Urban Left, Rural Conservatism: Red/Blue Social Politics
If you are somewhat of a misfit in the small community in which you were raised, you may feel a strong desire to finally, for once, be among your own kind, and to cease to be singled out as peculiar, and to no longer be the only person you know who is like you. So you go somewhere where there are a lot of people. Somewhere where there are so many people that even if you're not merely an exception to the rule but exception within that cluster of people as well, you still stand a chance of finding others like yourself and possibly even an entire part of town where your folks tend to cluster.
There are other people who head for the big city for somewhat different reasons: the folks who immigrate from faraway lands and different cultures, although they could and occasionally do flock en masse to small towns or farming and fishing communities out in the countryside, are more often going to make the big city their initial destination, because not only will there be other immigrants from where they came from, their ethnicity or nationality will be one among many in a diverse place and therefore less likely to stand out as alien and apart and different.
People, wherever they live-on farms, in suburbs, or in cities-all rely on various forms of a social contract. The social contract stipulates how people should behave, which lets us predict each other's behavior with some reliability and makes some additional provisions for how to handle various situations, including conflicts. The social contract is mostly informal: a set of shared expectations and scripted behaviors and learned patterns of interaction that we all know and expect other people to know. A smaller portion is formalized as laws and policies, where they are written down and made explicit.
If you happen to be somewhat of a misfit, whether because you came from somewhere else or just because you're different in a more fundamental sort of way, you may have reason to prefer a higher percentage of the social contract to be made up of formal social contract with the others in your social environment, rather than having to deal with those informal unwritten rules.
Why? Because in a formal structure, you can argue for and perhaps obtain recognition, in the name of fairness, of your right to be different without being subjected to unnecessary judgmental mistreatments.
It's very difficult to get that same kind of accommodation within the informal structures, no matter where you live, because informal social rules such as expectations and scripted behaviors and learned patterns and so forth don't come with any kind of forum that would allow you to bring up and discuss the rightness or wrongness of a way of treating people, or to petition to have them changed.
Smalltown and rural America is at least superficially homogenous and it runs on patterns of informal rules that assume homogeneity, a fixed number of social roles and ways of being in the world. That works for people who aren't exceptional. Such people often find formal social contracts intrusive, controlling, authoritarian; they don't experience the informal-rules structure as if it existed as a set of rules at all, so they think the way they live, the way they prefer to live, is a world nearly empty of rules, or else they think of those rules as the Natural Way, rules that humans didn't make but which were instead just magically always already there.
Conservatives have a wariness about the formal social contract, and we need to understand that just as they need to understand our reluctance to rely on the informal version by itself. At its core, it's something we should all be able to recognize and relate to: the political body that we have is not the same thing as the "plural us", the community of people. It ought to be, but it is instead its own special interest, the governing class, and it is unfortunately largely populated with people whose primary interest is in consolidating their own power and extending their reach. When you look at it that way, it should not look so unreasonable for people to resent extensions of the government (i.e., laws and formal policies) into interpersonal zones where human behavior had previously been regulated only by the informal social contract. They see it as an infringement on their right to interact informally in that zone without governmental interference.
The difficult task is to get such people to perceive the informal contract as a set of rules as well and realize how those rules can also be an assault on personal freedoms.
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There are other people who head for the big city for somewhat different reasons: the folks who immigrate from faraway lands and different cultures, although they could and occasionally do flock en masse to small towns or farming and fishing communities out in the countryside, are more often going to make the big city their initial destination, because not only will there be other immigrants from where they came from, their ethnicity or nationality will be one among many in a diverse place and therefore less likely to stand out as alien and apart and different.
People, wherever they live-on farms, in suburbs, or in cities-all rely on various forms of a social contract. The social contract stipulates how people should behave, which lets us predict each other's behavior with some reliability and makes some additional provisions for how to handle various situations, including conflicts. The social contract is mostly informal: a set of shared expectations and scripted behaviors and learned patterns of interaction that we all know and expect other people to know. A smaller portion is formalized as laws and policies, where they are written down and made explicit.
If you happen to be somewhat of a misfit, whether because you came from somewhere else or just because you're different in a more fundamental sort of way, you may have reason to prefer a higher percentage of the social contract to be made up of formal social contract with the others in your social environment, rather than having to deal with those informal unwritten rules.
Why? Because in a formal structure, you can argue for and perhaps obtain recognition, in the name of fairness, of your right to be different without being subjected to unnecessary judgmental mistreatments.
It's very difficult to get that same kind of accommodation within the informal structures, no matter where you live, because informal social rules such as expectations and scripted behaviors and learned patterns and so forth don't come with any kind of forum that would allow you to bring up and discuss the rightness or wrongness of a way of treating people, or to petition to have them changed.
Smalltown and rural America is at least superficially homogenous and it runs on patterns of informal rules that assume homogeneity, a fixed number of social roles and ways of being in the world. That works for people who aren't exceptional. Such people often find formal social contracts intrusive, controlling, authoritarian; they don't experience the informal-rules structure as if it existed as a set of rules at all, so they think the way they live, the way they prefer to live, is a world nearly empty of rules, or else they think of those rules as the Natural Way, rules that humans didn't make but which were instead just magically always already there.
Conservatives have a wariness about the formal social contract, and we need to understand that just as they need to understand our reluctance to rely on the informal version by itself. At its core, it's something we should all be able to recognize and relate to: the political body that we have is not the same thing as the "plural us", the community of people. It ought to be, but it is instead its own special interest, the governing class, and it is unfortunately largely populated with people whose primary interest is in consolidating their own power and extending their reach. When you look at it that way, it should not look so unreasonable for people to resent extensions of the government (i.e., laws and formal policies) into interpersonal zones where human behavior had previously been regulated only by the informal social contract. They see it as an infringement on their right to interact informally in that zone without governmental interference.
The difficult task is to get such people to perceive the informal contract as a set of rules as well and realize how those rules can also be an assault on personal freedoms.
--------
I am now echoed on DreamWidth, like many other LJ folks. My DW acct is here. Please friend/link me on DW if you are a DreamWidth user.
--------
Index of all Blog Posts