Rural Nebraska. What about rural New England. No civic engagement there? What about Michigan's UP? Or upstate New York. Or does rural America only mean red state America.
Also, if it's so "rich," why don't you think about moving there. Deal with the town budgets and the cutbacks at the high school. How will the 95% homogeneous white and Christian demographics appeal to you over the long run. Got kids? Rodeo for them. No summer camp in the Berkshires.
I will leave it to the other 900 or so commenters to dissect this truly facile essay. Though I guess we finally know the answer to the perennial question. Will David Brooks ever stop writing this nonsense? Nope.
69
What rural America has to teach me is to stay clear of Fox News, Alex Jones, Breitbart, and Christian Radio. Thanks, though.
70
David Brooks finds Shangri-La.
13
David, I'm interested to know how many of your favorites rurals are obnoxious Trumpistes, Fundamental Evangelicals, and obnoxious boundary-violaters who want to tell me what to do w my own body.
45
David,
Next time you visit a small town for your experiment, bring a non-white person with you and see how things go.
87
Go Big Red!!
5
David Brooks is like a pointier version of Charles Kuralt.
Sure they both traffic in treacly home-spun virtues of helpin the neighbors birth their calves where ... gosh darn it, what is wrong with wearing a plaid shirt every day of the year? You just tell me that - sort of mentality
But with Charles Kuralt it came from a kindness and a generosity of spirit. Where with Brooks he is just consumed with envy and hatred of people on the left who are trying to make the world a better place because they are all just so smug - so much so that he has to venture out to the hinterlands (task one, find a couple of poignant sounding towns to drive to) to talk up the virtues of real 'mericans. The implication being, of course, that all you liberal city slickers are what's wrong with this here country. Look Doris and Steve is shoppin' at the local store and avoiding Amazon. Take that Jeff Bezos- we is exercising our intentionality.
And the reason Brooks is leaving his suburban DC life to go look for virtuous people far away is that his party, the Republican party, has been bought and paid for by Russia and they worked to undermine democracy itself. And Brooks sure wishes he could be writing about some republican in the White House who didn't embarrass him but even he realizes Cheeto Bandido is de trop (and that's a word Brooks probably likes to use).
So off to Comfortville in the state of Nostalgia, USA to look for virtue since I can't be bothered to denounce evil here.
27
It's pretty bizarre (or telling) that the column written directly to a reader that is presumably an urban sophisticate (what the hicks have to teach us, or something like this).
5
Wonder if David noticed any Hispanics or blacks in their churches.....
24
My family on both sides are from and occupy wide swathes of NE Nebraska.
What you see as "neighborliness" is in fact control, judgementalism, and for those who "stray" too far - outright shunning.
Yes, the smart people leave. With good reason. And those 30% Hispanic towns? Fascinating how you found an Hispanic person who feels welcome. All my aunts and uncles refer to them as "the invasion" and want them to stay in their squalid little apartments over by the meat packing plant, and stop coming to their Catholic church.
You saw what you wanted to see.
98
Really? The plumber just let himself in and plunged the drain! Urban legend.
11
Betting David does not spend much time in rural America. Sounds like he got the "model soviet" view of the place.
People are "civil" but almost only ever to "their own." My family comes from two different rural areas. People from there are all about "family," but are vindictive to anyone from the "outside" and any family member who breaks any of the unwritten rules. They are unabashedly racist, homophobic, religiously bigoted, and stubbornly ignorant. My relatives have had kids while kids, even as the family spews religious platitudes, there are so many broken marriages, drug addictions, fights that I keep my "city folk" family away from it all.
No thanks. People are just swell in suburban America.
48
If life in rural America is so idyllic and full of civil pride why did they overwhelmingly chose a narcissistic, narrow minded liar who has no regard for civil discourse (and a lifelong Democrat to boot) over a slew of well meaning and intentioned Conservative Republicans for president?
Something does not compute!
45
All of a sudden folks are concerned about rural America.
Can it be because rural America gave us Trump?
Most of the time around here anyway rural America is made fun of and talked down to.
So now Liberals will cozy up to African Americans and Rural Americans just enough to get a vote....but don't bring one home to meet the family.
Both groups should see they are being used by white Urban Elitists for votes and in some cases to help sooth a guilty feeling.
10
David, you seem to not be aware of the many ways city folks help each other. SAD!
31
And then there are the Trump loyalists, who would never vote for Jacinda of New Zealand, mainly because they wouldn't even think of voting for a woman who's kind and intelligent to run our country.
Instead, they'd vote for a two-bit con man who's a self-proclaimed "nationalist", a fraud, a coward, a liar a morally bankrupt cheat instead.
They'd rather vote for a filth-driven ripoff artist and let their soy beans rot than someone who actually wants to make THIS country great again stead of Russia.
Civic service? Not at those Trump rallies.
33
Calf roping might just be David Brooks' true calling.
6
["The most highly educated young people leave. The community project is to find ways to lure them back."]
It's been a hundred years since 'HowYou Gonna Keep 'Em Down on the Farm' which was about U.S. soldiers seeing Paris and New York.
Today, the young have T.V. and the internet; anyone who can get out does. And they're not coming back.
20
Dear Mr. Brooks: This is just the lifestyle that you yearn for. Why not quit the New York Times and move to Nebraska? What does New York City have to offer you? I am sure that you could learn some skill useful in rural Nebraska, and the sense of community would make your life much more meaningful.
20
Teach "Us"? "They"? Who? We're all "us."
19
The Agrarian Myth lives! Brooks needs to read more Willa Cather and hang out at coffee shops filled with retirees and "home from the sinful streets of LA" types less.
6
Send me a post card from Nebraska after you move there, David.
You can work from home and submit your column by email, thanks to modern technology, so now's the time to make that move to where, deep down, you really want to live.
20
If rural America is so great, why doesn’t Brooks move there.
While I applaud the Times for having diverse viewpoints, the current trio of conservatives (Brooks, Douhat and Stephens) are awful. Their turgid drivel belongs in the Murdoch papers.
12
Opening by attacking the "moral coherence and social commitment" of tens of millions of people (who are disproportionately more likely to be immigrants and people of color, no less) while using dog whistles about work, unemployment, and crime is frankly disgusting. Who on earth decided to publish this?
29
David Brooks consistently has a weakness for simplistic theories of human nature and social behavior.
This is his latest one.
21
Anecdote <> evidence.
12
You don't have to go all the way to Nebraska to find community.
11
Would a Muslim woman wearing a scarf be welcome at that table?
I’m asking.
24
David
Drive a little to the southeast into the rural area of Missouri where the GOP 'Leader' wants to require that everyone owns a gun after they turn 16...….an AR15 when they are a little older ......... MAGA!
11
çLet´s say Mr Brooks is onto something. Small-town good old createintentions are obviously good
But, llet’s get serious.
3
What David doesn't mention about Nebraska is all of the drugs, crime, and human trafficking that happen in this state. The College World Series held in Omaha is one of the biggest sites of the trafficking. Additionally, although 58% of the state did vote for Trump, over 40% of us didn't. We aren't all a bunch of racist hicks, but this sure isn't heaven.
25
What rural American has taught me: they have VERY bad taste in presidents.
25
Let someone find something good about people in Flyover Country, which used to be the Midwest, and Coastals fuss up a storm. We don't approve! They need to be more open minded, and share our thinking! Wait, does that make us closed minded? No, surely not.
4
Another gross generalization. Rural America shouldn't be personified. There's plenty of good and bad across the geographic spectrum.
11
Brooks, your very strong desire to put down so-called "elites" appears to have made it impossible for you to really understand America. My very close friend grew up in a small town in western Illinois (2000 people) and describes how the high school English teacher visited Germany one summer and came home and wore lederhosen on several occasions. As a result the townspeople decided that he had become a Communist and did their best to get his teaching contract revoked. Also, people who lived in town and worked in the town regarded farmers and their kids as "poor dumb farmers." I actually went to college in this town. Their distain for blacks and Jews (ones they felt they could identify accurately by whatever criteria they used) was absolutely palpable.
22
Republican policies under Trump are going to destroy these people, who think the opposite. Are they naive dupes, or deserving victims?
7
The answer isn't subtle: lack of racial anxiety/resentment. Come visit Utah one day and you'll find the same communal values without all the farming. Seriously, agriculture as the root of strong communities (lol)? One side of my family lives in the greater St Louis metropolitan area. They won't even use public transit because they're afraid of crime ("which is mostly caused by blacks", which is inaccurate and misleading). The other side is from Wyoming and one family member doesn't even have a functioning lock on their front door. Maybe you should investigate a link between ranching and community involvement. Or get real about race and class (primarily) east of the Mississippi.
4
Try living in one of these places instead of just visiting.
12
Mr. Brooks gave us a glimpse of a small town on the Plains in Southwest Nebraska.
In effect, McCook became a Rorschach test for Commenters.
Quite informative and revealing.
34
I live an hour south of McCook. Mr. Brooks estimation is about right. I have commented before that my little town does a lot right. It takes care of the poor. Our low income housing and Genesis food program is amazing. The school district offers free lunches all summer. There is poverty but there is no one in the streets. People generally take care of each other. When people lose jobs, if they have lived in the community for a while, they often find a job quickly because people take care of them.
There is a down side. We have our share of racism and sexism, but it is not generally discussed. The nastiness of the national political climate really has not hit here. People try to get along and care for each other. I have lived in suburbia for about twenty years and small town rural America about the same amount of time. You really can’t raise your kids in a better place. We vacation to Denver and KC and my kids always say that they don’t want to live there.
53
@Anthony
And paid for by tax dollars from blue states.
25
@Anthony Give us an update in 10-15 years and let us know where your kids ended up. Especially if they attained college degrees, or spent time travelling abroad to another country.
14
My question is: did these dear hearts and gentle people vote for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election, and if so, why? My guess is that change has not been a positive force in their lives, and that they are nostalgic for the way things used to be, summed up in the slogan "Make America Great Again."
8
Oh, David. Ever the optimist. Re-read "In Cold Blood" or "The Executioner's Song", and as so many have suggested, spend more than a few days in the "country" ( like a couple of months? ) and then report. The authors of the above were the real deal; this column will tick a lot of us off because of its privileged perspective, but that's about it.
4
I believe that Mr. Brooks is misunderstood by many comments I read here. He is saying that there is simply something to be learned from a different culture. Who would argue with that? The culture of a (rural) much 'extended family' whether by choice or necessity is shown here to have lessons that might be of significant value wherever one may live. Who wouldn't want to feel so safe as to not worry about leaving their door unlocked? Who wouldnt want to be part of a large welcoming supportive community? Who wouldnt want to have their children raised by a whole village? It is at least worth reflecting upon some of the contrasts of lifestyle and apparent selfless happiness these folks apparently embrace with thier sociology and volunteerism, even without the financial success that many enjoy though sometimes without the peace and satisfaction.
14
David's 1950s nostalgia always brings a tear to my eye.
11
The major dynamic around which American life spins these days isn’t rural vs. urban. Rather, it’s the tension between what George Lakoff terms the “strict father” conception of society and culture and the “nurturant parents” conception of society and culture.
Authoritarianism and democracy begin at home, whether that home is in a big city or a small town doesn’t mean diddly.
7
Rural community structure can be wonderfully supportive. Unless you're a person of color, queer, non-Christian, non-neurotypical, a nerd or geek, hold differing political views, or have a "non-traditional" family structure. But otherwise, it's fantastic!
25
I avoid using Amazon most of the time ( four times since it came into existence), and always use the cashier operated checkout counter even when the store tries to steer me towards machine checkout (I tell them I like people). I live in NYC.
14
Fifty percent receiving free or reduced-cost lunches? This reminds me of the rural area I live in. The locals rant about 'welfare queens' and vote for like-minded politicians, but fail to realize that their very survival depends upon the generosity of others.
28
I grew up outside a town of less than 1,000 people in rural southern Idaho. It was quite the exciting day when the first stoplight was unveiled, and the second gas station to come to the town had flavored coffee, which was nice--there wasn't even a Starbucks in a fifty-mile radius (and this was in the nineties!).
I didn't know when someone in town behaved badly. I didn't know them, period. I knew the people I went to school and church with.
You can keep your front door unlocked when the road in front of your house is only one lane and your next door neighbor is a football field's length down the road. It's isolation, not trust.
Mr. Brooks, the people you spoke to are the kind of people who find community wherever they go: they are "people-persons." The reason they wear so many hats is because the number of people inclined to serve on city council and lead a 4-H group are limited in number in the country, just as they are in the city.
In the country, you know and trust your mechanic because there's only one mechanic in town, not because the mechanic is a nice person. In other words, you know who is to blame when your transmission falls out of your car and you discover it's actually a bale of hay.
In a city of 7,000, there are at least 6,500 who would rather be left alone.
49
@AJ. There is a flip side to high levels of social capital like those described in this article of course. But I think the difference you are pointing out here is the difference between the Midwest and the west. Those two regions are fundimentally different.
6
I don't see any african americans mentioned in this article. What is Mr Brooks really saying here.
10
To assume that because we are a small rural community that we are homophobic, racist, intellectually stunted and unable to grasp the slightest concept of the modern world and the complexity of living in it, suggests that the responders are exactly what they accuse us of being. We welcome anyone who comes to this area to make a life for themselves and their families no matter what that noun means to them. We do not shut out people different from what our demographics suggest but rather find that it takes a strong desire to live here to overcome the fear of those very demographics and realize the benefits of just being accepted into a new community as you are; a member of the human race. What can you bring to a community like this? Your talents, your ideas, your desire to work as hard as we do to make it a place to be proud of, to make it your home. Are we perfect? Far from it. We revel in successes and shed tears over failures for the community. One store closing in a city means nothing but one store closing here means jobs and services gone that we can ill afford to lose. We treasure those companies who decide to bring jobs to our town. We understand the the realities that a poor year for our farmers means a poor year for us all. We experience the truth of economics on a micro basis everyday. Think about that when you sit down to eat the food we help provide.
12
With so much social capital, people doing things right, why are many rural towns poor? Is it because the game is rigged? Or because modern farming is so productive that many people's work is no longer needed? Or because China with its low wages and oppressive working conditions can manufacture almost anything more cheaply? Or something else?
Maybe economists can help figure out how we could get from where we are now to something better.
8
The most surprising thing I learned from this column is that the salt-of-the-earth folks of rural Nebraska say "intentionality" a lot. Who knew?
14
Moral of this story: It's easy to be nice to people who are right in front of you, who look like you, and who you have to see in church on Sunday.
Too bad for everyone else.
17
Meetings after work. It depends on the meetings. We have a chamber of commerce officer who ran the local branch of a national hate group until he accidently outed them.
7
McCook sounds like a nice place.
But the facts about rural America are quite different. By nearly every statistical measure, rural America now leads the country in opiod abuse, unemployment, poverty, violence, divorce, out of wedlock children, declining church attendance, alcoholism and tobacco use.
13
Rural America is subsidized by the tax paying working class of urban america and yet again and again they get scammed into voting against their own self interest by voting Republican.
Thanks to the bigotry and religious hypocrisy of rural America we are in the mess that we are right now.
15
The important point here is that all rural communities are NOT socially reprehensible wastelands, as some seem to think. This does not preclude (thankfully) OTHER types of communities, like urban neighborhoods, from being socially responsible and dynamic, tool. And even if they are now rare and not what they used to be, there's reason to think that we will HAVE TO return to some version of these communities in the future, because they're far more SUSTAINABLE than our current, corporate-scale models. Basically we may have NO CHOICE but to return to small-scale enterprises (both private and public) or we'll destroy the planet and ourselves.
5
Hogwash. This attitude isn't uniquely limited to small towns. Its a cultural thing built into the expectation of being a community member. I live in a small city in urban Metro Boston. Volunteers are what makes the city thrive - to many organizations and causes to name. You want a strong local community? Get involved, don't just comment on it.
7
Why do you think what you saw is exclusive to rural America? Do you honestly thing the same community-based life is not going on even in the cities? Even among non-white and integrated neighborhoods? Rural America is not much different from urban America in these regards.
4
@Brookhawk Oh come on. There are different vibes in both places, and that is why many leave rural America in droves for the energy of the big city. Part of that energy has always been the edge, the anonymity, and yes, a sense of the unknown.
Who leaves a blank check on a car seat or your apt. door open and unlocked in a city? Who feels compelled to run for a local office simply because if you don't the office will be unfilled? Apples and oranges.
Why the need to put down rural whites and why the defensiveness? I see no animus from Brooks merely an effort to show the Great Plains may be half empty but the people are coping nicely.
6
Here is a gross generalization based on my own rural hometown and hometown church. The young people who want an education--including mainly those who want such an education, are qualified for it, and can afford to do so--leave. The population that remains has become older, less educated, more homogeneous. For reasons that I could speculate on, this population has also become more fearful, more susceptible to conspiracy theories and fake news, less tolerant. The rural midwestern Methodist church in which I grew up was remarkably tolerant. Not so anymore.
8
Brooks is actually as disgusted with the Trump administration as many Times readers are. But he has found a way to support his party without supporting the Trump administration. Most of his columns are devoted to promoting individual responsibility for “creating communities.” This strategy enables him to blame those who aren’t thriving in the “every-person-for-him/herself” environment of present day America. It absolves the government of any responsibility for social and economic problems. It’s just another method of justifying the heartless strategies of the Republican Party.
10
Another fig leaf on the blight brought about by bankrupt conservative ideology and voodoo economics. Trickle down, siphon up.
10
David Brooks,
My first acquaintance with you was as the conservative side of Shields and Brooks on PBS. As a life-long liberal democrat, I thought condescendingly of you as a nice, though misguided, man. You have changed some since then, and so have I. Now I see you as a compatriot from the other side, in a move to the middle that is frustratingly slow. I'm praying that the dems don't nominate any of the left-wingers currently declared: in a visit with my old college friends, everyone agreed they would vote for a dog to get rid of Trump. I'm sorry friends, but you voted against Trump last time. The people we need to reach are the moderates who voted for him.
Anyway: I really respect and appreciate your work nowadays.
6
@Sally Wow, I could have written this very comment and thanks for it. It is apparent that the "new" Brooks gets under the hard left's skin because he is far less easy to dismiss out of hand.
Thus, he is regularly accused of being a Trump-hating stealth conservative with a disguised white nationalist agenda. Preposterous, but I guess if you're not full on with the left's version of identity politics (the hard right's version is even worse), you are guilty of political apostasy.
2
David wrote: "Many people make time for civic life and seem to wear 15 hats" ...
And, the overwhelming majority of them wear MAGA hats .. that's more than enough pathology for me!
8
"What Rural America Has to Teach Us"; not much! The article is just another whimsical wish for the "good old days" that never were. I grew up in a town of less that 4000, lived in rural communities of 3000 or less, and now live in a rural community of <10000. Where did you grow up and where do you live?
3
Maine's year-round island and remote coastal communities exemplify social capital at its highest. The Island Institute has been working for over 36 years to help catalyze community sustainability in our state's 120 island and coastal communities, and to share solutions with other rural communities in the U.S. and around the world. I'm proud to be a supporting member. For more information, visit www.islandinstitute.org
1
Yet another essay on what “rural” America can teach us. Enough. I don’t care. I’m exhausted from trying to understand rural America, or any other part of America that I’m told I should be sensitive to.
We downsized to an apartment where there is more diversity on my floor than my entire former neighborhood.
The only thing I know is to be friendly, get to know your neighbors, invite them over to watch a ball game, and if you’re lucky you’ll find new a new richness in your life appreciating our diversity.
8
If these rural communities are so great why do many of the young leave? Mr. Brooks you might note that it's easier to keep the unemployment rate lower when the young ones just leave.
6
My wife grew up on a small farm and started driving a tractor at age 5. So did her sisters. But she also decided she would never marry a farmer. She didn't.
3
I come from a small town in rural America and this is an inaccurate, shallow portrayal of place, lifestyle, values, etc. that is like so many I've seen and heard: a story told by a selectively viewing out-of-towner whose perception and story telling is shaped more by what is not seen and not told than by what is; a story that seems to exist in the visitor's mind and for the visitor's benefit; a story for an audience from elsewhere who is happy to think of such people in such places (often preserves against some rot in larger society) where they, too, might sometime, briefly, visit.
8
@John
If you said what he got wrong then we consider your viewpoint.
I grew up in a small town in Montana and my Grandparents owned a cattle ranch in which I was privileged to work on during my high school summers. There is, no doubt, a sense of community. But there is also a sense of community everywhere else I have lived and that has included NY, SF, Seattle, and Los Angeles. And, of course, all areas have their fare share of problems. Civic-mindedness is a state of mind, not a location.
16
I would like Mr. Brooks to consider whether his experience of these rural towns would be as lovely if he were a man of color poking around asking questions. Probably not.
Find a gay teen and ask that person how it feels to live in such a place.
Small towns might be guided by the question "Does this help my town or hurt it?," but too often anyone who is too different is seen as damaging to "small town values."
22
1) Your description of rural Nebraska sounds like the Ohio suburb I grew up in and my current neighborhood in Cleveland. Having a civic mindset isn't about being rural vs. urban. It's about having more than a transactional relationship with the place you live.
2) The U.S. is a complex adaptive system of 330 million people.
This democracy cannot work if civic mindedness relies solely on interpersonal relationships.
8
Thank you Mr. Brooks, for actually spending time in "Rural America" and witnessing how some communities are scraping by. Unfortunately, altruism does not pay for student loans, a home, and a family. The crux of the problem with rural America (most of the country, really) is that people are not paid living wages. Many people would be willing to give their time and talent to their communities if they were paid living wages in those communities.
Just think, if people were paid fairly, they could afford their education, their homes, their families, they might stay in those communities, bringing life back rural America. The money spent in those communities would bring more economic growth, a more diverse population, more open minds, and help the overall infrastructure of this country.
Truly, this is not a problem unique to rural American; it's the plague that is killing our country. Only those who make money for other people are well rewarded, while the rest of us struggle.
8
Humans evolved to effectively operate in small bands. That’s why rural America and many other communities work better than urban areas.
Till we get new brains, nothing will changr.
Fortunately, progress in biology may help soon in that goal.
3
Nice to read the latest from Alexis de Brookville...from "Brookville," a magical and timeless place that does, in fact, epitomize many of those core, historic, small-town virtues that "the real Alexis" described in 1835-40.
I grew up in Brookville, too....one that happened to be in the Cascade mountains of Oregon...and can confirm that all of the virtues (and all of the challenges, and all of the deficits) noted by David do exist and continue.
It's one of the eternal conundrums: Small towns are the places where religious belief, acquaintance with one's neighbors (and their habits, and their vices, and their civic contributions), and relative simplicity are most in evidence--and they're the places "from which people have come," to reside in central cities or suburbs or further-outlying 'urbs.
When I get teary-eyed about this or that aspect of life that seems so idyllic and perfect and admirable, I occasionally ask myself one really useful (multi-part) question: "If it was so great, why did I leave? If it was so great, and was the root and origin of current life, why did it fail? If it was the exemplar of life well-lived, why is it shriveling on the vine?"
Those questions aren't to belittle the rural life, which clearly has its own excellences and "habits of the heart" that deeply appeal. Their answers, however, suggest that those communities leave some elements of human need and desire unmet--economic and financial, cultural, geographic, and otherwise--for many.
12
@Robert Thank you for this thoughtful and challenging comment filled with knowing observations. The best part is , unlike so many, you didn't have a need to go into a defensive urban crouch or put people down to sing the praises of urban life as an alternative. Questions, yes indeed.
2
"But I keep going to places with more moral coherence and social commitment than we have in booming urban areas. These visits prompt the same question: How can we spread the civic mind-set they have in abundance?"
Be as homogeneous as many (most?) rural areas are. It's rather easy to maintain "moral coherence and social commitment" when everyone is the same...
2
@HapinOregon
And as long as you don't hang around and peer into the corners.
People are - people. I know folks who have close communities in their condos or coops, too.
2
So many commenters miss the point! It was not intended as a general commentary on the virtues of rural America, nor as a prescription for solving all the social ills facing our country. It was not political or polemic. It was simply an observation and challenge to all of us to see if there are lessons to be learned here. Obviously not everything can "scaled up" or even lifted and transported. However, there may be information that could be helpful to certain populations under the right circumstances. Give the guy a break!!
6
@Kim. The negativity is the hair trigger response of our deeply polarized times. Write anything that even seems to be positive about people unlike us (rural, farmers, small town, simple virtues, less affluent, in general, fewer degrees, in general etc.) and such comment is attacked or dismissed automatically. Trump and the party David use to like with a passion get a lot of the blame.
2
Small rural communities can be tight knit, supportive and community-minded. But there's a dark, insular and simply sad side as well.
In all school districts near my hometown, as in hundreds of communities in the US, household income is under 130% of the Federal Poverty Guidelines. ALL students get free lunches. Neither families nor schools have discretionary income.
My home town prospered circa 1900- 1940. Currently there is little commercial property to provide jobs or alleviate the tax burden. To manage rotting abandoned properties, local governments seek rely on government grants or loans.
The passionate involvement in local government. can also get personal and ugly, as when a local town supervisor and her teen daughter were denigrated by some for their religion. They are Quakers: the daughter didn't salute the flag, or say the Pledge, and was attacked for her "disloyalty." By adults.
Rural property crime is a huge issue. Tractors and equipment are stolen; even animals. My family farmhouse was trashed by local .
There's also drug addiction and domestic violence. Murders. A local farmer was prosecuted for sexual abuse of Amish children. Educated sons and daughters usually move away for work opportunities.
