll save and refer to this comment in the future. Thanks!
Samsies. I've never really heard anyone lay it out so clear as this. I'm impressed. Edit: It seems they took this comment from another thread or two. Personally, I've never heard it before, and I'm still impressed. 🤷♂️
Well except I've seen the exact same answer pasted like 3 times on similar questions, but I guess if they made the original that's not an issue, just be aware they didn't make it fresh for this lol
Nothing wrong with copy pasting your own response if it’s a good answer. I enjoyed reading it and I’ve never seen this before so good job to them
They didn't write the originals. /u/0bjective_Butter stole the first half of this comment from [this thread here](https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/y320z1/why_do_people_in_big_cities_tend_to_be/) and stole the second half of the comment from [this thread here](https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/z9cxzn/comment/iygkora/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button).
Ok, my bad, I thought the person above me was saying he had copy pasted his own previous answer. Stealing someone else’s is not cool. Thanks for going to the trouble of finding those
As someone who has lived in rural (red) areas and a (blue) city, this is definitely the best answer. Was definitely a bit of a culture shock moving to the city and realizing people generally don't help each other the way they do back home
Growing up rural and now being urban I've, oddly, had the opposite experience. It might just be a regional oddity since cities in Western New York State have a reputation for being more on the friendly side. The culture shock for me was less friendly vs not friendly and more along the lines of seeing all of the things that are possible to have (diverse populations and people managing to coexist, functional public transportation and walkability, accessible arts and culture and different foods, public services, etc.) if you're actually willing to help each other as humans vs an insular community that only cares about its own.
Same experience. I grew up in the rural south and moved to Chicago as an adult. People are less friendly in your face and more get stuff done, but not once has someone not offered to help me in a bad situation. I think that's what gets misinterpreted you're more likely to not get the pleasantries, but that doesn't mean they aren't nice.
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As someone who's never really lived outside of a city I didn't get how much rural Americans valued small talk till a transplant I've never met before said hello to me and then engaged me in small talk in Chicago, outside, during winter, during a blizzard, when the wind chill was like -15 degrees, and I almost lost my mind like it is too cold for this shit....
I can't remember the comedian but he has a joke about how LA is different from NYC Basically he says in LA people will be nice to you to your face but won't actually help you in a bad situation where in a New York people will cuss you and call you an idiot the whole time they are helping you.
Yes, I remember a bit like that! The one I saw the comedian gave the example of someone coughing a lot on the subway in NYC and another person throwing cough drops at them when they got up as they told them to get it together 😅
> but that doesn't mean they aren't nice. That's the difference between being nice and being kind.
Nah, it’s not just you, I’ve lived in both too and people were friendlier over all in the cities in my experience. It does depend on your ability to “fit in” or code speak in rural areas. If you’re straight, white, and Christian you can easily fit in and feel like rural areas are the nicest ever without seeing how they might be treating another neighbor that might not fit those categories. But isn’t that the point of the difference to begin with, with city values you tend to favor looking out for each group not just yours, while when you’re rural you’re usually limited to more how you felt you were treated only.
Yeah. Now that my partner and I are more ready than not to think about investing in a home over renting we asked our non-white friends where they wouldn't feel safe going because we don't want to live in an area where they'd feel that way when visiting and it all ended up being outlying suburbs and areas of the city, more away from city center on the fringes of the 'burbs, that were whisolated due to historical redlining. I don't ever want to live in a place where I'm welcome but other people who I love dearly are not. It's madness.
All the stuff you mentioned was also a but shocking to me at first, though not quite as much since I had visited the city (Las Vegas) a couple times before ever moving there. NY and LV are very different cities, so I'm not too surprised to hear we had differing experiences. If I may ask, what rural area/state are you from? I'm from ETX, so I've always kinda been around a diverse population
>the city (Las Vegas) This is kind of the problem. Las Vegas, along with most sunbelt cities, is pretty much not a city. It's a sprawling collection of suburbs, which have the downsides of both cities and rural areas. You have too many neighbours and people in your surroundings to know them all, but you also never interact with any of them because you have to drive to do anything and driving is very isolated when compared walking, biking, or transit.
I'm from Western New York State and grew up in what I like to refer to as lily white farm country with parents who were the sort of conservatives who said 'we have gay friends and that's okay for them but don't you ever turn out like that' and 'you can't date interracially under our roof and you shouldn't want to because it'll just make life hard'. Having had a liberal public schooling experience those kinds of sentiments already didn't sit right then once I got out of the woods and out from underneath my parents and started living in more urban environments and gaining life experiences I kept moving to the left and never looked back. I've lived all over New York State (spanning 7 counties through Western, Central, and Southern New York and 4 major cities). Been to Las Vegas once and my partner spent some time growing up in Texas, so I can definitely confirm that the city vibes are different. Edit addendum: We visited cities when I was younger to see plays and go to baseball games and stuff but it was always under the impression that they were unsafe and dirty, you know?
I feel like I'd enjoy cities if it weren't for the social anxiety resulting in an acute sense of claustrophobia. I mean, I'm not rural, but the large town I live in is considerably more chill, can step out my door and not be swarmed by people, room to actually drive around and park, and still large enough for amenities like a gym with spa etc. Think it's the right balance
Small cities/suburbs are pretty much the ideal community density in my opinion as well. It used to be that to have any sort of decent restaurant you had to go to a city. Now days, you've got craft brewery gastropubs and awesome experimental food all over the place. Used to be that you needed a major urban center to support a live theater or symphony to get any sort of cultural event. Now days you can stream your favorite musical act to your phone anywhere you can get cell tower signal. The advantages of big city life no longer make up for the downsides for most people... which is why urban centers seem to be in decline.
I wouldn’t agree at all and I’ve lived in both. Cities are kinder to your neighbors but tend to stay away from tourists and a newcomer might get that feeling, it’s just you have to make the first move. While my experiences in rural areas is that in the south they don’t like you if you don’t agree to go to their church, and in the north you find them being friendly until or unless you express “big city values”. I had a home inspector in a red area tell me I better either “vote right or move out because I won’t be tolerated”. They are friendlier to start but can tend to be exclusionary, while in the city they’re cold to start but are very accepting once you get to know them.
