Editor's Introduction: Fighting for Rural America: Overcoming the Contempt for Small Places

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ajes.12148
• Published date: 01 May 2016
• Date: 01 May 2016

The AMERICAN JOURNAL of

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Volume 75 May 2016 Number 3

Editor’s Introduction

Fighting for Rural America: Overcoming the

Contempt for Small Places

Boondocks. Boonies. The sticks. The middle of nowhere. These are

derogatory terms that urban Americans apply to rural areas. City dwell-

ers often refer to the inhabitants of thinly populated areas as bump-

kins, hicks, rednecks, and yokels. Other countries and other languages

have similarly disparaging terms. Although these insults cause harm,

their damage is probably less severe than urban-oriented policies that

have ignored or overridden the interests of rural citizens.

How exactly have urbanites inflicted harm on small towns and rural

areas in the United States today? The answer to that question is long

and complex. The articles in this issue begin to uncover some dimen-

sions of it. As a simplistic starting point, we might think of rural areas as

having been colonized. Rural areas are the site where resources are

found and wastes are deposited. In effect, the urban mind regards rural

people as part of the natural background to be treated with some dis-

dain. Even many urban environmentalists, who may be genuinely con-

cerned about nature, are contemptuous of the people who live and

work in connection with farms, rangeland, forests, and wetlands,

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 75, No. 3 (May, 2016).

DOI: 10.1111/ajes.12148

V

C2016 American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Inc.

continuing a tradition that began centuries ago with aristocratic con-

tempt for the peasants whose work sustained them.

Rural areas are generally forced to live under rules, practices, and con-

ditions imposed by people in urban areas. For example, the mechaniza-

tion of agriculture over the past 75 years is essentially a transfer of a

mechanistic, assembly-line model of work to a rural environment. The

intrusion into rural areas of cost-cutting, large-scale retail outlets, such as

WalMart, is a function of an efficiency ideal that derives from an urban

mindset. Rural life has traditionally operated according to different

norms, particularly norms based on tradition. Urban thought is largely

oriented toward short-term gains; rural thought has been guided by what

works consistently over the span of generations or centuries. When the

two norms collide, the rural ideals are most often forced to give way.

The hegemony of urban values is perhaps the clearest, yet most subtle,

sense in which rural areas have been treated as colonies of cities.

Culture Gap: Urban vs. Rural Attitudes

It has become a truism that the division between the “red” (conserv-

ative-traditional) and “blue” (liberal-cosmopolitan) parts of the

United States, one which is mirrored in many parts of the world, is

primarily a division between rural and urban areas. Kron (2012), for

example, makes the case that “the new political divide is a stark

division between cities and what remains of the countryside.” An

editorial in American Prospect (2015) concurs:

Culturally speaking, I think both rural and urban folks have legitimate

gripes. Rural folks feel like they’re looked down on by those sophisti-

cated urban elites who consider them uneducated rubes ... If rural folks

are victimized by cultural snobbery, however, urban folks are the targets

of moral snobbery. Particularly in politics, we’re constantly told that rural

areas and small towns are morally superior to cities and suburbs.

Both of these authors regard the red-blue conflict as a matter of

beliefs and attitudes, a purely cultural division. Sullivan (2013) ech-

oes this view of an urban-rural split, but he simultaneously

expresses a great sense of urgency about overcoming the tensions

that divide the United States and other societies so deeply:

The American Journal of Economics and Sociology570