Turning Point USA sponsored an alternative halftime entertainment during the Super Bowl. One of the featured acts performed a country song lamenting how small-town values and the “all-American virtues” they supposedly embody are disrespected by urban America and the elites presumed to look down on rural people.
It is a theme that resonates deeply within MAGA and Christian nationalist circles because it asserts that they — and they alone — remain faithful to what is good and virtuous about the United States. But what, exactly, are these virtues? Beyond the refrain about wanting to be left alone to love one’s family, drive a truck, and drink a beer, they appear to include marriage, family life, neighbors looking out for one another, hard work, honesty, and the like.
It takes a considerable measure of self-pitying arrogance to claim sole possession of values that are widely shared by Americans regardless of where they live or how they vote.
Small towns and smaller cities are often less diverse than major metropolitan areas. Commutes are shorter. Business may still be done with a handshake. Daily encounters bring people together in familiar ways that are harder to sustain in large cities. I have lived in some of the largest cities in the country, in a small city in the far West, and in the densely packed East Coast corridor. I prefer smaller cities and believe the nation would benefit from a broader distribution of its population among them — for historical and practical reasons that need not detain us here.
But the central point remains: the people who live in major urban areas hold the same core values the song claims for a mythical small-town America. They simply express them differently. In cities, neighborhoods function as communities. Care for one another is a cherished value. The welfare of families and children is a shared concern even among those who are single or childless. Anonymity may be greater, but no one entirely escapes being known by neighbors, friends, and coworkers. Commutes may fragment community, separating work from home, yet the values remain intact. All those virtues piled high in the back of the pickup truck are present in apartment buildings, row houses, and suburban streets as well.
Urban and rural life differ in texture and rhythm, but not in their moral foundations. The differences are cultural, not ethical.
With that in mind, I am willing to venture that most supporters of MAGA and Christian nationalism are not rural holdouts in forgotten towns. They are widely distributed throughout modern metropolitan communities. The appeal of songs that belittle urban sophistication while indulging in self-congratulatory grievance expresses resentment toward an imagined slight — a caricature carefully cultivated and then paraded as reality.
Repeat a caricature often enough and it begins to feel true. But it remains a distortion — and a self-fulfilling one. If we convince ourselves that our neighbors despise our values, we will soon treat them as if they do. That is not cultural pride. It is a corrosive fiction, and a self-destructive one.