life in a red state 209mon designation. It’s hard for me to see the usefulness of lumping
Minneapolis, Atlanta, my little hometown in Kentucky, Yellowstone Park,
and so forth, into a single category that does not include New York and
California. “Going into the Interior” sounds like an endeavor that might
require machetes to hack through the tangled vines.
In fact, the politics of rural regions are no more predictable than those
in cities. “Conservative” is a reasonable position for a farmer who can lose
home and livelihood all in one year by taking a risk on a new crop. But
that’s conservative as in, “eager to conserve what we have, reluctant to
change the rules overnight,” and unrelated to how the term is currently
(often incomprehensibly) applied in party politics. The farm county
where I grew up had so few Republicans, they all registered Democrat so
they could vote in the only local primary. My earliest understanding of
radical, class- conscious politics came from miners’ strikes in one of the
most rural parts of my state, and of our nation.
The only useful generalization I’d hazard about rural politics is that
they tend to break on the line of “insider” vs. “outsider.” When my country
neighbors sit down with a new social group, the first question they ask
one another is not “What do you do?” but rather, “Who are your people?”
Commonly we will spend more than the first ten minutes of a new ac-
quaintance tracing how our families might be related. If not by blood,
then by marriage. Failing that, by identifying someone significant we have
known in common. Only after this ritual of familial placing does the con-
versation comfortably move on to other subjects. I am blessed with an
ancestor who was the physician in this county from about 1910 into the
1940s. From older people I’ll often hear of some memorably dire birth or
farm accident to which my great- uncle was called; lucky for me he was
skilled and Hippocratic. But even a criminal ancestor will get you insider
status, among the forgiving. Not so lucky are those who move here with
no identifiable family ties. Such a dark horse is likely to remain “the new
fellow” for the rest of his natural life, even if he arrived in his prime and
lives to be a hundred.
The country tradition of mistrusting outsiders may be unfairly applied,
but it’s not hard to understand. For much of U.S. history, rural regions
have been treated essentially as colonial property of the cities. The car-