Racists or ruralists? Elites vs. commoners?

David Brooks, the conservative New York Times pundit, has been dining out recently on a new theory that goes something like this:

The people erupting in fury over President Barack Obama’s birth certificate — or describing him as the Anti-christ, or demanding that “real” Americans take back “their” country — aren’t racist.

No, no. They’re just common folks. It’s an uprising of “the ordinary people and against the fat cats and the educated class; for the small towns and against the financial centers.”

He talks about the conservative media — Fox, AM talk radio — as “populist.”

Brooks has flirted with this meme for a while now, the idea that there really are sort of two Americas: the earth-rooted, dirt-under-the-fingernails small-town Jeffersonians and the Hamiltonians who stand for “urbanism, industrialism and federal power.”

Brooks’ argument doesn’t wash.

First, the conservative movement as it exists today is deeply tied to financial power, industrialism and its 20th-century incarnation, corporatism.

The idea that Democrats are the party of big government elites while conservatives are a movement of town hall Joes from Main Street is simply daffy.

Second, as Brooks himself occasionally acknowledges, the romantic vision of rural folks as down-home-up-by-the-bootstraps types simply doesn’t wash anymore.

Urban Americans, on average, are far more productive, entrepreneurial and well-educated than rural Americans.

They use fewer government services, on average, and pay far more in taxes. (A lot of those taxes are siphoned off and spent in rural communities.)

Rural folks, meanwhile, have problems with drugs, unemployment, and single-parenthood that often resemble those of inner city families.

The final — and most glaring — flaw in Brooks’ argument is his exclusion of race.

Yes, it’s true that in the 1700s the urban-rural divide was more about culture, regionalism and class than skin-color.

But after the Civil War and the great African American migration to the industrial cities, race became one of the key divides between urban and rural.

Even more so now, in the era of Hispanic immigration.

Yet Brooks pretends that the GOP’s “Southern strategy” never existed and that we’re still having the same old debate, in which skin color and racial tension are afterthoughts.

He tips his hand a bit when he quotes blogger Arnold Kling, who writes, “One could argue that this country is on the verge of a crisis of legitimacy. The progressive elite is starting to dismiss rural white America as illegitimate, and vice versa.”

Note that no one talked of a “crisis of legitimacy” when rural whites were in power — say, a year ago.

That, despite the fact that small town whites make up only about 20% of the American population.

Yet now that urban blacks (and urban women) have claimed the highest offices in the land, the “Don’t Tread On Me” movement has decided that the nation is unraveling.

Suddenly, Washington has lost its way and is no longer listening to true Americans.

I think the truth is a lot simpler.

This wholesale transition in power –symbolized by Barack Obama — is frightening for millions of whites, rural whites in particular.

We have a political and media culture that hopes to leverage that vitriol, for ratings, for financial support, and for votes.

The danger, as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has pointed out, is that all the fear, frustration and Glenn Beckian manipulation could escalate quickly into violence.

The town-hall movement that Brooks acknowledges as “ill-mannered and conspiratorial” could very easily become something far worse.