The good people ARE out there, but . . without "socialized" programs - government aid in many forms, Medicaid ( which provides jobs as well as medical care), a bit of income transfer -most of these communities would collapse.
Idyllic?
8
I appreciate Mr. Brook's statement. The subject is topical both in terms Timothy Carney's book Alienated America which considers why some place thrive and others collapse and examples of bottom-up success in the Fallows 100,000 Mile Journey into the Hear of America. It is difficult to disagree we are dividing in our interest and values. There appears a growing chasm between rural and urban. More importantly there appears little common interest in understanding each other building common cause. This is to the great detriment of America. Much of the discussion is in defensive tones. Maybe rural because the scale is smaller is more capable of comprehension and description for which I express my appreciation to Mr. Brook's for his elegant effort today.
3
Could we for once, just once, read an oped or indepth feature about what rural areas could learn from suburban and urban areas that are diverse and prospering?
25
Mr. Brooks, I truly like you and appreciate what you are attempting to do, but when you look at all the photos in the article you are looking at a deeply segregated community. The complexity of mixed heritage, breaking down the walls of bigotry, learning to walk in someone else's shoes is completely missing from this article. We are a complex society with a checkered history of marginalizing some who do not fit our preconceived notion of "community." The fabric you weave in your article is a bit too beige in my opinion.
7
David sounds like a child talking about something he clearly does not understand. Did he go to the local bar and shoot pool with the guys at midnight? Did he sit around in a trailer on the edge of town with some unemployed twenty-somethings smoking weed and playing video games all day on a Wednesday? Did he try to make an appointment at a free health clinic for say, a pap smear or a pregnancy test (or, god forbid, an abortion)? Did he talk to anyone who isn't basically the small town equivalent of himself?
I don't disagree that there are many lovely, caring, involved, and committed people in rural communities all over America. I don't think most people really dispute that at all. But that isn't the point. It's the homogeneity and the hostility to people who are different that breeds the tribalism. And life in these communities can be very hard. Opportunities can be very limited. And going against the grain can come at an extremely high cost.
This article reads like nothing more than confirmation bias. Conservatives have always had a naive and fantastical view of "family values" and "traditional America" that they think need to be restored in some way. David went looking for that and, of course, found it. But he doesn't understand these communities at all. Worse, he has a platform to broadcast his misinformed opinions to the world. As others have said, go live there for five years (without any vacations to the big city) then report back.
27
Mr. Brooks is something of a cultural tourist. Dropping by for a quick look around. Off back home to report breathlessly on natives he has met. Confusing these interludes with real understanding.
I have lived in small towns in Kansas, Ontario, Nova Scotia and Pennsylvania. I currently work in a small town in Michigan’s UP. This column reminds me of someone trying to sell me a car by encouraging me to admire the paint and interior without examining the engine.
The story is true, but incomplete. Something Mr. Brooks would know if he lived there instead of dropping by for a cup of confirmation bias.
26
God bless David Brooks for trying to bring us together. As much as I appreciate Mr. Brooks for pointing out the good side of rural America, we have to also remind ourselves of their other values. Rural Americans vote for people like Donald Trump, Steve King, and Roy Moore. They will not tolerate any regulation of their guns, even after school children are plowed down again and again. They deny science when science counters their world view. They advocate for racist policies even while denying they're racists. They have zero empathy for separating children from their patients, and putting children in cages. The list goes on and on. It's one thing to help your neighbor in a time of need. Most Americans do that. It's easy, because the suffering is right in front of you, and you know your neighbor. That decent behavior does not absolve them from the immorality and hypocrisy that they practice on a daily basis.
20
I grew up in mid-Jamaica, Queens, New York City in the '40s & 50's. It never occurred to anyone to lock their cars, ever! We kids freely played out in the streets and walked to school by ourselves. Parental supervision? What? And there are plenty of other examples of how degraded things have become since then! What the heck happened?
6
Now that we have learned about the praiseworthy civic engagement of rural folks perhaps you'd like to write a column about what lessons the "feudal mind-set" could learn from urban communities.
Or would that be condescending?
10
I am from Nebraska. I went to high school and college there. My mother's side of the family is from Kearney, Cozad, and Lincoln. I lived there for over 16 years, and I've returned there at least once a year for another 25. My perspective is that this article reflects how Midwestern people act when they perceive someone important is around: nice. How we act when the nice writer from New York is not watching is a different story. Homophobia is a given in most Nebraska towns, and people get beat up for it, as well as for a lot of other things, regularly. Nebraskans are terrible communicators, terrible at expressing important feelings. Nebraskan men are some of the most alienated Americans I have met. The KKK has a long history in Nebraska (Google it). That's because Nebraskans do poorly with race. Being nice is a safe way to get through the day: no surface conflict. Conflict is for football Saturday. My experience with Nebraskans explains why this is Trump country. Nebraskans don't like difference. (This is why we pretty much all dress the same.) Nebraskans are suspicious and quick to assume people with non-white skin are lazy and looking for a handout. Another thing: Nebraskans refuse to spend money to improve things. How were those roads, David? That's because Nebraskans are fundamentally stingy. David, your romanticization of Nebraskans speaks well of you as a person, but it is a UES pipe dream, a nostalgic vision of a place that only exists when when you are looking.
29
“Rural good = urban bad.” is a Jr. High debate club rhetorical logic fallacy. Brooks doesn’t seem the type to intentionally use this to take a dig at urban Americans. But the only other possibility is that he believes it! I thought he was smart enough to recognize deeply flawed thinking.
This country desperately needs intelligent moderate conservatives with a microphone. Brooks always seems to disappoint.
11
Please just stop writing.
As someone who grew up in parts of Montana and South Dakota that were significantly more “rural” than Grand Island, and living now in Nebraska, I can tell you unequivocally:
Most rural people are insulated from any version of America that is not monolithic and white and straight and Christian. They aren’t bad people, per se, but they do not have some superior handle on American virtue; they simply live in safe, isolated pockets of cultural monotony. They don’t see abject poverty side-by-side with lavish wealth. They don’t see the ugly reality of American capitalism up close. Their world does not resemble the America that MOST Americans know exists. They live in a homogenous subculture and they value that subculture more than they value their American citizenship. What you are glorifying is patent tribalism. Destructive and primitive.
And this is incredibly unhelpful at a time when the vast majority of rural Americans already believe they are more American than the majority of the country, which is not rural. They already believe they are “real” America thanks to the ceaseless pandering of politicians who see the structural overrepresentation guaranteed to them through the Senate and Electoral College. There’s a great return on flattering simple farmers. I don’t think we need more of this nonsense.
As for your particular examples: absolutely false. Laughably false. Damagingly and worryingly false and not representative of us at all. Ugh. Stop.
35
@Andre
Thank you. I am constantly spending time and effort to make things better than I found them in this city.
6
I like Mr. Brooks and much of what he has to say, although I am not conservative by any means. But every once in a while, he writes something that is so far off base and so out of his league that the reader can only laugh. This is one of those times.
He lives in one of the most civic-minded, educated, advanced and tolerant parts of the globe and yet he has to dip into the Midwest to extol those values and propagate the myth of a bygone America? Give me a break. He should admit this column is wrong and apologize to all his urban readers.
15
.
All city-slickers need to chop wood and carry water.
Get in touch with good, hard labor.
Volunteer what skills you have.
Work is worship.
Community is what binds us.
Amen.
3
I believe our good, hard urban labor is generally shouldering an inordinate amount of the federal tax burden and underwriting most rural states, how about that? That's a form of "community" to me.
15
I don't understand why we are bombarded with paeans to rural culture from Lord Brooks, who has spent his life in Toronto, New York, Chicago, and Washington, DC.
Perhaps it is time for him to "put his money where his mouth is."
7
Rugged independence, buttressed by billions of dollars in taxpayers subsidies to farm communities. From rural free delivery to the electrical grid to water management to massive crop subsidies, the agricultural sector has always depended on the kindness of taxpayers. Which is fine I guess. I just don't need the cliche-factory of David Brooks mobilizing to tell me about the superiority of Nebraska corporate farms. Can I have billions of dollars in subsidies too?
13
I grew up in a rural community in north central PA in the 1950’s and 60’s. I’ve traveled a great deal over the years, and I have never seen, read, or heard about another place that even remotely leaves me envious. I feel that I could write endlessly on the changes that have gutted my hometown. Just the other day it occurred to me that through high school in every single classroom there was at least one member of a family of active farmers. Wars and trade have gravely influenced rural life there, but without question the most adverse impact on daily social intercourse and openness has been the Internet.
The picture you paint is incomplete.
3
@Orbis Deo
Reminds me of Iris Dement's lament "Our Town:"
"I can see the sun has gone down on my town, my town . . "
My parents and grandparents were raised on small farms in Wisconsin. So was I. I loved living there and going "into town" was a real treat but at the same time, we always got the once over look from other towns people, primarily because we didn't have much money.
What I never forgot from my rural farm parents was them pounding into our heads - "stay abreast of current events. Watch the news. Read the newspaper. Just because we're poor farmers doesn't mean we're stupid."
It's one thing to grow up and live in a small rural town. It's something else to have a small town perspective and sheltered opinion about the world.
115
David Brooks should rely on data, rather than anecdote. The crime rate in New York State is 30% *LOWER* than in Nebraska. See this:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/301549/us-crimes-committed-state/
6
@Darth Vader how much of New York State is small rural communities, like this one in Nebraska?
This is beneath you, Mr. Brooks. I grew in a small town in Wisconsin very much like you described. The racism and hatred of gays was everywhere. Many people _need_ to be civic minded because so many of the rest are lazy, alcoholics or meth users.
Then there was this in the news today:
https://apnews.com/df20dedf955a468397aa724f73640c37
Black man arrested AT GUNPOINT while moving into his house in Kansas. He is a Marine veteran no less and now the local police department is abusing him too.
Your understanding and portrayal of "real America" is way off. I grew up there, still visit family all the time, and it's clear you aren't from these parts.
17
Seems odd to quote statistics about Nebraska and not acknowledge much of that comes from the economically stable Omaha and the large college town Lincoln. Though many of the same values and people connect rural and urban Nebraskans, this narrative is clearly looking for a certain small town cowboy ethic.
It’s also a bit offensive to refer to the Latino population as a problem — there are a lot of Mexicans all over the state and the do a fine job of fitting in, so much that nobody notices or cares, unless you are coming from out of town looking for trouble.
5
Well golleeee, Mr Brooks, I guess Mayberry still exists. But it means you have to live in Nebraska. So how many of these folks are college graduates? Do the villagers have high-speed broadband? Are there ethnic restaurants (pizza doesn't count) and are any restaurants open after 8 p.m.? I notice that not one of the faces in the photos shows a person of color. And where do the gay people hang out around here? What is the situation with opiates, alcoholism, gun ownership? You wax poetic upon encountering visions of America's past, but I see boredom, excessive religiosity, nosy neighbors, lousy weather, and no future.
16
Why doesn't David Brooks address the voting records of these civic minded towns? I see pictures in the article of all white people, and when I looked at the voting maps I saw overwhelming support for Trump and Republicans. A town who is "civic minded" with "unlocked doors" and "no crime" but still supports a leader who is a racist demagogue and a party who allows and encourages him to break laws and flout all norms is no better than a larger city with locked doors and more crime. In fact, I might suggest the citizens of these civic minded towns are as morally bankrupt as they leaders they enthusiastically elect, caring only for themselves.
15
Brooks, when other people do the whole "touring the interior of the country" thing i actually am tempted to believe its sincere.
You are not sincere.
You are an old school big business Republican shocked that your party has been completely taken over by angry people fearful of the unique demographic momentum of Latinos.
People who, again: uniquely among minorities in the US, work side by side in practically every field along whites.
To be clear about what I mean:
In rural economies, as well as everywhere else Its not a stereotype to say there are nowhere near as many Asian Americans (East and South), or even African Americans working in agriculture, the trades, or service industry, NATION WIDE, as Latinos.
That means poor white people, who are probably the plurality in this country, know and see the changing demographics first hand every day.
Rather than recognize the reality:
These are people, MORE SIMILAR TO THEM THAN LITERALLY ANY OTHER GROUP, are their best allies in the struggle for economic safety and upward mobility.
YOUR GOP has used the reliability of fear and tribalism for cynical political gain for 1 singular reason:
To keep the moneyed elite in power and to squueze out as much money as possible so they can sock it away in tax havens.
The GOP is the US oligarchy. Doing the same thing they do in Europe and Asia.
Trump is the dying spasm of this beast. 1 last ditch effort to squeeze out a few more pennies.
11
@Jarl
Well said
Another NYT piece that fails to note that this is an area where successful agriculturists get that way by practicing what they call "farming the government." In other words, depending on the blue states that contribute more than their share to the federal treasury for subsidies. While McCook residents may have not figured out how to use Amazon, Mr. Brooks must have missed the fact that Walmart decimated main street businesses decades ago - and continues to do so. I've lived there, and believe me one over-rated bakery does not make up for an overall oppressive squelching of diversity in culture, as well as professional, culinary, entertainment and recreational opportunities. Residents of the state may have convinced themselves that there is an aura of "Nebraska nice," but after living on both coasts and working extensively in developing nations, I have seen that this is just another myth used by those like Mr. Brooks profiles to rationalize their existence.
15
Urban and suburban America have plenty of civic service. Rural America does not have a lock on compassion or connection, quite the contrary. Stop stereotyping rural America as a place of virtue and moral superiority. America is a diverse place. There are altruistic people all over the country, not just in Mayberry RFD. Too simplistic and actually quite harmful.
There are many civic and charitable organizations in non-rural areas caring for people. Arguably, people in cities are even more community-minded because they’re used to living with other people, exposed to their differences, more accepting of diversity.
Rural America has given us many things we could do without, the current president, his amoral political party, and the bigoted attitudes he espouses among them.
4
"Donald Trump won the election in Nebraska with 58.7% of the vote. Hillary Clinton received 33.7% of the vote." as per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_presidential_election_in_Nebraska
How'd that work out for Nebraska farmers: tariff wars, tax cuts for the 1%, trillion dollar deficits. Will Nebraska vote for Trump again in 2020, against its own best interests? Or did it learn from its mistake? Before I join the boosterism, I want to know that answer.
5
Everybody should get out of urban areas once in a while and see how their fellow Americans live. As a hiker I'm out in rural areas all the time, and it still shocks me to see poverty like a third-world country. The only small towns that seem to be hanging in there are the county seats. Yet everywhere I've gone, rural people have been warm, friendly, generous, relaxed and refreshingly down-to-earth. A lady in a grocery store went out of her way to lead us to the junction we had been unable to find. A family let us park in their yard to access a creek. An old geologist chatted us up with backcountry lore when we stopped at his trailer to ask directions to a trailhead.
True, I do not live in a rural area and don't what evils lurk below the surface. And I can't defend their voting habits. But neither can I hate them. For when I hit the blue highways I feel like I can loosen my corset and breathe. While coming back to my urban home my stress level rises automatically. "The City" by Mark-Almond always comes to mind:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xkoiODV1ZE
3
Are you black/Asian/Hispanic/LBGTQ hiking around and being greeted warmly by all those wonderful small town folks? If not, and having lived in some of those small towns rather than hiking through, I can assure you your reception would have been totally different; you would have been very glad to have an urban oasis to return to.
2
I always enjoy reading Mr Brooks’ columns, but must agree with those who believe this one is too simplistic. I live in a very small town in upstate NY, and while there is a strong sense of community, there are also noticeable social divisions, which cause resentment. In addition, even if you have been part of the community for decades, if you didn’t grow up here, you will always be an outsider, at least to some extent.
One last comment: I hope that the mother of seven adopted at least some of them. The root cause of ALL the problems this world faces is overpopulation.
3
Well done David Brooks!
Awesome report. I grew up in the suburbs but it reminds me of that time in the 50's and 60's. They still have it. But the world is creeping in as you describe to their puzzlement.
How do they justify voting for Tя☭mp?
What was the point of the article?
I think, by reading the comments, you get a feeling that this MAGA place will not continue for long in its present state.
For entities to survive they have to have a diversified portfolio because life is becoming more complex by the day.
If you continue to work from scratch you are not going to evolve into more complex organizations. The motto "If God had wanted us to fly, he would have given us wings" is not what I would pack in my bag of tricks on my way to survival.
It is lunacy to think that because "something was there yesterday it will be available tomorrow". That may be true over a lifetime but it loses its accuracy as you try to extend it over generations. We are seeing more and more than an 80-year span is not a good reference frame for humanity longevity. We inherently know because we feel the need to keep historical records and we continue to want to expand human lifespan.
The 21st century is not going to be an extension of the previous one. It is going to require a lot of thought and we will really be hampered by contrarians stuck in the past. We are passed the age of the aging while male and we need all willing and forward-looking hands on deck and troglodytes will be left behind.
Abortion, guns, and the old boys culture are not going to be attention-getters and divisive wedges anymore. MAGA is over!
5
Last week the South Dakota legislature voted down a scholarship program to help 6,000 students to afford college. Republican Rep. Tom Pishke of Dell Rapids said it was tantamount to socialism and an idea promoted by Democrats. But he's a really nice and helpful small town guy I'm sure and his wife will bring over a covered dish on appropriate occasions.
https://www.yankton.net/opinion/editorials/article_1bfa8e30-4479-11e9-882f-232baaa8a21b.html#ath
18
I live in a very rural economically stable and diverse area, far from the crime, pollution and dog eat dog world of big city life. I will never return to the city I escaped from.
https://schrader.house.gov/uploadedfiles/180920_final_bd_rural_agenda.pdf
2
I went looking for ways to demean Nebraska. Its actually a pretty cool place. Lower than US average crime, unemployment, obesity, poverty, overdoses, suicide, divorce, teen birth, unwed mothers, air pollution, healthcare, illiteracy. A lot of these are just below average, but I ran out of things to look for.
Its infant mortality and cancer rates are barely above the us average.
Keep on being Nebraska.
4
In the small town I grew up there were noticeable a higher fraction of graves, being decorated on Veterans Day , than in the big city I moved later too.
The local radio reported Iraq casualties, the funeral processions would wind through town.
The metropolitan cities have culture, money but rural America defends America.
3
It is just so easy to Google to find out your assumptions are wrong. According to the Heritage Foundation for 2006-2007, the most active duty military came from the South followed in equal proportion by the West and Midwest with the Northeast following.
1
My parents (M.I.T., Wellesley) were active members of the Parent Teacher Association of the primary school I attended in East Tennessee. The P.T.A. organized socials to raise money to pay for the school's party line telephone connection.
My three sisters and I learned at early ages about commitment and hard work - even sacrifice - to achieve more than just career success. Each of us, in our own ways, have contributed to the well-being of the communities in which we live. Perhaps our children will be writing posts like this about my sisters and me in the future. I hope so.
2
When considering this article on the virtues of self-sufficiency and community spirit in the State of Nebraska, it is worth remembering that between 1995 and 2017 Nebraska received federal farm subsidies in the amount of $13,264,000,000.00. All the while, Nebraskans vote for Republicans while railing against the supposed evils of "big" government. You will have to forgive my skepticism that we have much to learn from a state that voted almost sixty percent for Donald Trump. https://farm.ewg.org/top_recips.php?fips=31000&progcode=totalfarm
14
In rural America, we also see the phenomenon of what Jonathan Metzl has called "Dying of Whiteness", a phenomenon in the developed world that's unique to the US. How does David Brooks reconcile this with his rosy view of rural America?
https://www.vox.com/2019/3/19/18236247/dying-of-whiteness-trump-politics-jonathan-metzl
From 10,000 feet, what Brooks is attempting to put a shine on here is tribalism: A homogeneous and like-minded group of people staying in one place, attending to their own needs, and unable to offer much anything to retain the ambitious, educated youth that is their only hope to break out of economic decline -- apart from government assistance they reject.
And not everything is rosy in rural America, is it? Because less than 2 years ago Brooks wrote:
"And the [opioid] crisis is hitting exactly in those places where Trump voters live, especially struggling rural areas in Appalachia, the Upper Midwest, and the working-class areas of New England."
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/04/opinion/lets-go-for-a-win-on-opioids.html
6
Thank you, Mr. Brooks, for sharing this upbeat view and identifying positive values still being upheld. What I wonder is how many of these hard-working community-minded citizens of Nebraska were bamboozled into voting for Trump--or were naive enough to do so--and whether they are now reconsidering their mistake.
@David Gibbons
They will be loyal. Rural people are powerfully loyal to someone they like or identify with or think is sympathetic. Loyalty through thick and thin is a rural virtue. They will not defect.
2
At the risk of shocking those reading these comments, I can tell you truly that growing up in the Sodom of the East, none other than New York City, I saw with my on eyes people doing all of the things described by Mr. Brooks that take place in his rural utopia. While I have moved away, it has been reliably reported to me that these behaviors continue.
16
David Brooks has made some great points that are maybe being missed here.
I was raised in small towns, lived overseas, settled in a large city and finally, moved to a farm with a small town as the county seat.
We're like a big pot of broth being boiled down to a condiment... we have to step up our game to survive. There's only a small percentage of people who are willing to do the work that will make their community, of any size, thrive.
But the small community requires more of each of us.
4
I am tired of white men fantasizing about the glory of rural white America. I grew up in rural white America. I was beaten, raped, abuses, and humiliated in school. And the oppressors were cheered on since I was too "much" as a girl.
When you glamorize the rural white American mindset, you glamorize that behavior.
190
One thing that many will and have said about this article is that these are homogeneous groups and that is why they play together with such 'intentionality.' I would like to point out that an equally small diverse group would act in a much similar fashion as McCook granted that most had spent their entire lives in that community. Roots mean a great deal in small communities. Diversity in and of itself does not necessarily divide and isolate people, many other factors come into play in an organized society.
2
What Mr. Brooks is describing is small town life which is not unique to any one part of the country.
I live in a small California town that exhibits these same qualities. This article starts with a stereotype and perpetuates it.
1
I made the mistake of reading the comments of this OPINION PIECE. Seems the majority of URBAN DWELLERS leaving comments on the article don't think much of us.
We're a bunch of gun-toting, misogynistic, racist, right-wing, inbred, uneducated, mouth-breathing, religious nut neanderthals.
As a person who is has never been any of the above AND chooses to live here, it truly warms my heart to see it's just another loving and supportive day for the HUMAN race in the USA. 😏
'Murica
5
I respect your point - the thing I can’t get passed is that a rural vote is worth more than an urban one. A hostile minority holds sway over our collective destiny and we get stuck buying your kids’ lunch and paying for your Medicare. On top of that you are loyal to Trump no matter what he does because at the bottom of it: you hate liberals that much. It’s pathological and just a radically different orientation and definition of justice.
4
I agree.
2
In Waverly, Iowa, a metropolitan area of about 200,000 but a small town, is Wartburg College. There, they teach civic leadership and civic responsibility. The small liberal arts college is unique, and students graduate in 4 years, almost all have jobs waiting for them upon graduation, and over one third have educational experience abroad. Student debt averages $25,000 and there are many scholarships. This is the heart of what Brooks is writing about. Rural, but worldly, quality education, and a lot of social responsibility. Not a bad combination. I live in a big city, but this is really a fine kind of education. And, the President should watch this place - there is free speech on campus. Not far from Chicago, and just a great place to get an education.
3
I would be more likely to accept David Brooks's paean to rural America if he resigned his job with the New York Times, moved to Nebraska, and became a columnist for the McCook Gazette.
11
@Chris Rasmussen
My thoughts exactly!
2
It is interesting that the author praises rural conservative whites for sticking together and looking out for their community.
Yet when liberal urban whites stick together and look out for their community, this same author has called it “dream hoarding.”
And when minorities do it, it is “identity politics.”
12
The only reason I still subscribe to the Times is to read the comments of the readers on the articles of David Brooks and Ross Douthat. The readers are more intelligent and better writers.
13
Hey folks, don't read too much into this. Unctuous romanticism is Mr. Brooks' schtick.
5
David, you did a great job of capturing what it was like to grow up in small town Nebraska (like I did). Those are my people! And it's the way Americans should treat each other, no matter their political stripe. We're all in this together.
3
Brooks , do you ever read the comments on your columns?
Apparently I am not the only one that thinks you are out of touch with real America and that ain't rural McCook.
3
Brooks has a rare talent for write pieces praising middle America while managing to simultwneously be incredibly condescending to them
2
Glad that there are rural communities like the ones highlighted in this article. However, this has been my experience living my entire life in Chicagoland. Our communities are active in helping others, volunteering in everything from helping the homeless, refugees, coaching, volunteering in our schools, tutoring, gardening common areas in our business districts: I could go on and on. Its a sense of community, not where that community is located.
168
I know Portland Oregon is supposed to be a bunch of hipsters. My experience of growing up in this town is of people who want the best for Portland. I am on the Planning and Sustainability Commission and it’s like a part time job, but it is volunteer. We struggle with hard issues of growth and climate change and yet treat each other with respect. I grew up here and have always loved Oregon, and Portland, my hometown.
What you describe is not just Nebraska. It sounded familiar to me — behavior I see and participate in everyday. Although I have to admit I would have called the police on that plumber!
9
Is the point of this article that the rest of America (the non-rural parts) should learn from it to have more intentionality and be more civic minded? I don't see how it's a helpful contribution to a national dialogue; nor do I see it helping us urban folks to understand and appreciate the supposedly overlooked rural folk.
All it does, in fact, is help drive that wedge further in. At first read, all I think is that urban areas have their benefits too, and their lessons for the rural areas too (like be nice to Latinx people in your community AND on social media). Both sides have their qualities and their pitfalls. This just makes it seem like rural America is better; and that's not helpful.
