I heard two people on Minnesota Public Radio the other day talking about how rural people feel about "things today" writ large. One of them made the point that their structural over-representation in the Senate and Electoral College doesn't satisfy them — they feel forgotten by elected government.
I suppose this may be true in a lot of ways, but those of us not in rural areas also feel forgotten.
This is because the only ones who are well-represented by government are big-money donors, as has been demonstrated in research.
Can I call up my representative in the House and get something out of it? No, I cannot. I barely feel that way about my City Council member, and I actually know her personally, unlike most people in my ward.
This country is too big for governance to work the way rural people think it should, at least as these two radio guests were describing them. That's the role of their local government (and my local government), whose members should be able to extract things from the state level and the federal level, but are all too often drowned out by those big donors or the general dysfunction of the current Republican belief that government is best when it has been ground to a halt.
Another thing the guests said is that rural people know that coastal and big city people look down on them, particularly in recent years, because we resent the structural advantage they have in the Senate and Electoral College. "We" denigrate their intelligence, saying they don't deserve that power.
I know urbanites can sometimes say harsh things about rural people (such as when you see comments about low IQs, in-breeding, or "trailer trash"), but it seems like rural people spend a lot more time thinking about "us" than we do about them.
People in urban areas aren't trying to do things, politically, for the sole purpose of screwing over rural people, while I have to say it sometimes seems the opposite is true.
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