I grew up on a farm in Indiana. I knew from a young age that people assumed rural areas were more racist and uneducated, but it didn’t bother me much. I was smart, and I recognized that my community, a small farming county of just over 7,000, maintained just as much intelligence as the general public. I spent my childhood walking through cornfields, butchering chickens, and participating in the county 4-H fair. I wouldn’t trade those experiences for anything, but as I go higher in my education, I realize dangerous stereotypes about rural America poison the minds of college liberals. The left looks down on rural life because it finds rural life analogous to conservatism, and liberals find conservatism analogous to stupidity. This is because American media and Democrat politicians condition the general public to believe that conservatives, rural conservatives in particular, are idiots.
When I started at Miami, I was proud. I was proud of my upbringing and experiences. But in expressing my life to others, I was met with shock. “You don’t look like a farmer,” they said. A man once told me, “You’re too smart for rural life.” I don’t know if he meant to imply that my entire family was stupid, but he did. I’m sometimes told that I’m “the exception to the rule.” They say I’m smart, sure, but my community isn’t. And when people realize that I’m conservative, they use my rural upbringing to excuse me. They use it to suggest that I’m only conservative because as a child, that’s the only political socialization I had. Once I learn, they say, I’ll choose the left.
The left’s ignorance was tolerable for me until I realized that liberals seriously consider themselves superior to rural American conservatives. It’s everywhere in our media. When explaining why rural Americans vote conservative, an article from Vox focusing on the new smugness of liberalism discusses the new base of liberalism, imitating a liberal perspective, “The trouble is that stupid hicks don’t know what’s good for them. They’re getting conned by right-wingers and tent revivalists until they believe all the lies that’ve made them so wrong. They don’t know any better.”
This is how liberals argue now. They assume rural populations to be so ignorant, and more than that, so stupid that we can’t possibly make good decisions. Mike Bloomberg, a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate and former NYC mayor, said, “I could teach anybody, even people in this room, no offense intended, to be a farmer,” and then suggested that occupations other than farming call for the use of “more grey matter.”
CNN ran a segment where reporters and commentators laughed and mocked rural Americans for being illiterate, putting on rural southern accents as they imitated Trump supporters saying, “You elitists with your geography and your maps and your spelling.”
It’s no wonder liberals express shock when I tell them I can read and butcher a chicken. This is all people see. Unless someone lives in a rural area and experiences rural life, they don’t get a view of rural America anywhere near the truth. All they see is Bill Maher talking about rural poverty as though it’s the best joke on the planet.
Liberals fight so hard to dismantle racist and sexist stereotypes that plague our country, but then they perpetuate harmful stereotypes about rural conservatives because they only view victims as those within their party lines. They won’t rush to defend someone who disagrees with them, and so I must remain, in a liberal’s mind, an exception to the rule within a community of people not fit to be treated with respect.