2
Mr. Brooks' article seems to have its own "intentionality"..
Google "moral coherence" ..
"That is, they altered their perceptions of fact to fit their altered moral judgments. In sum, moral coherence describes the tendency for people to fit their factual beliefs to their moral world-view ..."
Yep, that pretty much describes the composite rural voice.
And that is exactly the problem. No innovation, because innovation can't occur when the truth is suffocated.
Rural opinions orbit around a small set of accepted ideas. "Different" ideas get casually trivialized by the guy who doesn't read much. So .. not much innovation occurs, and the smart kids leave.
"Nearly everybody is working at something" Yet .. 50% of the students can't afford school lunch (?)
"Many people try not use Amazon." Yeah, they're at Walmart.
"The most highly educated young people leave." EVERYBODY who goes to college leaves. Very few jobs. Farming is CORPORATE.
"there are a ton of local government functions" Reality: small towns are lucky to find 4-5 people to serve on a town council; and usually only one will have had any real business experience.
REALITY: Federal welfare. Rural life blood.
Readers: Check with Krugman if you want reliable data based inferences. His recent article "Getting real about rural America" is much closer to reality.
4
I had lived for two years in rural America, Minnesota and upstate NY, and didn't feel welcomed. I felt as an outsider. I believe that the true measure of people is how they treat people different from them.
11
This paints far too rosy a picture. The described individuals get along well with each other, but what if you don't want the same life as they do? What about kids that don't want the 4-H club? As soon as you are different, you are vilified.
4
As long as you fit into these communities this all sounds wonderful but if you are of a different color or faith there are any one of a number of ways you feel apart.
These towns can remind one of the play "Rhinoceros"
3
Why are we looking to reify this false rural/urban split?
Does it work more conveniently for Mr. Brook's obsessive white virtue ethics program to split the country and then valorize one segment over the other?
Or does Mr. Brooks run only in circles that think that terms like Heartland, Fly-Over, Ivory tower, East Coast Elite, Hollywood values are actually indicative of anything real?
I've lived all over this country and count as close friends people across racial, SES and political affiliations and of course there is nobility and virtue in every group you wish to create.
I doubt that Mr. Brook's intentionality observed at Walgreens is very much different than the community I've seen in city co-ops fighting for safe play-grounds.
Stop feeding this media beloved inferiority complex that is supposedly the driving force for my neighbors.
2
Donald Trump won the election in Nebraska with 58.7% of the vote. Enough said.
3
im not sure service is a way of life in any greater degree in rural America than where the other 90% live.But this has long tradition in America saying the Real America is in the hinterlands somewhere
3
It is with personal sadness that I say I’m afraid this portrayal has been overly sanitized. Whitewashed, if you will.
For I was raised in an “idyllic” rural, midwestern town. And it certainly did have its Mayberry charms: one post office, one diner, one jail. Nothing but deer-frolicking woods in front and back of our modest home. Crime was a problem only big cities had, save for an occasional drunken disturbance or an out-of-town speeder.
But in contrast to these bucolic charms existed—and exists—an equally seductive set of attitudes and practices that I, for one, chose not to subject my children to. For it took me far too long to overcome and outgrow these very attitudes.
Racist attitudes. Be they blatant or held close to the vest, racist attitudes which view all non-white visitors or residents with deep suspicion and fear, if not contempt, for the sin of looking different.
And gun attitudes. Rural folks love their guns, with a passion. Many, including most men in my family, are die-hard NRA members. And they truly do seem willing to die for their guns. In all candor, I understand the love for guns; but I do not understand the extreme fanaticism, the blatant idolatry. But it is real and it is widespread in rural communities. And, like racial prejudice, it is most unseemly, to put it mildly.
Of course these attitudes do not apply to all rural people. But they are unmistakable, primary influences in rural life. And that’s very sad.
5
Well, they're all solidly behind a man (I use the term loosely) who is the antithesis of those values, so something doesn't square, Mr. Brooks.
5
Mr. Brooks - I would strongly recommend you come visit the farmer's market close to your Alma mater on the South side of Chicago. You will find a much more universally applicable example of coherence, civic mindedness and social commitment - and all of that in an area that is much more diverse and complex than the all white community of Christian farmers with the one token Latina woman that you could find to use as an example in your column. Good, God fearing people with family values live everywhere in America. As do bad people with problems of abuse, addiction and bad morals.You cannot be cherry picking to simplify things.
5
There are pockets in the Northeast that still have this way of life. I happen to live in one. It is special to me.
1
Mr. Brooks, your romantic depiction of rural life is noted. I can assure you, though, that there is as much drama and politics in a small town as you can find in any large city.
All the intentionality described in the article happens in urban areas, too. The weavers exist, but they are simply harder to see because the overall population is greater. Reading this article makes it seem as though civicmindedness is exclusive to small towns and that is not the truth.
3
I grew up in a small town in Northern Michigan. I came of age during the Great Recession, the local paper mill that employed the majority of my town closed in 2008. It was a dark time for rural America, and in many ways they have never fully recovered. I knew my only way out was to go to college, and move to a big city that would never lack for opportunities. I’m a biologist, even if I wanted to move back to a small town what job would there be for me? There can be all the “community” mindedness in the world, but you have to have employment opportunities.
6
Anna, I too grew up in Northern Michigan during the recession. There was nothing for me there except minimum wage jobs and a bleak outlook for my future. I finally managed to escape and go to college in my 30s. It's unlikely I'll ever be able to return, simply out of my need for survival. I could not survive in the village of Honor Michigan, which is now a town within a county hit hard by th opiate and meth epidemics. I lost my own mother to an OD. My father is an abusive, severe alcoholic. Addiction is very common in small country towns.
2
I consider these dreamy elegies by Mr. Brooks about rural life, morality, small town virtues and on and on to be some of the most divise writing produced today. It starts from the basic premise that one group - in Mr. Brook’s case usually white, rural, Christian and homogeneous - has an inherent goodness that isn’t found in other groups. For one thing, it’s just plain wrong. People are human everywhere - some are good, some are bad, some are bigoted, some are empathetic, most are just trying to make it through the day. Second, it defines people of the other group as just that - the other, different, strange and “less than”. Until we begin to accept that all humans are of equal value simply because of their humanity, writings like Mr. Brooks’s will continue to promote and exploit the evils of tribalism and division. Mr. Brooks, you are not helping.
16
David, I'm disappointed by this piece. While I agree that everything you mention about Nebraska is good and healthy, you frame the piece as if this is not how it is in urban locales. I used to live in NYC, and for a number of years, at 75th and Amsterdam. I knew all the local small businessmen and women, and we all looked out for each other. I volunteered with Central Park Skate Patrol to help fellow New Yorkers and tourists to learn to rollerblade in Central Park safely. We had neighborhood watch groups. It felt like we were all one big multi-ethnic, multi-generational family. It's not just "What Rural America Has to Teach Us', it's what every community minded person has to teach us.
7
Oh I it brings back memories. As a teenager, getting up on Sunday morning and my mother saying 'I heard you had a good time last night at the party'. Small town living in all its glory. I left at 19. I'm 72 now and the only way I'll ever go back is in a pine box. It may be fine for some, and look romantic to those who've never lived it, but I hated it then and don't ever need that again.
4
I wish you stop feeding this notion that rural Americans are the "real" Americans or the most moral, hard-working, law-abiding and neighborly. I prefer small-town life for a lot reasons -- less noise and congestion, more nature, more space, name recognition, cheaper land and housing, a sense of permanence and slowness in a too-fast changing country. I don't pretend that I and my friends and neighbors and fellow church members are any better people than those in bigger towns and big cities simply because we live in a small town. People are people everywhere.
12
I grew up in a small town of 3,000 in rural northwestern New Jersey. With college, I moved into a loft in lower Manhattan for 41 years. I owned a farmhouse in upstate NY for 10 years before selling the farmhouse and the loft in NYC to live in a small city in the Hudson Valley last year.
A) I left NJ because it was culturally and intellectually stifling
B) Once the fracking debate hit upstate NY, the "rural America" of the fracking fairway taught me that rural folks could be as myopic, selfish, and downright nasty as the next person. They couldn't care less if fracking their farmland would poison their neighbors: they felt they had a "right" to extract the maximum value on "their" land and regarded health-protecting regulations as a "taking". It was the second home owners that exhibited the "intentionality" that Mr Brooks speaks of (though I prefer the word "mindfulness" as it implies a consideration of others interests and needs and a vision of the future), not the rural folk who were constantly sneering at us "flatlanders" (snide, derogatory slang for out-of-town city folks) who should mind their own business.
C) With these varied experiences to draw from, anecdotal though they may be (though no more so than those Mr Brooks chooses to try to prove his point) I have found more demonstrations of mindfulness in NYC and my new home of Newburgh NY than the rural areas I have lived in.
I think Mr Brooks biases are not fooling anyone, judging by the other comments posted here.
8
I live in the DC metro area. I have neighbors, friends, and relatives who have devoted their life to public service by working in federal, state, and local government. They make this country a better place by their dedication to their mission.
14
One key to understanding this, is that this is a homogeneous ethnic culture. There is no one they can disdain or look down on. This reduces the potential for conflict. There are small towns like this across America. A relatively small number of people live this way. If it is so great there Brooks, why not move there? I think I know why.
5
Come on David, quit trying to convince us you are a conservative. Get out of the closet and join the social democrats where your true voice is.
Rural America gave us Donald Trump.
Maybe we should be asking what can urban areas teach us? They’re more ethnically diverse and are willing to provide social safety nets for those less fortunate.
Rural America isn’t as innocent as you make it to be.
11
@John New York taught Trump his barbarism. Rural America fell for the con.
I have always enjoyed your columns Mr. Brooks, but I also have to be honest - this article is more Pollyanna than usual.
"Crime is low. Many people leave their homes and cars unlocked."
I cannot help but disagree. Many people will recall the kidnapping that occurred in Barron, Wisconsin last year.
A man kidnapped a 13-year-old Wisconsin girl and killing her parents after killing her parents - in front of her no less.
There are some small towns that still exist and have that Mayberry flavor to it. But those towns are usually more accepting to long time residents and their off spring that some "big city" person or persons pushing in.
A goal most folks I know who have kids is to make their kids' lives better than their own. The assumption is that the town will always go on and provide.
I remember when I lived in Green Bay and it's really a big small town. It's big enough but small enough to feel that small town atmosphere.
Dan Devine, then head coach of the Packers, lived in Green Bay. He had a terrible record coaching the Pack. On night, one of his neighbors was so incensed with the Packers loss record, a neighbor poisoned his dog. To this day, I get sick to my stomach that someone would kill an innocent animal because of a poor football season.
So please Mr. Brooks, while there is a lot Rural America can teach us, there is always positives and negatives to every teaching lesson. Sometimes those learning curves are deep and hurtful.
7
@Marge Keller
I too am from a small town in Wisconsin. The fact that some towns have not suffered from murder, and kidnapping as Barron WI did does not mean they are foolish not to lock their doors. Pollyanna looked for the good in people and she was not disappointed. She was a force for good and we need all the good in this world we can muster to counteract the natural tendency to fear the unknown "other".
2
They vote for poor healthcare- taxes breaks for the wealthy- cutting gov't funded programs. In other words they vote against their own best interests. I have no sympathy or pity until they wake up.
13
Everything you describe about the humanity of these people, I have seen in my hometown San Jose, and in Los Angeles, and in Sacramento, and in Nevada City, CA, and I could go on. These wonderful qualities are not the stuff of the Midwest, they are the stuff of America. I wish we could unite as a country on our common culture, rather than divide and compare, and for what purpose? I don’t need to learn from the Midwest what I already know as an American. With all respect, it seems you might need to open your eyes a little wider.
11
Corporate decisions to locate in rural areas or to relocate out of rural areas (or out of the country) are not made on the basis of civic service, and local civic service cannot do much to counteract their decisions in the long run. Local managers who like and participate in local civic service will find themselves with dual loyalties, and if they go with their communities they will lose their jobs and hurt their families. Corporations expect their employees to be loyal first to them, and, for example, not to violate company policy by telling the community their company is thinking of closing the plant.
For corporations, local civic service is a way to increase productivity (and to keep taxes lower), and will vanish if the corporation finds that operating in other ways or in other locations is more profitable.
1
So many Republicans I know way people need to pull themselves up by their boot straps.
Then when they have children, they move to the best school district they can afford.
It is not surprising that those "terrible socialist" countries like Canada, Denmark, Australia, Germany, etc. have better economic mobility than we do.
There are rural parts of the US with infant mortality rates of a second world country.
35 years of Republican trickle-down Reaganomics and rural America got an opioid crisis.
Thank your Republican Party Mr. Brooks.
10
I see only white folk in that photo ....
13
My family moved from an urban midwest city to rural Arkansas, then rural east Texas, in the 70s. The culture shock I had was worse than any experienced traveling to a foreign country.
It wasn't so bad for my dad, who went to work each day, or for us kids, who had school. But it was terrifically lonely for my mother, because outsiders were pretty much ostracized from local society.
Can't say we learned much about civic service from being treated like non-human aliens.
13
I think that's awesome and it sounds like an awesome town. Still, I don't see why one great anecdotal experience in a town Brooks visited for a few days has to be globalized into a grand theory of all rural communities being better than all urban communities. It seems naive.
Town size, the most basic factor, doesn't seem to be part of Brooks' great theory. You can find the camaraderie this town has in bedroom communities of non-farming, ex-city slickers up the Hudson River too. But you can't leave a check in your car for your mechanic or not panic when you come home and find a guy in there fixing your sink unless the community is tiny and you know everyone. That isn't realistic in a bigger group - or even a group of the same size. Watch a little true crime - residents are always gobsmacked, saying "I can't believe this could happen here!" Heck, even in Mayberry, Andy was a cop.
4
I am a native Nebraskan, my hometown has a population of 2,000 and it's the biggest town in an hours radius. Of the 93 Counties you mention it is #42. All of those positive things you say are true. But this is a deeply "RED" State that's fearful of change and outsiders. When Barack Obama appeared on the TV at the local bar, "There's our "N" word President" was a common refrain. Too many of these fine folks are misinformed, uninformed or just willfully ignorant.
21
“...a Rotary Club, a 4-H club, a future farmers group, a music festival, a storytelling festival, .... churches, libraries, museums and...a James Beard Award-winning bakery and coffee shop where the retired men....”. Having visited many small towns across the country this richness of organizations is the exception not the rule. David lives in a make believe lala land of his own making.
11
Trafficking in stereotypes about the supposed moral superiority of rural communities is the epitome of lazy social commentary. Spend time in a place like Little Italy in the Bronx and you'll see the same dedication to hard work, family, and maintaining community ties.
18
What you describe exists everywhere ... We moved into a 4 building/8 unit townhouse condo in Providence, RI. It took all of 3 months for all of us to be on first name basis, sharing dinners, working on condo issues, shoveling snow together, and just generally looking out for one and other. Any oh, just enjoying having new friends.
Yes there is some petty crime so we lock our doors, but my condo neighbors share door key combos so we can all put the Fed Ex package inside, walk dogs, even "could you check to see if I turned my iron off ?"
6
A lot of this is true, but in a larger political sense in America, Trumps MAGA doesn’t stand for what he says it does.
For cynical politicians MAGA should stands for “Middle America Gullible Again”.
“Middle America” can be Trumps base in the Midwest, or Middle Class voters anywhere in the country.
Why do we always put people in rural America on pedestals? Aren’t these the people who - in every presidential election - vote against their own interests? My experience in rural America (and I’ve got plenty of it) boils down to racism and ignorance. Small towns are great until you come out as gay, transgender, or God forbid your a member of the only black family. Not buying it. People all around this nation work hard and help others. Remember how NYC came together after 9/11??
15
Having despaired over the GOP now that it has become a servile creature of evil billionaires, David is looking for some example somewhere that shows sensible virtues can succeed.
Such examples might salve David’s wounds, but his talents could prove more useful if he focused upon extracting our government from the claws of the Mercers, the Kochs, the Spencers, the DeVos, the Uihleins, the Adelsons, ... , and the hugely successful “alternative reality” machine of Fox, Trump tweets, Hannity, Limbaugh, fanatic fundamentalists, etc.
10
Nebraska is headed for big change. A 2013 U of Nebraska sudy predicts that 2050 there will be 538,941 Hispanics in the state. Hispanics will account for 24 percent of Nebraska’s population, compared to 9 percent in 2010.
On the notion that we urban dwellers can learn from country folk, it sounds nice, but it's not even remotely possible.
Big cities require a whole different culture than what one finds in rural areas.
1
Quit the us and them scenarios. Urban dwellers and rural life are one in the same they are just life. Trying to put one life as more pure than the other is nonsense. Its articles like these that put us in the state we state in right now. Focus on what binds us.
9
Mr. Brooks, you're only partially right.
We live rurally. And, yes, there's great cohesion, support and intention.
But, the same rural community that can be so supportive, nurturing and giving, is also a community that says our transgender child is an abomination and doesn't deserve his place in the world.
This fundamental intolerance/unwillingness to grow/stagnation/call it what you will, that undergirds rural communities makes them unfit as exemplars of the future.
13
My only experience of rural small town America is from watching
The Andy Griffith Show. Mayberry seems so wonderful.
After reading the comments, I figure the only reason there were no black people in Mayberry is because they took them into the woods and shot them.
5
@New World - You are approximately correct - see the Wikipedia article on "Sundown town" - I first learned of these reading a Kurt Vonnegut novel - they were by no means restricted to the South.
2
I wonder if the lack of wealth contributes? Does a narrower wealth gap foster a "we're in this together" mentality?
A recipe for the US?
3
There is the same wealth gap!
David Brooks, you're impressed by the employment rate but you tell us that despite everyone working, half of the population is still too poor to feed their children. It sounds like in Nebraska, or at least whatever crime-free ice cream parlor you visited, the state has assumed much of the burden of compensating exploited workers. Is that the lesson?
13
Cities experience community engagement too. I no longer live in a mega-city like New York. I'd describe "urban" Salt Lake as anywhere in the New Jersey metropolitan suburbs. Probably less crowded actually. All the same, we participate in community councils, volunteer programs, local board meetings, cultural and community events just the same as anyone else. We did in New York too.
You think I'm going to buy my groceries from Amazon when I live in easy walking distance of a local farmers market? You think I'm going to Duane Reade when the pharmacy on the corner can fill the prescription? You think just because I have a funny accent and know how to ride the subway I'm not civically engaged? Trust me. When I see the neighbor's kid doing something stupid, the parents are going to hear about it.
Let's not romanticize Nebraska. They are simply easier to notice because there are fewer communities for the outsider to sift through. It's pretty easy to understand a community under 1,000. You try 100,000 or 1 million, your skills as an amateur anthropologist are going to reach their maximum incompetence level relatively quickly.
In fact, in all my continental journeys, Nebraska has a special place in my heart as the worst state to drive through anywhere in the western hemisphere. I'm including South and Central America as well as Canada. The top competitors are Texas and Kansas. I'll even take the Dakotas first. At least you benefit from a latitudinal advantage in distance.
1
Do you seriously believe that what you glorify here scales up if the population is larger, more diverse in multiple dimensions, and is home to plutocrats? If so, you're more naive than I would have thought, and that's saying something.
2
The communitarianism espoused in this column is outstanding, minus everything you overlooked that readers articulated in the Times’ picks comments. But these rural Republicans destroy national communitarianism. They seek to destroy our national public sector by their voting for Trump and the capricious Republicans. They are destroying the goose that laid the golden egg. Their pride (and bigotry against people not in their community) will be the nation’s undoing if they do not lose their electoral hegemony on power. They must be stopped.
8
#NebraskaStrong this is reality! I grew up in Eustis. We are stronger together. I am because we are. We are because I am.
1
David, allow me to translate for you:
"moral coherence" (n) - That oppressive atmosphere created by the "moral elders" of Midwestern towns, beating down any change to the "proper" way things are done. This is implemented to pander to the elderly's endemic fear of change, and results in the flight of youngsters and intellectuals and their oppression being thus delivered remotely from then on.
6
And how many rural people voted and will vote for “family values” candidates/incumbents who will end social programs, like school lunches? Red areas receive way more aid than blue ones. So sick and tired of hearing about how great these hypocrites are.
11
A sense of share purpose an the old adage that the sm is greater than its parts. I live in a gate community where the biggest beef is that the palm tree is in my way so I can't see my kid in the pool so cut the tree down. What about moving your butt or not helicopter/snow-plowing parenting. Kids in a pool should know how to swim so you don't have to watch them every second. Point being we see a lot of people (mostly younger, but not always) who have a sense of entitlement at all cost to others. It was nice to read about communities that have retained the sense that we are in this together. Thank you David.
1
People in this farm county seem to be as happy as at any time in the eighty years I have lived here. 75% of them voted for President Trump.
1
With a town that size and in that place, they BETTER be civic minded. That place could dry up and blow away, and nobody would really know it except the people being displaced. The weather is changing country folks, and you should stick together, work hard, and help your neighbors and your town. Don't call it 'Socialism' though. Just call it"Civic Mindedness" if it makes you feel better.
4
Lower populations equal more community. Abortions to save the country? Anyone?
1
I'm genuinely curious why Nebraska has such an excessive amount of counties. Please help, nebraskans.
@Tim NJ has 21 counties and is 8,723 sq miles. Nebraska has 93 counties and is 77,358 sq miles. We have 4.4X as many counties for 8.9X as much area. I'm not sure what the issue is?
2
What's wrong with harmony through homogeneity?
@Questioning
"We hold that these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."
3
No mention here of meth addiction, just the missing "pathologies" Mr. Brooks associates with poverty. Perhaps you didn't look hard enough, David. They're there; trust me.
5
I've seen many many articles about what city people need to learn from rural people, I have never seen a single item about what rural people need to learn! I guess we are awful awful people, you know, we work hard, we pay lots of taxes, we embrace diversity. Such bad values. Only to a Republican.
10
It's not rural America it's homogeneous America. It's the "Johnson's" of Blazing Saddles.
Rural America may have many things to teach us, Mr. Brooks, but you, are not a person who could ever determine them.
Retire from the opinion scam.
2
You can always find a place to park in a small town.
2
So David, why are you writing so elegantly about the 'takers'? Nebraska is a net taker of government funds. Between the low income students and the high buck, commercial farms that benefit from the farm program, they get lots more from Uncle Sam than they contribute. If it wasn't for all the hardworking, tax paying people in the metropolitan areas, they would be left to the dust of the prairie. The almost 100% white population is so intolerant of immigrants that Freemont passed a law that they couldn't rent to 'illegal' immigrants, as if the landlord had to verify the renter's status. And this law was copied in other Nebraska towns. If you are white and fervently (appropriately) religious, you will be welcomed. If not, STAY OUT.
8
Funny, David. The front range of Colorado is teeming with ex-Nebraskans, who come here for the jobs but never, ever let others forget that they are Nebraskans first and always (and not in a kind way). The other thing that sticks in my mind was an interview with a Nebraska couple, National Guardsmen both (health care and other government benefits, anyone?), interviewed in early 2009, who believed that Obama was the antichrist. Weavers. Yeah.
5
Turns out human societies tend to be most trusting when they are small in number and homogenous.
So much for cities and multi-culturalism. Then again, most in the city wouldn't find the life you describe as better, just quaint.
1
I wish this was longer. Fascinating. Reading from Hollywood, CA.
1
I wonder if Mr. Brooks met any LGBTQ youth, and if so, if their take on things is this rosy.
6
Homogeneity uber alles? Humanity's evolutionary defect of tribalism works positively when you live exclusively in your tribe. This was great when there were only scattered tribes. The great challenge of overpopulation is learning to live civilly where the tribes overlap and intermingle. We brave urbanites are doing fair-to-middling at that even when the loudest mouths are among the tribalists.
3
Oh, Brooks. Once again, you demonstrate you've discovered what an elephant looks like with your eyes blindfolded. The mistake of a visitor to a small town (regardless of geographic location in America) & thinking you've "seen-it-all".
Just stop. Small towns appeal to "some", and not to "others". Just like it's always been.
I grew up in that sort of "small town." I suffocated. I got out before I was stunted anymore. True, I lived like you mentioned in the story---50+ years ago. My daughter's experiences 30 years later wasn't nearly as "enjoyable," her telling of how the local Sheriff's office (and other agencies) had the best drugs later confirmed. Small town with essentially 3 police departments! Astonishing turf wars, can't afford the education (thankfully daughter went to private school with 15:1 classroom size, not 32:1) in town 'cause they won't tax themselves to provide quality education, etc.
Agriculture vanished---big capitalism won.
You're "close...but no cigar" in your column today.
3
holy.. did you just seriously say "But these community weavers are pretty honest about their problems. A few of the towns are 30 percent Latino, and they struggle with integration. The most highly educated young people leave. The community project is to find ways to lure them back."
HOW ABOUT reach out to the latino population and accept them as the neighbors they are?!
6
@James Campbell n retrospect I'm hoping read that wrong and that he meant the latino population are having the same problems. Not that they are the problem.. which is how it sounded..
We should rename this article "Fantasyland." It is very enlightening though to read how people can fool themselves, just like you typical Trump supporter. A simple internet search could easily provide enough data to rip this article apart. But why bother. Individuals like this long for a yesteryear that never existed and who are we to trying to pull them into reality. Better to beat them at the ballot box and send them back to "Fantasyland."
3
While some folks might feel safe enough not to lock their doors, the story is a bit different for African Americans.
