The all-knowing YouTube algorithm served me up a video from a guy who calls himself the CityNerd about people who call themselves “rural”. It’s a long, involved path, but it relies on peer-reviewed medical literature and a widely used measure of rural vs. urban (RUCA), so I think it’s at least reliable enough to post about.
The nut of the video is that people who live in areas that are absolutely urban (1 on a RUCA scale of 1-10 on urban vs rural), self-identify as residents of a rural community. The graph from this study (above) shows that 30% of RUCA 1 (truly urban) think they’re urban dwellers.
This is important to medicine because a person’s conception of themselves as a rural or urban person is tied to their health. Rural-identifiers health habits (obesity, drug and alcohol use, smoking) are worse, so their outcomes are worse — and studies show it’s rural identification, not actual physical location.
A psychological attachment to rural identification has also been correlated with anti-intellectualism, and that distrust of science and learning in general is of course politically relevant as well as relevant to health outcomes.
CityNerd has a whole agenda about figuring out why rural cosplayers drive F-150s from the suburbs into the city to work, but that’s not what I found interesting about his video. We think a lot about “suburbs” and the voters there who swing a lot of elections, but the RUCA scale is urban vs rural, there’s no “suburb” involved. Given that rural self-identification, not location, is key to some attitudes that I’m sure correlate with voting preference, it’s not that someone lives in a suburb that’s important. Maybe our concentration on the “soccer mom” vote or other suburban-located demographics isn’t the right way to look at suburban voters, or to figure out who’s reachable. It’s the attitude not the location.
Second, this kind of rural self-delusion is bad for Democrats — we’re the urban party. These rural cosplayers are urban dwellers benefitting from their proximity to a city. Cities are the engines of growth and jobs in the US. Presumably the media these folks consume glorifies rural life and denigrates city life, so they address the cognitive dissonance of their dependence on the cities by adopting the attitudes, dress, vehicles and other signifiers of rural culture. I sure don’t know how to handle that other than by pointing and laughing, but that’s generally not an effective political technique.
Anyway, I thought the video was interesting, and the video description has links to a bunch of studies and articles on this topic. This is the only one of his videos that I’ve watched, so let me know if you’ve watched others and consider him a reliable source.
TBone
I didn’t know why I wanna say correlation does not equal causation right off the bat, before I’ve had time to think about all of this. I will reread.
Oh, now I know: in my rather affluent suburb, there are a lot of people who grew up very rural, and it shows. They’re proudly sticking to their guns. They didn’t “adopt” the hillbilly, they really are the hillbilly, dressed in fashy new clothes. Formerly poor mountaineers who are now feeding at the trough like Jed Clampett.
Chief Oshkosh
Complex subject. The ‘simple country life’ as a wistful daydream of city dwellers has been around since there have been cities. I’m definitely an urban dweller, but I fondly recall growing up in a rural setting, and still enjoy vacationing in rural areas around the world. Where does that perspective land on the RUCA scale?
narya
This. Their jobs, shopping options, access to high-quality healthcare, cultural options (movies, concerts–don’t even have to include museums or symphonies or the like), the sports teams they follow, ALL depend on their proximity to a city. (Okay, fine the Packers are an exception.) They like to think that “rural” = “real American” (and, as we here know, what they also think but don’t say, is that “rural” = “white”). It’s an absolute refusal to actually look at the conditions of their lives.
@mistermix.bsky.social
@Chief Oshkosh: Because you’re realistic about where you live (you say you’re an urban dweller), no matter whether you have nostalgia about your rural upbringing, you’re realistic about where you live. The rural cosplayers are living in urban areas but will tell you that they live in rural areas.
TBone
@@mistermix.bsky.social: take a hard look at Lenni, Pennsylvania.
JML
democrats are the urban party, but they can and should also be the suburban party. Making it an urban/everyone else split is going to lose pretty consistently.
It is an interesting shift over time: democrats had managed an urban/rural coalition for a long time (farm communities were strong for Democrats for a long time and we had a lot of senators from the plains states that kept things moving even if farm subsidies got a little out of control), but the winning shift for state-wide races for democrats in the past 10-20 years has been urban/suburban partnerships. the GOP used to own the suburbs, but they’re so crap on things like education and transportation, while also being so retrograde on social policy that suburbanites aren’t interested much interested: the tax giveaways aren’t enough for a lot of them.