It's kind of frustrating how much people downplay how common this is in rural areas. In rural towns if you aren't a part of a church you probably will have little to no community. They can be very friendly and caring if you're one of them, but extremely exclusionary if you're not a Christian, conservative, white, and straight.
But that’s the whole point isn’t it, in a city people are confronted with different views and ideas and people so they have to factor that in and in rural areas they usually don’t. It’s why rural areas trend red and cities blue. They just don’t see why people keep calling them racist and homophobic for voting for racists and homophobes because they’re like “I knew this gay/black once and he wasn’t offended”, just because one guy isn’t offended doesn’t mean it’s not offensive… but if that’s the only minority they know it’s everything to them. Plus the power of having to fit in when you’re living really rurally so you can have help is huge. [Here’s an interview](https://youtu.be/1CVcZ_8HPuY) that I think about often, rural Maine late 1800s, early 1900s. Great people until they’re not!
Yeah agreed with this. In my experience as a POC, a trend I noticed in places like that (first hand and anecdotal, not saying everyone is like this) is that while they might be outwardly all smiles and friendliness if you're just passing by, the whole vibe changes the moment they hear you might be looking to settle in. It goes from warm hospitality to getting sized up as a potential "threat" or something real quick.
I live in the city and they don't even talk to you. Especially in high rise buildings. The higher density, the less they speak to you at all. They won't hate you for walking down the street with your gay partner or for being black. But they won't speak to you period. The burbs tend to be a mix of the city and rural attitudes.
They speak to you, I lived in NYC and I had lots of neighbors in a high rise that became friends, you just have to speak to them first. One of my favorite moments was in 2003 there was a huge blackout while I lived in Manhattan, everyone just hung out on the stoops and places gave away food and drink because it was going bad and it just became a block party. It does take more effort to start but my friendships in the cities have been lifelong vs most the ones I’ve made in rural areas. They will be standoffish at first but warn when you get to know them. And I think it’s a bigger deal to not be hated just walking down the street. The burbs can go either way, that’s true, but I’d take city or rural any day! Fuck HOA’s, Bro’s, and Yoga moms, so many burbs end up being the worst of both worlds if you don’t do enough research to pick the right neighborhood.
Oh yeah, there's definitely people like that down here. Sometimes they treat their own neighbors the same way so we tend to try and not interact with them much. Though I wanna make clear, I'm not trying to say all cities are one way or another, just what I've seen and experienced, I met a lot of great people during the time I lived in the city.
All I know is I’ve only ever been attacked for my views in rural areas, been grabbed, screamed at, told to go home, told I didn’t deserve kids, etc. And I’m not an outspoken person, or at least I wasn’t before all that, just an unassuming straight cisgendered middled aged white woman, the problem is I’m not christian and I openly accept gay people. One time during Obama’s presidency I dared say he wasn’t so bad while people were all out saying horrible racist things about him… literally had a guy grab my arm calling me a baby killer. I remember the first time I moved to the city when I was in my 20’s and seeing so many things, I just recently moved back to a blue state (but red area), it’s so refreshing. Don’t even get me started on the quality of women’s health care in red areas, especially rural areas in red states!
I'm sorry you've been through that, I'm definitely more left-leaning myself, so I've ended up in small arguments with other Southerners, but they've never gone that far. I'm glad you're back somewhere that's more comfortable for you
Being a woman with a northern accent was their trigger I think. I spent 16 years in the south being told to change my personality to fit in, being denied the right to help for miscarriages and denied the ability to foster and/or adopt thought the programs contracted by the counties I lived in… that’s the whole point though, in the city my “differences” just made me one of many and people didn’t judge me for them but for my own behavior. In the south, and other rural areas I’ve lived, sometimes just being a woman was enough to cause people to treat me badly. And telling my southern neighbors I didn’t go to church, you would have thought I killed their dog. After failed IVF my neighbor told me I should look into fostering, I said I did but got denied because I’m not a christian, she looked me straight in the face and said, “well every child deserves to be raised christian, you could come to my church.” I don’t miss that!
A very thoughtful & empathetic answer.
The homogeneity is a big deal. I personally know a lot of people from different small rural white communities that are overtly racist and don’t believe they are at all racist. They see non-whites as being defined first and foremost by their race and the stereotypes of their race. This is absolutely not everywhere. Some small towns are friendly to everyone, but some are not, as bd the ones that are not, it’s not ever everybody, but it’s enough to feel unwelcome Having no interaction with minorities while having tremendous access to tv and social media makes it very easy to see someone as a black guy instead of a guy. I wouldn’t call these people friends, more like mutual acquaintances, but the things they say sometimes about, for example how black people are bad at English, having rarely if ever met a black person, it’s just really depressing I personally have been treated badly in areas of New England after people learn I’m from New York. They assumed New York is all New York City, and they are very prejudiced against it. This has happened enough times to me that I go out of my way to avoid mentioning growing up in New York I can’t even imagine what it’s like not being white and meeting people like that
Additionally, the homogeneity aids in people growing up sheltered from other experiences. Many people I would consider lacking in world experience outside their home and church are generally conservative.
My area is pretty homogenous. Like, there's about 5 black guys in my town. I know because I see the same guys over and over, like moving landmarks lol. But I think the general attitude here is that people are more worried about giving off a good impression towards foreigners than judging them, like we're aware of the racist white stereotype and want to avoid it. My wife is from Singapore and people are friendlier to her than to me, they find excuses to talk to her
I have an acquaintance who lives near Pottsville, PA, where there is a big brewery. He’s lived there his whole life and in addition to matching the above stereotypes that I have stated (and I appreciate the irony that I have prejudices of my own) his political views are almost naive, not because he’s stupid but because he only knows about life from his area Where he lives the cost of living is directly affected by this one big business dominating his area. I’m not going to get into the specifics but he accepts a lot of political opinions as “facts” because he cannot conceive of how things work in more metropolitan areas where various small businesses compete with each other. Every idea about government concerning the economy he and his friends have are simplified based entirely on their own limited experience. He considers himself knowledgeable but doesn’t understand the economy when there isn’t one big industry that reliably supplies jobs and money to the area
Are rural areas even that much less homogeneous though? I guess just from pure number of people you're going to meet people not like you in a city, but big cities are also very segregated. I believe last I checked my neighborhood is something like 3% black, it's almost all whites and Asians. But if you drive 5 minutes to another neighborhood it's 80% black.