My mother was raised to lock all doors in the house, day and night. Her parents would punish them if they found the doors unlocked. Why? Because traveling salesmen (white men) would sell door to door, and they felt free to walk into the homes of African Americans. Sometimes they would assault the African American women in their homes. If they even reported the crime, it was their word against these white men. At that time, there was no recourse, no justice, from this assault.
One day, my mother broke her parents' rule. With her siblings down the street, she decided to buy a watermelon for her family from a white farmer selling door to door. That farmer kindly offered to bring this large watermelon into the house. She let him in, and to her alarm, he decided to stay, sitting himself down for a chat in her mother's kitchen. My mother stood by the sink with a knife in her hand, wondering if she would have to fight for her life against this farmer. Luckily, her sister, brother, and neighborhood friends all barreled in, and the farmer got up and left. My mother has locked her doors ever since.
Her country cousins also locked their doors, as there was no telling when the Klan would come by for a visit. Securing one's home was one of the few things that African Americans could control.
Mr. Brooks yearns for an America that never existed for my mother.
7
I think that David Brooks is primarily an idealist: he sees what he wants to see in America, and especially in conservative-minded folks.
2
And these are the same good folk who admire and vote for a guy and a party that demonstrates daily that it believes in the seven commandments.
They should try leaving a signed blank check at Mar-a-Lago or at a Kudhner property
Brooks has a wonderful idea…travel to parts of the country that agree with his conservative ethos; cherry-pick examples, and then hold them up for us as proof that conservatism will solve all of our problems. And naively assume that the social-economic dynamics of rural (apples) and urban (oranges) are identical.
I have an idea David - why not go to any inner city, any boiling cauldron of despair and rage, driven by racism, poor education, and lack of economic opportunity, and see if they leave their doors unlocked and blank checks on the car seats. (Imagine David Brooks walking around Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood.)
Or go to any community where the middle class has been gutted by 50 years of conservative economic policies, where the free market has exploited and plundered those communities and then moved on. Maybe they should just follow Nebraska’s example of “doing extraordinary things to look middle class.” Conservative brilliance: just “look” middle class.
“Nebraska ranks eighth in the country for social capital.” Brook’s “impartial” source for this is the “Social Capital Project” a conservative Republican organization promoting “families, our communities, our workplaces, and our religious congregations.”
If “moral coherence and social commitment” are so effective why are rural areas loosing population and moving to urban areas where over 80% of the population lives?
David, your anachronistic conservative message wilts in the face of modern reality.
7
David , you lost me at "everybody says" ...the first words of your column.
Who are the everybodies that say things?
Are they the "they" that Trump and conservatives say are victimizing them?
3
I'm sure this is true for the individuals who are deemed worthy of being embraced by the community. But what about those who are not? How would these communities react to someone significantly different from their average member? How homogeneous are these communities, Brooks? You've completely glossed over it, but your slight of hand is revealed in this paragraph:
"And they do have to work hard to make sure national viciousness doesn’t tear local bonds. At one dinner, a Latina woman looked at her Anglo friends with tears in her eyes and told them why she had dropped off Facebook: “There’s a lot of people who make me feel at home here, and I’d never had a home. I know you because I know how you make me feel. I don’t want to change my mind about you because you liked one comment on social media."
What this woman is saying is "you've treated me well but I don't want to realize that you are bigoted and racist and advocate for policies that hurt people of color."
It's a classic case of liking individual members of a group (usually because they generally comply with your values/ you know them) but still being racist and supporting systemic oppression. You've called it "national viciousness" but what you really mean is "bigotry."
Would these people show the same "community values" to a poor black woman who has a few kids? To a young girl who wants an abortion? To a pagan? To a middle school kid with a non-binary gender? To an outspoken atheist like me? A Muslim? I doubt it.
4
Rural America is neither a utopia nor a dystopia.
2
Too much of rural America has to teach us racism, xenophobia, gun fanaticism, and the ignorance or stupidity to vote against their economic interests. I will add, though, that the ignorance and stupidity is not entirely their fault.
1
Sorry, Mr. Brooks, but you're not a 'reliable narrator' - it's not a question of what you select; the prob' is what you leave out.
Your portrait of rural Nebraska is as useful to understanding Midwestern America as a Norman Rockwell painting.
Except I prefer Rockwell - his characters at least have terrific vitality, as opposed to your vision of small town America, whose denizens apparently live out their lives in perpetual, submissive, devotional, and emotionally wan service to civic duty.
3
Mr Brooks has a point and he ought to go live in McCook or Grand Island and be improved by their civic spirit, he could pen a memoir of his experience as "My Rosy Life Among The Trumpists". In turn, while there, he could help them disengage from the government support they receive from, you know, those depraved Blue States.
6
@John L Aptly said!
Horsefeathers.
We lived for 30 years in a big city in a neighbourhood where you could walk to stores and restaurants, where local businesses knew us by name, and where the neighbours all looked out for each other, including the Chinese, black, and East Indian immigrants who lived nearby.
We now live in a small town and there is racism, drug crime, and even murder, same as in any big city.
6
Sorry, David, but I don't like being in a religious chokehold.
I'll take pluralistic, diverse, educated Los Angeles. We embrace outsiders here.
3
Sounds idyllic. And yet do these same people buy into our current president's rhetoric? Did they vote for him?
Happy to help out my neighbor if he looks like me and thinks like me. Oh, and goes to my same church.
Those other people? Not so much.
2
Where can I get a pair of those rose-colored glasses you are wearing, David?
The people in the small towns Brooks describes voted overwhelmingly for a man who mocked a handicapped person, said he could grab women with impunity, called Mexicans rapists, stiffed his sub-contractors, went bankrupt four times, openly discriminated against African Americans, bragged on the radio that his daughter was hot, worked with the mob, cheated on three wives, and cut his seriously ill nephew from his health insurance plan. If these are rural community values, I'm glad I live in the 'burbs.
3
It’s called The Protestant Ethic! What made America.
It free lunch a part of the Protestant Ethic? Not when that lunch is served in the Bronx.
1
Silver lining, eh Mr. Brooks? As long as Nebraskans and their "heartland" brethren insist on voting for Trump's brand of no-nothing, anti-environmental, American fascism and nativism, i don't care how so-called "civic" they are.
1
Mr. Brooks,
Your logic seems to be: "Rural Americans treat ME with respect; therefore, rural Americans respect everyone." I'm sure they act their best when a NYT's reporter is around asking questions like a hush puppy. I guess you agree with Trump that white nationalists are few in number and not reflective of anything larger. Poor you.
2
There is a lot we could teach. Problem is, whenever we open our mouths, the coasties roll their eyes, call us rubes, and quit listening.
2
Small towns have their charms, but typically only if you're white, Christian, and heterosexual. Fall outside those parameters and you have a different story.
4
If only rural America knew how to choose an honest President
1
Rural America elected Trump, spare me the lecture on their values.
3
The place Mr. Brooks is describing sounds pretty nice - as long as you look, think and act just like everyone else in your town. Are you black? Want to become a Buddhist? Think you might be gay?? Watch how quickly the welcome mat gets pulled up.
Although the part about the tearful Latina was casually glossed over, I found it to be the most telling of the whole piece.
3
Rural America elected Donald Trump and more than likely will help elect him again. What that teaches me is that rural America is all in on racism, misogyny and the white nationalism Trump preaches.
3
After 14 years in Boston, I moved to Vermont, to embrace the small town college life. After 14 years, we couldn't wait to leave. As a single Mom with a child with a disability, there was enormous isolation & stigma. Besides our small circle of friends, we were never invited for dinner, a common way Vermonters socialize on a weekend. Maufacturing left, the dairies are struggling desperately, & the drugs came in. I never left my door unlocked. I miss the kind locals who were plumbers or electricians, old school and caring. Outside of that, I don't think we'll ever go back.
3
Your single case study is lovely, and it's nice to see a public discussion of civic engagement, but there is an entire line of social science that studies exactly this. Perhaps you should delve into that for your theorizing.
3
What a quaint vision of rural America, worthy of a Hallmark card.
P.S. There are civic minded people everywhere, including in NYC. Generalizing is generally not accurate.
5
[ At many of the schools, 50 percent of the students receive free or reduced-cost lunch. ]
Those lunches are not free. They are paid for by NY taxpayers.
9
Oh please. Now I’m not saying there aren’t great people in rural America but there are plenty of wonderful caring people in cities! My mother spent decades involved in her community and watching out for her neighbors in PITTSBURGH.
Rural America is no more saintly that urban American and in many ways it’s more closed off and exclusionary. Neither of those traits are good ones or particularly neighborly.
Rural areas can be oppressive and mean spirited bwecaise there is nowhere to hide if you are different or not in lock step with your neighbors. Many rural areas are plagued with meth addiction and related crimes.
What we need is not your “lets divide them up” mentality but rather a recognition that those of us nonbillionaires better recognize that we all need to band together because right now we are all getting our collective lunch eaten by the big money that has infected our government.
9
Everything that rural people do,gets done in urban areas as well.
5
It was fun living moving to VT about 10 years ago from greater NYC. I enjoyed the quiet, the slower pace, the fact that you had to stand in a specific spot on your dock to make a cell phone call, the poor internet. I loved it. Fast forward I find it all depressing and love to escape to Boston, NYC, LA, Chicago, DC, Philadelphia, Montreal, Europe, Asia, Africa any chance I get for some diversity, different food, culture, new-ness, strange-ness. Sure it is great to return, but I am more than ready to leave and it does not take long. I know people living here who think going to Burlington, 47 miles north is a big deal and maybe they do it once, maybe twice a year. You see the same people over and over and over again. The world is a big place and has a lot of good things to offer. You would never last a month in VT David, especially in the winter.
3
At first I fell for the rosie picture David painted of rural America. For a minute it made me yearn for the days of 'yesteryear'. Friendly community all pitching in to make a better life for not only oneself but for neighbors. Apple pies and baseball games. But then, I snapped back into reality. My reality. This is a generalization but these communities are fine, in fact great, if you fit into the nice neat mold of the dominant demographic. White. Straight. Christian. Married or on the track to being married and with kids. If you're anything 'other', then you would run away just as I did the minute you turn 18 and graduate from school. As one reader wrote, these are tribes. If you're not in their 'tribe' your experience will not be oh so rosie. Mine was not. I had to leave to find my own tribe in urban America. Maybe that's just the way life goes...we naturally gravitate to our own tribe and build a community within it. Bad? Not bad? As long as we respect one another and cause no harm, then so be it. Apple pie for all!
9
David, as you yourself identify, the "virtues" of the community that you are describing depend on its small size and isolated nature. This isn't scalable solution to the ills that plague modern society.
Moreover, the community that you are describing is dying by inches, as its best and brightest flee for places with real economic opportunities. And unfortunately, I can't really find myself caring.
This community has cut itself off from society as a whole. And as such, society isn't really going to notice when these small towns finally die off. Sure, there will be a bit of nostalgia and perhaps some of them will live on in much the same way that Colonial Williamsburg or Old Sturbridge village does. But, ultimately, the failure of these locations to either integrate themselves with modern society or provide a sustainable development path for their citizens means that they are going the way of the dod.
1
I moved to a small town in the Midwest 2 years ago from LA and have lived in the Northeast as well as abroad and as a person of color, I've never felt more "othered". My coworkers are educated and travel to India and UK for work, so they are not your typical rural America inhabitants. However, their higher salaries and passports don't make them any less hostile towards ethnic minorities, LGBT people, coastal Americans, or anyone who defies their homogeneity. The idyllic small town neighborliness isn't for everyone. I've had neighbors flip me off for parking my car "too close" to theirs (in a lot where there's 3x spots as there are cars), coworkers laugh when I told them my car broke down and I had to walk to work (and not ask when it was getting fixed and much less offer a ride) and haven't made a single friend even though I've volunteered, attended Church every Sunday, supported small businesses and have otherwise made an effort to embrace this town. I'm waiting for my lease to expire and have started applying for jobs in morally deranged, tax-hungry, and diverse big coastal cities. Rural (white) America didn't embrace me and I don't think it ever will no matter how much I try.
5
@Nancy...I have livid in both urban and very rural environments. I think it is much easier for someone to move from the rural area to an urban one, rather than other way round. Its almost amusing to watch, but people from the big cities just don't understand how rural works.
1
Thanks David for recognizing the good in closeness with neighbors. Abe Lincoln grew up in a one room log cabin and look what he did. America has lost the virtue of simple homes with nice chairs and tables, Materialism infects us poisonous, distractions, addictions, gadgets, phones, politicians who never measure up to Abe. We need values of simple nice living, we need a new generation of admiration for the teachers and nurses, ministers and mechanics, cowboys and shopkeepers. We do not need to admire the billionaires. I want our next president to bring. back the community sacrifice for the common good. The heck with the greedy billionaire crowd.
1
I am Canadian and ever since Mr. Trump has been in power, I must admit that I and everyone I know has tended to feel (maybe a tad arrogantly) that we are living in a superior, kinder society as opposed to our southern neighbours. Your article has reminded me, with examples such as Ms. Graff, of why we always used to consider that the U.S. was a society which we should admire and attempt to emulate. It seems that, with regards to “small town America”, we still should envy our American neighbours and, hopefully, still friends.
1
I agree! I grew up in a medium sized ( for Iowa) Iowa town. We did know that our folks would know before we got home if we messed up. One day when visiting shortly after moving away I was in the local drug store during the day. Mr Heber called out to ask me what I was doing there during school hours. I guess he missed the fact that I had graduated- but it reminded me that there was no way to get by with anything for long.
3
@Judith Turpin
As a teacher in a dense inner city, I don't fully understand how this is a rural thing. We're expected to start texting parents at 7:45 if children haven't shown up yet. If a student does something serious in my class, you can bet all of us (student, parent, and myself) will be chatting on speakerphone before the end of the day.
I guess there's another level if there are only a handful of places in town to actually go if you're skipping, and all of them are staffed by people who know your parents. But it's still pretty hard to "get by with anything for long" if your teachers are on top of you.
4
David, I grew up in a small midwestern town, too. I can relate.
Now I live in a small city of 42K in rural AZ.
What I see happening, more than anything else, is the very small percentage of the 40-50 year olds, stepping up to replace us “older geezers” who volunteer our efforts to support our community. I hear this same lament from surrounding towns and municipalities.
As an old friend once said, “there are only do’ers and reviewers.”
1
Every single county in this central midwest state voted in the majority for Trump (and in the majority for Obama's opponents in both elections). We live in the second largest city in the state, which I tend to think of as a miniature Austin, a very liberal island in a sea of conservatism. My wife came from a small town 30 miles outside this city, and she left as soon as she graduated high school, and never moved back. She is still friends with a few of those people on FB, but only after a lot of unfriending was done, as almost all of them drink the Trump Kool-Aid. Her hometown is racist, homophobic, misogynistic, gun-worshipping, intolerant, and its share of meth/opioid problems...and that's just one little town here. (There is another once-prosperous smaller town 20 miles east of there that is actually dying a slow death - and it's sad to watch.) There are many others. 'Small town glamor', at least in this this area of the state, is a rare thing.
6
I am so tired of these rural v. urban anecdotes which only serve to reinforce stereotypes that are not helpful.
I grew up in a state that is recognized for being "bucolic". It is the destination for many well-to-do to go on vacation and buy second homes.
It was in that lovely state, in a lovely little town, that I was almost raped and murdered a number of years ago by a thug from a few towns over. I was not his only victim. There were others and some had it far worse than me.
People I knew in high school committed suicide after having untreated substance abuse problems. Their drug issues were overlooked, dismissed, explained away because of who their parents were.
There was no privacy--people/adults spread rumors and lies about people they didn't like, even children.
I now live in a tight-knit neighborhood in a large city. When neighbors are sick or move in, we bring them food, when people need help shoveling out their cars after a snow, we all pitch in. There are many other instances I could cite of why it is a warm and caring community with many of the attributes of the "small" towns that Mr. Brooks writes about so lovingly.
Bad things happen in small towns.
Good things happen in big cities.
Let's get over the stereotypes and anecdotes that tell us otherwise.
11
I've lived in NY (just outside the city), Tucson and rural Southern Oregon for about equal amounts of time in my life-I'm 71. The benefits David Brooks lists are/were/and can be available in every city, town and hamlet. It's up to the individual whether they trust the plumber, the mechanic, the open door,etc. I have done so and still do. It's an individual choice to volunteer wherever you live; I have and still do. Choose local businesses over National one? Yep, no matter where I lived. No doubt some small towns are better than some big cities and some people are more civic minded, but you will find them anywhere, everywhere, if you just ask around. It's not the location that produces this mindset, it's the rearing.
2
I read this column and the comments. I grew up in a post war, suburban development between two villages that were founded before the American Revolution. The adult neighbors that I knew growing up were almost all transplants from Brooklyn / Queens and instilled in all of us kids the exact qualities that are described as "rural" in the article. Good and bad can be found anywhere and everywhere. If you only look for one of the two, not only will you find it, but you will miss out on so much more.
2
I have one small question. Why do people claim to not lock their cars or homes, yet they claim they need to carry guns for self defense?
27
The attitude is: I’m a farmer. My business is my business, and your business is your business. Their loneliness is driven by fear and pride.
But then they complain they are being left out of the conversation by the elite.
7
It seems like many of those places are an echo chamber, the large columns of red states. They're concerned about someone taking their guns, and telling them things that they don't want to hear about gender and identity. I wonder about the degree to which Clear Channel radio and Fox news have helped them trade away their rights to corporations in order to ostensibly protect them from those things they fear.
6
Having grown up in a small rural California valley ranching town, I experienced the kind of environment David Brooks describes - up to a point, and way back in the 1950's and 60's. There was also a lot of judgement about people's behavior and back biting, behind closed doors. My non-white friends there told me it was almost impossible to live there, with the underlying but unacknowledged prejudice. Now that formerly successful agribusinesses are suffering there, the area has poverty, meth heads and locked doors. It's also predominately white, far right, and uneducated. I have liberal friends there who play country music on the weekends and don't tell the predominantly white, evangelical Trump supporting people they know what they really think. The large East Indian community nearby is thriving, but the whites don't "mix" with them. I left at age 20 in 1968 because I was starved for cultural and racial diversity and have lived happily in the San Francisco Bay Area ever since, where volunteerism, civic responsibility and participation is alive and well. I know all my neighbors for two blocks around in my suburban town and if people need something it's freely given. Can we leave blank checks on the seats of our cars? No, but a small price to pay for open-mindedness and acceptance of others, and also a predominant availability of jobs.
3
Garrison Keillor appreciated country folk as much as anyone and clearly shared that love with all who listen to his broadcasts.
But I remember a piece he wrote in the NYT about a certain virtue to living in the big city that's too often overlooked. Big-hearted guy that he was, he saw how the small courtesies we preform, as simple as holding open a door for someone or giving up your seat on the bus or subway to an older person irregardless of race, color or country of origin, go a long way to creating harmony.
7
Sounds like Gemeinschaft vs gesellschaft... Smaller societies where things are more personal and require fewer formal rules to function.
3
The stats tell a different story. Rural America (and Canada) have higher crime rates, higher rates of social breakdown, and higher rates of ill health than the cities. There may only one homicide every few years, so it looks like there's not as much crime as in the cities. Until you do the arithmetic.
Say you have 1 homicide/20 years in a town of 1,000 --> 0.5 murders per 1000 people per year --> 50 homicides per 100,000 people per year. That would be about 430 homicides per year in New York City. In 2017, there were 290 homicides.
4
In my rural community levels of literacy are so low that people cannot recognize two-syllables words or pronounce them aloud.
10
David gave this his best but, alas, too much lecturing. Stories, like this about the communities of America (and the rest of the world, for that matter), are better told by people like Anthony Bourdain rather than political pundits.
1
sounds like they are desparate to continue a small family farm way of life that's already beyond life support because it's what they already know. no wonder the educated young high tail it out of places with endless lonesome horizons but no discernable future... and where everyone knows everyone else's business and you better not get too far out of line. feudal sounds about right.
2
If these communities are so wonderful, why is everyone leaving? And why on Earth do the ones who stay vote overwhelmingly for Trump?
11
I feel inadequate after reading this. Great article.
5
I look forward to “What urban America has to teach us”. Never seen it. Certainly not from the right. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not disparaging country folk. I am tired of them getting more value as salt of the earth, and definitely more value in the voting booth.
What David may not realize, is that columns like this add to our division.
7
Dear Mr Brooks, to arrive at your conclusions no travel was required when you could have could simply watched "Doc Hollywood" and wallowed in the evergreen notion of charming small town America versus the evil big city. Of course there is some truth in the stereotype, but this column just goes to reinforce the equally evergreen absurd affirmation that Rural America is Real America. It is not. All America is the real America, and both good and bad can be found in every inch of every corner.
8
I grew up in a town of French Lick, IN and my father served as Mayor for some time. Orange county was the poorest county in IN. The streets were full of pot holes. When Larry Bird started at IU, just north of FL, he freaked out because the first class was one of those giant lecture things that had more students than FL. Everybody knew Larry - the local guy who made good. He went to my father with his hand bag - he had hitch hiked and the people were delighted to give him a ride. He told my father, "Earl I need a job." MY father said all he had available was loading the town's make shift garbage truck, a logging truck with sideboards. My father warned him that some of their residents were so poor they had their town water - awful - it reeked of sulfur dioxide but that was what we had to drink. The town just had a few stop signs and one local policeman on duty who did not drive and was driven around by a local taxi driver. When the policeman on duty ran into a dangerous felon, they called the State Troopers and ours was our next door neighbor. A local miscreant got into an argument with a local cop and killed him because the miscreant started a fight when he was drunk and picked a fight with our local policeman and was told he was under arrest. Unfortunately he managed to escape and holed up in his tiny house. My father went to the scene and fired several shots though the house with his 30-06. Best outcome all agreed.
I appreciate that Brooks is searching for things we can learn from each other. Yes, people have plenty of faults (homophobia and racism seem to be more common among these populations), but that doesn't mean we get to dismiss the value of civic service he's describing here and that this population seems to do quite well. Sprinkle some Wendell Berry into your reading lists, don't let yourself get too worked up that you miss some interesting learnings here.
2
@Trevor
Progressive, highly educated, feminist atheist here -- pretty sure I've read a LOT more Wendell Berry than the vast majority of Rural America (tm)
1
"50 percent of the students receive free or reduced-cost lunch. But they don’t have the pathologies we associate with poverty." OK, good for them! What Mr. Brooks is suggesting is that impoverished people can learn to accept their plight and deal with it. Is that supposed to make the rest of us happy? The fact is that the very rich are getting richer and stealing the lifeblood from this country, and while they do so I read an article about "civic duty in rural America." What nonsense! Tell the masses what they want to hear and all will be well - is that the supposition? Sorry but that doesn't work for me and I don't see any reason to find comfort in civic duties. People find ways to adjust to what they need but don't have and the result may reflect itself in civic services that people perform. None of this makes up for governmental neglect and a tax structure that fails to provide the necessities of life to a vast section of the American population.
6
"At many of the schools, 50 percent of the students receive free or reduced-cost lunch."
.....and they will repeatedly vote for a demagogue who demonizes "socialism". Think about that for a few minutes.
6
I just read a book "Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J. D. Vance" and the rural community Mr. Brooks describes in this article does match with the small communities the author describes in his memoir.
3
As usual, the two coasts savage a positive article about rural America. Why is it so hard to see rural populations as normal people who have normal lives? They see only bigotry and 'tribal' behavior.
So city gangs aren't 'tribal'? There aren't homogenous neighborhoods in the city? The NYT runs frequent articles about how segregated things are when it comes to schools and neighborhoods - both by race and money. Yet there are positive articles about community as well. Do you see the rural folks savaging those articles as biased depictions that ignore the bad stuff?
There's good and bad everywhere. For me, I'll stick with the rural life - always have. In the words of John Cougar: "Got nothin' 'gainst a big town/ Still I've seen enough to say 'look whose in the big towns'/ my bed is in a small town/and that's good enough of me."
6
And despite all that, people leave.
THAT's where the collapse is.
4
I live in NE. Think how much more effective and successful the civic endeavors of many would be if they had the support of their state legislators. Because of their Republican mindset, the latter continue to curtail what should be their mandate to create a fair tax structure to support the needs of the community and provide the very services that the civic society you praise is heroically but inevitably unable to fully underwrite ie; reliable dams & bridges (now underwater from river flooding), roads (try driving in Omaha w/o falling into moon crater sized pot holes), school programs, and healthcare. Civic pride & works are no substitute for good planning & governance. Omaha has more millionaires per capita than any city of its size in the USA and without their remarkable philanthropy this would be a sorry town.
7
You can meet some nice people in small towns, but they aren't all good citizens like this article makes them out to be. There are just as many good people, if not more in cities. Plus, at least last time I checked, everyone has a choice where they live. I think it is high time in this country that we stop pandering to rural voters. New York city pays ten times the taxes that South Dakota does, and always will. We need the Hudson tunnels, not more redundant military bases in flyover states.
8
Moral coherence is not the same thing as a thriving community.
Moral coherence might feel reassuring in the short run, and it seems to match Mr. Brooks' taste for stability. But if your coherent vision can't grow and adapt in a changing larger world your community will decline and be left behind, which would really be a moral crisis.
The two small towns Mr. Brooks mentions may be doing OK for now, but they sure seem to be working hard to hold it together. Meanwhile, thousands of other towns are in serious distress due to many forces, including an identity based on a coherent, but hide-bound and exclusionary moral vision that prevents them from adapting.