The rural vote is dwindling, but it’s going to be hard to pry many of them out of the GOP delusion they’re under. the GOP promises them that they’re going to turn back the clock for them to when things seemed fine, and democrats can’t bring themselves to lie that way.
Jeffro
why would anyone ask someone whether or not they ‘identify’ as rural, suburban, or urban?
why not just ask them their ZIP code?
(serious question)
and I do think you’re right about it being much more of a mind-set than a location…that’s true of a lot of things, it seems…
dc
I subscribe to City Nerd. New video every Wednesday! I love him.
Jackie
O/T but this made me smile in satisfaction:
With wind chills factored in…. BRRRRR! All the millions in bribes given to the FFOTUS’s inauguration can’t compete with the wrath of Mother Nature! :D
Kosh III
“adopting the attitudes, dress, vehicles and other signifiers” such as slang
Like how lilly-white folks listen to black music etc.
scav
@Jeffro: I need a bit of help coordinating the first and second part of your post. If its a mental thing, of course you need to ask what they identify as, plus get a ZIP, county, geocode of some sort.
zhena gogolia
@Jackie: No biggie, they’ll just move it to Mar-a-Lago.
Cheryl from Maryland
I have lived for 30 years within walking distance of a Metro Stop in Montgomery County, MD. Only in the last decade was there a functioning sidewalk for me to be able to walk from my house to the subway. Why? Because many of my “suburban” neighbors felt sidewalks devalued their property by appearing “urban”. Many still do. They want the appearance of the country with the convenience of the city and, of course, automobile first.
Steve LaBonne
Tons of these people on the fringes of the Cleveland – Akron metro, where I live. You want to see actual rural, go visit the Amish in Holmes County.
Snowlan01
This points out something very interesting about the evolution of the English language in the U.S., as I see it. “Rural” no longer meaning (objectively) the individuals engaged in an agricultural form of earning a living and geographically sparse in population. It means something different.
As a historic analogy, I think about the changing meaning of the word “fear” from Elizabethan times through the 20th century. Roughly, the Elizabethan meaning of “fear” was more akin to a combination of “awe” and “respect.” Terror might be slightly present, but it was not the primary meaning of the word. Over the space of centuries, the “terror” aspect of the word became dominant. This changing meaning plays havoc when we are reading the word “fear” in an Elizabethan document.
If we are having a similar evolution of the meaning of “urban” and “rural” right now, how do we find a way to describe accurately the new meanings of those two words that clearly remain in opposition to one another? This study points out this current anomaly in how we communicate growing from changing word meanings.
Kirk
@Jeffro: define suburban.
That said, it’s what they’re doing. They’re defining zip codes and/or census tracts as urban or rural.
My personal preference for definition is the Urban Area identification used by the Census department, but it heavily overlaps with the WWAMI RUCA
Anyway
@Jackie:
Where’s the global warming, libtard?
LOL. Cheeto is probably kicking himself for not doing that.
Steve LaBonne
@Snowlan01: Historically “rural” meant family subsistence farming, which is virtually extinct. I’m not sure there is any longer an actual rural America, apart from people like Amish and Mennonites. The rest of the agriculture industry is overwhelmingly corporate.
Steve LaBonne
The word missing from this discussion, which I think covers a lot of the phenomena, is “exurban”.
TONYG
I wonder how much of this attitude pertains to people who live in an exurban town — i.e., in a town that is not a close commuting distance to a city but still being supported economically (in ways that they don’t acknowledge) by the closest city. That is the case, for example, in the central part of New Jersey — towns where the people generally don’t commute to either New York City or to Philadelphia. Some red-state attitudes in that part of the state, in contrast to the rest of the state.
Kirk
@Kirk: Adding instead of editing.
Census is based on population density. RUCA is commuting pattern of those population densities.
From the census:
For RUCA:
Snowlan01
@Steve LaBonne: And no one living in Montana would be calling the Mennonites “subsistence” farmers either!
I think you are right about the disappearance of true historic “rural” communities in America. But what do we do with the overuse of that (now obsolete) meaning of the word when discussing political issues?
West of the Rockies
Some of this could be pure ego or self image: a lot of people identify rural as meaning not soft, as meaning rugged, able to McGuyver shit. It’s an old film, but remember City Slickers? City life was spirit less, sad, pathetic. Country folk were inherently more knowledgeable. They knew you needed “one true thing.”
