Memo to Rural America: Urban America Came Through This Already

Readers who know relatively intelligent Trump supporters – and there are a few – have probably seen this Cracked column by David Wong on the travails of rural America. Wong, who grew up in “the Country” (his term), insists that what rural America suffers at the moment is both unprecedented and largely beyond the ability of “the City” to understand.

This has gotten a lot of cache in 2016, in part due to the geographical nature of the recovery – far more concentrated in Urban America, more on that later – and of course due to this election campaign. It is also, in my humble opinion, more than a little ahistorical.

Indeed, Wong himself hints at this in his column when he discusses how cities were viewed un his youth:

What I did hear was several million comments about how if you ever ventured into the city, winding up in the “wrong neighborhood” meant you’d get dragged from your car, raped, and burned alive.

Yet somehow it never occurs to him to ponder the implications of that.

As someone who grew up in the north Jersey suburbs of New York, allow me to explain why, for the most part, Urban America is less than fully sympathetic with what “the Country” is experiencing right now.

First: The Cities have already gone through this.
Wong (and many, many others) talk of rural towns wiped out by economic malaise, drug addiction run rampant, and general hopelessness. Did they not pay attention when the “inner cities” were suffering the same maladies in the 1970s and 1980s? Did they not notice New York City’s bankruptcy in 1975? The blackout riot of 1977? Cleveland’s Cayuhoga river catching fire? The MOVE insurrection in Philadelphia? The “Rodney King” riots in LA?

Or did they just think Billy Joel’s “Allentown” was a catchy tune?

America’s cities suffered just as America’s counties are now, except that the problems were far more concentrated, and received a good deal less sympathy (but plenty of racially charged assumptions and assertions about “those people”). While Donald Trump whines about needing to prop up rural America with protective tariffs, farm subsidies, and unreformed entitlements, his 1976 predecessor as Republican nominee for president was famous for refusing to bail out the Big Apple, leading to the New York Post headline: “Ford to NYC: Drop Dead.”

Of course, New York did no such thing, and thus we get to the other reason behind the disconnect.

The Cities, left no other choice, sorted themselves out.
Ed Rendell and Anthony Williams led a swath of reform-minded Democrats willing to knock down sacred cows in their cities and make said cities liveable and governable again. Where cities couldn’t find reform-minded Democrats (New York and Los Angeles), they took the plunge and elected Republicans (Giuliani and Bloomberg in New York, Riordan in LA) to get the job done.

Indeed, one could argue that the actions these mayors took enabled their cities to take greater advantages of the current economic climate, while most of rural America became afflicted with the aforementioned issues.

The political irony in all of this is that Trump (and his chief Tri-state area backers) should already know this. Yet for some reason, Donald Trump is assuming that (1) the entire country is New York City circa 1993, and (2) there has been no Giuliani-Bloomberg example of how to combat it. That last part is made even more painful by Giuliani’s own presence in the Trump campaign: he certainly should know better.

In short, whatever problems Rural America is experiencing right now, they can be handled – and indeed, they were handled by Urban America. Instead of insisting on Trump’s Big Government solutions, our rural communities should learn from what worked in the cities (and what didn’t work) and adapt it to their own situations. If they will be as self-reliant as they claim they wish to be, they will come through this, without Donald Trump’s “help.”