What's needed in many towns like these, and possibly in our country as a whole, is a compelling, inclusive, compassionate and coherent moral vision, that includes growth and adaptation.
I would love to see Mr. Brooks research and describe how communities and countries might generate and implement such a vision. That would be a useful article for many.
3
My experience is that the desire to contribute to the community via civic service is alive and well across the nation, not just in the rural areas. However, many people in urban areas do not have the time to volunteer much. I know this sounds mundane, but the significant traffic congestion and poor mass transit systems in many urban areas eat up so much of people's time that they find it very difficult to volunteer. The commute time in Boston has doubled since the about 2001! The public transportation options for lower income urban dwellers is abysmal causing them to use significant portions of their day just commuting to and from work. Perhaps we should invest in infrastructure to solve these problems so people can spend their time more productively serving their communities than wasting their time sitting in traffic.
5
Reading this make me weary and wonder what is the point. In any community cooperation is the engine that moves us along. In my city we have a lot to cope with, the economically poor, the mentally ill, and the homeless. There are armies of people trying to help them. There are a lot of people, young and old, who never had a family net of support or who lost it. And yet we try to help with time and money. I hope those who are trying to help outnumber those who don’t. Our efforts might not look like rural Nebraska but we are still as real.
7
Those who grew up or have to return to rural communities have already written more eloquently about all the reasons why rural communities are dying. Being from one of those communities myself and being "diverse," there's absolutely nothing magical about the lack of art, human resources, and curiosity, the intense segregation along racial and ethnic lines, the crushing poverty and deserts when it comes to opportunities there. Urban areas offer everything described here, including community, for those who make it so - and they also offer mobility, opportunity, and diversity in thought, population, and interests. I will NEVER go back to a rural community, not even in a pine box.
5
Literally millions of urban and suburban dwellers also participate in civic service. Stop the unnecessary glorification of rural America and Americans.
I mean, I don't see YOU moving to Iowa, and there might even be good reasons for that.
7
It's not "rural America". It's certainly not Appalachia, or the South. It's the Plains, especially the Northern Plains. On every map of some metric of social health (drug addiction, illegitimacy, divorce...) there is a band running north-south through the Plains in which life and society are healthier than in the rest of the country.
Why? I don't know. Perhaps the farming culture. Perhaps the Scandinavian heritage (though that may not extend as far south as Nebraska or Kansas). Perhaps some influence of geography and climate (in a climate with severe winters and sparse population, people help one another).
Read Willa Cather. She offers some insight.
9
What is the point of saying that the vast majority of people that live in mostly populated areas must behave more like those in sparsely populated communities. That make about as much sense or has as much possibility as saying the reverse. Maybe you could try advising how the majority might improve within its own context. Otherwise, you're just wasting your time and ours.
4
Rural America has its charm. Community members often do come together to help in times of need (although in the Trump era even this quality can become politicized). It also can have a seedy underbelly that upon closer inspection sustains racism and local corruption. Rural populations are older, they tend to own more guns, are more likely to practice a faith (usually Christian, usually conservative), are less trusting of government but ironically much more dependent on governments' services and revenue circulating through their less diversified economies. Republicans have become adept at appealing to hot-button issues or pseudo populism while seeking to undermine Social Security, Medicare, any social safety net, etc. These areas consistently vote against their own economic interests (Thomas Frank's 'What's the matter with Kansas' is a sobering exposure of this contradiction).
Let's not over-romanticize Rural America. It must have been pretty desperate collectively to think a billionaire narcissist would actually care after the election about populism and the working class. And--irony of ironies--that 'coming together' is of course a de facto tax of sorts that must compensate where the government fails. Exhibit A (there's an entire alphabet): food banks may build community, but politicians' stinginess makes them a necessity.
3
Many commenters think David Brooks is comparing urban places unfavorably to rural places. I disagree. Look at the headline. He was using rural places as an example of how our wonderful urban places could be even better.
Imagine if NYC, with all our human capital and resources and tolerant ideologies, shared the civic mindedness of these rural places?
7
I spent six years in what I called a small town, but which residents called the "5th largest city in the state." With three small children, it was an ideal environment to raise a family. Doors were left unlocked, children rode their bikes to the library and to the pool (both excellent, and public), people pitched in to coach athletics and serve on committees. But, we were outsiders, since we were not born in the state. Since we had a very common Norwegian surname, shared with many other "natives," this was not due to ethnicity or big cultural differences. We were not trusted, because we came from somewhere else. It was the most homogeneous culture I had ever experienced (on both coasts and Hawaii). There was one black family, and one family with 2 adopted Asian children. And while the town was safe, with very low crime, the election signs we put out for the minority party were repeatedly stolen from our lawn. When native Americans from the neighboring reservation came to town to shop, racial slurs were shouted at them - on Main Street. Alternative points of view were not welcome. Politically, the state leadership decimated educational programs; by the time we left, all art classes and most music had been eliminated from the curriculum. Our friends, and our children's friends, with a few exceptions, were fellow transplants. We were not sorry to leave.
13
I've lived in places with as little as 3700 people all the way to 250,000 people and I've not noticed as much a difference as this. True, the smaller towns have closer communities but the cities have many more opportunities to connect with people.
I think par of the difference is how well the people identify with each other and decide to work together. I haven't seen this in suburbs, - in the city of 250,000 i knew only two neighbors but in a neighborhood less than a mile from the center of Cincinnati there was a great and caring community.
It's easier to form a community in small towns but they're not always active in helping other citizens or neighbors.
But they voted for Trump; he won all those neighborly counties but two. Let that sink in. They think like him. It’s scary to think what their well-organized civic groups could accomplish.
12
@Dawn Gondoli
Thank you.
Mr. Brooks is looking at rural America through rose color glasses.
1
I think that in smaller, less populated cities and towns, it's easier to get involved and make a difference. This is one reason I prefer Spokane, my father's hometown, to Seattle where I was born and raised. People's efforts are more likely to bear fruit. But given that, I don't think there is anything all that special about rural America, at least in the way Brooks describes it. There is as much that is laudatory in rural America as there is in urban America, and there is much that is desultory and maybe even deplorable in both. Enough with the urban/rural us/them.
2
@Bradley Bleck: Spokane, with a population of over 200,000 is not a small town.
1
Didn't all these small-town, deeply-rooted volunteers vote for Donald Trump? If they are so civic-minded, someone needs to explain that to me. Were they wearing so many hats for local civic life, they couldn't see they were voting a grifter into the most powerful office in the World? This week, the Pacific Ocean fell on small-town Nebraska, largely from something their leader calls a 'chinese hoax'. Rural America can remain precious in its 'intentionality', but it can't wall out the World. Yes, they can teach us something, but maybe they could also learn a thing or two, first.
14
This seems all too rosy a picture and a bit patronizing to me. In Arizona we have some great rural communities and a lot that are not. Every year we get flooded with Midwesterners coming here to escape the harsh winters and social problems which many of them actually are engaged in. It tends to disrupt our Western way of life.
4
Reminds me of my moms village. Most work hard because they have to in order to survive. They also behave well because they know everyone and everyone knows them. The shame factor and peer pressure to act in accordance is high. You will never get that in the anonymous big cities. Which except for the crime, I prefer.
3
I grew up in a small town in California's central valley. Some of what you say about small communities is true. Unfortunately, it is easy to gloss over underlying currents, such as the pressure to conform to community standards. Those who are not white, christian and politically conservative are tolerated, but only to a degree. If your interests were not centered on farming, the local softball team or the quilters' circle you're seen as an oddball. I do not imply there is anything wrong with any of these examples of the kind of activities seen as normal. What I am saying is that the parameters of acceptability are very narrow and can be stultifying.
13
@Barbara: I lived in a smallish town in Eser Californian for a while one the locals at my church found out that I was a Deputy Public Defender, they shunned me. David
brooks wrote a Normal Rockwell piece about small towns ignoring that they are ingrown an hypocritical.
1
Moved to a small town awhile back. It was a three hour drive to a mall, four hours to an allergist, you get the idea. We found the residents of this small town to be nice, but skeptical of "outsiders." The joke was you had to live in the town for at least 20 years before you might be accepted. We now live in a major urban area where everyone is from somewhere else. We all share our "where are you from" stories and we have felt accepted from the first day we moved in. Urban areas have an openness to the new, to progress, to change. We feel more comfortable living in an area that embraces the future with all its uncertainty and change, as opposed to an area that wants "what is" to last forever.
13
David Brooks drives into small town Nebraska for a snapshot of rural America. He spends a week and then claims to completely understand rural America. What would I understand about Queens, Brooklyn or NY City by spending a week looking around?
He knows nothing about rural America and its problems.
21
Mr. Brooks studiously ignores the fact that as soon as the law tells these civic minded individuals that they cannot discriminate in the providing of services to LGBTQ people, people of color, or people wearing a hijab, these virtuous rural individuals will all quit those civic services and decry it all as a big government conspiracy against their way of life.
Why do we city dwellers (where all the tax revenue comes from) allow our tax dollars go to pave roads to these communities (where a disproportionate amount of the tax dollars go)?
7
Funny, in DC where I live, and where I believe Mr. Brooks lives, we have neighborhood "advisory commission" meetings. friends of public library branches, PTA groups, church outreach programs such as the Capitol Hill Group Ministry, organizations that help senior citizens, supporters of museums and parks, and more.
I don't see any empirical evidence that small towns have a monopoly on civic pride or engagement.
I'm glad that Mr. Brooks is enjoying his visits to these communities but his personal anecdotes don't necessarily translate to some great revelation. Economic opportunity is still a key element for stable and thriving communities.
15
You really should read Roger Barker’s ecological psych research. He argued that integration/isolation was a function of the individual to social roles ratio. In Big School, Small School, he argued that smaller schools had better people/social roles ratios — not enough folks to go around, so they wear multiple hats, just as in your article. In big schools, however, there are too many people chasing too few social roles, so folks get alienated and for. Their own subgroups — in a school of several thousand, not everyone can be on the football team, etc. however, if schools get too small, they can’t provide enough opportunities, and so may fail. From the 1960s, he called it being over- or under-manned — we need a more contemporary term, but the principle is solid...
4
Thank you for this informative and not at all rose-colored perspective. Being a city dweller, all I can do is scratch my head when I see people talking to one another or engaged in acts of volunteerism. Too busy with my latte's and self-interest, I suppose.
5
I left Texas at 18 to attend a women's liberal arts college near Philadelphia (Bryn Mawr) and rarely returned home for ten years. When family circumstances brought me back, I did not expect to be welcome for a number of reasons: I do not attend church, refuse to pray to an exclusively masculine god, strongly support gay marriage, etc. I was initially dismissive of pillars of community life here--the local Christian college (irrelevant), slow-moving and chatty store clerks (inept), local law enforcement (corrupt), the lone regional hospital (second-rate).
After seven years, I now deeply appreciate many aspects of this community. When I interact with people with honesty and respect, the vast majority are respectfully accepting of my differences. I do recognize that many (people of color, gay couples, others) without my luxury of blending in with the "good old boy" circles at least superficially have a different experience, and that is unjust. Rural intolerance can and must crack open so that the simplicity and beauty of rural life can become available to all. Life happens at a more meaningful scale here. The challenges of limited resources & insular thinking are real but workable--I can participate here and make an impact. My words and actions have weight. Urban areas are wonderful incubators for new possibilities, and I am working with others to bring badly needed services here. But rural communities offer much as well, and both can benefit from dialogue between.
7
Its called low population density. It has its negative social issues, but overall its a safer, saner living situation.
In an ideal world, every town would be right-sized and have all the basics and amenities for lives of security, health, and happiness. Everyone would be trusted regardless of their ethnicity, religious beliefs, or relative prosperity. All would be engaged in working together to help their communities thrive and adapt to rapdly changing environments. There might even be concern for “others” living in different communities or parts of the world.
We do not live in an ideal world, and pretending that people who live in more homogenous, less stressed communities have created those conditions through “insane” work ethic, is just preposterous. Other commenters who have actually lived in rural areas are giving David Brooks the realities he refuses to acknowledge. I wish he woukd go back and read a few more classics like Main Street or Hard Times. Whatever book he writes as a result of his travels will not bring needed enlightenment.
1
Norman Rockwell community and volunteerism is not limited to rural America. Metuchen, where I live and work, is a Borough of about 14,000 people 40 minutes from NYC where community pride and volunteerism thrive every bit as much as the communities that David describes. I chair the Metuchen Downtown Alliance dedicated to making cash registers ring through the efforts of well over 100 very active volunteers. Last year we hosted 50 events and oversaw the installation of 3 large murals. The Chamber of Commerce, the Arts Council, the Environmental Commission, the Health Board, the Traffic Commission, the Accessibility Commission and so many others are staffed virtually entirely by volunteers. Even our Mayor and Council essentially volunteer their time. Last year, there was an anti gun violence rally, a rally to support Indonsian Christian men claiming asylum who were arrested by ICE while dropping off their American citizen children at school, and for the Jewish victims of the Pittsburgh shooting (organized within hours after the shoot). Today, our rabbi is participating in a ring of safety for the local mosque following the shootings in New Zealand. So, kudos to rural America - we support and salute you! But the spirit of community is alive and well in suburban New Jersey and many other areas of America.
8
Gallup's state well-being rankings (2017): 1) South Dakota, 2) Vermont, 5) North Dakota, 7) New Hampshire, 8) Idaho, 9) Utah, 10) Montana...
46) Oklahoma, 47) Mississippi, 48) Arkansas, 49) Louisiana, 50) West Virginia.
New Yorkers can choose to look down their noses at rural America, or look up at rural regions with median levels of education and cost-of-living-weighted economic prosperity that they have no hope of attaining.
1
Years ago an older co-worker accused me of seeing the world through rose colored glasses. David, I think you might be doing that too right now. You are romanticizing something that probably should not be...small towns can be fun, neighborly, and more. They can also be smothering, have little opportunity, and lack needed services. And any plumber who lets himself into my house without my permission is trespassing, whether I live in a little village of 2000, a larger suburb or the big city.
5
I was born & raised on the same small farm that my father was born & raised on and went to the same one room country school that he did but when I started first grade I learned that difference can be based on anything. And yes, people know everything about everybody and they never forget. I left as soon as I could and have never regretted doing so.
It is not enough tp go and visit a place for a few days, especially when you know that you can leave at any time. I generally enjoy your articles David, but I think that you are seeing what you want to see and of course, everyone that you meet will be on their best behavior because they know who and what you are and so do their best to create a good impression.
4
I appreciate this article. I've lived in an east coast city, as well as Seattle and rural Eastern Washington.
I agree about the "intentionality." In the small town I lived in (& am returning to later this year) people do try to support the local businesses. It's small enough that you know the local grocer & his family. You want them to stay open
Two things I've noticed about the urban vs. rural life are time and money. In my small town my commute is short and there isn't a lot to buy. I have more time to spend with my friends & neighbors, & therefore contributing to the feeling of community either informally (by just being present) or formally (for fundraisers, etc). I also just simply buy less. Here in Seattle leisure activities tend to be around eating out and shopping. In my small town our activities were more about sharing meals at home & outdoor activities. For me, the small town is much healthier.
I know small towns aren't perfect. I know there is a homogeneous lifestyle & if you don't fit into the norm it can range from annoying to outright hostile. I don't blame people who head to the cities.
But we've got to stop the rural vs urban thing. It's not helpful and plays into the political divisiveness in our country. Small towners, head to the city sometime and enjoy the variety of people and activities. Urbanites, head out to the small towns and chat with people rather than judging the Trump signs and lack of good coffee. It's all good. We're all Americans.
4
And yet the majority of those same people who value civic duty and supposedly place others before themselves, put themselves before the country when they voted for Trump.
Good lives everywhere, so open your eyes Mr. Brooks.
7
This opinion piece is so idealized that I had to comment. Having grown up in a rural town of 250 people, where my father was the town mayor for two years of my childhood, I can tell you that civic involvement does not equal progress (neither economic, social, nor political). In fact, civic organizations in these rural communities become nothing more than small tribes that people use to be exclusionary.
Many relish in their closed-off statuses and there is an underlying fear of the "outside world" (growing up, I had classmates who would brag about having never been out of the state). Those who are highly educated have no interest in moving to these communities because they won't find jobs and will most likely be looked upon as the "educated elite" that the right-wing abhor, becoming black sheep.
The basis of many of the social problems faced by these rural communities is fear: a fear of change, a fear of social and racial integration (which was highlighted in this Opinion piece), a fear of Muslims and Latinxs, a fear of the "liberal agenda," a fear of LGBTQIA communities, and a fear of the future. It is fine to possess a rosy outlook on these communities, but one has to realize that many are struggling with drug epidemics, lack of public school funding, and little to no economic opportunities. They will only fall farther behind as the world becomes progressively more liberal and idealizing the fact that they don't have to lock their doors at night will not help them.
17
I'll admit that there's a lot to recommend the approach to life that one sees in our Country's heartland but I take issue with Mr. Brooks' column if the implication is that this is what the rest of us should embrace. In poor, benighted Massachusetts our kids are near the top when it comes to levels of academic achievement. We tend to be better than red states when it comes to measures like teenage pregnancy or high school and college graduation rates. In terms of sacrifice, at the beginning of this period of long war Massachusetts had - on a relative percentage of population basis - among the highest rates of KIA of all states in the nation. And this is even though we send more tax dollars to Washington than we receive back in federal spending.
Heck even New Yorkers have shown their mettle in their actions in the face of the worst attack on our Nation or in the actions of guys who make their living on the water taking their boats to rescue the passengers of a ditched aircraft in the middle of the Hudson. Not only that but I'd challenge the folks that elect guys like Representative King to Congress to visit NYC and see Orthodox Jews, Muslims and Christians (and non - believers) sharing the City's streets where their lives and property are protected by folks who're a couple generations or less removed from places like Cork City, Abruzzi or Santa Domingo.
Mr. Brooks, we coast - dwelling urbanites get a bad rap but IMO it's undeserved.
13
I'd love to know of a town as superficially idyllic as this one where the demographic more reflected that of our country... say, roughly 54% white, 23% Hispanic, 15% African American and 8% Asian or native American. I confess to experiencing the same sort of mysterious longing for communities like this one where the primary social network exists through handshakes, town festivals, PTA meetings and coffee shop jibber jabber. But these places are, for the most part, retreating remnants of a time when so much of America beyond the safe harbors of small (and mostly white) communities was far less idyllic. Does this article suggest that we romanticize and lift these insulated pockets of paradise as a blueprint for a community to which we should all strive? I laud the suggestion, but far more lament the fact that our ideology and behavior as a nation establishes no foundation upon which such a thing could exist.
4
There are many things to value about small communities and the enclaves which exist in urban America, mainly their sense of community and determination. But your Rural America communities are fairly closed to those who are different themselves in skin color, religion and culture. Could a Sikh family be welcomed with open arms? Or an refugee Syrian family? How about a family from Ireland or France? Also, I notice you don't mention education, vocational, job skills. There's a reason large corporations are running from Rural America and it's not because the communities are "intentionally" civic minded. It because the communities don't have the job skills they need today. Wax on poetically about Rural America, there's a lot to admire about it - there are also serious drawbacks. One glaring one is that they have fallen for a Con man named Trump. They believe everything he says because it resonates with how they feel and thing. You need to think about that.
7
I grew up in a small town. I recognize the portrait you provide. I broke out of the rigid mold I occupied and discovered there's a lot more to humanity and life than I knew growing up in Gunnison, Colorado.
I approached this article with anticipation and dread. Mr. Brooks, you write thoughtful pieces and you're on a journey of your own, so I was curious what you would say. The dread came from my concern that this would be an "us versus them" rural versus urban piece. It is.
Here's one thing cities and Nebraska folks have in common: everything about our way of life is threatened by climate change. I ache for Nebraska farmers. I just heard a forecast that much of the US is at high risk for unusual flooding this spring, Here in Seattle, we're at risk for another bad wildfire season, and the snow that we rely on for a slow melt to provide our water is melting rapidly as we break records for by far the warmest days in March.
We are all at the mercy of those who use the reins of power to steer us over the edge.
12
@kathyb Most people in cities and in Nebraska must not share the stand that climate change is real. If Nebraskans still cling to the anti-climate change dogma promoted by Trump and his administration, maybe God is sending them a message to vote Trump out in 2020. Otherwise the plagues will continue.
Free and reduced lunches?
Socialists
6
I have never heard anyone use the word "intentionality" in any context. And this is supposed to be on the tip of everyone's tongue in Nebraska?
Sorry, David, but that's not credible. And that reinforces that this naive puff piece could have been written by a local Chamber of Commerce... or a gullible coastal elite slumming it in the prairies for a few days.
9
@Michael
Thanks for saying that - it hit me as well -- a friend and I might talk about supporting a local business, but never have I or anyone I know uttered the word intentionality in a conversation.
2
David Brooks for President! Before it's too late...
2
Too late. We are in the 21st century now. The past is not returning.
2
So if these salt-of-the-earth folks are so wonderful, why do they overwhelmingly vote for racists, misogynists, xenophobes, and those wholly owned by the gun lobby? I mean, I'm sure they bake a lovely apple pie. They just don't understand what apple pie is really all about.
21
The idea that this kind of civic-mindedness is unique to the country is pure garbage. Volunteerism flourishes in almost any town or city you can name. Frankly, your implication that high-density population areas are somehow morally lacking is downright offensive.
14
White rural America is aging and shrinking with a below replacement level birthrate.
And the only white rural Americans still having babies come from the socioeconomic educational bottom of the pyramid.
A majority of the Baby Momma and Baby Daddy in America who are unemployed and relying on welfare are white like Bristol Palin and Levi Johnston. While the black proportion is higher in that cohort there are 5x as many white people.
White rural American life expectancy is decreasing due to alcoholism, drug addiction, depression and suicide. Of the 40, 000+ Americans who die from gunshot about 2/3rds are suicides. And 80% of the suicides are white men who tend to use handguns and be veterans.
In the 2016 Presidential election Donald Trump won 63 million Americans voted for Trump including 58% of white people made up of 62% of white men and 54% of white women. Trump won white rural America.
In the 2016 Presidential election of the 66 million Americans who voted for Hillary Clinton were 92% of the black voters including 88% of black men and 95% of black women. Trump lost black rural and urban America.
What can white rural America possibly teach the rest of America that is more diverse socioeconomically, educationally gender color aka race, ethnicity, national origin, sectarian and politics?
6
Now do West Virginia and Mississippi.
7
Check out Liberty, Texas! You will come away smiling! Small town America is the heart of this nation!
1
I am surprised at how bitter many of these comments are. It is as if there can be no success if it does not match the readers' version of what that looks like.
2
If everything is so wonderful in the Midwest why has it become a bastion of right wing religious fundamentalists and MAGA-hatters who think Trump was sent by God to save them?
8
It is a shame that the NY Times chose to run a photo of cruelty to animals -- the rodeo -- with this article. Abusing a calf is hardly indicative of civic values, at least, none that any of us should support.
4
"Many people try not to use Amazon so they can support local businesses."
Recently my neighbors in Brooklyn NY got accused of being socialist wackos for wanted to retain an affordable community to live play and pray in.
8
You went to small-town America and the word you heard most was "intentionality." Who on earth were you talking to?
12
Racial and ethnic homogeneity. Like Norway.
1
i have one word for you david "homogeny". it's easy to be civic minded when everyone looks the same. i wonder what would happen if a muslim family moved to town??
3
“... and they struggle with integration.”
Meaning, if you’re not white, straight, Christian and Republican, then you’re not welcome.
9
The single person of color you seem to have spoken with basically says,
"I deleted Facebook so I won't have to see how racist you people are."
Your take: "they do have to work hard to make sure national viciousness doesn’t tear local bonds".
Apparently, "they" refers to the Latina women, not the civic-minded community weavers and farmers with the insane work ethic.
13
I don’t know if the men of McCook ”kibbitz” in the coffee shop but I bet they talk amongst themselves.
3
Thank you for this insightful report that supports the Marxist view of the true people: the salt of the earth. And thank you for encouraging the wealthy conservatives, for by keeping those little people where they are, they get to feel better than the rest, maybe even buy a NYT Digital subscription just to read your column and prove to you, how important you really are.
2
......and also alcoholism, drug overdoses an suicide.
5
Wondering how Mr. Brooks decided that McCook, Nebraska was representative of rural America. Sure sounds a lot different from Hillbilly Elegy.
1
I admire your attempts at trying to bring people together on your sojourns to the ruralites but David, you live in the Unites States of Central North America, a land so bereft of common sense that we in the Rest of this Rock worry for you.
So good luck.
1
The harrowing movie Boys Don’t Cry paints a far more accurate picture of small town Nebraska than this fluff.
7
What Rural America Has to Teach Us
Guns, unemployment, opiate and meth addictions, self-pity fueled by a narcissistic leader. All the while, taking more of the shared tax money from more populous states than they contribute. Nice lesson.
Spend more than a few days in rural America and see what it's like for a nice Jewish boy from New York City (Stuyvesant Town, no less).
8
Oh please.....
I'm sure these homey people are nice in thier own way....but I live in a small western PA town, predominantly white (99%) and MOST people are nasty, bigotted and think Trump is the best thing since sliced bread. How do I know? They write to the local paper and spew their venom and distrust.
Which is funny, really.
There are virtually NO minorities or blacks where I live. Yet THEY get the blame for unemployment and perceived wrongs against the "hard working, christian locals".
Yet, in the daily police blotter in the paper, every day there is some fine local arrested for his third DWI, for molesting kids, for beating his pregnant wife and trying to strangle her.