I’m not saying any of that is accurate. But it’s a fairly widely-held perspective.
Jackie
@Anyway:
I’m sure FFOTUS would – if he could! I’m pretty sure there’s a law stating the inauguration of the president must be held in D.C. The frigid temps will possibly contribute to the lowest attendance in inauguration history! <fingers crossed>
Mendo
@dc: Another City Nerd subscriber here. I’ve learned a ton from his videos, and I enjoy his dry, dry sense of humor.
Steve LaBonne
@Snowlan01: Replace it with “exurban”? Which conjures up more realistic images of big box stores and huge pickup trucks not used for work, interspersed with derelict old small towns.
Quicksand
RUCA is an interesting way to look at this issue. I live in a suburban/exurban area near Columbus, Ohio. Lots of tract homes, but also still plenty of older homes on large properties, some of which are still attached to farmland. And there’s a considerable amount of farmland still – corn and soy.
I think a lot of residents consider it rural, partly because of the farmland but also partly because there’s basically no commercial presence within a few miles.
It’s RUCA 1.0, i.e. none more urban under that rubric
Looking at the reality of the situation, it’s only about six miles from Columbus city limits, a giant mall, multi-story office buildings, industrial parks, etc.
Steve LaBonne
@West of the Rockies: The word “white” belongs in there somewhere.
Miss Bianca
@Kirk: I have no idea what any of this actually means. I live in what would, demographically speaking, be considered a “frontier county”: we have fewer than 5,000 full-time residents, and we’re about an hour’s drive in any direction from what could be considered a city. Not sure where that lands me on this chart.
Stevo
I love this. There is a word for the f150 dude driving into the city. It’s “jackass”. I live in a very dense single and two family area with other multi family units near a major city and the damn pickups trying to parallel park or parking with their giant ass sticking into the sidewalk drives me nuts. I had a direct neighbor who fit this perfectly. Huge F150 sticking into the sidewalk making people walk into the street to go around in a busy place. Did not need it for his job, just being a douche. And this topic is why they exist. Some are jackasses others are clowns and most are Trumpy.
Belafon
@Jackie: God sent a plague during Trump’s first term to tell us something. God tried to tell us something by taking Carter home so that flags would be at half staff, but many Americans wouldn’t listen. God’s going to make it cold to tell us something. When are we going to listen to him?
Jeffro
@scav: if it’s a mental thing, you would want to NOT ask them what they identify with.
you’d just ask their ZIP code
Steve LaBonne
@Belafon: The 12th of never.
zhena gogolia
@Belafon: You laugh.
West of the Rockies
@Steve LaBonne:
Absolutely.
Belafon
@Miss Bianca: Number seven if I’m reading it right, a small town core.
Jeffro
@zhena gogolia:
@Anyway:
he could have…there doesn’t appear to be any prohibition against it.
(some additional interesting facts about inaugurations here)
scav
@Kirk: So they finally have enough data to really capture the commuting end of the definition! Brilliant.
Belafon
@Quicksand: Looking at the list in comment 21, and your area is probably at two or three.
Miss Bianca
@Belafon: a small town core “within an urban cluster”? Is a 50-mile drive to a larger town in every direction really count as being “within an urban cluster”? What a fascinating modern age we live in…
scav
@Jeffro: No, you need both so you can be sure what’s in their mind rather than assuming it. You need the geocode so you can see where they actually live, you ask them for what in their mind.
Belafon
@Miss Bianca: An “urban cluster” is any group of houses and businesses located together enough to be recognized as an entity. Most are either incorporated areas or towns. Yours would definitely be if it’s around 5000 people.
Steve LaBonne
@Miss Bianca: The way I think about it is, would your town be sustainable if those larger towns 50 miles away vanished?
Belafon
@Belafon: So, imagine a small town with 500 people inside, surrounded by people not in the town, but would travel to the town, their kids might go to school there. That would be a small town with an urban cluster.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
One of the better, meaning not vague, definitions of ‘exurban’:
https://aede.osu.edu/node/1534
It’s also hard to make a lot of blanket assessments about various aspects of ‘exurban’ because of local, geographic histories and peculiarities.
