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rural America

Thursday 5th of March 2026

Abortion [E]vidence from national surveys shows that the odds of being against abortion under all circumstances with the only exception of rape or incest rises steadily as town size decreases, taking into account other differences due to age, gender, education, and region. Compared to cities of at least 250,000, the odds of opposing abortion in the smallest towns are more than three times higher. Robert Wuthnow, The Left Behind © 2018 Kwiple.com
Bad news The odd thing about most of the reportage interpreting rural America is that it has nothing to do with the communities in which rural Americans live. It's all about private resentments and personal attitudes. It's as if rural Americans spent their time in isolation pondering only their pocketbooks. citation Robert Wuthnow, The Left Behind © 2018 Kwiple.com
Bullshitters say The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer. Donald Trump © 2019 Kwiple.com
By the numbers Factor by which the number of children born with drug dependencies has increased in the rural U.S. population since 2004: 6 Harper's Index, March 2017 © 2017 Kwiple.com
Corporate welfare As the data centers' labor needs have shifted [from low- to high-skilled jobs], tech companies have begun breaking ground in less rural areas. New Albany, the wealthy suburb of Columbus, Ohio, where Facebook is putting a $750 million facility, has a poverty rate below 3 per- cent, an unemployment rate of around 4 percent, and a median household income of $196,000. Even so, Ohio is offering $371,000 in tax credits for each of the 100 full-time positions Facebook has promised there–none of which is likely to provide a lifeline to a laid-off factory worker. Bloomberg Businessweek, October 2, 2017 © 2017 Kwiple.com
Kwiplers say Deploy all-fiber internet access throughout rural America with no data caps © 2018 Kwiple.com
Polarization Today, the rural-urban divide is really a divide between citizens whose orientation is national and citizens whose orientation is global. Barbara F. Walter, How Civil Wars Start  © 2022 Kwiple.com
Political inequality As of the census of 2010, the five most rural states wielded about 50% more electoral votes, and three times as many senators, per resident as the five most urban ones did. Economist, July 12, 2018 © 2018 Kwiple.com
Political inequality … by 2040, 70 percent of the American population will live in fifteen states. Thirty percent of the population will live in thirty-five states. Think about what this means. That widely distributed 30 percent will be disproportionately white, dispropor- tionately nonurban, disproportionately older than fifty years of age. They will control seventy seats in the US Senate, enough to override a presidential veto. If they all support the same candidate for president, that candidate will begin every election with 40-vote head start in the 538-vote Electoral College. The 30 percent who live in thirty-five states are only three states short of the num- ber necessary to amend the US Constitution. David Frum, Trumpocalypse  © 2020 Kwiple.com
Political inequality In 1790, a voter in Delaware (the least populous state) had about thirteen times more influence in the U.S. Senate than a voter in the most populous state, Virginia. In 2000, by contrast, a voter in Wyoming has neary seventy times more influence in the U.S. Senate than a voter from California. What began as a strictly small -state bias has become a rural -state bias. Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, Tyranny of the Minority  © 2023 Kwiple.com
Political inequality [I]n America's political system winning votes and winning office are not the same thing. Federal elections give more power to rural voters than to urban or suburban ones. When it comes to picking a president, California has one electoral-college vote per 720,000 people. In Wyoming the ratio is one per 190,000. The disparity is much greater in the Sen- ate, since California (population 39.5m) and Wyoming (population 580,000) both elect two senators. The Economist, July 12, 2018 © 2018 Kwiple.com
Political inequality Many people find it odd that voters in small, sparsely populated states seem to have more “voting power” than people in large, densely populated states. As an example, about 553,000 eligible voters in North Dakota get three electoral votes, or one elector per 177,666 voters, roughly, while California's much larger electorate of about 23.6 million eligible voters gets fifty-five electoral votes, or about one for every 429,455 votes. Richard M. Valelly, American Politics [copyrighted 2013] [429,455 / 177,666 = 2.42] [2.42 is criminally beyond “1 man 1 vote”] © 2018 Kwiple.com
Political inequality Today … Republicans are predominantly the party of sparsely populated regions,  while Democrats are the party of the cities. As a result, the Constitution's small-state bias, which became a rural  bias in the twentieth century, has become a partisan bias in the twentieth-first century. We are experiencing our own form of “creeping counter-majoritarianism.” Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, Tyranny of the Minority  © 2023 Kwiple.com
Punt returners say If there are people there, it's not “nowhere.” This is somewhere. It's just a somewhere that doesn't get a lot of attention. Dr. Jeff Bulington, who moved to Franklin County, Mississippi, to teach childen there how to play chess, responding to Sharon Alfonsi, 60 Minutes  correspondent, who said Franklin County was “in the middle of nowhere” © 2017 Kwiple.com
Republicans say Real Americans are native-born, English-speaking, rural white Christians © 2018 Kwiple.com
Rural America [T]he assault on the safety net is espe- cially harmful to rural America, which relies heavily on safety-net programs. Of the 100 counties with the highest percentage of their population receiving food stamps, 85 are rural, and most of the rest are in small metropolitan areas. The expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, which Trump keeps trying to kill, had its biggest positive impact on rural areas. Paul Krugman, New York Times, May 9, 2019 © 2019 Kwiple.com
Rural America But the great fact was the land itself, which seemed to overwhelm the little beginnings of human society that struggled in its sombre wastes. Willa Cather, O Pioneers! © 2017 Kwiple.com