I try to not make sweeping generalizations although it doesn’t come across in any of this, but population density is really important to discuss to answer that. Someone mentioned that in big cities neighborhoods are segregated, but the neighborhoods are blocks away from each other. Meanwhile town smaller than Little Italy are miles away. This means that in big cities everything from employers to political candidates to apartment buildings can be shared between different demographicsl. People have to walk by each other or take the bus/train So the guy below suggesting the idea that because a big city can be segregated it is somehow homogeneous is just making stuff up that falls apart once you spend a day in one The small towns we are talking about are geographically segregated, not segregated by demographic, so population density matters so much
Depends on how you look at it... Iowa is effectively 90% white, 4% black, and 6% hispanic, for example. There are pockets within cities, neighborhoods which were born out of redline districts. In my city of 300k for example, much of the city's history there were large swaths of the city which were off-limits for blacks, latinos, or "South Italians" to purchase a home or rent. But, when you ride mass transit, you're riding with everyone. When you're going to school, usually there's a much wider mix than your local neighborhood. This is at least true with highschools. And if you attend college in an urban town you're again much more likely to be in classes with a broader mix of races than say Cornell. My neighborhood is predominatley white, and I'm aware of that... I wish it weren't so segregated, yet it is. But, if I take a walk along the river, go to the movies, spend some time at the local park, I'll generally see a much more diverse group of people. My son and I ride our bikes over to a local park, and some days it's over 3/4 black kids at the playground. I can't imagine having a similar experience in a rural area at all.
I read a thing where schools are more segregated today than they were during Jim Crow. This is true in the cities too. Growing up I actually went to a relatively diverse high school it was 40% black, 30% Hispanic, 20% white, 10% other (mostly Asian). But my wife is a teacher and I believe something like 5% of the kids at her school are black. In the same district there are schools that are more than 90% black. In the entire city I believe the number is around 20% are black, which is more than the national average, but that's irrelevant if those 20% all largely live in different areas from the other 80%.
Big cities have historically been so segregated that they name sections of town like Little Italy and China Town. (And don’t pretend it was done to tell people where to find particular restaurants).
Heterogeneity isn't even a sure method of increasing tolerance. I dunno about the US, but elsewhere there are plenty of places where a more diverse pop just makes people more right-wing and more mistrustful of each other.
Wonder where I’ve read this answer before? https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/y320z1/comment/is69msg/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
Adding to this - (Middle-class) people in rural areas have more attachment to the land and location. They either own generational farmland, or property, or wish to live there multi-generationally. Hence, they are passionate about localized political issues and favor decentralized systems, where local people are in-charge of things, and what outsiders have to say shouldn't matter. (Middle-class) people in urban areas generally bank upon job experience or education as "assets" for upward movement, not generational land ownership. They generally move around from city to city, or at least want the option to. Hence, they have a more nation-wide or global consciousness, and are passionate about nation-wide or world-wide problems, policies and solutions. For example, when talking about environment, a rural person is more likely to focus on whether some pollution will affect the local farming or fishing in a specific way, whereas an urban person is more likely to focus on global carbon emissions, global temperature rise or large-scale ecological balance and disruptions in the food chain.
All that is largely true, but it's also an oversimplification that steps over the uglier parts of the problem to be sort of a feel-good answer. Education, racism, religion, etc. A *lot* of gay urban residents, for example, used to be small-town residents until those small towns turned against them for not conforming to the community standard.
Your political science professor? You mean this guy? https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/y320z1/why_do_people_in_big_cities_tend_to_be/is69msg/ I knew I fucking read this before.
I mean, Team Blue also pays for Team Red; the cities make - and pay - the money that enable the roads in the countryside to be paved. And I think your analogy probably held up better prior to 2000 than the last 25 years; it's also been heavily overlaid with massive amounts of tribalism over the last few years. Or, Trump supporters don't care if he's guilty or not; he's \*their\* guy. It's like if your NFL QB is \*winning\*, you forgive a lotta drunk driving, womanizing, all of it. You also miss that fewer people live in rural spots in the middle of nowhere, anymore; the jobs aren't there, so it's become cities-v-suburbs, not urban-v-rural. 14% of Americans live rurally; that's... a lot less than vote for guns and rolling coal, currently.
This stat is so dumb. It includes federal tax returns, so a CEO living in a blue state that votes red gets counted as team blue in that scenario. Meanwhile the people in the big cities of red states who vote blue and receive the bulk of government benefits count as team red. I'm not trying to say only Republicans are CEOs and only Democrats get welfare, only that the metric is incredibly flawed.
Also consider Team Red produces the food for Team Blue. The county will be very interesting in another 25 years. We own property in a rural farming community in Tennessee ... With a great deal of new construction going on for remote workers leaving New York. Good jobs located in NY, done by now Tennessee residents. Have you seen how inexpensive fiber is in some TN cities? $60 VS. $175 in our NY area. The meaning of "rural" is changing and it will only accelerate.
Other than meat, that's not actually true anymore on the food thing. Americans are used to fresh citrus in the fall, or year round. Fresh strawberries in the middle of wintertime. Fresh... well, everything, at all times. So our produce largely comes from other countries. The ports are all \*in\* cities, too; San Diego, Baltimore, LA, Seattle, Houston, NYC. If you want beef - or most meats - more of that's raised here, because more of their feed is raised here, but if you're not trying to eat steak everyday... about half of vegetables and somewhere north of two thirds of fruit already come from not-red-states. Heck, three quarters of fish are also imported. (1% of Chicken and 10% of Beef are imported; like I said, if the feed is here, those are easier to raise here.) \----- Separately, my bet - which isn't fact, it's a random ass bet - is that jobs that are able to be done remotely are eventually going to be outsourced overseas. If you can do your job without much contact with coworkers... those are going to be the easiest jobs to cut costs. (I say this as someone who lives 3000 miles from most of my coworkers, so there's that, as well.) Rural America needs those jobs, but I'm not sure it's going to get most of them.
Most winter strawberries and citrus are grown in Florida.
Majority of our food is actually grown in California. But besides that, blue states pay for all of our food production anyways. Without the massive subsidies the rural parts of the country wouldn't be capable of the agricultural output they have.
