There are many good points here:
- Far less need for public services in rural areas because with few people they can be self-provided
- Often no visible inequality at all, and no emphasis on individual fulfilment eliminates the individualism and egalitarianism that dominates urban areas throughout the world
- Rural areas in America are much more sparsely populated than those in Europe or Asia and this leads to a highly self-protective and socially conservative identity – especially as most are entirely devoid of nonwhite populations (and devoid of nonwhites by design)
- People in rural areas of America have been largely self-selecting, and as James Löwen shows (Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism) they have been so at least since the immigration wave of the 1890s. I term this a “white cloister” because it has the effect of sealing rural America from the outside world, especially since media changes in the late 1970s
One thing I will add is that the political and cultural gap between urban and rural America has grown rapidly since 2000. I suspect this actually reflects the generation coming of age in the era
before this divergence. As music critic Richie Unterberger told me around fifteen years ago, in the late 1970s commercial radio in the United States rigidly standardised and narrowed its music playlists. I would imagine commercial radio and (more importantly) television did the same with the opinions they broadcast. This meant that rural areas, which lacked alternative broadcast options, were exposed to the narrowest range of the most conservative entertainment, social and political cultures. Urban areas, in contrast, where college radio became important in the 1980s and where concerts by bands much
more cutting-edge than those played on college radio were invariably held, saw their children exposed to radically new cultural views that were rare in the 1970s.
The result, especially from 2000 onwards, has been a complete divergence politically between rural and urban areas of the United States. In Europe and Asia – where the hostility towards aid to nonwhites that so severely limits public services in the United States is absent and distances much less – much more liberally funded public broadcasting means rural areas have the same access to cutting-edge culture and entertainment that urban areas do. Thus there has been either less, or less consistent, political divergence, especially given the demographic gap between urban and rural America due to the “Great Retreat” (Löwen,
Sundown Towns) of blacks from almost all the rural North, West and nonplantation South between about 1890 and 1970.
Also, as “parochial boy” very wisely says, the two-party system no doubt hides diversity in both urban and rural areas, although I would say in today’s US more in urban areas given the deliberate homogeneity of most rural areas in America.
