When you read up on U.S. political basics, you can’t help but come across the detail that many of the people in cities in the U.S. seem to lean left, yet what isn’t as clear is why and what influences their concentration in cities/urban areas.
Cities don’t exactly appear to be affordable, and left-leaning folks in the U.S. don’t seem to necessarily be much wealthier than right-leaning folks, so what’s contributed to this situation?
It’s more that cities tend to make people liberal. Some folks in small towns have never met a Muslim person or a Korean person. They have only a family tradition of racism in their small white racist town. People in cities have to live alongside many different types of people, and get to eat different foods and have different experiences. That cures racism.
Yep. There’s nothing like face-to-face interactions to dispell myths, bias, and assumptions.
Oh, like the myth that cities are a utopia where there is no racism? Because guess what, bud, there are plenty of fucking racist pieces of shit in the city. Or how about the myth that only white people are racist? Because there is racism between Asians and Black people. Or Black people and Hispanics. Or between the various religions. It ain’t just white people.
Yes, there tend to be more liberal viewpoints in large cities, but this broad-stroke painting a picture of a lack of racism in cities needs to stop. People need to re-learn nuance.
Maybe ask them if they’re generalizing before a tirade? Yes, hate and stupidity exists everywhere, but I’ve lived in rural and metro areas and their generalization is accurate. And for that matter, there’s a lot of warm people that live in back country who aren’t stupid or racist, but, depending on a few factors, you can easily run into rural stereotypes. All the same I imagine a lot of us are talking in general views.
Being liberal is more than just an issue of race and culture though. It’s a whole philosophy. And there are things in every established philosophy I can’t see myself getting behind.
It’s a whole philosophy
… I kinda feel I might regret this, but what do you mean? Are you sure you’re not too deeply invested in your own biases about what “a liberal” is?
There are a lot of people that identify as liberals, and a lot of people that identify as conservatives. They’re still all very different people. It’s a better grouping than say, someone’s preference of coke vs pepsi, but it’s not all encompassing.
The comment I was replying to was implying two things, one, that exposure to cultural diversity magically changes someone, and two, that rural areas lack that diversity (one could argue a third implication, that cultural diversity is the only diversity).
Both of these are wrong. If you live close to people of all backgrounds, sure, you’re going to be less likely to double down on people who are culturally different than you, and I welcome this. But exposure to people all around the world isn’t going to equate to, say, making you believe in raising the minimum wage or that reparations would be great as an idea. I’m not saying there aren’t things that would make someone conclude such things, but there’s nothing in “exposure” alone that will do that.
In their traditional senses of the words, “conservative” and “liberal” are political philosophies, two of several political philosophies, which include the likes of such things as “libertarianism”, “marxism”, “communitarianism”, “futurism”, “fascism”, “socialism”, and sometimes “stoicism”. Imagine asking a presidential candidate a single question like “do you support civilian gun ownership”, and if they give an answer you agree with, thinking “the candidate gave a liberal answer, and I’m a liberal, so I must vote for them”. That’s not how it works. These are fleshed out things. If I didn’t know better, I’d wonder if the original commenter just hated rural people (and yet I’m downvoted into oblivion for mentioning “liberal” means something more fleshed out and I end up being asked if I’m the biased one, like you’re better than this, Lemmy). I’m a rural societal member (side note, rural society has its own types of diversities that are not common in urban areas, such as more tolerance to the handicapped) and I seem to get along great with the liberal cause even though I’m not a liberal (I don’t know what I would be considered).
Aspects of liberal political philosophy:
- The belief that human ingenuity is better than tradition at solving problems
- The belief that heavy government interference is more likely to help than to cause trouble
- Belief that everyone deserves to be taken care of, and that it is everyone’s responsibility to do this
- Belief that violence begets violence and that the most stable and predictable path to peace is disarmament
- Belief that progress is best accomplished through consensus-based central planning
- Belief that the primary cause of human suffering is lack of resources
- Belief that evil is a disease state that can be eradicated through provision of adequate care and attention
Left leaning people tend to be better educated. The majority of the jobs for better educated people are in cities. Cities are more expensive because jobs for better educated people tend to pay more.
This is my take too. Reality has a liberal bias, and people doing skilled/educated work tend to have a firmer grasp on reality
So you think someone who designs cars has a better grasp on reality than a person who fixes cars?