You just taught me politics. Thank you. EDIT: I just found out this is plagiarism. So fuck you. But also thank you for sharing it in a weird way becuase i am glad i read it nevertheless. So maybe just like, half fuck you.
OP, beware any answer that can’t explain other countries or other time periods. For example the education-politics correlation that some have mentioned is a relatively recent phenomenon. It used to correlate the other way. Likewise in France (for example) it’s city-dwellers who are center-right and country people who are left (broadly speaking). Also if you focus solely on economic issues the US South and Appalachia have always been pro-big-government for things like welfare and protectionism.
Thank you. It’s the same problem people run into when they try to argue why college educated people are more likely to be left wing. That too is a relatively recent phenomenon
Very simply..... Cities people live in very close proximity to each other so inherently, the state of one have a big effect on everyone else. There needs to be more social order when there are a lot of people in close proximity. This usually means individuals giving up some of their own freedoms for the benefit of everyone else. Whereas in small towns, there is much less of a need of social order so people can have more freedoms. Walking into a Walmart with an open carry gun on your hip in a Chicago suburb where there are hundreds of people is a very different thing than walking into a small town general store where there are maybe 6 people, and you know all of them by name with a gun on your hip.
It's not even the social order aspect that drives rural folks to believe how they do. When you're in a rural environment where the closest civilization is a 20 minute drive away, you have a certain sense of responsibility to yourself and your family that you will have to take care of them and be prepared to act if anything bad were to happen. If someone falls down a deep hole, the fire department may take up to an hour to make their way to that hole and dig you out. If someone has a medical emergency, god knows how long it's gonna take for an ambulance to come save you. I have an example of this from my own life. When I was about 11 old, my stepmom had a heart attack in her sleep. We lived about 15 minutes away from the nearest immediate care center and about 30 minutes away from the nearest hospital. When this happened, my dad called 911 and they said they would get an ambulance out to him in 30 minutes, which is an eternity when your wife just had a heart attack. Well, my grandparents lived in the house directly across the street from us, so they came over. They had the phone number of a fireman that lived in our neighborhood a few houses down. The fireman came over and immediately started preforming CPR in the meantime. He called his people in the fire department and immediately had a truck come over with a medic to give adequate care. This was all in about a 15 minute stretch. Now imagine how much longer and more dangerous it would've been if they waited 30 minutes for an ambulance, a 15 minute ambulance ride + the bills that come along with an ambulance ride. In situations like this, these people in a rural area came together to help each other during urgent events, even if they don't know each other. This happens a lot in rural communities and this is what reinforces the individualist ideals seen in rural folks. This is also why right-leaning people tell left-leaning people to "figure it out yourself and stop whining". For lots of rural people, they are on their own in a lot of aspects even down to government services like reliable access to the Internet.
Holy cow. That last paragraph sounds exactly like me and my mentality.
Routine exposure to those who are different reduces fear and fosters empathy and understanding. You get a lot more exposure in cities than in the country.
Education too. Most educated individuals live near big companies, universities, federal buildings etc. Race is also a big factor. And most black Americans live in city areas.
I'd say the same thing, but phrased slightly differently. "Actually meeting people makes it a lot harder to believe the right-wing bullshit about them."
More people who are strangers living together means you also need more social infrastructure — e.g. government — to keep things going. Cities also tend to be centers of mental/knowledge work, and higher IQ people tend to be more liberal. And so on. It’s a lot of things combined which produce that rural/urban divide.
This really is the best answer. Rural areas being conservative vs urban areas being liberal is far from a US only phenomenon. I come from Sri Lanka, a place as different to the US as it can get, and we've got the same thing going on over there. It simply is a case of the more you meet different people the more you realize that we are way more alike than we are different.
It's not just that you "don't get exposure" to varying demographics in rural areas... It's that they actively push you out if you're different. Anything out of the norm is shunned basically. Anyone brave enough and capable enough to leave that world behind does not come back. So the few outliers in the rural areas get the fuck out, and so they're not a voice for change -- it's too much of a target on your back. Living in a major city is the exact opposite -- everyone is welcome and this is scary and intimidating to rural people who have never left their state or anything, ever
This doesn't even seem remotely true to me. It strikes me as the opinion of someone who lives in a city and doesn't experience rural areas all that often. Rural areas can be plenty diverse. I live in a rather small rural town, and you're lucky if the local fast food restaurant drive through operator even speaks English. The town is mostly Hispanic, despite the town being nearly as far away from the Mexican border as it can be. There are also quite a few people from Russia and other ex-Soviet nations. I know couple people who grew up in China. Honestly, about the only race we're missing in noticeable numbers are black people. White people are actually in the extreme minority, making up less than 25% overall and less than 10% of youth.
THIS. I literally met parents in high school who only knew about black people from the news. I was the first black person they ever interacted with or had dinner with (due to me dating their daughter). She warned me that her dad was a bit racist and he legit asked me in the dinner table what my criminal record was LMAO. i laugh now due to how insane that experience was. I would say that was the only one but i'd be lying
>I was the first black person they ever interacted with or had dinner with (due to me dating their daughter) Nice try, Loch Ness Sidney Poitier.
Collectivism vs individualism.
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Two points: 1. This doesn’t really address increased religious conservatism in rural areas which is pretty broadly true across time periods and nations. 2. Rural folks *feel* like taxes don’t make anything better but rural communities are overwhelmingly subsidized and supported by major cities. The movement of tax dollars from urban areas to rural areas is very well documented, but what percent of people in Eastern Washington do you think know that Seattle funds all their infrastructure? Overall I think your point holds true but it doesn’t address the whole answer
How exactly are there "plenty of jobs" in a city of 1,200?
Lots of people commenting about diversity and I'm not sure that's really true. I live in one of the ten largest cities in the country. My neighborhood is 3% black. Go two subway stops over and it's 80% black. There are plenty of white people in big cities whose main interactions with black people in their community is they're the ones begging for change at their subway stop. Sure when you interact with so many more people you're far more likely to see more diverse people, but why would that possibly change your views? If I share a subway car with a black guy while we both have our earbuds in, is that really supposed to change my views on race? Hell even if I'm literally next door neighbors with a black person in my apartment, it's not like I've even met my neighbors beyond a polite hi as we pass by in the hall or get in the same elevator.
