** Victor Davis Hanson - On the urban/rural divide in the United States.
Excerpts:
. . . . The media figures who report on the election are urban denizens. Few have any idea of why half the country votes as it does. So they just assume that pollsters, like themselves, are better educated, smarter, and of greater value to society than those whom they often to fail to find in their surveys. . .
That fact of the rural/urban dichotomy is underappreciated, but it remains at the heart of the Constitution — to the continuing chagrin of our globalist coastal elite who wish to wipe it out. The Electoral College and the quite antithetical makeup of the Senate and the House keep a Montana, Utah, or Wyoming from being politically neutered by California and New York. The idea, deemed outrageously “unfair” by academics and the media, is that a Wyoming rancher might have as much of a say in the direction of the country as thousands of more redundant city dwellers. Yet the classical idea of federal republicanism was to save democracy by not allowing 51 percent (of an increasingly urban population) to create laws on any given day at any given hour.
So the originalist theories of the Founders — nursed on classical tropes found in bucolic, pastoral, and agrarian romance, and on the skepticism of human nature conveyed throughout classical political philosophy — was that in a republic, real diversity is needed to offset sheer numbers. That is, rural voices, always to be in a minority, provided checks on the exuberance and occasional danger of the volatile cities, prone to fads that could devolve into hysteria and worse.
Few city dwellers realize that half the country probably always found the increasingly hyped burlesque half-time shows of the Super Bowl buffoonish, boring, and a time to wash dishes, make a beer run, or shut off the television. The old network anchors never grasped that plenty didn’t appreciate their snarky frowns and their eye-rolling. Articles written under the masthead of the New York Times mean no more to someone in North Dakota than posts from a blogger with a well-viewed website. . . .
The Western exegeses of these differences was often simplistic. Rural people, with or without proximity to the frontier, had to rely more on themselves for their own defense, for obtaining their water, for disposing their sewage, for feeding themselves. What they did not make or grow themselves, they saw produced by others living around them — minerals, metals, fuels, wood — to be sent into the city.
Nature for them was not distant, not a romance, but a mercurial partner to be respected, feared, and occasionally with difficulty brought to heel and for a while harnessed. When you see, firsthand, wondrous life born around you, from the barn to the woods, and rural underpopulation not overpopulation is an ancient worry, abortion is not just a moral crime, but a tragic loss of a precious resource, a needed voice, another ally in an eternal struggle. . . .
We can see this incidental dichotomy between pragmatism and accepted authority almost everywhere today. In the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court confirmation hearings, crusty old farmer emeritus Chuck Grassley drew on common sense and a knowledge of human nature; urban sophisticate Dianne Feinstein, on ideology and current fad. Missouri’s Josh Hawley recently sliced and diced the masters of the Silicon Valley Universe, because he was able to reduce all their arguments from authority and esoterica about social media into the pragmatic: These billionaire modulators of influence had no defense of their own power to adjudicate the free expression of millions of Americans. Read dairy farmer Devin Nunes’s final memo concerning the Russian collusion hoax and compare it to that of his counterpart Adam Schiff. The former is blunt, truthful, and logical; the latter rhetoric is a dishonest mess masquerading as an exposé.