Palin's reverse snobbery and the myth of small-town superiority

Small town life isn't all it's cracked up to be. In fact, much of the common wisdom around the wholesome nature of life in rural America is just plain wrong.

“Americans disdain snobbery in all its forms except the most popular one: reverse snobbery,” said Steve Chapman [in the Chicago Tribune]. That’s why Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin repeatedly gets away with implying that small-town and rural Americans are more honest, more hard-working, and generally better than those lazy, lying scoundrels who live in big, bad cities.

My single favorite publication, The Week magazine, has an excerpt from Steve Chapman's article in the Chicago Tribune entitled Palin's small-town snobbery is faulty.

After citing some of Palin's statements indicating that country folk in America are holier than their urban counterparts, Chapman goes on to debunk much of Palin's insulting rhetoric.

Most Americans, it seems, can tolerate hearing of the superiority of the small town, as long as they don't have to live in one. You wouldn't know it from listening to country music stations, or to the governor of Alaska, but four out of every five Americans choose not to reside in rural areas.

Maybe if they ventured beyond the city limits more often, those people would not be so inclined to believe everything they hear about the merits of rustic hamlets, which harbor a full complement of social ills.

Not everyone in rural America gets high on fresh air and the smell of new-mown hay. Illicit drugs are nearly as common out there as they are in cities and suburbs.

Chapman doesn't mention recent findings that urban living tends to be far better for the environment than living in the country, but he does cite some interesting facts:

• country kids were 26 percent more likely to experiment with drugs than middle-schoolers elsewhere
• overall methamphetamine consumption among adults and teens is more than 50 percent higher in the country
• relative to their urban counterparts, rural youth ages 12 to 17 are significantly more likely to report consuming alcohol
• excessive boozing among adults appears to be no less widespread in Mayberry than in Metropolis
• the highest rates of births to unwed mothers are in Mississippi and New Mexico, both of which have high rural populations
• the most urban states, New Jersey and California, do better than the average in out-of-wedlock births

Chapman concludes:

One of these days, the 80 percent of Americans who live in more populated areas may tire of being obliquely insulted. Most urbanites and suburbanites don't think they're any better than their country cousins. But Palin might want to think twice before telling them they're worse.

Of course, we don't need statistics to tell us this at all. Sarah Palin loves to say that (despite being sandwiched between two foreign countries, giving her great international affairs experience) Alaska is a microcosm of the United States. Well, I think hers is a microcosm of the small-town family. And it doesn't take a very close inspection to quickly discover that it's far from perfect.

The myth of small-town superiority | The Week

Palin's small-town snobbery is faulty | Chicago Tribune

Comments

[The Real McKee]

If it's true when Chapman says that big city folk don't look down on their small town counterparts, then how come you insult their intelligence in your "Who's the elitest of them all?" post? Of course the majority of people don't want to live in small towns and rural areas: there's no jobs out there and nothing to do. It has little-or-nothing to do wit the whatever snobbish attitude they may have (which obviously isn't much different from that displayed in big cities). And yes, I live in urban Oregon (Bend), which is 75% of the state with the biggest meth problem in the US.