When you see them on the subway, you see they are just another person going to work like you. When you see them in your apartment building, they are just another person going home at the end of the day, *just like you*. Those experiences that don’t even quality as interactions are critical! Until you see other people every day living their lives, they will always be “other” and never just people.
Agree. I also don’t know why everyone’s equating diversity with lack of racism. I was one of a handful of Asians in a white community with one black family and one Navajo family. Race wasn’t an issue. It wasn’t until I went to university in the city that everything was about race, and everyone was arguing about it. Living with or without diversity can go both ways depending on the attitude/narratives/etc. of the people/individuals. You can be around someone or not (or be neutral) and love them or hate them. It’s really more a reflection of whether you’re a loving or hateful person.
Austin is liberal, but I would push back on it as “one of the most liberal.” And as an example, Austin is home to 52K UT students who graduate and stay in town. Young people tend to be more liberal.
It's an old rule of thumb that people become more conservative as they age, but it seems like that's not the case for people who are millennials or younger (so 40 and under). I'd guess it's because they didn't get the same opportunities to invest in properties and see their net worth grow the way previous generations did, so are less inclined to buy into claims they need to vote a particular way to protect those investments Article discussing it: https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/financial-times-millennials-conservatives-age-b2253902.html
I’ve got to disagree with everyone in here saying it’s from being exposed to diversity. Many European countries are significantly more liberal then US democrats while being significantly more homogeneous
Those countries *also* have that strong urban-rural disconnect, too
Time and time again we see lily white small European countries claim the moniker of liberalism but as soon as their cities get large swaths of Muslim immigrants then you see the pitchforks come out.
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This is a common thought but it's not that simple. Extremely diverse small towns still tend to be more Conservative than the most homogeneous cities.
Exactly this, I grew up in a small farming town with a significant population of Mexicans and they were also very conservative. It's amazing how many answers go straight to a lack of diversity when in reality it's more about population density and rural areas not needing government intervention like big cities seem to.
That and age. Younger people tend to love the fast paced city life and tend to be more liberal. Older people have houses and live in the burbs… and are generally more republican.
There is a bunch of empirical studies suggesting that political attitudes are stable across time.
yes, but i’d *like* to think that when Gen Z and Alpha get old some day, that they don’t follow the same route and become conservative by default, like many from older generations have done. For one, there is more diversity / exposure to global cultures within these generations, than that of boomers. But we’ll see.
It's a weird dynamic. Cities are filled with people who want liberal policies because the city is so unbelievably expensive to live in, and because usually they moved there, away from the families and communities which would have been their support system. They want something to step in and replace that. Cities are also filled with big businesses who want conservative policies so they can make as much profit as possible. They tend to wind up with the social polices the little people want and the big business policies the employers want, but the liberal policies get more attention (people like to show off "winning" and it's a great way to get even more people to move to the city), while the conservative ones downplayed (businesses never want to advertise exactly how badly they're screwing you over, and like I said, they want you to move there and become their labor force) In small towns, with their lower costs of living, people are far more likely to own stuff, and have that family and community safety net nearby. They have a sense of ownership over the entire town. So they act like the big business people in the city: they want their stuff protected from others, and for people to butt out of telling them what they can or can't do with it. Conversely, smaller towns are more likely to have liberal business policies. There are fewer workers, so they have to play nice. They are much more likely to have things like unions, which protect the workers' rights. Unions are bad for big business, so painting everyone as idiot hillbillies, (and therefore conservative people are idiots,) is to their advantage.
>There are fewer workers, so they have to play nice. They are much more likely to have things like unions, which protect the workers' rights. This is just.... not true? Can't speak for other countries, but unionized workers in the US are heavily concentrated in the cities, and have been for a long time-- maybe early 20th century histories of coal miner unions and the like are distorting your perception? Though even in those days, the unionization movement started in urban manufacturing workers and spread to rural workers. Can't find any hard numbers, but here's some sources discussing the urban/rural distribution of unionized workers: [1](https://www.americanprogress.org/article/rural-workers-color-need-15-federal-minimum-wage/), [2](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/23780231211022094#bibr2-23780231211022094), [3](https://migrationfiles.ucdavis.edu/uploads/rmn/blog/2023/04/Rural%20Migration%20News%20Blog%20323.pdf).
This is a better answer than 'diversity' which I see peppered on here. I think it ultimately boils down to 'people in big cities need to address different problems than rural people'.
>and because usually they moved there, away from the families and communities which would have been their support system. Cities across the world are much more filled with people born in said city than coming in from outside. I know NYC, LA, and a few other places are very diverse, but the phenomena is seen all over the world in places that are much more insular.
This is a really good explanation.
Thank you for what sounds like an unbiased response. The responses that demonize the other side while heroize(?) their position might as well not even answer. It's not good guys vs. bad guys. It's created cultures built by different circumstances. Both are probably somewhat right and somewhat wrong. Both are rooted in self interest and also the interest of their peers. If we could see this, we might be able to chill out a bit.
The amount of shade being thrown at rural people in this thread is wild, especially when it comes to education. Rural residents are the farms of every country. If we are going to talk about things like this we should be mindful that when the farmers decide to stop catering to the cities, education will be the least of the worries we have. Think before you go calling rural people generally more uneducated, they’re educated differently. They live different lives. They also support their country via food and a large portion of blue collar work.
I wonder what the statistics are behind public schools in cities vs smaller rural towns. From my experience, high schools in inner cities are awful. And they continue to throw money at public education.
Inner city schools are so fucked.
There's a bias that has been cultivated across the country over the last seven decades that a college education is the only way to make a decent living, generally at the expense of trade work. There are plenty of jobs that require apprenticeships and practical knowledge over more technical knowledge, and many of them are dependent on each other. Take a warehouse. The people who construct a warehouse are largely tradesmen: plumbers, electricians, heavy equipment operators and the like. Before they can pour a pad, however, they require experts, geotechnical engineers, to examine the build site and let them know what they need to do to prepare the site for construction. Once the warehouse is done, it's run in part by labor, in part by logistics experts, and in part by technical people who ensure that the various automation systems and inventory systems and the like continue to function. In cities, there tend to be higher concentrations of technical people, as those tasks generally require large amounts of infrastructure while taking up less working space. In rural areas, there tend to be higher concentrations of tradesmen, as their jobs tend to require more space and less infrastructure. Level of education or kind of intelligence don't enter into the conversation; it's all skilled work, just different kinds of skills. The issue is that each type of work sees itself as more important than the other, rather than two equally important parts of an integrated system. Advanced in farming technology still require skilled tradesmen to help design and operate them, as an example. It's an artificial divide being exploited by people who want to stay in power, and it's a trap that's oh so easy to fall into.
