Urban living is more anonymous and alienating than rural living.

There are too many people in a city to form relationships with everyone, you don't know 99.9% of the people you see in daily life because there are so many moving around. On the other hand in a small village, most times you see another person it's a repeated interaction and you have met that person before.

So the rural conservative view and values on social interaction is more based on repeated interactions with people you already know, whereas the urban liberal has values and prefers systems that work well with anonymous people; the government needs to step in to help people in need (because their neighbours won't).

In my experience, neither urban or rural communities are impersonal.

Suburbs, however, are dystopian soul destroying hellscapes. Simultaneously parasites feeding off of the prosperous urban areas while desecrating previously productive lands.

Urban and rural peoples are natural allies, kept apart by pro suburbanite propaganda. The American Dream™ was presented as McMansions, endless pavement, strip malls, and 2 SUVs in every garage.

The suburbs have changed. White Flight is a cycle, not a one time event in the 70s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight

https://lit.newcity.com/2010/12/20/nonfiction-review-please-...

Do you have evidence of this? Survey or something?

I have lived in suburban, urban, and rural environments. I think the issue is more about whether globalization has changed all that. During the pandemic lockdown, many people were working from home, and some realized that paying for rent in NYC or SF wasn't worth it, if they couldn't go out and enjoy it, so it makes a lot more sense to work from home in a rural area if I am an IT person. That said, I don't think political viewpoints has anything to do with trust- when I was in the city, I didn't think "liberal" or "conservative" neighbors were more likely to be trusted. The point is that if one is raised believing there will always be a helping hand, it is better to not expect much, even if there is nothing wrong in asking for more help than supposedly more "individualistic" areas, which, in many cases isn't exactly reflected in rural vs. urban environments (e.g. cattle grazing was exploited by libertarians as cheap land leasing)

> The point is that if one is raised believing there will always be a helping hand, it is better to not expect much, even if there is nothing wrong in asking for more help than supposedly more "individualistic" areas

I don’t disagree with anything here, except there is a correlation between the amount of trust liberals and conservatives give to people in their community, and one user up above directly addressed how small towns generate trust between people they personally know. The only thing I would disagree with here is the notion that some people believe there is a helping hand to be had; I think this is more of a political myth. What I was originally getting at is that liberals believe government can and does help people, while conservatives, at least in the US, promote the idea that government should be hands off.

I don't disagree either, and maybe I worded it to indicate otherwise. While I think there is a difference between the notion that a helping hand exists or not and whether a person is entitled to advocate for government assistance, the two are typically correlated because liberals believe in a legal mechanism (voting) for seeing that type of assistance through a machine, the Democratic Machine (Tammany Hall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoils_system) (I wouldn't even call many government services assistance, but programs that accomplish basic services, like National Parks management, etc).

I also think the GOP relies more on the patronage system now,

What I find interesting is that there is a study of this viewpoint, and it's called Primals: https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/Penn-Primals-Project-resear...

I think that best captures the divide, more so than specific political issues, although that does overlap alot- for example, the perception of crime and immigration, while not correlated, get grouped as a platform issue on the right, whereas the Democratic platform does not consider those issues in the same light.

There is another anthropological term for fear, that I can't remember but read a few days ago- I think it was a Dutch anthropologist who coined a term in the 70s and also developed a computer architecture.

Except for the police, social security, and medicare