Much has depended over the last dozen years on who’s going where and in what numbers, thus, it’s hard to find blanket consistencies in exurbs from one state to another. Hell, it can be hard to find any in one state.
If you look at the exurban growth along the Front Range here in CO, you’ll find that politically, it’s somewhat different going north, going south and going east. And yes, I studied this stuff back in the early 80s in grad school up the road at CU-Boulder although then the eastward spread wasn’t something anybody foresaw.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
Not all of the people who flee rural America because there are no jobs/opportunities for them become more liberal. Some of them just stay resentful and convince themselves that living on the edges of a city means they aren’t really part of city life. It’s BS. They can’t admit the communities they come from are dying because they can’t compete with modern life.
Jackie
@Jeffro: From your interesting link:
Should odds be taken that FFOTUS does the same?
Also saw Nancy Pelosi won’t be attending… reported by The Hill.
Belafon
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: They also can’t admit that if they would only change a little bit, they wouldn’t have to give up their rural life. For example, Texas, even Republicans, would like to build a rail between Houston and Dallas. It is opposed by people all along the track. If they allowed it, then people could live in the towns and catch the rail into the big metropolitan areas to work.
sab
@Steve LaBonne: What about Ohio llama and alpaca farms? //
Tim C.
@Snowlan01: I think it’s merged somewhat with what might have been called “Dixie” Culture from the mid 19th century. What used to be very distinct cultural groups have amalgamated based on white grievences and a kind of cultural pseudo-christianity that is all about tribal identity over any real philosophy or theology.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Miss Bianca:
Let’s use a real life, CO example.
Our offices were in Lakewood. I had one user, fulltime remote since 2016 (I’ve mentioned this before but our administration was bleeding edge on remote work long before The Plague Times), among many, who lives in Strasburg out on the godforsakeneasternplainsofcolorado.
It would be a 46-mile commute for her, one way. Now, the town sits astride two county lines and those counties are cut east-west, the east having few residents, the west (closer to Denver) obviously more. Thus, from a statistical standpoint, a place like Strasburg of 3300 people technically qualifies as being in the urban cluster.
But, nobody in areas like that live there to make 46-mile, one-way commute willingly. One thing we see is how outer ring burbs and exurbs provide their own foci for support/workers from places even further out.
I saw this play out in the DC metro area over 50 years. The Front Range is maybe 20 years behind but making up for lost time given the fact every person of a certain racial and economic demographic wants to move here.
glory b
@Stevo: Don’t forget F-150s in city parking garages.
dc
@Mendo: Yesterday was Wednesday and he did not post a new video (emoji with a sad face).
glory b
Guys, duh!
EVERYBODY knows “urban” means “black.”
Kirk
@Miss Bianca: Yep. Every federal agency has different measures of what is urban vs rural. Every federal agency has to deal with edge cases. (New York City is urban, Tryon Nebraska is rural, and not only do they have to clarify where everything between falls they may have additional categories such as suburban or small town or micropolitan or …).
I don’t use census because it’s the easiest. I use it because it’s the one I’m most familiar with.
That said they all fit into a ball-park measure. Draw a circle with a 3 mile radius. If you’ve got a single square mile in there with a population density of more than 3,000 people, and the average of the whole ~28 square miles of that circle is over 30,000 people, that circle is urban. If you don’t have that spike density and you have less than 15,000 people in the circle you’re rural.
Everything else is the gray area. And it always surprises me how relatively few gray areas there are.
Citizen Alan
@TBone: I can see that. I was rural as recently as 2 years ago. You can’t get more rural than North Mississippi. But I hated rural living and wanted city life probably as early as 12. And now I’m in Fresno, which is a city of 500k people that nevertheless insists that it is a rural area because it only has about five buildings more than 3 stories tall. It’s starting to grate a little.
I will be salty until I die that I didn’t get that job in Newark that would have let me live in Manhattan and never drive a car again.
Citizen Alan
@Jackie: God doesn’t live me enough for Trump, his whole family, Vance, and all the billionaires in attendance will get pneumonia and die. But it’s a nice thought.
Belafon
@glory b: I’m finally black. :)
Citizen Alan
@West of the Rockies: When I think about it, it is fascinating how much self-loathing Hollywood has for its own cultural identity. The message of movies like City Slickers is driven in part by that attitude: that people who live in cities are weaker in some way than people who don’t.
William Capra
A related phenomenon.