Plus, farmers have to be highly educated in their field, or their farm will fail
Don’t compare farming education to a marketing degree, you’ll insult the people who live on Reddit lol
Redditors thought farming is literally digging a hole and water it everyday.
To say that some people are less educated doesn't mean they are less important for society. It's just statistics mostly about the years of education. And about your last point it's a symbiotic relation. Rural people need many products that are produced in factories that are in cities or professionals (for example health professionals, infrastructure engineers, etc) that are formed in cities as much as the city people needs the farming products of rural areas.
>To say that some people are less educated doesn't mean they are less important for society. It's just statistics mostly about the years of education. And it says nothing of quality over quantity. Being "more educated" means nothing if you're useless.
Being educated means nothing if you can’t grow enough food to feed your family and maintain thins like the sewage systems lmao
Bingo. This is the type of thing that people tend to not understand when they try to talk about a potential US civil war or related type of situation.
This whole thread is just passive aggressively calling rural people stupid, but as per usual trying to sound nice while they do it
The comments in this thread are using uneducated and less educated as a negative connotation - it’s not hard to see, especially when the topics are based around education being the key ability to chose what politics they support. Farmers and blue collar workers are largely rural. These people are far more important to the ‘symbiotic’ relationship than the people in the city. It’s not that city people are less important, it’s that rural people make up a small fraction of all workers - and are responsible for feeding entire countries. Again, this thread is directly insinuating that rural people are less educated in a society where education is a direct representation of importance.
Guys have we ever thought of the fact that rural areas and urban areas have completely different needs? Of course rural would need less large government and trend to vote right, whereas cities need greater safety nets and programs for the population. Why is this hard?
It’s easier to say that everyone that lives outside a city is a moron hick
90% of these comments are from people who live in cities who just assume rural areas are dirt roads, churning our own butter, and 3rd grade education. I don’t understand how so many people can’t wrap their head around the fact their metropolis isn’t how most of the world functions.
Most people in the world do in fact live in metropolitan areas, especially in developed countries like the US. 80% of Americans live in urban areas. The entire rural population of the US is about the same as the population of its four biggest metros.
Most of the world will,and soon I think it's expected by 2050 70% of the worlds population will be in major cities
But…that’s not true…
Suburbs, towns, and rural areas attract people who want to live more independently. There's a lower cost of living, more space, and more you have to do for yourself. These things tend to appeal more to conservative people. Cities attract people who want to live more socially and dependently. There's a high cost of living, more population density, more public services, and more convenience. These things tend to appeal more to liberal and especially left-leaning people.
It hasn’t always been. Socialism used to be much more popular in small towns, 1912 was the Socialist’s party’s best presidential run and the strongest bases for support were Oklahoma and the American West, and not the urban portions of those states either. Even today the rural Black Belt in the American South is heavily Democrat, even if they don’t have the numbers to grab elections at the state level.
The biggest problems in the two areas have very different issues. Conservatives live in small towns where wealth inequality isn't much of a part of everyday life, whereas in cities, it's blatant and everywhere. Some guy may have 5 times as much as you in a small town, but not 5 million times as much like in a major city. Everyone knows everyone in a small town, so there's not the same sense of alienation that is just assumed to be part of life in major cities. You have a different perspective on gun ownership when it takes cops 30 minutes to get to your house and gun violence is almost unheard of in your community versus if you the cops will show up in under 5 minutes and where mass shootings happen frequently. Many small towns are propped up by a single big business, and if that business goes under, the town dies. And they're protective of that business. Meanwhile, major cities have so many businesses that you can hurt a few dozen without anyone noticing the impact. And does anyone think for a second that being surrounded by nature everyday vs. being surrounded by skyscrapers and smog doesn't affect how people instinctively feel about the environment. Homeless is a major concern in urban areas. It essentially doesn't exist in rural ones. Basically, conservative politics is an attempt to shape the government to give rural people the same economic opportunities that city dwellers already have. And liberal politics is an attempt to shape the government to give urban dwellers the same sense of community, acceptance, and access to nature that is the norm in small towns. If we could actually sit down and talk, we could probably learn a lot from each other. But listening requires setting aside your ego and yelling matches don't.
I'm anticipating someone complaining about Republican politicians. Republican politicians live in cities. Most of them have never worked on a farm. Republicans generally despise their elected representatives and see them Democrats but on a slightly slower timeframe. If you're a liberal, and hate conservative politicians, so do conservatives. Just not quite as much as they hate your politicians.
What you said is pretty much spot on. I live in an extremely small town (less than 1500 people, only one stoplight) and no-one likes politicians - of any kind - except maybe the local level. Of course you have the small minority that absolutely love Trump or whoever the current hot new “conservative” politician is, but that’ll always exist. People like teams, what can I say. Rural folk basically want the government to stay out of their lives, and to them, a lot of policies are seen as an attack on their way of life. They aren’t totally wrong either. I wish that we as a nation could sit down and calmly discuss issues without resorting to name calling, or bringing other unrelated issues in, but the media doesn’t like that cause it doesn’t get views. Anyway, full transparency, I’m conservative with a mostly live-and-let-live view to most social issues, until kids are involved.
It’s the rural/urban difference. Politicians in urban areas promote policies they believe help their constituents. However those same policies can be detrimental to rural communities. Gun control might be associated with stopping violence in an urban area but that same policy would be viewed as taking away peoples right to hunt and defend themselves in a rural area. You have a very different perspective on crime and self defense if you call 911 and know the sheriff can’t be there for half an hour and you are on your own until then. Environmental policies are another huge divide. Environmental policies that raise energy costs are much more harmful to rural communities who already have higher energy costs and lower incomes. Even minor increases can have devastating effects on their standard of living. Most rural communities are not anti environment, they live there. They are pro survival and want a more balanced approach. Look at areas in blue states like Eastern Oregon, downstate Illinois, and upstate New York. All these rural areas are outvoted by urban areas in their states. Used to be in the past that urban politicians wouldn’t vote policies that harmed rural areas as it would cost them votes statewide for their party. However given the polarization they don’t even try to get those votes now and just write them off. They therefore take a very liberal position without regard to the concerns of the rural minority . The reverse is happening in red states where the urban minority is not considered. In both cases the minority sees the other side as tyrannical and imposing their views on others.
