"true blue americans"

new answers. really i want to know what all the people out there in the other areas of the country (and outsiders too!) think of this piece. it's really upsetting to me that new york had to grovel for its money to rebuild downtown, despite the nationwide chest-pounding since the incident that made downtown have to be rebuilt occurred.

god that last sentence was a syntax NIGHTMARE but i think you all know what i mean.

Having grown up in the heartland, I've been telling everyone I can find what a dangerous, poisonous sulfur pit it is. I'd rather amputate my feet with a dull broadsword than live in rural America.

If you hate the heartland you should try the lungland. I've always had a spot for those good ole boys of kidneyland but liverland is where its at.

Somehow I think "which states are morally superior" would involve a lot more complexity then what part of the country they're in. And isn't "we make more of the money so we deserve more of the federal dollars" a pretty conservative stance? Here is an interesting ma p.

Liverland's constant demands for booze subsidies are a disgrace though Pete.

The basic contradiction of "farmers have small-government conservative tendencies; they also gobble up whopping great subsidies" is a constant throughout the West, is it not?

Well, it's interesting. On the one hand, I do agree with you that aid dollars to rebuild NY should be a no-brainer, but on the other hand, one could argue that it's a straw man to say that the "red states" have a reputation for being self reliant and morally superior. I'm not sure inhabitants of those regions are gloating over their moral superiority to denizens of the coastal metropolises so much as trying to keep up. It's not surprising to me that they would vote for representatives who would serve their own interests. I do find interesting the article's point that

The odd twist to his argument, though, is how his "red states" analysis accidentally makes a case for conservatism: i.e., it is the people in the states with higher rates of illegitimacy, divorce, and crime, and lower rates of economic productivity, who vote for the conservative candidates who advocate the promotion of marriage, "getting tough on crime," and continual corporate revving.

The good argument here, of course, is that rural conservatives should quit imagining that these are problems which emanate from the cities; the New-York-as-Babylon thing in particular is just incomprehensibly ridiculous. An even better framing of this would be that such problems struck cities equally -- but that metropolitan-"liberal" reactions to them offer a better model for solving them than rural conservatism (something I obviously am already convinced of).

So what's next, then, an Angry Young Urbanite revolution? "We're sick of our tax dollars supporting you yokels and your ridiculous ideas?" (Awful as that sounds, I think this was the pull of the Green party for various people I know: they saw it -- perhaps wrongly, perhaps not -- as a party for progressive urbanites who therefore needn't make any of the typical bows to "the heartland" and its conservatism.)

I'm not sure inhabitants of those regions are gloating over their moral superiority to denizens of the coastal metropolises.

Oh, they are, they are. This is why "east-coast" always gets tacked before "liberal elite" ("they're evil godless metropolitan types"), why George W. Bush was pretty open in his not-liking New York (until Sep. 11, obviously), and why Falwell in his later- retracted religious analysis figured it was New York in particular that got the brunt of the Sep. 11 action. Conservatives -- religious conservatives in particular -- let the spectre of Babylon loom, not to mention associating cities with "urban" crime ("crazy black and Latino animals!"), moral decadance ("strip joints, prostitution, red- light districts!"), the dreaded secular humanism ("atheists! the ACLU!"), homosexuality ("that's where gays and lesbians GO!"), and on and on and on and ON. (Of course all of these things exist rurally as well, only less visibly.)

If I'm not mistaken, the bulk of that money goes to corporate farming, not the dwindling family farms. I lived in Nebraska, and my grandparents lived and owned a tavern in an unincorporated area for many years. I'm not sure how 'conservative' farmers really are. Not everyone in small-town bumfuck is a farmer, far from it, in fact.

I lived in Lincoln, which is actually a small city, and quite conservative. I think there may be a lot of conservativism clustered around those small cities.

Also, a friend of mine recently re-located to Janesville, which is not far from the People's Republic of Madison. Wisconsin has its progressive / greenie parts and it's scary jingoist Christian parts. Apparently Janesville is the latter. But it's an industrial town out in the middle of nowhere, not a farming community.

Paul Krugman's columns are very informative and very insightful. You may have seen the red/blue maps with relative population density factored in. A totally different picture. Most of those red states are mountains, deserts, plains, and forests. Some states have more livestock than people. One personal observation though. There aren't self-reliant, rugged individualists left in this nation anymore. We're one ignorant nation of self-centered sheeple.

Dan Perry, I agree that rural America can be dangerous, but I think you exaggerate a bit. Rural America is not really that dangerous on the whole, but a large proportion of crime is in the suburbs and small/medium sized cities. I live in Florida, a state which cannot begin to make any claims of moral superiority. It's a real cesspool down here. Florida is the second-chance and has-been state. America's failures seem to eventually make it down here. The Miami metro area represents just about everything that's wrong with the nation. Orlando and Tampa are disgusting places with disgusting people. Really, it's a different country down in South Florida. I'm not all that pessimistic though. That's just the way I see it. Good people live all over the country. And very many rural Americans really are good-natured and pleasant and more tolerant that one might expect. If I broke down, I would expect more help and kindness from the rural folk than some middle class suburbanite who lives in a gated subdivision.

wasn't the heartland of the progressive/eugene debs/joe hill/woody guthrie/wobbly/matewan tendency in us politics before WW1 in the non-coastal centre? eg from the appalachians up to the pre-ford, pre-new deal, not yet full-on industrialised mid-west?