I’m a “Land Use Planner”, by which I mean I’m a “City Planner”, but I’ve worked on land use and development issues for communities ranging from truly rural, where the big issues are the intersection of farm/forestry and natural environments, to towns and cities ranging in population from 500 people to over a million. I’ve also worked in communities with typical incomes ranging from desperately poor to decidedly well off.
In every single one of those communities, I’ve asked a version of the question “What do you want this area to look like in 10, 20 or 50 years?” I’ve gotten a wide variety of answers, but one response has been universal. Regardless of population size, density, growth rate, or wealth, there is always always always a demand to “maintain our historic small town character.” I’ve come to think that its something like the phenomenon that nearly everyone claims to be an above average driver. It’s even almost true, because everyone thinks that the aspect of driving where they feel they are the most skilled (safety, speed, music selection), is the only one that counts. Terms like “rural” and “small-town” are endlessly malleable to mean anything from “most of us earn our money from agriculture” to “I share a friendly not with my neighbors while riding the elevator to my apartment on the 24th floor”.
It’s not the least surprising that multitudes of objectively “urban” dwellers self-identify as something else, and it is also not surprising that those self-conceptions extend to lifestyle, politics, etc. I don’t know if it is helpful from a political communications standpoint, but from a land use standpoint, I learned years ago that it was never productive to tell people “this community stopped being a small-town, decades before you and all your friends moved here”. Instead, I ask “What about the small-town character of the community is most important to preserve?” It doesn’t always work, it does often get people off their pre-conceptions and into a discussion that can actually influence policy.
Chris
@Belafon:
The last couple decades have been a spectacular prolonged instance of the “God sent you a truck, a boat, a helicopter” parable I’ve ever seen. The public can not say they didn’t see plenty of warning signs, or that they didn’t have plenty of off-ramps.
JaySinWA
I’ve been living in a suburban area with no sidewalk for 40 some years.
I have come to understand that sidewalks are expensive to build to code. The city budget for sidewalk construction is largely none existent. They rely on building codes to force sidewalks into new construction. Hence we are building a patchwork of sidewalks one house demolition/townhome construction at a time.
We have old sidewalks that have been broken by badly chosen trees from the federal urban tree program decades ago (the name escapes me, but the trees eligible for funding were not always consistent with where they were planted. So our existing sidewalks are problematic for strollers and walkers (assistive devices, as well as people).
Sidewalk politics is not simple.
Citizen Alan
@Belafon: I still half suspect that he’s the actual Antichrist and God sent him to kickstart the Apocalypse in the most ridiculous and farcical way just to fuck with all the Fake Christians who dominate the Evangelical community.
narya
And I’m gonna throw in another thing. I grew up in a small town in NJ. We were (minimum) an hour from Philadelphia and 1.5 to the edge of NYC, IIRC. We did not go to those cities, with very minor exceptions (we went to the Philadelphia Zoo, and, once a year, to a Phillies game). Now, Allentown was 20 minutes away, so there was urban-ish stuff, for sure, but my county was still a farming county, complete with an FFA club at the high school and a county farmers’ fair every year. One big thing happened: an interstate was completed, which enabled folks to get to/from NYC much more quickly. As a result, a lot of the farmland now has housing developments. There are still farms, for sure, but not nearly what there were when I was a kid. Many of the folks I grew up with stayed in place, and I doubt they think of themselves as “urban.” At the same time, it’s now commuting distance to NYC, so I get the sense that a lot of the development is serving that city. I think what I mean is that to really understand the demographics, I’d want to know (a) where did any given resident live, say, 10-20 years ago and/or where were they born (i.e., are they transplants), and (b) where do they work compared to where they live. Some people were rural-ish, but urban grew up around them.
Citizen Alan
@glory b: Expanding on what I said about Fresno, that raises an interesting point. Do Fresnoans perceive this 500k population “town” as being rural because less than 6% of the population is black. Coming from Mississippi, the relative absence of African-Americans from the landscape around me is still startling at times. And Fresno county is something like 57% Hispanic, but their presence (if not dominance) is still somehow a rural signifier rather than an urban one.
TBone
@Citizen Alan: I’m sorry you didn’t get that job too! Which Fresno are you in? Cali?
