{"id":1074,"date":"2009-09-22T07:04:00","date_gmt":"2009-09-22T11:04:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2009\/09\/22\/racists-or-ruralists-elites-vs-commoners\/"},"modified":"2009-09-22T07:04:00","modified_gmt":"2009-09-22T11:04:00","slug":"racists-or-ruralists-elites-vs-commoners","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2009\/09\/22\/racists-or-ruralists-elites-vs-commoners\/","title":{"rendered":"Racists or ruralists? Elites vs. commoners?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

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.<\/p>\n

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.”<\/p>\n

He talks about the conservative media — Fox, AM talk radio — as “populist.”<\/p>\n

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.”<\/p>\n

Brooks’ argument doesn’t wash.<\/p>\n

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

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Urban Americans, on average, are far more productive, entrepreneurial and well-educated than rural Americans.<\/p>\n

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.)<\/p>\n

Rural folks, meanwhile, have problems with drugs, unemployment, and single-parenthood that often resemble those of inner city families.<\/p>\n

The final — and most glaring — flaw in Brooks’ argument is his exclusion of race.<\/p>\n

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

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.<\/p>\n

Even more so now, in the era of Hispanic immigration.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

He tips his hand a bit when he quotes blogger Arnold Kling, who writes, \u201cOne 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Note that no one talked of a “crisis of legitimacy” when rural whites were in power — say, a year ago.<\/p>\n

That, despite the fact that small town whites make up only about 20% of the American population.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Suddenly, Washington has lost its way and is no longer listening to true Americans.<\/p>\n

I think the truth is a lot simpler.<\/p>\n

This wholesale transition in power –symbolized by Barack Obama — is frightening for millions of whites, rural whites in particular.<\/p>\n

We have a political and media culture that hopes to leverage that vitriol, for ratings, for financial support, and for votes.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The town-hall movement that Brooks acknowledges as “ill-mannered and conspiratorial” could very easily become something far worse.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

David Brooks, the conservative New York Times pundit, has been dining out recently on a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1074"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1074"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1074\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1074"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1074"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1074"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}