(i know that's a bit hugely broad to be lumped as a "tendency", plus it's ages since i read anything about that stuff so i might just be wrong)

Also: that's not true about the attraction of the Green party. Nader had a relatively small turnout here in overwhelmingly Democrat Chicago, while he had some really high percentage in neighboring Wisconsin. If you look at the support for Nader in the presidential campaign, he received much higher percentages in states with copious natural resources: Montana, Wisconsin, Vermont, New Mexico, (I believe).

I think that the rural areas may actually have a broader range of political beliefs, as opposed to the fiscally conservative / somewhat socially liberal suburbs and the mostly-liberal-with-considerable-leftie-minority cities. Ruralists on the other hand, mainly don't want the government messing with guns or alcohol, they're not really big on the law, but they do care about the environment and the family farmer. When I think of a typical ruralist, I think of my grandmother, who was active in her church and all of that, but who believed strongly in welfare programs and the preservation of the environment and who distrusted large corporations. Didn't care too much for the huge defense budget, either. The problem is that these people have been stereotyped and shunned by the snobbish , east coast and urban-oriented media, who seem to think you have one or two political options.

Ergo, when these people go to the polls, if they go, they tend to vote on one issue, and very often that issue is guns.

Bryan: Point taken. Large portions of my bias against suburbia and rural areas come from growing up out in the country 10 miles from a suburb that can be best described as a fucked-up version of Twin Peaks. I remember being darkly amused when I came to college and realized that, thanks to my "safe" suburban high school, I had been exposed to more things than most of my classmates who went to urban schools. (This is largely a demographic thing; most of the kids who I went to college with either went to private schools or magnet schools, but it was still odd to me that I knew something like 15 girls who had kids while in high school and that there were something like 12 fatalities/murders involving kids in my high school within a 5-year period, while kids who lived in Reagan and Bush Sr's so- called "combat zone" areas didn't even know someone their age who had died.)

You're right on the whole, mark s. A lot of progressive ideas have come from the "heartland." Back when there was a real struggle between labor and big business. But the western states have historically voted conservative. And once upon a time, there was a thing called a Texas liberal.

Nabisco : it cuts both ways, believe me, and the perception is not entirely unwarranted. This assessment is a bit of a caricature. The media do seem to serve the eastern centers much more than the 'heartland' - perhaps if there weren't this bias, pluralism in remote areas could be better nurtured.

I'm also wondering why qualities like self-reliance, trust, a lack of cynicism and other qualities that you find more in rural areas are not viewed as 'liberal'.

Dan, I honestly feel that growing up in Florida has made me stronger and tougher. If you can keep your cool around a drunken angry hick who has a firearm, you can pretty much handle anything.

It's a damn shame that the word "liberal" has been tagged by some as moronic, or bad/evil. The social-demolitionist right wing has succeeded in dismantling semantics as well as social programs.

The trend in America that disturbs me is how many Americans are isolating themselves in these enclaves we call gated communities. Then there's the trend in which surburbanites reverse exodus into inner city neighborhoods(where their teenage kids buy cocaine), gentrify them, import their surburban "values", and drive all the poor people out. Talk about social demolition. America is looking more and more like Brazil. Drive down highways in some parts of the country and see. Many parts are a third world nation.

Janesville, Wisconsin is a pit of darkness and despair.

No, the weird thing about living in Florida is that the drunken hicks are the nice, good and broad-minded people down here. It's those stick-up-the-rear-end upper middle class people who scare me.

California is the number one farming state in the nation (actually in the world, by some measures) but I guess it's too mexican or something to qualify as part of the "heartland" or for gigantic farm subsidies (California got, by proportion, almost nothing out of this bill). Of note:

63% of Hispanic households contain a married couple.
56% of Caucasian (non-Hispanic) households contain a married couple.
32% of African American households contain a married couple.
I'm sure that for Asian households it's much higher than any of these. That was a great article.

Yes, the wrench in many a proud white person's attempt to describe the failings of other groups: Asians "outperform." I enjoyed watching some white people learn this during California's initial clashes over affirmative action policy: "Wait, it we based admissions solely on test scores ... these schools would be like 60% Asian?"

A) the "contain married couple" figure seems suspect as unwed white mothers are at essentially the same proportion as unwed black mothers (so sez Ishmael Reed's excellent "Airing Dirty Laundry" which I just reread) so perhaps this involves the nature of extended households.

Along the same lines, the "we're more a model than you" may be satisfying at first but the model minority stuff rilly bugs me too. Said article also notes that 60% of ny heroin trade is Chinese gangs. (hey! asians are even better DRUG DEALERS than the white mob!)