The disconnect is frightening. White Christians committing the crimes they insist only immigrants and "illegals" do.
The drug epidemic is epic. PA has a HYUUUUGE drug problem, and of course, it's always "someone else's fault" that Johnnie is a thieving junkie. "Them illegals!!!" cry the locals.
Infrastructure is non-existent where I live. Isolated, no easy way to get to interstates, yet year after year people moan about no businesses coming in. What are they supposed to do? Build a plant where there are single water wells and no central sewer or gas lines to run the processes?!?!?
Nope....it's "Them illegals from Mexico...Build the wall!!!"
Well educated kids leave, and the remaining weaklings make the next generation. Hatred flourishes. Bigotry rules.
But by God it's "homey"!!!!
25
We lived for 3 years in the Hill Country outside of Austin. Finally moved after my wife got tired of being called "that Damn Yankee"
Nice enough people, friendly to talk to, but that "Damn Yankee" finally had had enough of the intolerance.
9
Careful or you will get called some kind of
"phobe" for wanting to protect your way of life....
Maybe there is a demographic explanation for why towns like Mccook lack some of the pathologies of cities like Chicago?
1
Tough crowd to please here in the comments section.
2
Where are the African Americans and Hispanics in the article's photos? It feels more like the Dakotas than like a heterogeneous state. And the US is less homogeneous than these photos show.
Bet that you were the only Jew in the places you visited too.
5
Oh please, I’ve lived in cities all my life. Am active in parent teacher organizations, food coops, civic, Union, community, social organizations up the yazoo. Civic engagement is alive and well in cities! I would give Brooks more credence if he lived in one of these towns.
7
I am trying to understand what the rural communities have to teach us, and nothing comes to mind. When I grew up, there was the same feeling, actions, and comfort, but that all went by the wayside, from knowing your neighbor and leaving your door unlocked, to not knowing any of your neighbors, but they do wave good morning, afternoon and evening. That's as good as it gets.
Back then, one my next door neighbors, upon retirement, died in between closing on his own house and a house down the shore. All I remember after that was seeing his wife walking around town with her dog, sometimes very far away from where she was then living.
My neighbor on the other side of my house, I seldom saw. One day, I went to sit on my porch, out front. Across the way, there was the guy I never saw. He was sitting on his front porch in his work uniform, so I asked him if he was waiting for a ride or something. He didn't answer. Instead he asked me what I was doing on my porch. I told him I wasn't feeling well, and was taking the day off. He told me he was retired now, never took a day off in his life, and although he did not say this quite this way, he was wearing his uniform because he didn't have any other kind of clothing. He died within the year.
Personally, I am glad I don't live in a small town. It would be like going back in time. Your world view would tend to shrink and you wind up judging things by standards that are not relevant.
4
To my mind, I think it is very important for this author to examine his own racial bias and how that lens affects what he sees. Before he writes on this topic again.
If he does not see community, hard work, and morality in urban communities, it's because he is not hanging out in East New York, etc., and if he did, people would not open their hearts and tell him about their lives, because they'd be suspicious (rightly) of how he would view what they say. Community, hard work, and morality are very much present in the poorer neighborhoods in NYC. Despite that, structural barriers knock people of color down every single day. The valor to keep hope alive in the face of that, get up and do what you need to do, is more impressive that the grit you describe in your article, to me. And, to be frank, I have my kid in a majority-minority public school in Brooklyn, and I'd rather die than see her go to the "high graduation rate" rural-inevitably-white-segregated school you mention in the article. I come from the Midwest, and I know what being in an all-white school does to people.
-Just my two cents.
3
Wow. It's almost as if they DESERVE those extra electoral college votes--after all, they're better than the rest of the country. David Brooks panders to the rural areas as does the GOP. Anything to get those easy votes.
7
It's nice to hear about a rural community doing well. But extrapolating from that is dangerous. I live in a small, unincorporated rural community where a tiny handful of volunteers routinely wear several hats to keep local organizations running. Our average volunteer firefighter is 66 years old and the average is going up, not down. Our volunteer ambulance relies on the same four people on run after run. The volunteers are not ranchers. None of them were even born here. Say what you will about "city people," but when they relocate here, a few of them keep things running. And they are literally dying out.
4
When Mr Brooks gets going about the yeoman virtues of the Midwest, I enjoy looking for the things he leaves out. Residents of McCook and Grand Island, for all their civic zeal, live in one of the most Republican congressional districts in America. They gave Donald Trump 75% of their votes for president. They elect a hard-right conservative congressman year after year; he is a Tea Party member and a champion of the House Constitution Caucus, too, which works to drag America as far to the right as they can manage. When Mr Brooks held a mirror up to the people of McCook and Grand Island, asking them to describe themselves, it's little wonder he came away thinking he'd stumbled into Lake Woebegone, above-average children and all.
5
and very little mention of religion.
1
"I don’t want to change my mind about you because you liked one comment on social media.”
Sole reason I had to abandon FB. During the 2016 election I surveyed the landscape and was surprised at what I discovered. I lost some virtual and actual friendships. Sadly some others became acquaintances (from friends). To this date I don't feel sorry in the least.
While this article attempts to paint rural america as a bastion of civility and compassion social media allows its citizens to unmask their true sentiment on an continuous basis.
Next election is already ramping up...
1
Brooks needs to pay more attention to the dedicated volunteers in urban areas; perhaps he walks right by many right in his city. Brooks is not supporting people here... supporting volunteers in sometimes complex situations like some very diverse urban areas, imho helps us a lot more than guilting and cherry-picking stats that just happen to show how good homogeneous (white) populations are to each other.
4
I lived in the East Village on 9/11. Don’t tell me New Yorkers don’t know what love is. Even when I go back to visit I meet cool people. Most people in the city are scrambling to pay the rent. They are putting in the same hours or more, but those hours go to their employers. Why? Aggregation of wealth, foreign investment driving up prices, a tax structure that says, “if you want something nice, you have to pay for it. If Iowa wants something nice, you pay for it.” David, I think what you really like about rural America is family, patriarchal family. If we were to really respect rural America, we would break up big ag. Give farmers a chance to thrive, even if it means Europe style subsidies. Wouldn’t it be great to have a national food culture that rivals those in Europe? What would that do for the soul of America?
4
50% of the children need free or cost reduced lunch? What lesson is learned in that reality? Chin up, lunch is served, and guess what, it's cake.
That level of poverty is not acceptable anyplace in the US.
4
@sep I live in a rural area and, indeed, half of our public school students are on free lunch. Many get breakfast at school as well. It is because rural poverty is a ever-present and increasing problem, not because of some huge disparity in values between rural and urban populations.
6
@M. Grove
Yes, I have seen the same in my rural community. My flippant comment was meant to underscore that if we look beyond the picture of strong civic values described by Brookes, half of this community's members live at a level of poverty that requires public subsistence, and that is disturbing.
I'm interested in knowing how this rural community addresses poverty? How can a community with such low unemployment be so impoverished? How do community members work with the local and state government to address it? What are their expectations from the Federal Government for helping impoverished members of their community? How do these needs and expectations align with their political choices and philosophical beliefs?
3
@sep I agree. Unfortunately I think that Brooks, like so many republicans, is drawn more to mythmaking than to actual problem-solving!
3
I hear ya, David, but let me interject. My wife and I recently moved from Dallas, TX to my family's ranch out in far West Texas. The nearest town is 6 miles away with a population of 8,000.
Everyone we know practices what you call "intentionality" because in a small town everyone knows everyone's business. If you are a jerk, or got too drunk at the party, the whole town knows it. Therefore people try harder to "behave." Big cities provide anonmynity. You can be a jerk in Dallas and suffer no consequences because you are among strangers.
Not so in a small town.
195
@WesTex
Yes, small towns are different and their institutions are difficult to apply to large cities. Both have something to offer the other.
There are downsides to the smaller communities, but David would have to put on a different pair of goggles to see them. I would love to have him observe both sides of city and rural life, respectively, and teach us how the best of each side could be exported beneficially to the other.
20
@Larry N True, Larry, but I would propose that there is no "perfect" place to live. No matter where you go, there will be some kind of "problems." Too many people think that rural folks are "more authentic" but sometimes that just means they are all ignorant of their shortcomings. Because everyone is the same, they can't see the issues that are pressing upon them.
It's like flies living in a vinegar bottle: They think it is the sweetest smell in the world.
11
@WesTex
You were anonymous in those voting booths in 2016.
2
Then help advance the dialog by providing better example places. The ones in the article are hardly zones of comfort and privilege, but are just towns with considerable disadvantages just managing to carry on. A key message is active civic life, inspired in part by an "insane work ethic".
I grew up in a small town in the Rust Belt, and back then each town of any size had a factory or two that were the primary economic engines along with agriculture. Those factories are long gone, and not coming back. Most people of my generation moved elsewhere for jobs, the ones that stayed lost their decent paying jobs and get by working for Walmart or coming up with a permanent disability. The only job generators are schools, health care, low-paying retail, and unfortunately, prisons. This basically permanent depressed economy will not substantially improve, and those voters that live there make up a significant portion of the MAGA crowd. How does anyone sensibly and logically appeal to them without the bombast and anger that is part of the Trump pitch? I don't really know.
8
This has a lot of the feel of Rousseau's Noble Savage idea. Superficial romanticism is wonderfully cute, but it's not something to build a model of society on.
13
The article notes a minority resident of McCook expressing how good the community residents make her feel, which implies to me she is treated with respect and goodness. Also noted is many minority towns have Hispanic populations around 30%. As a native Nebraskan it is my experience that a sort of reverse golden rule applies living there. You are treated by town residents as you demonstrate by your words and actions you desire to be treated. Not by your ethnicity. The Taste of India restaurant in Overton NE off of I-80 operated by Indian immigrants is regularly packed with area community residents and truckers. The community is grateful the owners chose to stake there. Nebraska has the lowest tourist rate in the U.S. Consider taking a road trip touring the off roads and visit some small towns and experience for yourself should you want to see for yourself. No lifestyle is without some less than positives. But unemployment rates are low and life expectancy is long. It is not for everybody, including me, but it is a lifestyle seeped in pride and community involvement that merits more media exposure than only when reported on when a disaster strikes. I am grateful to have been raised in an social environment that taught me you get our of your community and friends, what you put into your community and friends.
3
Just wondering if the Indian owners of that restaurant have been invited to the homes of those stupendously upstanding, god-fearing, patriotic people portrayed in your comment. My guess would be a resounding no. Having lived for several years in a very small southern town in outback TN, I can tell you my white two year old was excluded from the local white gentry’s birthday party because “you aren’t from around here, are you” even though I was also a southerner by birth but not that town. I can assure you the Chinese restaurant owners in that same small town were never invited into any of those white southerners homes.
["...and seems to sit on every spontaneous civic organization that pops up."]
It's rural America. No museums, theatres, zoos, etc. What else is there to do?
It takes many people in an area to support cultural venues.
2
This is a very, very old line. But then, say around 1940 or so, Sociologists discovered that urban places were not simply filled with the dregs of humanity but that, lo and behold, there was also community in urban places, every bit as much and every bit as good as pure white Iowa towns. And these communities often even actually included different kinds of people, like different religions, etc. Surprise, surprise--Of course Brooks never read that stuff. Now, rural people are good people, so are urban people. The real offense is that these rural people from these small states have a terribly unfair advantage with both the electoral college and, especially, the Congress. Not to mention that they benefit from all kinds of the Socialism most of them so vehemently decry. Just look at the "Farm Programs."
14
@Donald E. Voth ... nail on the head
Brooks provided an interesting and appealing profile of some of the many benefits of living in small town America. I notice, though, that he steered clear from describing their attitudes about modern political issues, and which of the many divisive issues of our time they support or reject. The only inference is a Latina who dropped Facebook because she was reluctant to see what kinds of things her neighbors “like”. This implied that her neighbors were anti-immigrant as the issue has been pitched by Republican politics.
Seemingly Brooks didn’t ask them about the issues that will shape rural America in the future; opioids, rebuilding infrastructure, guns and climate change. We city folk are assured that we know how they feel about all this. Brooks seemed to avoid opening that can of worms, instead providing a cartoon of “Morning in America”. I don’t appreciate that.
10
Like everything, for better for worse, things change. You either go with the flow or you are doomed to live in the past. There are pluses and minuses of both rural and urban life. Unfortunately this article focuses on one aspect of rural America, the good side.
1
How do you scale a petri dish containing ancient bacterial forms of no particular use to the rest of us? What works the local level does not always work at the larger level.
2
Well what Mr. Brooks is selling here is a vision for life that he saw in a small sliver of the US. Many communities are existing because there is something going on for people to live there. The problem is how we have met their aspirations? My status quo may be nice way of life for someone else, but what about my aspirations and ambitions? Have we fulfilled that? Lets not get too rosy eyed for rural America as there ar some handful of areas that may be content with meeting their citizens needs. This is also illustrative of Mr. Brooks' compassionate conservativism where facts are twisted and delivered with just a touch of compassion.
I keep reading these stories and they all keep perpetuating this myth of rural America being the heart of this country and what it has to teach us.
The reality is rural America doesn't have to deal with the complexities of a racially and culturally diverse population. it doesn't have to deal with competing interests. It doesn't have to deal with people who are afraid that they will be shot by law enforcement because of their skin color. These issues effect how people interact with the community.
If you want people to be more civic and to help their neighbors, a good first step is have their neighbors stop calling the police on them because they're black. Look at that photo of Sehnert's Bakery.
David seems to miss what is happening right underneath his nose. The community organizations and collectives that are in the inner cities, helping the poor and struggling. Organizations of mixed races and religions, these are the communities that can teach America something, not so myth of the White Saviors in halcyon communities.
13
Yes, rural America doesn't have cops that are afraid to do their jobs because of the "it's because I'm black" problem that cities have. It also doesn't have the "I hate cops" issues that urban areas have. You mentioned the "issues" that diversity brings. The only one I can think of is criminality. Is there any other real issue that that one? And assuming that urban people are the smart ones, it really doesn't appear to be that way.
My only question David,:what are these local activists doing to help create greater national social cohesion? That is, what are doing to foster the local connections yet with us here in the cities?
It’s not either or....it’s HOW to make the connection. Perhaps a new column can explore what both sides of the rural/urban divide are doing to get past the seemingly intractable national intolerance?
"And when you tell them that this pervasive civic mind-set is an unusual way to be, they look at you blankly because they can’t fathom any other."
Because it's not unusual-or limited to rural areas- it's the same way we think here in Detroit!
3
I applaud you David Brooks. Your grace as a columnist is the ability to pull in both sides to a conversation so they can begin to examine the larger picture. Because it's true, whether we like it or not - we all have to come to some type of functioning consensus as a nation.
Truth in cries to 'drain the swamp' will now resonate with new meaning - and all forms of civil and environmental indiscretion will come to light. The terror we dreamed of invading our homes from far off countries, is now in our water and our food. It comes at us unceasingly, at every hour, with face of raging fires and surging waters and incessant winds. We are bathed in the ills of our ancestors and struggle mightily with the repercussions of our actions or in-actions - and yet, our greater intention remains. This is the grace of our union.
You are on the mark with your civil assessment of rural America - the same could be said for much of any community in America. People do not have reason to fear one another. Perhaps the only people that should truly be afraid, are the people who are not willing be a part of the broader discussion - or perhaps even the bigger picture. Perhaps their time of service is up. We thank you as you join the lexicon of great actors that have contributed to where we have come, to this moment, today.
Perhaps these people should continue to work incessantly toward interstellar market futures and start with the vacation of a lifetime, to Mars.
1
It would be a mistake to think that all rural Americans are conservative. Many of us are left-leaning, but thanks to the electoral college, our votes don't count. Yes, everyone is civic-minded in small towns, but racism, rumor campaigns and shunning also manage to thrive.
9
Actually, thanks to the electoral college, less populated states have an outsized influence on national elections. It’s the densely populated urban centers who’s votes count much less than they should.
4
That’s true. But those of us who vote Democrat in red states can’t say our vote counts because of the electoral college. Yes Wyoming has an outsized day but that doesn’t mean there are no democrats here.
Agreed! I’m a disenfranchised blue dot in the Red Sea known as Wyoming. Brooke’s romanticizing isn’t helpful. Nice to notice the better nature of any community, but let’s not ignore the whole story
1
Thank you for the conversation. The comments are fantastic! Try this with a dead tree newspaper.
I'm an old white guy who couldn't wait to get away from a small country town. Surely we should be looking forward to the future instead of looking back to an imaginary past with such nostalgia.
10
Often times, the people moving to small towns are retirees with little savings who survive on Social Security. They can’t afford rents in the city, so they move to small towns to live out their days. It’s actually quite sad. Many people reading this might not imagine themselves being there someday, but it will happen. If you are in your 20's or 30's and making really good money and living in the fastlane, you might think you've made it. But, as you get older, you will find it's hard to compete with people who are many years younger than you. You may live to regret what you were paying for rent on that apartment downtown when you find that you have little choice but to move to rural America to avoid going broke.
3
Reading David Brooks' column today (and often), I imagine him as a 19th century explorer to the Dark Continent in pith helmut and starched safari suit, announcing that he has discovered... Natives and not only that, he has fathomed their true nature, and it is simple and virtuous, morally above the corrupt and venal ways of the cosmopolitan elites!
I teach writing at a university, and I warn my students not to generalize based on unverifiable criteria such as "places with more moral coherence and social commitment than we have in booming urban areas;" "if a teenager misbehaves, his parents have heard about it before he gets home;" and "many people seem to make time for civic life..."
I can't speak to rural areas. I live in Brooklyn. Among my various groups of friends and acquaintances, I know a couple who have created networks of support for migrants separated from their children across the country; a friend who stages house concerts and gives the money to another organization; a cluster of neighbors who rallied to prevent an elderly neighbor from being abused by a guardian; a couple who teach music to people of all ages and take calls about personal problems in the middle of the night; a single woman who has personally mentored several young people in her church and helped them go on to successful careers.
Are these isolated cases? Is New York or Brooklyn full of people like that? I have no idea. But I have no trouble encountering such people.
17
Well yes.. rural life in America has different qualities than big urban centers.. No kidding. --However to put one above the other is simply nonsense. Rural and city life have different environments & rhythms, require different skill sets, and each have positive & negative aspects..
-It's the qualities of each that give America its richness..
13
Small population, lots of space, less diversity versus dense population in a tight space with incredible diversity. What works in rural areas may not work in cities because the environments are so different. This is true in all areas of nature. Cities must adapt in different ways than rural areas.
I think the underlying argument Brooks could be making is to let communities solve problems, let people wear many hats and all that. That works in rural areas, perhaps. Cities, however, may need more top down government intervention, state funded programs to ensure a functioning, fair community.
3
Rural life is more pastoral and people living in small communities look out for each other. Not mentioned are the suffocating effect of everybody knowing everybody’s business, peer pressure to conform to social norms around religion and others social rituals, lack of opportunities for upward mobility, low levels of education, political conservatism and resistance to change in a changing world, an aggressive frontier spirit celebrating gun ownership and killing animals for sport. The primitive rural lifestyle may sound appealing to you, David, but given a choice, most people choose the personal freedom, cultural sophistication and opportunity found in urban civilization.
5
"At many of the schools, 50 percent of the students receive free or reduced-cost lunch."
This place has problems that depend on support from the more productive parts of the state and nation. It would be a lot more interesting if David could explore that rather than this puff piece.
Without outside aid from urban areas, what would happen to these rural towns?
16
I think David's comments about small communities not existing in urban areas isn't refined enough. In suburbs and exurbs, where people drive in isolated vehicles, walk across vast parking lots, and do their errands at chain stores which cycle rapidly through staff, yes, that is not a small community. Ditto in urban work centers, where people interact in the public space for a small sliver of time. But when you go to the urban neighborhoods where people live, it's very different. We live in a somewhat gritty urban area where the crime rate is among the highest in the country. Yet I see people everyday on my errands; The same people have rung up my purchases at the grocery store for the last dozen years. Forget your wallet at the employee owned bakery that you have frequented for a decade - pay next time you come. And so on. It's an extremely rich fabric where not only are there small communities in which you are immersed, we also have significant personal freedom with tut-tutting from the ill informed.
5
David Brooks has discovered rural life--or more likely small-town life. And he's enchanted by it. Some of us grew up with it. I was a townie; my mother grew up on a farm; I could throw a stone from our town garden to the north or to the west and it would fall in farmland. In cities, people change. Crowded living, competition, greed. Don't try to transplant rural mores to cities: re-imagine cities. Dull the hard, bloody edge of greedy capitalism. (In NYC, NYCHA?) And remember, these changes from country to city have been going on for millennia and have given us words like civilized and pagan. In English, via Latin, we have dexter and sinister. In Gaelic, sinister or "left"-- and "awkward"--are derived from same root as "countryside." Remember, too, that the areas that enchanted Brooks are also strongholds of creationism and sectarian bigotry.
7
It’s ridiculous to claim that rural areas have a lock on civic duty compared to people in cities do. I see all kinds of social activism, and volunteers in all kinds of areas in cities. This is just another way for Brooks to excuse them for being Trump supporters by papering over their ignorance, racism, nativism, and white identity politics.
20
This blinkered faux-insightful column offends me.. I've seen firsthand the intolerance and insularity of rural America. I dated a guy from Iowa and went to visit his family in Iowa and Indiana a few years ago. Although I was a white Nordic blonde I was treated as if I were a freak because I was an attorney worked as a public defender. They were anything but welcoming. They were completely uninterested in anything I had to say, and insisted on bragging about the virtues of their way of life. They were somehow offended that I was a woman who had an education and worked as a professional. They were the kind of small-town farming people that David idealizes in this article, and they were petty, bigoted and they couldn't understand how I could possibly represent "those people". I have run into the same kind of intolerance and bigotry in my small town in the Northeast. My neighbors are mystified by what I do, because as a lawyer I should be making the world safe for white people, not representing poor defendants who are largely minorities. There is nothing virtuous about small-town life unless you believe in the virtues of tribalism, conformity, parochialism, and xenophobia.
23
Lots of nasty responses to David's article because he found that not all of rural America is comprised of the deplorables that the Coastal Progressives believe live beyond the shadow of tall buildings. Work ethic, civil pride, respect and community are not a function of money. Thank you David.
3
Posters are reacting to the distain expressed by Brooks toward urban dwellers. It’s just another ploy to separate us. Another ploy that seem to encourage hostility. Maybe that’s really the intention.
1
@Greg Beckstrom If they still support Trump after these two years, and polls suggest that they do, they are deplorables, despited being nice to their neighbors.
@Greg Beckstrom
What he says is heartwarming. And informative to some extent.
It simply leaves out a great deal that doesn't fit the vision he's presenting.
It also carries his specific political message that the US can be changed by good hearted people from the ground up, whereas I am absolutely positive that Government has a massive impact on our security, and welfare through social programs, tariffs, and tax policies - and it has to be changed.
Vanishing social mobility and a stable middle class is not going to be remedied by "community weavers," no matter how much good they do locally.
1
The kind of community involvement Mr. Brooks describes is astonishing. The way he glides past what 30% Latino and the lack of integration says about these communities, is not. These same places voted heavily for Donald Trump's raging racism, aimed at those same Latinos. Many of them are undocumented, yet do jobs, essential to the agricultural business that dominates the state. This state strongly supports Trump's wall, while employing Latinos to do work that Anglos will not. Mr. Brooks talks of young people moving away. It is the unintegrated Latinos who are filling jobs that those young people might be expected to take on, but they won't. This story is central to the tale Mr. Brooks tells.
12
If they don’t use a self-checkout line, why is there a self-checkout line?
4
Sure, a wholly White, homogeneous part of the country. David posits that we'd all be better off if we could just learn to be like this.
Real life, real exposure to others, is walking up your tenement stairs smelling five different foods from five different cultures. When you immerse yourself in other people's cultures, that's when you learn community and tolerance.
11
David: Can you back up any of this reporting? It rings false, like self-burnishing anecdotes to please a vistor’s preconceptions.
This anecdotes, by the way, are astoundingly condescending:
Do people still write checks to their mechanics in Nebraska? Why? What year is this?
Do people really enjoy a plumber who shows up on a whim, not a schedule?
Do farmers enjoy getting publicly humiliated if their teenagers make the same stupid mistakes as suburban teens?
I’m as urban as they get, but this insults rural residents. Geography doesn’t turn people into bumpkins who can’t use credit cards, schedule appointments, or value privacy.
10
As a fourth generation southwest Nebraskan, who now lives in New England, I think much of the social cohesiveness stems from our history and pioneer roots. People were so few and far between on the Great Plains, that if you didn’t help one another, and welcome the newcomer, you just might die.
Nebraska friendliness has taken a hit in recent times. Friends tell me that they keep it to themselves if they don’t support Trump. They are afraid of reprisals. I hope we can all weather this time of division and come to a new vision of community.
4
"What Rural America Has to Teach Us
Civic service as a way of life."
I have never locked my doors.
I see people volunteering all of the time.
There are free English classes for non-English speakers.
Urban farming is big.
etc.etc.
Mr. Brooks, Is there anything in big cities that you see that could teach rural America? You, as well as the other pundits, point to a divide that is not there when it comes to civic service. What does divide us is the continued drum beat that the rural folks are good and the city slickers are the devil.
9
La Vie en Rose!!
If all rural America was the way Mr Brooks presented, you wouldn't have DT in the WH now.
@Kaleberg in Port Angeles-- I'm glad for your comment. PA was a shock to my system when you looked at the beauty it is surrounded by.
