Their ideology is well thought, but I get the sense that, even though we agree on almost everything, we have completely opposite reasoning - and I suspect it's partially religious (duh) but also an urban-rural kind of thing (even though they actually live in a more urban area than I do).
Where do you live?
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You live in Amherst, right? I think is probably more urban (or at least urban tied) than Boone, NC, although I must admit that I don't know too much about Western Mass.
Boone is fairly dense but I would not characterize it as being a city or anything. If anything that's more of a function of local topography.
Until recently I was in Amherst because I was going to school there but where my family actually lives, and where I am now, is South Deerfield. It's a village center, certainly not the middle of the woods, but it has only about two thousand people and is sandwiched between farmland and another, historically preserved village center to the north, more farmland to the south, wooded mountains and then the Connecticut River to the east, and a ribbon of highways and then mile after mile of wooded mountain to the west.
From what I know of Boone it and Amherst are about equally urban without taking the UMass campus into account. Taking the UMass campus into account--as one should, really--Amherst is definitely more so, yes.
South Deerfield is probably more rural then.
Boone feels more rural than it is in some ways- the local high school, for instance, is the whole county and the transition from Downtown Boone to the more rural parts is pretty marked*. Nonetheless, basically being the center of Northwestern NC and having ASU does make it a little more cosmopolitan by regional standards- not to mention having a (crappy) mass transit system.
Also, Boone is fairly remote from most major cities. Asheville is a fellow lefty mountain city, but it isn't very directly accessible from Watauga County. Most people go to Charlotte or Winston-Salem, to shop, even though the closest major city is actually Johnson City, in TN. Not that it's much of a destination for day trips or anything- the roads in between are either obscure back routes or incredibly twisty highways which must be avoided by anyone with a susceptibility to motion sickness.
*It's a bit of an illusion though- topography made the town develop in a very easterly direction, but if you go to the west in just a few minutes you'll be in countryside (albeit rather Boone tinged, with student housing interspersed between trees).
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