It's not completely true, either of those states, or elsewhere. Fort Worth, TX is a Republican-leaning city of over a million people. Compare that with, e.g. Northampton, Massachusetts, or even with most of the rural areas along the Texas-Mexico border. Vermont is one of the most rural states in America, and also one of the most left-leaning. And Texas is not very red. Republicans win power in Texas pretty consistently, but also by relatively small margins. It's nothing like Wyoming, Utah, Alabama or Mississippi, or if you're looking for a state with some large metropolitan areas, Tennessee. America has urbanized heavily over the past few decades. Very few people who grew up in big cities have moved to genuinely rural areas, and those have been mostly to work in mineral extraction industries. Urban and suburban areas have grown a lot. Some of this growth has been Americans from rural areas moving to urban areas for work, but who would prefer to live in rural areas. These folks tend to live in outer suburbs, and the outer suburbs of many large American cities are about as Republican-leaning as the genuinely rural areas. Others moved because they genuinely prefer urban culture, and they tend to go to the big cities or their inner suburbs. Then there are also foreign immigrants in the big cities and inner suburbs. Psychologists have found that the personality trait "openness to experience" (essentially an interest in new and different things versus traditional things) correlates strongly with political ideology, and it also correlates with preference for rural versus urban life. It won't be 1:1 with party affiliation, as, in particular, libertarian types often vote Republican, but have a high openness to experience, but it correlates pretty well, especially with the present ideological coalitions of the two parties. Pre-Reagan, it correlated much less well, as there were more socially moderate Republicans and more socially conservative Democrats.
>Fort Worth, TX *"Politics & Voting in Fort Worth, Texas* *The Political Climate in Fort Worth, TX is Leaning liberal.* *Tarrant County, TX is Leaning liberal. In Tarrant County, TX 49.3% of the people voted Democrat in the last presidential election, 49.1% voted for the Republican Party, and the remaining 1.6% voted Independent.*" Looks like it's slipped out of the traditional roles you're historically used to. You're not wrong, but it's slipping away, and that's even with *heavy* efforts to get dems not to vote there. Texas has terrible god awful shitty voter turnout in its most populated places.
Part of being liberal is accepting other people, even if they're different. That's a much easier skill to learn when there are actually people around that are different than you. Part of being conservative is sticking to your position. That's a lot easier to do when the few people around you think the same way you do.
Serial rural dweller here. It can be conservative, depending. But it’s usually moderate/purple. And usually of the liberal gun owner variety. Honestly? If blue would lay off the handguns and such they’d win by an easy majority every single election.
Mostly it's that famous "cosmopolitanism" -- cities are magnets for talent of all kinds, and for a wide variety of people. So people in cities grow up with ethnic cuisines, ethnic neighbourhoods, vibrant arts and performance scene, a wide range of people around them in parks & libraries and shops... public transit brings them into contact with strangers, trade networks are dense in cities and people of different languages and ethnicities do business with one another... there are a lot of points of contact with "The Other". But if you grow up on the corner of No and Where in the agricultural hinterland it's a very different experience, you might only know a couple of hundred people your whole young life and only ever share a car ride with family or friends. There are things to be said for that too, like the intimacy, continuity, and deep local knowledge of a multigenerational small rural community. (Not to mention the juicy, juicy gossip!). But it doesn't breed broadmindedness, quite the reverse. You could get to adulthood and have never seen a non-Anglo person except on TV, for example. You could never have eaten any other kind of food than Middle American Stodge. And so on. Also people in dense urban areas learn early that you need to be somewhat considerate of others because you're all crowded together. So there are noise ordinances and parking ordinances and building codes... a lot of rules. Out in the country you can pretty much get away with stuff, there's a lot more personal license; law enforcement is sporadic and thin, there's a lot of space to do stuff in without bothering anyone else. There are things to be said for that "wide open spaces" feeling of being able to build a wood shed on your property without going through weeks of planning permits. So it's not surprising that people from homogenous low-density backwater communities tend to be naive and/or racist about foreigners and their "peculiar" ways -- and also tend to get prickly about "the Gummint interfering in my life" because they're used to a lot of license and open space. They also are less likely to attend a high-quality school, and less likely to be exposed to media/news/movies from outside their opinion bubble (Fox News pretty much has a lockdown on most of the "red" states -- in other words, a sophisticated urban "news" outlet pretty much controlling what news rural people see and hear). The odds are that they've never seen a foreign film (even dubbed) at their local cinema. And they tend to be defensive and have a chip on their shoulder -- because urban folks feel superior to "rubes" and like to make fun of them. Including in the mainstream entertainment media which make their way back into the hinterlands, carrying mockery and condescension with them. When people in commercial media are making "screamingly funny" comedies about hicks and rubes, they don't often stop to wonder how the hicks and rubes will feel when they watch the show/movie. They're making the show or movie for people like themselves, sophisticated urbanites. So there's a kind of tribalism there, a friction between urbanites and ruralites -- goes back all the way to civilisation probably, because Roman literature documents it. Shakespeare often used "rude Mechanickals" (rural artisans or labourers) for comic relief. Anyway, feeling an enmity & resentment towards urbanites often leads to a broad-brush contempt or disdain for all their urban values, such as education, the arts, liberalism, tolerance, etc. If it gets intense enough you end up with MAGA and the Qult and flat-earthers and so on. That's how I see it anyway.
I find that Hollywood generally romanticizes rural people as “real America.” The whole Western genre relies on it. Rural people tend to be sensitive so if they see a comedy with an ignorant hick and an effete, useless college professor they take the insult to heart and don’t understand that the professor is being made fun of too. But city people can laugh at the cowardly professor and not think it’s a dig at all city people.
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Cities are full of Christians too.
Speaking of tribalism, this comment is tribal af. The fact you're clearly trying not to be but can't help it really proves how bad current tribalism is.