So if we set aside those that simply lived there already & so that affected their leaning, then the other part may be the employment opportunities?
Which then may shift the question to matters concerning the employers’ location decisions, so that’s another route to research, I suppose.
Employers go where they can find a well-educated workforce that will sustain them. And round and round we go.
Economic location geography is a lot more complicated than that (not every business is labour-intensive, cluster economics, IO logistics et cetera). Political geography of population also isn’t equal or similar to economical geography, given that social factors like class or race and discourses around sometimes heavily distort those maps we imagine.
I’m not sure that it’s simply that a city attracts left leaning people.
I grew up conservative, religious, and from the country, and had to move to the city because that’s where my mom took us. My move to the left ocurred due to what the city offered: cultures. I was exposed to many other ways of thinking, to art, to music, to trends, to drugs. I came to see other types of people as just people like me, with different points of view but each deserving their own chance at the American dream. I also became atheist.
The city might attract the left, but it also creates the left.
Incidentally, I want to move to a more secluded part of the state, probably where you’d see the F**k Biden billboards. We can’t all be pigeon holed so easily.
Incidentally, I want to move to a more secluded part of the state, probably where you’d see the F**k Biden billboards. We can’t all be pigeon holed so easily.
I’m trying to move to the sticks right now, and a high likelihood of having trumpers for neighbors is honestly one of the things that’s bothering me the most.
I concur, cities are cosmopolitan in their nature. Being confronted to diversity brings socialist ideas more easily than living in a secluded countryside, where everyone is the same.
Though it can bring rejection and discrimination as easily.
Exactly where I was going to go with it. This question comes with a lot of assumptions about causation rather than just examining the correlation of political views and population density.
It’s as weird as asking the question as “why are conservatives moving to the middle of nowhere?”
Tbh I was considering flipping the question and asking, “Why aren’t leftists moving to rural areas?” but that seemed a similarly mucked up form of the question.
The question wasn’t aiming to be academic, so wasn’t carefully formed to account for causation and examining demographic details, but regardless, it could be better. I’m simply not sure how I might better ask the sort of question I’d like to ask to get the kind of info & responses that would satisfy my curiosity concerning this area.
Despite the malformed query, some of the responses here have given some useful insights, direct or indirect as they may be.
Edit:
Also, despite several of the anecdotes about moving to the city and city life influencing them to more left-leaning views, part of what influenced this question is experience in rural areas and developing as a leftist there among other left-leaning folks.
I think if you had asked " “Why aren’t leftists moving to rural areas?” " you’d get a lot of “because rural areas suck” answers. Because holy shit unless you’re there specifically for nature and isolation they’re inferior on every metric.
You have it backwards. Living in cities (and especially growing up there) move you to the left. You see people suffering and you know it’s not entirely their fault. You get to know other cultures, eat at their restaurants, hear their music etc.
Maybe, but I’m asking what draws those that may be more left-leaning to them apart from those already there, given aforementioned cost of living issues.
Again, you have this backwards. I’m suggesting that exposure to people and their cultures “moves you to the left”. Being “drawn to the right” is easier in isolation from other cultures.
If you live in a place and most of what you know comes from talk radio and Joe Rogan you will have a very different view of the world than if you live in a major city.
I understand what you (and others responding similarly) are suggesting, but that doesn’t address the question I’m asking, which is inspired in part by the fact that there are folks on the left that don’t come from the cities, but may eventually find themselves there.
The responses that have addressed that question have related the variety of stuff as a draw, economic opportunities (albeit that runs into unaddressed problems concerning how one affords the move & living), cultural variety, and the like. Those address the question better than the supposition that I have this backwards, and that cities serve as the primary producers of leftism.
That being said, I’m not dismissing those expressing that view, as I don’t think it’s entirely wrong, only that they appear (in some instances) to be overlooking rural leftists in favor of their view that cities just are or produce leftists and rural areas just are or produce only right-leaning folks/conservatives. Those may be the prevailing trends, but trends are not the whole picture.
This is a huge factor. Rural people pay all of their taxes but from their perspective, they are getting nothing back. There is no point in building a huge new Hospital 50 miles from any settlement, nobody can use it and it will be a complete waste. Why would they ever vote for politicians that plan on spending taxes to fund services, when another group is saying they will cut taxes?
