Raymond Williams with the Long View

In the U.S., it seems as though the so-called urban/rural divide is a relatively recent political phenomenon: maybe something that has become important in the last 40 years or so. It has definitely been more exploited by Republicans in the past 20 years, it seems to me.

I'm from a very rural area and the people there definitely resented city people (in this case, New York City) but I don't remember them disliking the people of the smaller cities in the rest of New York. Obama's 2008 speech where he said that people in small towns "cling to guns, religion, or antipathy to people who aren't like them" was prefaced with a cause: their areas had lost their economic base. But that part didn't get much coverage, and his partial words were part of a new wave of Republicans exploiting the divide, continued that year by Sarah Palin.

So now we have an almost constant stream of Republicans and rural people insulting cities and the people who live in them, which is providing cover for the Trump regime to send the military into Black-led cities where crime is declining. In contrast, if anyone points out a single negative thing about rural areas, they're instantly attacked as elitist and out of touch with the "real America."

I thought of all this the other day when I found a copy of Raymond Williams' 1973 book The Country and the City at a used bookstore. I haven't read it yet, but I looked through the first few pages and on the first page I found this:

On the actual settlements, which in the real history have been astonishingly varied, powerful feelings have gathered and have been generalised. On the country has gathered the idea of a natural way of life: of peace, innocence, and simple virtue. On the city has gathered the idea of an achieved centre: of learning, communication, light. Powerful hostile associations have also developed: on the city as a place of noise, worldliness and ambition; on the country as a place of backwardness, ignorance, limitation. A contrast between country and city, as fundamental ways of life, reaches back into classical times.

So in some ways that makes me feel less badly about our current mess, but it also makes me more angry about the people who intentionally manipulate this aspect of the human condition instead of trying to improve it.

All those of us who grew up in the country and moved to cities know both worlds. Most of us miss aspects of the rural, but there are many reasons we don't return, and lack of economic opportunity is only one of them.