@Sandi: lived in WA for 6 years and visited a lot of rural places. The stark economic, intellectual, diversity, education and development contrast between the Seattle-Tacoma-Oylmpia-Portland corridor to the eastern WA was mind boggling. I couldn't imagine I was in the same state.
6
Ah, again the saintly heartland, where lynchings never took place and Steve King is a pariah.
So beautiful and heartwarming an exemplar of the way things ought to be that neither David Brooks nor any of the others who regularly hector the rest of us to defer to the people who foisted Trump upon us choose to live there.
No, thank you.
15
"The word I heard most was “intentionality”" I live in a very small "town" (one general store that sells gasoline houses the post office and a firehouse), and I can't remember ever hearing a local say "intentionality."
There is no mystery about it, David. If you know that you are going to see the people you deal with again and again and again, and may need to get help from them some time in the future, you treat them differently than if you never have to deal with them again.
2
When he says “the pathologies we associate with poverty,” does the “we” mean racist white people? Why bring up that some towns are 30% Latino and their lack of integration without examining the systemic issues preventing integration? Why be so quick to blame people of color for their own misfortune and praise white people for their success, when conditions are in place that favor white families? Maybe instead of traveling around the country profiling white communities, Brooks should come back to New York and profile the thousands of working families of color, who are failed by the system, not by themselves.
7
Brooks is once again living in never never land. Take it from me. I moved from a relatively large metro area in Colorado to a small town in northwestern Wyoming about 10 years ago. It's place chock full of racists, with a self imposed lack of basic services such as decent health care and a grocery story that doesn't have rotting food in it. There is a massive drug problem with meth and other drugs used by workers in the Oil and Gas industry. The shops are closing, you can't get a decent meal most nights of the week and the educational system is horrid. As one reader below mentioned, rural america in a cultural and intellectual desert. No, rural america is not a place I'd raise my children. There are a lot of redeeming qualities living in a place like this but there are many more drawbacks. Rural America IS NOT a bastion of morality, at least not the kind I'd like to see in this country and it certainly IS NOT a place where people of color, LBGTQ or anyone else of "difference" can live without recrimination. Wake up Brooks. While your Whiteness and your straightness might let you blend in for a visit. Anyone who is not you isn't welcome. Further, while folks welcome you outwardly, there is so much back biting, rumor mongering and other petty wickedness that happens behind the backs of other people that it's shameful and it inhibits any possibility of the community moving forward.
13
If what Brooks says about rural America is true, then why do so many of these civic minded people support Trump, a man whose values are the antithesis of theirs?
11
Is this the same rural America that unconditionally supports the immoral Trump by significant majorities?
No thank you.
12
Brooks: "more moral coherence and social commitment than we have in booming urban areas".
Please stop.
The arrogant presumption that rural America is somehow morally 'better' than the rest of us is divisive and dangerous, especially given all the evidence these days about child mortality rates, rural drug use, refusals to recognize global warming, etc.
Plus rural adherence to Trump in the face of his debasements is mind boggling. And, claims that cities are morally inferior has more than a little whiff of racism.
This kind of rural or regional or religious exceptionalism is tearing this country apart. We are all in this together, and it is the only way out.
13
It'll be a shock to Mr. Brooks I'm sure, but civic service & helping one's neighbors & friends are not unique to rural America.
8
Yeah, but no, I like to be able to have Thai delivered at 3 am.
6
David:
I am very familiar with life in small communities in Arkansas, Texas, Oklahoma and upstate N . Y.
it is tempting to wax poetic about the community values which are real and honored mostly in daily life. But what you failed to mention or perhaps don't factor in is the nepotism. In most small communities the good jobs are pretty much passed down in families. You can marry in but don't expect to just move in. This is natural human behavior at the tribal level. But if you want to be a judge, sheriff, firefighter, school superintendent, run the county health department, the roads and bridges crews ad infinitum you do not have a chance unless you have been there for generations or are wildly charismatic.
This passes down not only opportunities but also attitudes and connections.
Yes people are kind, nice, hard working, community spirited. Everyone is lovely at the pancake breakfast at the American Legion Hall. But if you stay home you'd better have a good reason. The volunteerism that you are impressed by is complex.
7
And just think these Cornhuskers did it all without the help of Democrats. By the way David, did you ask any of them what they thought of the Electoral College?
3
Really? No mention of the bigotry, racism, gun-toting, god-fearing parts of the heartland? How everyone hates the government but gladly accepts "free lunches" and enormous farming subsidies? How people don't vaccinate and force their peers and children to "pray away the gay".
There are undoubtedly good people in these smalls towns - not mentioning the other side is like calling New York a thriving metropolis without mentioning the crime, filth and gross inequality.
6
Rural America is all Republican . I can't wait until the day Trump stops the daily mail there or privitizes it. See how long they will remain Republican. I lived in a rural Northeast Pa town. The Republicans allowed fracking to occur now there drinking water is destroyed. Give me city life any day.
8
Yes, we in small towns pitch in, because we care about our community and neighbor. Where do we learn these values? At our Christian churches. They teach this, not the racism and diverseness, that too many progressive urban dwellers imagine
That statement in itself is probably divisive, so forgive me. Now I'm off to my Library Board meeting..
1
Thankfully what is collapsing are the walls that communities create insulating themselves.
2
Mayberry sounds wonderful. While lecturing us about their superior morality, can you remind us again who they voted for?
7
The rosy picture you paint of Nebraska could have been made about Kansas a few years ago. Now after the "Kansas experiment" its a wreak. I wonder how soon Nebraska will be joining them?
3
This group believes that the Glory of God is manifested in the belief that the Lord's power comes from the knowledge that the collective (community) is only as strong as its weakest link.
Thus, everyone rows the boat. Not many freeloaders or free riders, or they get tossed off the boat as they would in any colony.
If the colony thrives...starting with the individual and then to the family and to the neighborhood, the town, the county and the state..then the nation is strong.
They don't look for their problems to be solved by big city mayors and governors or people working in Washington DC.
They do rely on those programs to get by..but by and large they are people who believe God's power comes from the strength of the individual vs. those who belief they only get their power from God..and in the absence of God..from the United States Government.
After all..Government is the only thing we all belong to.
Right?
1
@Erica Smythe Ummm, no. Maybe you need to read up on the First Amendment which provides us with freedom of and from religion. And read some history about what happens in countries where religion is in charge. Hint - it isn't good for folks who don't hew to the same set of beliefs.
1
David Brooks you 're off base, again.
While we can all admire the collegiality and civic mindedness of McCook, you're comparing oranges to pineapples. One small the other larger and a-lot more complex.
1
Mr. Brooks, I spent the last ten years in rural New Mexico where the proliferation of guns led to high rates of thefts and homeowners getting killed defending their guns. There was a forth of July shoot-out one year when a brawl broke out and the pack and carry crowd decided to break it up with guns.
In addition to that racial tension (hispanics vs ranchers), religious tension (catholics vs evangelicals), misogyny, poor schools and torturing and neglect of domestic and wild animals helped me miss civilization.
2
It sounds like you finally got out of NYC or the Beltway.
It's not really news to many of us that Nebraskans are generally very, very nice people.
Of course, like all red states, poor white residents are disproportionate users of "liberal" (socialist!) programs, like the school lunch program you describe.
Better article might be- how come they vote against their own self interest ?
Repeatedly.
The Rs would cut the legs off all those programs.
4
This reminds me of the drek Hollywood producers came up with to soothe the unemployed masses in the '30s. Did you notice the racial demographic depicted in the photos? I'll bet most of them want "the wall" to keep it that way. Give me a messy, diverse, sophisticated urban population any day.
3
It is human nature and thousands of years of evolution that developed cultures, countries and ethnicity. I am so tired of the term “diversity “ being shoved down my throat. It is human nature to be around your own kind. It be comfortable with the people who speak your language, practice the same customs, and have the same beliefs and morals. That is why the large cities ended up having “Little Italy”, “Chinatown “ and so forth. There is nothing wrong with not wanting to be “diverse”. I am NOT promoting hate!
1
@Lauren "There is nothing wrong with not wanting to be 'diverse.' I am NOT promoting hate!"
Actually, you are - since what happens when a person who "creates diversity" enters the picture? If he or she is not accepted as would any person who is already a member of the tribe - well, that is hate being promoted.
1
A large portion of the comments react to praise for the virtues present is these rural communities by branding them as racist, intolerant, uneducated, homophobic, anti-science, close-minded, etc. Is it any wonder so many ruralites resent the urbanites?
David...It’s Nebraska...I wonder if depicting them like the Lost Tribe of the Amazon & yourself like an itinerant anthropologist is really necessary to get this point across. Also, I guarantee that buzzwords like “intentionality” were not home grown but rather imported from some new age think tank where intellectuals read about someone else’s experiences and determine how they can have better ones.
1
Yes
It apparently "takes a village."
2
David -- you have nothing to teach the world about civil service. You led the media charge to support the Iraq war. It was illegal, based on lies, hundreds of thousands of innocent people died. It is impossible listen to anything you say without remembering that you used your public platform to support one of 21st century's worst atrocities.
2
I grew up in rural Nebraska and carry those work-ethic laden values with me every day.
When I lived in NYC, Boston and Chicago...almost every person I told I grew up in NE assumed I grew up on a farm. When I told them I was a city kid who lived in a town of 8,000 people..they laugh..then ask if Nebraska really still does have wild natives and do I get to California much since we're right next door?
The ignorance and arrogance of big city types who just wait for a government agency to take out their garbage..fix their potholes..or replace a burned out lightbulb on a playground is mind-numbing.
Too many people have given up their personal responsibility for doing the right thing in favor or waiting for a government agency to do it. ...which is not the Nebraska way.
Nebraskan's all pitched in this past week to help neighbors and friends and strangers in danger from unprecedented flood waters.
You know what you didn't see? A staged protest for the media demanding the State of Nebraska cease the use of fossil fuels because global warming caused the floods.
You know what caused the floods? Weather. Nothing more and nothing less, which is what every average Nebraskan realizes.
The sad part for Brooks is he needs to move to Wahoo or McCool Junction or Columbus or Kearney for a year and file his NYT reports from the heartland...where men are men..and so are the women. :)
2
Mr. Brooks, if you are going to put on a reporter’s hat, you got to be willing to dig deeper.Why can you leave your house and car unlocked in McCook, Nebraska, but not on the Upper East Side? You relate it to the good-heartedness of rural folk and the good civic nature inherent to small towns. But you describe generalized poverty. What’s worth stealing in these towns? And where would you hide after you stole it? How far would you have to come from, or run away to, to escape suspicion? How many suspects would local cops need to interrogate for the local crime wave?
Now ask a few more questions. Where does the money for that free school lunch come from? The local banker or major factory farmer? Or from Wall Street financier taxes? Life expectancy better than average? What percent of the town depends on either Medicare or Medicaid? Who subsidizes that coverage? Their 25 bed critical care hospital, which is likely the largest, or top 3, employer— how does it stay open if not with major Medicare supplemental payments, piggybacked on top of lax rules about “facility fees” that boost revenue from their lab, CAT scanner and colonoscopy charges? Again, does that money come from the local economy? From taxes on all that wheat and corn being grown? From taxes on that plumber or mechanic you heard of (who prob do good business in cash under the table)? From fracking? Nope, it comes from us unhappy, unsocial idiots in the cities getting taxes withheld from our fat big city salaries
5
David, how about if you go to a couple of these rural towns wearing a button that says "Looking for a Husband!" You are SO insulated from the reality of America.
6
I like the column, even if it comes across just a little 'pollyanna'.
But "The word I heard most was “intentionality”??? You have to be making this up. Maybe they said something about intentionally supporting their town, neighbors, local businesses, but please honestly tell us how many people used that specific word. My guess: Zero.
Dan Kravitz
2
After reading some of these posts I honestly wish Mr. Brooks would have stayed out of Nebraska. Our state slogan was recently changed to “Nebraska... it’s not for everyone!” Obviously a truer statement has never been written. I not sure if most of these comments are mockery for who we are, our morals, our education, our net worth... the list goes on, because we apparently have none of that here, or your distaste for the article? 🤔
1
Rural America would completely collapse without farm subsidies and other federal aid. The proud people of rural America are anything but self-sufficient.
5
I am from Philly and refuse to use eazypass or self checkout.
1
Well and good that you dropped into Nebraska, David. Now, try Mississippi. I recommend "Dispatches from Pluto" as your next reading. What's on the surface is not always what lies underneath. Ya gotta live there, see beyond the banalities and self-serving platitudes. Of course, I live in a "small" Indiana town where the major TV station reported recently that "Cow stops traffic in Noblesville." With Indianapolis 20 miles away, we have the best of both worlds.
@Brooks
I remember that a steer got loose in Brooklyn once, so it can happen here!
In a way, these communities are not weavers at all if, what that means is binding everyone together, immigrants and homosexuals and descendants of slaves and all. They are weaving plain white robes and plucking out the darker strands that mar it in their eyes.
2
That may be the case in Grand Island, Nebraska and some other communities around the USA, but it is NOT typical of all rural America.
They can ‘weave’ as hard as they can. But as long as their overwhelmingly dominant political party (and media conduit) continues to brainwash them with lies, hate and suspicion, they are doomed.
1
For a period of almost two years, a professional assignment had me settled into a small, rural enclave in Georgia. It took me just as long to get over this experience. My environment was largely populated by drug addicts, spousal abusers, sex offenders, overt racists of every stripe and an incompetent, under-educated working class. The white male population that ran the town, all NRA members and many with severe drinking problems, were as nasty a group of people as I've ever encountered, ready to resort to mob violence against anyone perceived as a threat to their way of life ... Oh, and by the way, the town had an active PTA and Boy Scout contingency.
3
If you're white, go to the same church, adopt right-wing ideology, and don't express disagreement with gay-black-jew jokes, then sure, rural life is great. The microsecond you transcend any of the above, you'd better move because those nice people will shun you. Been there, done that.
3
This guy is like one of those first-world tourists observing some native folks in a strange land.
3
I'd like to recap a number of important comments that others have made, and add a few of my own.
- The values and civic organizqations that Brooks extolls in rural Nebraska exist in urban areas too! Rotary Clubs, Boy Scouts, churches, libraries, etc., all exist in the Bronx and in Compton.
- A single mom in Detroit has to wear 15 hats, just like a farmer in Nebraska.
- A gay Wall Street executive who's raising a foster child is doing as much "civic volunteering" as a bank owner in Nebraska.
Etc., etc.
Furthermore....
- Why is it that every article of "rural America" places it in the Midwest? I live in one of the most rural counties in NY state, which has the same low density as half of Nebraska. My town has 1200 people, and no traffic lights. Doesn't that count too? Or does the fact that we went for Pres Obama twice disqualify us? Or perhaps we have too many people of color, or LGBT folks?
- And how welcome would a Jewish family be in McCook? A lesbian couple with two Hispanic kids? Would McCook welcome a mosque in their town, to serve as a locus for Muslim families in the region?
Brooks obviously spent waaaaay too long cloistered in his milieu of elitist punditocracy. He keeps writing about these "amazing" things he's "discovering" about America. Huh? They've been here all along; and they exist in many places that you haven't even tried to look.
Spend some time with the Dakota or Ojibwa in dowtown Minneapolis; their lives are just as meaningful as McCook NE.
2
What rural America also teaches us is that the Good Ole Boys rule. And if you're not a white protestant of Anglo or Germanic descent, you're not welcome among them. Our farm in York County, Pennsylvania, had a beautiful slate-roof barn that the Good Ole Boys of the town decided to torch one night. To teach the non-members of their hick churches a thing or two. The fire company was composed of these active Klan members. They let it burn. So much for rural civic spirit.
4
Can you hear "The Fishin' Hole" while reading this nostalgic yearning for a simpler time (when people got polio and African Americans were excluded and lynched and women couldn't get bank loans or credit cards)?
2
Come on, David. "Everybody says" rural America is collapsing? Who is "everybody?" That's the kind of weak-minded, simplistic generalization your readers expect from our President, not you. You generally write well thought out opinion pieces, but you undermined this otherwise good piece with this howler.
This article should be subtitled "People of color need not apply."
2
[so everybody has to chip in.]
In urban areas, we pay taxes and hire people to do the work; it makes jobs for people and allows them to be self-sufficient.
People who volunteer deprive someone of a job.
You make a good case for leaving those proud, civic-minded rural communities alone to meet their own needs and solve their own problems. If a farmer is polluting the neighbor's well water with pesticides and herbicides, let them go talk to that farmer and urge him to go organic and pay for the damages to his neighbors. No need for the EPA to get involved. If some kids come to school hungry, let the churches feed them breakfast and lunch. No need for that federal school lunch program. If any among them can't afford their insulin or if granny can't afford the nursing home when she falls and breaks her hip, take up a collection at the mini-mart and send volunteers to care for granny round-the-clock in her home. No need for "socialized medicine." There are as many civic activists and good neighbors doing good works in low-income urban neighbors, per capita, as in rural communities, and God bless them all. Just don't let our rural and small town folks pretend that they don't need and accept the help of the bigger community -- our governments representing millions of voters and taxpayers -- to achieve the quality of life they enjoy.
5
@abigail49 "Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?"
@abigail49
And don't orget public schools, librariies, parks, Socialism Security* and more...
* A guy I worked with always called it "Socialism Security" when Obama was President. He's now retired and guess what? It's no longer a socialist program ( of course he brays that he "paid in" but he will get a LOT more out of it than he EVER paid in....)
2
I love how the comments here are directed to David personally! Somehow he does engage us, doesn't he? The take on small towns here is, I think, valid and good-- even though not all rural communities are like this, some are. But also, as some writers here state, so are many cities, big and small. I live in Duluth, Minnesota (metro area 100,000 people), which has experienced a kind of renaissance in the last 20 years due to just the kind of involvement he details here. I guess to me what this says is: individuals are what make communities. If the community is small enough, it can be easier for them to make a big difference. Our communities thrive when we strive to include individuals, and as has happened in Duluth, when we strive to make all individuals welcome and valued parts of a community. Acceptance of diversity matters hugely when the community asks its individual citizens to help.
2
If the takeaway from this article is that one can build trust in communities through routine one-on-one interactions, volunteering, in goups with a shared identity, I would agree with Brooks but also suggest that many, many, many people have come to the same conclusions without all the legwork he undertook. If instead, Brooks is arguing that we can use small town life as some universal model to heal our nations woes, I think he is naively mistaken. There are as many benefits to urban and suburban life as there are to rural life. There are also as many problems with rural life as there are with urban and suburban life.
Did Mr. Brooks ask residents of McCook whether they were happy or sad when the Walmart came to their town and put countless local stores out of business? Did he ask them about their thoughts on the wall, immigration, and the president? Did he ask them how many of them voted regularly? Did he ask them how much they trusted people outside of their community or state, let alone the rest of the country? Close-knit communities are great places to live as long they are also welcoming to outsiders and are willing to thoughtfully engage the larger world beyond them. Without that welcoming spirit and engagement, small communities can become closed places which only benefit those who fit the mold.
2
This is the environment I grew up in. I left when I was 18, after realizing there was not much of a future there for me as far as economic opportunity and a job or career. Although I visit often and I respect the people there, I tell people that "it's a great place to be from". But drug and alcohol abuse is a real problem for many, as well as fear of the future and the unknown. My life has been immensely enriched by traveling the world and living and working with diverse cultures, and I am saddened that many people in these areas of the country have only experienced the rest of America and the world through the distorted lens of Fox News.
5
Thanks, David, for reminding us that the people you describe still exist. They are closer to nature than us city-folk. Also, they experience the reality of having to solve mutual problems through personal contact. We city-folk have virtual contact through the internet. Although I fully recognize that racism and the male sex drive are natural, and must exist in McCook citizens, I can see a path to channeling them constructively in the people you describe. The required patience and maturity to take that path are hard to find in the crucible of tribal war that dominates so many big cities. One of its products, identity politics based on behavior, would fracture McCook into small groups, each seeking their right to make an artificial state of expression normal, rather than merely tolerated.
I'm sure that all these lovely people voted for Trump and are strong advocates of smaller government, lower taxes (for rural communities, anyway), and the curtailment of big government spending. Except agricultural subsidies of course. And federal assistance with catastrophes like the recent flooding. And Medicaid and Medicare. Oh, and Social Security and the ACA.
What price smaller government now? Communities like this one are classic "Keep the government away from my Medicare" kind people.
When will Trump's so-called base realize the hypocrisy in opposing government spending until they want the money spent on them?
7
You got it sister
Homogeneity helps community weavers. If the proportions between us and them shifts too much, then common civic action turns to ways to enact xenophobic practices.
1
Glad to see my tax dollars from my "elite coastal city" that is being redistributed to rural areas is being put to good use. They can thank us anytime or just not reelect Trump. I don't understand this narrative about the coastal cities running the country when it's only the rural areas that determine all of our elections and receive all of the benefits.
3
This is a view through rose colored glasses. I particularly object to the inference that rural residents work harder than urban residents, particularly farmers ... their work is highly seasonal, and much of it is contracted out. Farms are highly subsidized, and in many cases are producing products of dubious value, such as animal feed (corn, soybeans), and ethanol. I don’t have a solution for curing rural ills, and I myself like living in a small town, but maybe these rural areas should consider returning to voting Democrat ... it may help.
8
I was raised in "rural America", less than an hour from Seattle, Mr. Brooks. Many "rural", poorly educated, rabid "christians" moved to the area to log, work in the coal mines and at Boeing when it first started.
Ours was a seriously dysfunctional community. New ideas were squashed in the schools and the rest of the community. Many of the adults were alcholoics, including our teachers.
No, many of the people who hide in rural America have nothing to teach us until they invite and support proper education, stop addiction, accept gun control that protects 99.09% of us and join the rest of us in moving civilization forward.
10
Scratch the surface. I live here. Nebraska has some admirable attributes, as mentioned in the article, but a of spirit inclusivity (unless you are a die-hard Husker fan) and a forward-looking attitude are largely not to be found. The status quo is just fine, thank you, no matter the economic, social, or environmental costs. Oh, and farm subsidies are somehow not a form of socialism, by Nebraska standards.
15
So yet another plight of the yeoman farmer angle with some implied demonizing of cities thrown in? Super, that hasn't been done repeatedly over the last few thousand years; it's not just an empty self-involved trope that praises what's familiar and and blames any problems one may have on the unfamiliar based on the most subjective of standards... How exactly does one quantify "moral coherence and social commitment" anyhow?
3
I am heartened by many of the reader responses to this tired old presentation of rural virtues. Yes, by default people help one another in the hinterlands, yes they are close-knit and public service oriented. They must help themselves because no one else will. But they are monochromatic, their libraries are little-used, they have pinned their philosophies to solipsistic insights. The readers of this column see the flaws in "by-cracky we're a pretty good little place" self-congratulatory flap. I have lived in many small towns across the country, towns and places whose fortunes depend on decisions made by distant groups in urban centers. The rurals put a brave face on, cope as best they can and rely on their finest quality--grit--to get through the stuff the fan blows at them.
1
I would love to live in my small hometown in the southwest, but there is no way I could make a living there. The lack of industry, water access, opioid abuse, sustainable business growth, and a near ritualistic conservative mindset, makes it an almost impossible and impractical place to live. I don’t want to be stuck in the past, but also miss the feeling of that community, so I find what I can here and work to make where I am a better place.
6
Has there been a shortage of praise for rural American values? They might be able to compete with veterans and police for most-celebrated-with-empty-platitudes. I assume the goal of this article is to make us think about our fellow Americans in a new light, celebrating their positive qualities. Why not do the same for urban progressives? They've been demonized by the right so long that it may require an extinction-level event to bring us back together as a country, and progressives have lots of wonderful qualities that improve their communities and those of other Americans too.
9
All you haters can say what you want about the Midwest. But much of what Mr. Brooks says is true. I live in a mid-sized city as opposed to a rural area. After more than a year of living in the house I bought for south of $90,000, I treated myself to locks on my doors. Before then, I left my house unlocked, for a week or more, when I went out of town. I still leave my house unlocked when I go to work each day. When I've lived elsewhere, I locked my car doors when I pumped gas.
People around here are aghast at skyrocketing crime and break-ins, with virtually every one of these incidents involving unlocked cars where parking meter change (yes, parking meters here still take quarters) was swiped. People whose unlocked cars get pilfered blame cops for not preventing crime, and they also are mad at the thieves for not closing the car doors behind them, which leads to dead batteries, without understanding that closing car doors might wake folks up.
We have issues with meth and opioids. We haven't dealt with racism any better than anyone else has. But tell you what: A tornado or flood comes through, and folks have your back. It takes 15 minutes to drive to and from work, and there's lots of parking. Folks in Seattle or San Francisco might want to try it sometime. If you're smart and have a decent job, and such jobs exist, you can retire before you reach 60 and live comfortably.
There's a lot to be said for flyover country.
2
This will surprise you. I have lived in the Bronx for almost 40 years. My front door is only locked when i go on vacation—and then I leave the back door unlocked.
When my husband was in the hospital my neighbors brought me dinner every night.
I remember that midwestern politicians balked at sending money when we were hit Hurricane Sandy. I remember those same politicians voting down much needed relief for Puerto Rico. And when the Midwest is hit with unprecedented flooding, midwesterners still —STILL—deny climate change and any action to mitigate its disasters.
15
@Zejee
You're stereotyping, and so am I. When I recently visited friends on the West Coast, they were stunned to learn that Illinois didn't go for Trump. They just assumed.