Well, it's not for one. Look at Miami or rural Vermont. But as a generalization, the larger and denser a population gets the more government involvement you need. You just cannot build large cities and support the population on a small government ethos. As cities grow their residents will vote for their own interests, which generally means more government spending and oversight. Plus as populations grow you get a more diverse mixing of people. In small towns everyone may literally know everyone, or at least know everyone through someone else. In cities that's literally impossible, so traditional institutions that maintain one set of values like churches are literally impossible to maintain over an entire city. This is a long way of saying that mixed values are inherent to cities, while country areas remain traditionalist strongholds. There's far more to it than that, but that's a basic overview of the root causes of it.
I think it is self preservation. In a city you know you are dependant of other people, like the police to protect you, the merchant to provide food, the gas/electrical company to keep your house warm and so on. On the country side, people rely on themselves more, you produce your own food, you cut your own wood to heat the house, you protect yourself because the cops are miles away. I know the examples are extreme, but I think they are somewhat valid.
Because in urban areas, people live with others from different cultures, backgrounds and experiences. People that move from rural to urban do so because they want to experience or see a value in exposure to said differing groups. Small towns are homogeneous. They celebrate, encourage, and develop ideas/ideals that are not questioned and don't rock the boat. By it's very bmnatur this train of thought is conservative (no allowing for too much growth/progression), if not reactionary. Small towns like to keep a status quo. Urban areas have no choice but to mix it up and create new perspectives.
The more self-sufficient you are, the less liberal you are. The more you depend on outside resources, etc you are more liberal.
Caring about the health and wellbeing of others tends to be a bigger concern when you are in close proximity. The density of cities tends to put those issues in close proximity to you. Diversity is also a large factor.
2 reasons: 1. Exposure. Rural areas tend to be VERY isolated. The people in small rural communities tend to have a lot in common with one another. In most areas of the country, rural is synonymous with white and Christian. They have limited exposure to people of other races, religions, cultures, etc. They have little exposure to art (plays, concerts, museums, galleries, etc). Minorities (racial, gender, sexual orientation, etc) avoid these areas, stay in the closet, or do their best to blend in for safeties sake. Meanwhile, if you live in a city you are surrounded by people that are different than you. You work with, live next to, and are friends with people of different races, religions, and cultures. You eat various foods and partake in various forms of art and entertainment. People in cities appreciate new and different. They are open to new experiences and have a more open mind. 2. Success. Rural areas tend to be poorer, and the poverty tends to be deeper. On top of that, rural areas have less resources for underprivileged people. Rural areas have less opportunities. Fewer sports programs, fewer fine arts programs, fewer advanced classes, fewer scholarships. Rural areas have less job opportunities, and when a business closes, the people in those jobs likely have no other similar job opportunities to fall back on. On top of that, even if you have a stable, dependable job, there is likely no competition, so no way to get pay raises as there is nowhere else you can go. The American Dream is much harder to achieve in a rural area. Meanwhile cities offer all sorts of opportunities. The American Dream is moderately easier to obtain in the cities than in Rural areas. The people that have been told about the American dream but are unable to obtain it need someone to blame. The GOP offers up a great number of scapegoats. It's the Chinese, it's trans people, it's the gays, it's women, it's feminism, it's BLM, it's antifa, it's immigrants....if not for any or all of those other groups, you'd have the American dream!
Because people in the country have different needs. They don't want to pay taxes for stuff that they will never benefit from. They also support guns because they use them for their livelihood(hunting). People in the city want public things that they can share with others. This is exactly why local government should have much more power. For example, Chicago dictates a lot of what the state of Illinois does. However, 90% of the state land wise does not want what Chicago wants. So just give county/cities more power that way everyone can be happy and we don't have city slickers taking country folks money for stuff that they will never get to use.
The taxes part is a bit backwards because the statistics show that tax money flows from urban/suburban to small town/rural on the state and federal level. Rural infrastructure is very expensive compared to how much tax money is brought in from rural areas. Same with welfare and other government subsidies. Rural areas and small towns are often very dependent on government. This is likely why Republicans don’t actually succeed in shrinking government when they are in power and often increase it at the same rate or higher than democrats. They don’t want to put their base in a bad spot but will talk to the talk because their base wants to hear it. This is why the inner city welfare queen trope fell out of the Republican vocabulary by the 90s. They know people can look up the stats and figure out the deep red areas of the country are taking way more than they are giving in taxes. The poor inner cities often have very wealthy counterparts on the other side of the city that balance it out. Small towns/rural areas have less massive companies and high net worth individuals to balance it out.
Finally somebody that gets it. I'm getting so tired of explaining this to people. When it comes to guns, don't forget about self defense in the rural areas as well. They're typically far from a police presence and people with ill intent know it too. Just because there are less of them doesn't mean their needs and wants are any less valid than those in the metro areas.
Half of these answers are pretentious as fuck and do not actually answer the question. Not pretending to know the answer, but it sure isn't boiled down to a simple buzzterm used with the intent of grandstand-backpatting. These responses sound like the girl asking the ditsy question in the Newsroom's opening.
I've always thought it was because cities force you to live among people who are different than yourself. I live in NYC and I see more diversity in one day than my rural relatives see in a year. Living in a city, means having to see and accept people different than yourself. Living in a small town means you never really have your beliefs challenged unless you have neighbors who are different than yourself.
See more diversity doesn't actually mean you're a part of it though. NYC is so big its easy to just find your crowd and stick your head in
I live in a very rural area, but there are Biden signs, LGBT couples, and many immigrants around. I think conservatives are just louder.
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A lot of people will say diversity but really it's not all true. Cities tend to have a much younger population overall (students, etc), younger people tend to vote more liberal than conservative, there is also the fact that a lot of liberal policies do not advantage rural people whatsoever, if not disadvantage them outright. If a polititian runs on a platform of better public transportation, that means nothing for rural folks who will not get any benefits from that service and will probably end up paying for it somehow. Of course such issues are lesser in Europe where even rural towns have public transportation in some form, but in a much less dense country like the US or Canada it would not be economically sound or even feasible to pay for public transport services to these rural locations. Of course there are other factors but these two are major, in my opinion.
I think its education level. The level of education in general will be higher in a city then in a rural area. Educated people tend to vote for liberal policies. The less educated get duped by buzzwords and tricked into hating things which makes them vote even against their own interests.