As always, Pennsylvania is just…weird. I lived in Philly-adjacent DelCo (very populous) almost my whole life until about a decade ago and have also traveled back and forth to rural, PA my whole life for very rural family farm, as well as summer camp, and then weekender cabin. Then I moved here to cabin, and then into small town (rural/college town) suburb. Can see the Appalachian mounains from my house near the Susquehanna river. I’ve always been a weird mix of city/country but a lot of DelCo is that way too, despite it’s very urban location. Especially Lenni.
Hoodie
@William Capra: That “small town” character they envision probably is kitsch. These folks would not have wanted to live in a small town if they didn’t have a full spectrum supermarket, several big box stores and at least one Starbucks. A lot of them just want the conveniences of the suburbs without people of a certain skin tone.
TBone
@narya: exactly what I was trying to say.
GregMulka
I watched part of the video. No problem with the information but unfortunately I can’t stand his voice. <shrug emoji here>
I grew up rural. Nothing but trees and water for miles. 15 mile drive to a gas station. Luckily only 20 miles to a hospital. Never again. I like being in walking distance to everything I need. I like being no more than 5 minutes away from multiple hospitals. I like having access to museums and multiple theaters, a zoo and a botanical garden. I’m certainly in the suburbs now, but it’s not entirely bedroom community.
That said, I am eyeballing a truck. The Scout Terra looks awfully tempting, and with the range extender I should be able to tow without stopping to charge once an hour. Moving beehives and the spouse’s materials for her woodworking makes more sense in a truck than in the Outback. We’re committed to never buying another ICE vehicle and after a month with our Equinox EV I really hate getting into one of the other cars.
The cowboy cosplay has been going for a very long time. It’s one of the subjects Dr. Sarah Taber frequently returns too, along with the divide between farm owners and farm labor.
Citizen Alan
@TBone: Cali. I wasn’t not aware of any other Fresno. :) And I do like it out here. But I was hoping to live in the Big City (my time in Queens was the best 9 months of my life), and Fresno is, in a lot of ways, a gigantic version of Tupelo, MS. OTOH, I’m hopping a plane weekend after next to spend four days in San Diego, which is something I couldn’t do in North MS.
scav
@Hoodie: That plus they want to maintain low-density housing because that (in their mind) keeps out the poor as well as other definitions of “those people”.
suzanne
@Citizen Alan: Don’t forget that “urban” also means “gay” to a good portion of people.
In Phoenix, “urban” is a pseudo-polite way of referring to Latino neighborhoods, the kind where you see signs in Spanish. Some parts of Texas have a similar vibe.
TBone
Male emergency eruption. Hubby vomiting, male kitty Noah the Love Cat vomiting (projectile yellow bile), both are growling. Am more worried about cancer survivor Noah right now because he has never growled at me in his entire life. Hubby is not taking this well because he has almost no experience with vomiting (an exceptionally robust immune system) and has never had the flu.
Hubby has to drive us to the vet and he’s pissed. Fuck. Grateful to vet for getting me in right away anyhow at least. MENtal can come on ya quick!
Hoodie
@GregMulka: You’ll be waiting quite a while – initial production is 2027. Looks a lot like a Rivian.
TBone
@Citizen Alan: please mask up on your journey, we need you (see my MENtal #73 comment just now)!
Jackie
@Citizen Alan:
Odds are that several of them haven’t gotten pneumonia, flu or Covid vaccinations…
Hoodie
@scav: Which, of course, means total automobile dependence and the need for more roads that just increase sprawl. I grew up outside of Atlanta in the 70’s and remember how Gwinnett County blocked Marta expansion to the NE essentially because the exurbanites didn’t want urban blacks from Atlanta coming up to their areas. Now, the suburbs of Atlanta sprawl everywhere with epic traffic congestion. My nephew works in downtown Atlanta but lives in Gwinnett and has to leave for work no later than 5:30am or risk having a 2 hour commute.
TBone
I’m still here, grateful for the temporary distraction, because we’re gonna be driving through a snowstorm to get to the vet, on top of being in a vehicle with two pissed off, panicky males. Gawds help me!
Wapiti
(deleted, someone answered the same)
Chris
@Citizen Alan:
Honestly, I think it goes beyond Hollywood; Hollywood’s just the most blatant example of it. This is a problem that runs through the entire white-collar professional-class demographic that’s ground zero for a lot of liberal politics. There’s a widespread sense that being an educated professional, especially an educated professional with a white-collar job from the cities or suburbs, is something you’re supposed to be profoundly embarrassed by, because it makes you inauthentic, privileged, soft, out-of-touch with both “real” life and “real” people, and, well, liberal.