Rural America But the true losers from the romanticisation of rural life are, I suspect, rural-dwellers themselves. Their social problems get lost in the credulous notion of the countryside as the seat of virtue. Their economic decline is obscured by our wonder at the pastoral sublime. They might be poor, this line of thought seems to go, but what ravishing views they have. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, June 15, 2019 © 2019 Kwiple.com
Rural America Exit polls showed that 62 percent of the rural vote went to Donald Trump, compared with 50 percent of the suburban vote and only 35 percent of the urban vote. Robert Wuthnow, The Left Behind © 2018 Kwiple.com
Rural America From 2010 to 2020, more than 130 of the 1,800 rural hospitals in America went out of business. At the start of 2020, almost half of the rest were at “high risk”  of closure, according to the nonprofit Center  for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform. The situation grew even worse as the pandemic diminished the frequency of money-making elective surgeries and a growing demand for health-care workers caused hospital payrolls to soar. Many hospitals were kept open only by infusions of federal money. BloombergBusinesswork, January 28, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Rural America In terms of poverty, college attainment, teenage births, divorce, death rates from heart disease and cancer, reliance on federal disability insurance, and male labor-force participation, rural counties now rank the worst among the four major U.S. population groupings (the others are big cities, suburbs and medium or small metro areas). Wall Street Journal, May 26, 2017 © 2017 Kwiple.com
Rural America The melancholy of having to count souls Where they grow fewer and fewer every year Is extreme where they shrink to none at all. It must be I want life to go on living. from “The Census-Taker,” by Robert Frost  © 2017 Kwiple.com
Rural America The moral outrage of rural America is a mixture of fear and anger. The fear is that  small-town ways of life are disappearing. The anger is that they are under siege. The outrage cannot be understood apart from the loyalties that rural Americans feel toward their communities. It stems from the fact that the social expectations, relationships, and obligations that constitute the moral communities they take for granted and in which they live are year by year being fundamentally fractured. Robert Wuthnow, The Left Behind © 2018 Kwiple.com
Rural America Of the 19,000 incorporated places in the United States, 18,000 of them have populations less than 25,000. 14,000 are located outside of an urbanized area. This is rural America.  Robert Wuthnow, The Left Behind © 2018 Kwiple.com
Rural America Over the past decades, 128 rural hospitals shut down as a result of financial pressure and 400 more were at risk of closing before the coronavirus pandemic, according to to the National Rural Health Association. Rural areas have 20% of the U.S. population and 9% of physicians, the group said. Wall Street Journal, April 1, 2020 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Rural America Rural America Is the New ‘Inner City’ — — — — — A Wall Street Journal analysis shows that since the 1990s, sparsely populated counties have replaced large cities as America's most troubled areas by key measures of socioeconomic well-being – a decline that's accelerating citation front-age headline, Wall Street Journal, May 26, 2017 © 2017 Kwiple.com
Rural America Rural communities are places of moral obligation. Residents can live there and be so independent that they rarely speak to anyone else. But if they do live that way, they are treated as outsiders. Robert Wuthnow, The Left Behind © 2018 Kwiple.com
Rural America Rural communities's view of Washington usually emerge in two competing narratives: on the one hand, the government ignores us and doesn't do anything to help with our problems, and, on the other hand, the government constantly intrudes in our lives without understanding us and thus makes our problems worse. Robert Wuthnow, The Left Behind © 2018 Kwiple.com
Rural America Since 2010 the amount of bad debt at rural hospitals has jumped 50%, according to the National Rural Health Association. It sets a vicious cycle in motion:  A depressed economy leads to unpaid bills; unpaid bills lead to hospital closures; the closures strip the local economy of higher-wage jobs; and the economy gets more depressed.  The National Institutes of Health estimates that when a rural hospital closes, per capita income in the surrounding county dips an average of 4%. BloombergBusinesswork, January 28, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Rural America Their sense of moral obligation cuts both ways: don't be a burden if you can help it, and pitch in generously when you can be of help. Robert Wuthnow, The Left Behind, on rural Americans © 2018 Kwiple.com
Rural America These relationships, obligations, and common understandings are what I have called the “moral community.” … Being part of a moral community, even when it sits lightly on people's shoulders, means that sensing your community is declining and your young people are falling behind is a reflection in small measure on you. You may not be affected personally, but you are part of a failing community. The school that closes is yours. You may be well educated yourself, but you feel that people consider you a hick simply because of where you live. Robert Wuthnow, The Left Behind © 2018 Kwiple.com
Rural America  We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty, sincerity and dignity. Sarah Palin, quoting without attribution what columist Westbrook Peglar said in 1940 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Rural America What seems right is what has seemed right for a long time. Robert Wuthnow, The Left Behind © 2018 Kwiple.com
Selfie I don't like America enough to want to live anywhere else except Manhattan. And what I like about Manhattan is that it's full of foreigners. The America I live in  is the America of the cities. The rest is just drive-through. Susan Sontag © 2017 Kwiple.com
Snapshot The Pied Piper of hamlet America Donald Trump portrayed by Rudyard Kwipler © 2017 Kwiple.com
State of the union  How did the salt-of-the-Earth people get hooked up with with the salt-in-the-wound people? Bill Maher © 2018 Kwiple.com
 
Trumpists Virtually all the people Trump had sent into the Department of Agriculture were white men in their twenties. They exhibited no knowledge of, or interest in, the problems of rural Americans. Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk © 2019 Kwiple.com