Every issue that ails our country is in flyover country as well as NYC. What's dangerous and wrong is to assume stuff based on what politicians say. What has irked me on this thread is so many holier than thou's saying the Midwest is filled with racists and homophobia. I've lived on the East Coast and the West Coast and I can't see any difference.
@August West Can I get your address, and when you'll be out of town? Asking for, uh, a friend...
I've spent time in rural America and I too was struck by their sense of community - and by how that was overwhelmed by their intolerance of those that don't look like them or pray like them.
Rural America can teach me how to farm, but I don't want my children exposed to any of their other "lessons".
8
As someone who grew up in a small Iowa town Pop 800 then on to a small University city in Iowa then New york City and now living in suburbia outside of New York City your over generous account of small town America certainly overlooks the darkers sides of small town life.
Rural America is currently losing nearly every young person and working age person in the general population who has the means to get out be it due to education or just plain ambition for a better life for them and their families. Most available jobs are poorly paided with no health care insurance or any advancement available. Locally owned Small businesses are hanging on by a tread if not put out of business and soon as a big box store or chain store opens such as Walmart, Home Depot or Walgreens opens within 25 miles of their store. Selling drugs or growning pot are the biggest growth industries in Rural America not farming jobs which have been replaced by machines or manufactoring jobs which if no one noticed moved overseas in the 1970s and 80s and continues today...
True there are good people in rural America who work everyday to try to make their communities better but I seen the very same types of people in the South Bronx and Brooklyn, so while you paint a nice picture of good god fearing rural people who are mostly white I've seen a rainbow of colors of people who are also kind caring people
working everyday to take care of their communities.
17
The unspoken reality is that these communities would not exist without the backdoor economic support they receive from their urban counterparts. Their retirees rely on Social Security and Medicare contributions from the cities that far exceed what they paid in. When they get sick, their medicines and hospital care are only available in cities. Their problem children are invariably shipped off to the cities. Large military bases, paid for by taxes on city dwellers, also dump huge amounts of money into their economy. When the urban areas finally get sick of this situation, these rural areas will be ghost towns.
8
You aren't necessarily" making time for civic life." You do it because without your participation, no civic life would exist. It is out of necessity. Comparable interdependency can be found in neighborhoods and small communities that together comprise larger cities.
2
David, I'm a big fan of yours but this longing for Leave it to Beaver imaginary life style is a fiction. As many of these comments point out, lots of small towns are not idyllic. Ask this, how close is the nearest emergency room, or other services. You also ignore the fact that many urban and suburban neighborhoods behave just like small towns. Also the reality is that people live in cities, more each year, and not in rural areas, and the very fact of being in a city changes the dynamic. The only way to achieve your perceived utopia is the disperse the population. The one thing we know for sure, is that the overwhelming percentage of the bigotry, racial intolerance, and hatred (hypocritically so) for "socialism" emanates from these isolated rural communities. It's not good. It's bad.
7
What's important for readers to know is this:
the kind of community involvement Mr. Brooks describes exists all over our county. Rural areas are not alone.
I live in one of these fortunate places, not a rural community, not a large city. So, look for these. They are not unicorns!
5
I grew up in Charlotte, the nation's 17th-largest city. Civic service was and is a way of life there as I'm sure it is in many other American cities as well.
No one had to consult with our country cousins to figure that out.
10
"Constantly they are thinking: Does this help my town or hurt it? And when you tell them that this pervasive civic mind-set is an unusual way to be, they look at you blankly because they can’t fathom any other." Not so fast.
On a small, local level they might ask this question, but as a person from a very small town, I can tell you there is a serious lack of understanding as to why life in small towns has gotten so hard, and much of the responsibility lies with Republicans, I'm afraid. Massive tax cuts have led to massive reductions in aid for everything from street repairs to schools to libraries and more in small towns. But the GOP says, "Blame Dems!" and the small town echo chamber fueled by a convervative-owned local "news"paper and steady diet of Fox News does as they are told: they blame the Dems. This is dangerous, and while it might lead to what looks like unity and civic-mindedness in small towns, there is also a disunity in the call to unite against anyone who doesn't share their views. This is dangerous and damaging to democracy. Likewise, civic-minded community members who go off to become teachers are criticized and demonized on the regular in small towns.
So, the postcards always look pretty, but when you open the cover of an entire book, the story isn't as rosy.
9
Another thing rural America can teach us is the acceptance and respect for immigrants. There are a number of small towns and small urban areas that have been revitalized and stabilized by foreign immigration. The farm belt and meat processing areas have welcomed this group of hard working and strong family structured people.
1
I've lived in big cities and small towns in America. Mr. Brooks ahs a fairytale view of small towns. All the good and bad things of big city lire are the same in mall towns, except that medical care is requiring long drives, the scope of entertainment is less and it cost more to live in small towns. Outwardly there are the attributes that Mr. Brooks ascribes to small towns but there is a lot of clannishness, and suspicion about newcomers. There is also a lot of classification of peoples into two group: "those like us" and those who are not." "those who are not" pretty much remain outsiders for a very long time.
1
Would be interesting if Brooks included how many federal funds flow to these small town Nebraska communities. If 50 percent of the children are receiving free lunches, my guess is the parents are receiving government subsidies of some kind too. But don't call that socialism. That would be offensive for some reason.
14
@Kristine thank you for your comment.
David, your romanticization of "Rural America" could only be written by someone who has no idea what they are talking about. I grew up in rural Maine. After the paper company that employed the majority of the town pulled out in the late 80s, the town basically became a ghost town. When I go back there, it breaks my heart. Anyone with a college education and the wherewithal to get out of there has. Small towns everywhere are dying. Our economy doesn't support them. I wish someone would do some real reporting on that. What you see, David, is so far from the truth. Yes, people help each other out. They have to. In this age of Trump, no one else will.
11
Reminds me of my little hometown in Missouri. Very supportive of local schools and people in the community. Of course the small towns have their fault. People act as if ingrained sexism and racism are just in small towns. That could not be farther from the truth. Speaking from experience, it's everywhere.
2
I hope Brooks reads the comments, which are spot on. I've spent quite a bit of time in Nebraska recently and admire Nebraskans' work ethic and civic spirit. But Brooks' idealization of rural towns and implied deprecation of urban settings are overblown.
11
Mr. Brooks: I am a physician who works in rural Missouri. Yes: people will pitch in when some neighbors need help. There is also a lot of suffering due to abuse of women, abandonment of children, illicit drug use, and failing rural hospitals. The problems that these communities face are monumental. Some days it's hard to hold back the tears. I'm sure that there are towns that have banded together to ease their collective burdens, but they're certainly not even a significant minority. Nothing short of a massive national commitment to educate and help will do the trick.
7
“Nearly everybody is working at something. Nebraska has the sixth-lowest unemployment rate among the 50 states”
Yes, “working at something,” but compared to other states median family income is 25th over all and 15th in household incomes below the poverty line. Those aren’t bad numbers. I cite them to point out that it’s easy to cherry pick data to paint a rosy picture of what might be a pretty average state economy.
4
What you leave out here is the fact that, as a number of studies have shown, the friendliness and folksy qualities praised here are only bestowed by people upon others of their perceived peer group. When confronted with people they see as outsiders, the well very suddenly runs dry, even drier than in less folksy places, where its level is lower, but consistent. The gosh-darn goodness of these scattered Mayberries simply isn't available as an export product.
11
This is Nina Castro:
Nice try. Flyover country has been just that. And the more the coasts hoard their wealth, and inflate their expectations, the poorer and less able to pull ourselves up by the bootstraps the rest of us will be. We practice civic service largely because our governments are weakened by the abandonment we've experienced. I fault our mid-sized cities for the short sighted and devastating effects of white flight in the 60s/70s, but beyond that, global capitalism as practiced with the outsourcing of jobs has been absolutely the most devastating. Now, AI supported by runaway technological advancement with no clear purpose except to gain more leisure (I've heard that before) is on the horizon. All talk, all the time, while the great cultural divide widens. In fact, I'd say more leisure time might not be good....what about some more civic service. Everywhere.
1
@Nina & Ray Castro
The coasts do not hoard our wealth. We give a majority of it to the Federal Government to prop up the flyover.
6
They're like anywhere else. They have their good points and bad points. The pace of life is good. It's easier to buy a house. People tend to be fairly respectful of one another. There are some interesting, colorful characters. As David Brooks points out, there's a greater sense of community than you're likely to find in large, more impersonal cities. Having said that, they tend to be pretty divided. There's a lot of petty, small town politics. Who you know is important. (Yes, I know it's "whom".) Drugs are a big problem. They can also be kind of corrupt. Educated, upper middle class, urban liberals ignore small rural towns and cities at their own political peril.
2
While it might excite derision among some urban readers, one might conclude that some or even much of this "community" commitment is related to values inculcated by religious observance.
4
@Francis Dolan
Your "religious observance" = profound discrimination for those of us who are not part of your tribe.
1
@W Yep. Worked with a fellow who, when he interviewed for a job after law school in Montana (Biloxi?) was asked by the firm's partner, "What church do you go to?" My friend laughed and said, "You know it's illegal to ask me that, right?" The partner laughed with him and then said, "But really, what church do you go to?" I guess it's fine if you go to the "right" church.
1
David Brooks makes a causal connection between civic virtues and rural America. But civic virtues are found in any setting in America, from the most urban to the most suburban to the most rural. Without more than just his anecdotal experiences in one of the many settings -- i.e., a rigorous study -- there is no way to say that rural American exceeds any other setting in it's civic-mindedness, or what underlying conditions create or enhance it.
11
I have to laugh. Brooks visits Grand Island, the fourth largest city in Nebraska, and he thinks he has been to rural America. I grew up in farm country in north central Illinois in a town of 450 people. You couldn't drive five miles in any direction without coming to another town with populations of 250, 1700, 500, etc,. We would have regarded McCook as a city and Grand Island as a major metropolitan area. Places like McCook became the major shopping centers for the surrounding area and their businesses thrived. It is the smaller communities that suffered. First the loss of the high school, than the hardware store, the restaurant, and grocery stores. Populations declined, and they can no longer support their infra structure. Everything viable moves to places like McCook. If you want to see real rural America you have to get out of the cities and drive the back roads.
14
In Frank Brunni's recent NYT article, he quotes Nicholas Christakis (Yale sociologist) as saying:
"that we’re transcendently and inherently good — that we’re genetically wired for it, thanks to a process of natural selection that has favored people prone to constructive friendships, to cooperation, to teaching, to love." and that...
"Complex societies are possible and durable only when people are emotionally invested in, and help, one another; we’d be living in smaller units and more solitary fashions if we weren’t equipped for such collaboration; and human thriving within these societies guarantees future generations suited to them."
It is this approach that should guide our way forward since it is not based on small town, which is not scalable, but on behaviours in larger communities, which have positive attributes we can cultivate.
3
This is a small community you are born into. Everyone knows everyone and knows everyone’s business. The company I work for has more people in it than live in that town.
Basically they are a large family or tribe so they have earned trust with one another through familiarity.
1
Homogeneous cultures have fewer social challenges. When everyone in a community shares the same cultural, economic, political and religious backgrounds, it's easier to maintain cohesion and a mutual sense of purpose and direction. The irony is, I think small towns like this would benefit from immigration, but I doubt they would welcome it. Mexico is in many respects a conservative culture that is similar to rural America with it's emphasis on family and faith and a rural agrarian heritage. If depopulation is a problem, immigration could be part of the solution.
3
Here in Stephentown NY I feel like a slacker. Though I have been on the library board (yes our little town has a library) and that of a local conservation group, I no longer serve on those. My wife who has MS still manages to serve on the food pantry. I am in awe and in debt to those who serve on the town board, and the local fire department (volunteer) and EMT, and the heritage society. An amazing community. (We are "newcomers"...just 11 years here.) African Americans are few...but not invisible, and serve on the town board and in other capacities as well. Many other citizens serve their neighbors in less visible ways, or by means too numerous to list.
1
@SP
I would like to amend my own comment to say that a unique aspect of our very rural location is proximity to the cultural benefits of the Berkshires, Capital District, and Hudson Valley and an easy drive to New York. And yes the litany of rural problems including opioid abuse, and hunters with a sense of entitlement exists here as well.
3
This is one of Mr. Brooks' best op-eds! Yes, rural America has a lot to teach the nation. I suggest that the northeastern. midwestern and, especially, western city slickers take heed and begin to conduct their lives appropriately, honestly, wholesomely, spiritually, morally, and ethically. Thank you.
2
@Southern Boy
Why do you think we don't conduct our lives in all those ways?
3
Oh spare me. There is just as much civic involvement in cities.
There is nothing to idolize about uninformed, close minded and mostly bigoted “Christians”. Thoughts and prayers and may Trump throw you some paper towels, rakes and federal dollars given by those elite city folk (who are as socially involved and caring about their fellow citizens)
4
Yeah, and what happens when one of those city slickers- or anyone from the “outside”- moves in and doesn’t share their religious beliefs? Not so friendly.
4
A very pollyanna article about the complexity of rural America. I had a small ranch in Nebraska's sandhill county, planned to retire there - until the reality of living there appeared front and center. I was 'not born there', I 'cared about the environment', and I was a 'single woman'. None of these characteristics pleased the locals. I sold the land and realized it was not a good fit. Its much more complicated than Mr. Brooks suggests.
32
We city folk would be just fine with all that rural neighborly friendliness if it weren't for the accompanying lack of racial, religious and cultural tolerance, disbelief in evolution and climate change, and a tendency to be fooled by special interests into believing guns bring safety and that no one should be "forced" to pay taxes for the common good. Oh yes and some good bookstores and cultural events are a plus too.
(Speaking in broad generalizations and stereotypes as David did.)
18
Usually, the rural US brings to mind methamphetamine, racism, crime and welfare, so it is nice to see that such broad stereotypes are not the only story and good, hard-working folks are found in the country, just like in the city. Current economic reality is that urban areas are the economic lifeblood of our country. Maybe it is easier to have “more moral coherence” when urban folks are subsidizing rural living.
8
I applaud everyone who works to make their community and country better.
But I think it's perplexing, if not insulting, that you think those of us in urban areas aren't also wearers of many hats, weaving social fabric out of thin air.
Our city exists on the backs of people like the ones in the article. Except they are city dwellers, no better than country dwellers but also no worse.
We don't need to learn duty from rural areas. What we need to learn as a country is that we are all in this together. We need to appreciate everyone, not just people in our own tribes.
27
Eloquently stated. Thank you.
2
I’m sick and tired with being told that rural areas have “heart” and community and urban environments do not. I live in the center of Los Angeles. We take care of each other too. If Mr. Brooks cared to, he could write the same antectodal stories about how are lives are interweaved in a trusting envIronment as well. Perhaps the difference for us is the scope of our caring, what we define as community. We don’t just look out for the folks who look, talk, and act exactly like us. My neighbors speak Korean, Spanish, and English (in that order). We are united in our desire to create a better world for ourselves and our children, and we realize that we only accomplish that by working together.
29
I believe that the point of this article is that folks have choices to make and the perspective that they hold works for them.
If you have a problem with being in the wrong life, then the only way to survive is to detach yourself by moving away, as some folks have done.
And if you stay, make as Emily Dickenson says "It is better to light a candle than stumble in the darkness."
4
Far too often "rural America" implies "real America" where the majority of us who also work hard, strive to create decent communities and relationships, and improve our nation are always seen as "lesser". It's exhausting.
I grew up in a rural/suburban area. I'm also gay. Let me tell you how fun and welcoming it was growing up there. Or the endless haranguing I overheard about how Latinos were "stealing jobs" (this was well before Trump, by the way). Or the denigration of diverse ideas or creativity. Sure, I found my niche, got educated, and got out, but living there was absolutely suffocating and depressing, not to mention an economic dead-end. We really need to stop holding "rural America" on a pedestal, with this starry-eyed version of what it supposedly represents. There are millions of us- the vast majority- who live in suburban and urban areas who are innovating, creating, solving problems, creating diverse and interconnected communities, and moving our nation forward without fear. We matter too.
24
The communities you describe are not economically, professionally, or ethnically diverse. Larger urban centers are more so but that does not mean that 'civic service' is less - it just exists in more diverse ways. The issues facing larger urban centers are correspondingly more complex and engage people's efforts in different ways - there are many different 'communities' in urban centers overlayered through each other. I don't think this intrinsically makes the residents of urban areas any less 'intentional' or civic-minded.
13
"Constantly they are thinking: Does this help my town or hurt it?" In a column that doesn't appear to have a point, Brooks stumbles upon a great question that has a broad range of answers.
Brooks sticks to answers that address small issues, like town residents not purchasing goods from Amazon or using self-checkout registers at stores. Why not address a larger issue, such as the astronomical rates we're forcing young adults to pay for a higher education?
Does it help or hurt a small town for its younger residents to be saddled with so much student loan debt that they're forced to move to a larger municipality -- most likely closer to the east or west coast -- and work so hard that they have trouble focusing on engagement in civic life in the city they now call home?
If these young adults weren't saddled with crushing debts, more of them would opt not to move out of town. This would help the town by slowing the pace of population decrease that feeds into the decreasing property tax revenues that smaller towns are faced with.
Moving forward with this answer, the question then becomes "How can we combat the problem is student loan debts?" It would be great to see a column about that topic.
6
We enjoy your Friday exchanges with Mark Shields on PBS Newshour every week. And we enjoyed a segment yesterday that showed a couple in Alabama looking at the lake behind their house that used feature live fish and cypresses and is now dead thanks to pollution from local chemical and petroleum plants. Who did they blame? The government. Not because it failed to prevent the corporations from killing their lake, but, somehow, because excessive regulations caused the lake to die! Another local later commented that she could not believe that humans have any effect at all on the global climate. They all lived in a state that depended on the federal government for fiscal solvency, yet they believed that if government would just get out of the way, their lives would be better. Yes, it's charming, but it is also tragic.
19
@Bill Van Dyk I watched that, also. The woman who commented on her lack of belief in human-caused climate change made no attempt to explain her belief. She could have been saying that she believed in ghosts, or Bigfoot, or that babies carried “high” or “low” are always boys (or girls).
Our country is in so much trouble.
1
My great aunts lived into their late nineties in Beatrice, NE. And they were both sharp as a tack. I am convinced that part of this is minerals in the water. The water is so hard you could almost walk on it.
1
Rural America isn't quite as idyllic as Mr. Brooks suggests but he makes some good observations. Perhaps the biggest factor is that rural people tend to be at least acquainted with one another. If not they'll usually just make something up! So there certainly is a group mindset of sorts when it comes to responding to community needs and disasters since we all know most everyone on at least some level.
1
David,
In your article you quote someone as saying, "They don’t use the self-checkout lanes in the drugstore so they can support local workers."
Well, I have been doing that in San Francisco and around Northern California when I go to places like Home Depot and Lowes.
This is a long line with one checker. The Self Serve line is empty or short. A woman or man comes over and asks me to come over to the self checkout line, they will show me how to do it.
I tell them no. They ask why. I tell them that I want to support jobs. They look at me like I am from Mars. I tell them they are helping to put themselves and other out of work. They still look at me like I am from Mars.
There are people in the Urban area's that get it. But we are spitting into the wind.
Many years back there was a news story. They were asking people leaving a box store why they did not buy their child a bicycle at the local bike schwinn shop. They said the could, they had the money. But they could get it 20% cheaper at the box store.
So, there you go. Even educated two income people with economic "head room" who could have helped save a job at the Schwinn factory could care less about their neighbors job.
The factory is long gone today.
American's have raced to the bottom. They only care about price and nothing else. Rural America does not have anything to teach us. We know what we are doing, we just do not care.
6
STARK CONTRAST
David Brooks' voice about rural American
is a refreshing counterpoint to Paul Krugman's March
18 column "Getting Real About Rural America."
Krugman is the pessimist.
Brooks is the optimist.
I suspect the truth lies, as it usually does, somewhere
in between.
4
@John G. Tucker I suspect that the truth lies, as it usually does, with Paul Krugman.
4
I too recently was in rural Tennessee. Mixed and mingled with locals in a small town. As Brooks writes and explains it occurred to me , for lack of a better word the so called Swamp has zero affiliation with the likes of what Brooks writes of. Not everyone labeled a deplorable, deserves such a title. Now look at the circus going on in Washington.
These are the people that think Branson MO is a cultural center.
Come on Mr. Brooks, I've spent a lot of time in White small time USA and it's not quite the way you describe it. Most of these people are at least mildly racist, religious oriented and still hold with male dominance in civic matters.
See how far you get in these small towns if you are not white,"Churched", and have some ancestry there. I have nothing against small town USA but I would not want to live there. No libraries, museums, major newspapers. They live in a vacuum of their own making and have no understanding of the larger scope of the country.
16
Fantastic. It's morning again in America. Hard-working white people and nickle Cokes. Where have we heard this dreamy tale before? As a native of the rural Midwest, I find this dewy-eyed paean 90 percent rubbish. Go a little south into Kansas, where the soil and aquifer has been worked dry, the meat packing plants are worked by Mexican, Asian and Somali immigrants (legal or not), and the towns look more like those described by Veblen in "The Country Town," "Perfect flowers of cupidity." This romance of small town heartland values works great on political ads (the handsome young local lawyer with his sleeves rolled up walking through a bean field talking to a farmer) or banks ads (same scenery), but it's a false picture. Where I come from, the land of beans and corn, some call the landscape rural. We call it the factory floor, for that's what it is.
20
If 50% of the students in rural towns like McCook, Nebraska, receive free or reduced cost lunches their parents had better stop voting for the GOP because Republicans want to abolish all those government "freebies" that help the poor.
21
"One woman I met came home and noticed her bedroom light was on. She thought it was her husband home early. But it was her plumber. She’d mentioned at the coffee shop that she had a clogged sink, so he’d swung round, let himself in and fixed it."
If David came home to find that a plumber had let himself into his home, he would call the police on him.
8
While many readers' comments focus on the Nebraska voters (86% white) who support the current occupant of the WH, consider:
DT garnered "only" 58% of the Nebraska vote in '16. His totals trail Romney's 60% in '12, Nixon's 62% in '60, GW Bush's 64%, Nixon's 70% in '72 and RR's 70+% in '84.
2
You call them “civic” yet they oppose the “social” aspects of government at every turn.
6
Mr. Brooks's article portrays a community ethic shared by residents of rural areas, towns and cities across this country and on military bases, too, both here and overseas. Most of us look out for each other. Why the "us versus them" tone? Why the denigration of "coastal elites?" They're not the ones who voted for a hater like Donald Trump, and the fact that the good people of rural America support him is a great mystery.
11
Sounds like a tightly knit tribe of like-minded humans. How do they respond to outsiders? Does it take longer for non-whites to be accepted, if at all? Civics is not about helping the people you went to high school with, it's about helping people who need it whether you know them or not.
12
There is one glaring thing missing from this article, data. Brooks fakes it a bit with his "some high schools have 98 percent graduation rates." But think about it and that is a meaningless statistic, it simply means that Nebraska, like most if not all states, has at least one wealthy suburban high school.
All this navel gazing about unlocked cars is just silly. It has to do with density more than anything, and there isn't enough room for us all to live in the country.
It seems like the purpose of this article is to suggest that rural, white America is where the virtue lies. The truth is, there is virtue and vice everywhere in America. Brooks will focus on his handpicked anecdotes. I'll focus more on the one statistic that, more than anything else, indicates the virtue or disrepute of an area: what fraction voted for the cretin in the White House. On that moral question of the our day, Nebraska failed. 58.7% of the state chose evil. I'll take our virtuous cities with our locked doors over the bigotry, selfishness, and lack of regard for future generations that comes with Trump support.
No Republican has the moral high ground anymore. None.
17
Well said!!
Another heartfelt homily from David Brooks. How do they feel about climate change? Because they're going to need that social capital when they're facing a 20-year drought alternated by catastrophic fooding.
Connection or civil-mindedness are not the problems – or even related to the problems – facing the country. Evangelical churches have cut white rural America off from the country's common culture to the point that they're now susceptible to any crank on Fox News.
14
I find it fascinating that Mr. Brooks never shows any grasp of the idea that economic distress causes family and community decline more than the other way around. Over the last 38 years, the virtues he holds so dear have been harmed most by the very “free market good, government bad” cult policies promulgated by the moneyed interests he shills for. He’s obviously a well informed man—how does he not see it? And if he does, what makes him want to run this con? Continues to fascinate me.
6
David, It would beneficial to your thinking for you to visit rural Black America. You may find essential similarities and differences to this first draft if your experiences. One one hand you would encounter a comparable closeness of community and work ethic. But as you alluded to, you would also encounter the damaging legacy of racism and segregation that still very much lingers to this day. And while the trope of hard-working rural America is undoubtedly a great animating myth of of our nation, our robust cities as well as the countryside continue to perpetuate the horrific and damning results of slavery. I was moved by your openness to reparations, an idea I fully support. So keep traveling and report on what you see. Let your moral compass lead you.
4
I agree! This article was just a GOP evangelical ad.
The disdain many commenters here have for their fellow citizens seems whipped up. How can anyone blame and hate so much of our country for giving us Trump AND believe that the election was profoundly illegitimate because of the electoral college and the Russians? It's not natural or rational - it's political.
1
We blame them for being so gullible to racist propaganda (whatever the source) and for not paying any attention to the FACT that Manafort was a well known bad actor and that the GOP changed their platform on Ukraine- plenty of warning that something was suspicious. Putin may have pushed the propaganda but they didn’t have to buy it.
2
@OneTrickPony
What your evidence that they believe racist propaganda? If it's statistical, you'll need a large enough AND representative sample size.