Honestly, I think this explains a ton of the mainstream media’s pathological “both sides do it, but liberals are worse” act, too. The owners are increasingly straight fash, but quite a few people below them are also exactly these kinds of people, who’ve been conditioned to think they’re supposed to go through their whole life either apologizing for their identity, or loudly and performatively separating themselves from it. I mean, what else are the Cletus Safaris than this? “Hey, man, I may be a nerd, but I’m not one of those nerds! I’m with it! I hang out with the jocks! They let me carry their lunch box and eat at their table and laugh at the other nerds when they beat them up!”
(Incidentally, a ton of the appeal of The West Wing when it aired was that it pushed back so hard against this notion that being an academically successful lifelong teacher’s pet was something to be ashamed of, as opposed to proving that you’d put in the work and demonstrated your ability for a demanding job).
Betty
@Jackie: But he can say it’s just like JFK’s inauguration. That’s something.
Chris
@GregMulka:
I miss reading her on social media; a lot of the straight talk seemed to get dialed back after she ran for office, for understandable reasons.
Is she on BlueSky?
Ohio Mom
How to categorize suburbs like mine? No one here thinks they live in the city of Cincinnati, I’ve met a fair number who are afraid to cross the city limit. There be dragons (or Black people, take your pick).
But we are not rural either, if that means identifying with a hazy memory of the simple life and sustaining yourself by the sweat of your brow.
Families move here because of the highly-rated school system and are very ambitious for their children to get ahead. It’s a job, making sure your middle-class privilege gets passed down. They want tech-savvy kids ready for the modern workforce.
I am also going to take issue with the idea that the Amish and Mennonites are somehow pure rural. In a way yes, but they also have a deeply symbiotic relationship with city people.
They market themselves as a tourist attraction, which succeeds
because of the contest between their environment and the city. They market their goods (foodstuffs like jams and jellies, cheese, etc., and wood products like furniture and pre-fabricated sheds), as well as their services to city folk (they do kitchen and other renovations); they utilize big city hospitals. Their life style depends on there being urban areas.
ronno2018
@dc: he has been hitting it out the park lately and I say this a former land use planner that has worked in tech for the last 25 years.. great channel
scav
Most farms today depend on the existence of an exterior market, and even the purest of utterly subsistence farmers go to hospital. Let’s not define rural out of existence. We really haven’t got into some of the other criteria for distinguishing rural v. urban landscapes, the employment patterns: predominantly devoted to resource extraction vs diversified service and manufacturing (and then there’s the complication of isolated manufacturing centers to wrestle through).
rikyrah
@narya:
UH HUH
UH HUH
The Urban areas MAKE THEIR LIVES POSSIBLE.
PHUCK OUTTA HERE.
Steve LaBonne
@TBone: Ugh, I hope things will be looking up soon.
Steve LaBonne
@Ohio Mom: Yet they still vote for the Republicans in Columbus who are on course to destroy the public schools.
Anonymous At Work
Houstonian/Texan here on the F-150s. It’s a fairly even split between worship of cowboy culture and a “male organ insecurity” thing. (Sorry, trying to avoid being too gross)
Cowboy culture, especially in places like Texas is heavily worshipped as “true”, “clean”, “real” and all other manner of adjectives completely at odds with reality. Your Assistant Director of Midwest Human Resources wants to ride the range and be a manly-man in his truck like oil field workers (the actual ones, not the ones working downtown). He also has manly hobbies requiring a pickup truck like driving his kids to soccer practice and fantasy football.
The other thing, well, size and/or loudness of a car is usually inversely proportionate. Exceptions are made for gear-heads who personally reconfigured their engine and made a custom muffler out of individual parts.
Over at Digby’s Joint, a post was made about the difference between bluster and courage. The F-150s on urban workers is all about bluster covering for insecurity.
K-Mo
This jibes with what I see living in downtown Baltimore. It’s routine to encounter folks on narrow city streets (with cars parked alongside) who have decided the best way to get around town is to drive an F150 or other vehicles better suited to the farm. Maybe these folk believe they live in a rural area?
JaySinWA
TBone
@Steve LaBonne: thank you, we’re waiting in the vet parking lot for them to come and get us so Noah doesn’t have to deal with all of those friendly dawgs inside. We made it through the snow over river, hill, and dale without incident. I hope all that Noah requires is an enema!
scav
@K-Mo: They could also just be using the vehicle to signal their affiliation / team / cultural membership without being confused about where they live. People sporting the stars and bars in New Hampshire don’t believe they’re in Mississippi.
K-Mo
@glory b: yep.
See also: “cosmopolitan” and Jewish
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KbgoAchOhEk
TBone
@TBone: PS days like these is why we have the all wheel drive truck besides it being great camouflage here in Pennsyltucky!
Captain C
@Hoodie: Kind of like that meme on Hallmark Channel holiday movies, I don’t remember the exact phrasing, but something like, “Every Hallmark Channel Christmas movie small town is like, “He works part time at the horse farm, she owns a small boutique bookstore. Every Christmas season, all the villagers gather on the lovely, snow-kissed town square. What’s meth?””
(ed. for punctuation)
TBone
OT grievance – when I turned off auto correct, this crazy contraption starting inserting apostrophes where they don’t belong instead!
TBone
@Captain C: thank you for the laugh!!!
Captain C
@TBone: “What’s meth?” has become code between Dame N and myself for this sort of bad rural/small-town portrayals.
K-Mo
@scav: Yeah, most likely they are jacksses as Steve put it. I was giving them an out, maybe they’re just dumbasses.
K-Mo
@Captain C: LMAO
Hoodie
@scav: It could be that, but more generally it’s just fantasizing that they might use such a vehicle at some time for it’s nominally intended use, even if the likelihood of that is vanishingly small. Plenty of people buy boats and RVs but barely use them, or at least use them far less than would justify the expense of owning such things. There is a vein in the US that conflates shopping for/owning something associated with a particular activity with actual participation in that activity (think massive gourmet kitchens in new homes). In fact, it’s any important aspect of the consumer economy because that’s where the producers’ profit margins are.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Sort of bad for government policy in general having huge numbers voting assuming they are farmers who are basically small businessmen when they are in fact employees of large companies.
Worth pointing out that the Democrats are an effective political party so that means this Rule Cosplay is more of a spectrum that some binary choice.
Chris
@Hoodie:
See also, gun ownership, where the simple fact of owning a gun is supposed to reassure everyone that you’re a trained veteran who’s Been There, Done That, and Seen Things.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
City Nerd main bread and butter is city walk ability and has a lot to stay about awful freeway interchange designs. Basically not one were locations the freeway built chosen for racist reasons but they ended up doing the maxim damage to those cities.
Something that I did realize because here in the San Fransisco Bay area we are between the hills and sea to there is pretty much only one place for infrastructure to go. But oh boy is this obvious in cities in middle America were they have plenty of room.
Chetan Murthy
Wow, amazing video! And this guy is so clearly trying hard not to be even more dismissive about these rural cosplayers.
Speaking of cosplay, tradwives! https://lithub.com/my-babies-are-richer-than-yours-on-the-lie-of-the-online-tradwife/
Chetan Murthy
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: I’ve read that the construction of Geary Blvd in SF destroyed quite well-developed and large Black communiities: people who weren’t able to find housing in the City afterwards, and hence were pushed-out.
Ohio Mom
@Steve LaBonne: Nope, looking at the detailed voting map in today’s NYT, my school district is almost all light and medium Blue — the only pink part (and it’s light pink) is that warren of old, small and shabby houses between Starbucks and the post office (I know that description means nothing to you but I use it as an indication of exactly how detailed the NYT’s map is). My suburb is actually Bluer this time around.
JaB
@Mendo: Excellent, excellent content. He does not suffer fools!
Steve LaBonne
@Ohio Mom: That’s encouraging! Clearly my knowledge of the Cincinnati area is lacking.
🐾BillinGlendaleCA
@JaB: Especially when they call him “Soy Boy”.
ThresherK
Additional City Nerd follower here.
When I saw the post title Rural Cosplay I knew you’d found him.
Quicksand
@Belafon: I actually looked it up. It’s officially 1.0.
Misterpuff
@Jeffro:
Even back in the eighties, the cosplayers admitted they were “Urban Cowboys” or Dudes.