Notes on a Journey to Small-Town America

Right as Jason Aldean’s recent song raised controversy, I happened to go on a cross-country road trip from my current Jersey home to my small-town hometown in Nebraska. I spent a lot of my trip thinking about the realities of small-town life versus the popular culture renditions. American popular culture either portrays them as uncomplicated fonts of virtue, or as bigoted hellholes. Contra Aldean’s notion that small towns are harbors of peaceful living and virtue, the last time I visited somebody got murdered. This time around, I witnessed the same kind of anti-social behavior at the movies (including letting a kid play a game on their device with the volume up!) that I see in New Jersey. On the other side, I also hung out with an old friend who has moved back from Los Angeles with his husband, and is very happy with this decision. Small towns are more far more complex than most people think.

The discourse around small towns also tends to throw them all into the same bucket, which is a huge problem. Every town’s location, economic activity, and demographics set it apart from others. My hometown of Hastings has about 25,000 people. It sits at a railroad junction in corn country, with a few small factories. There’s a small private college and a good-sized hospital that draw in some educated workers. It does not suffer from the problems of unemployment as other towns of its size. In fact, it has a labor shortage despite the fact that the mall and a lot of other retail has closed. Hastings was founded by stern Scots Presbyterian immigrants and has a strangely Calvinist ethos for a town on the edge of the West. It has always had well-supported public institutions, making it unlike many other small towns (more on that later), especially in the South. It’s not very racially diverse, with over 93% of the population being white. It’s neither prosperous or poor.

While small towns differ greatly in size, demographics, and economy, they are developing a more uniform political culture shaped by a radicalized Republican Party and Fox News. My first couple of days there I could sense an angry reactionary resentment in the air, from the skull stickers on pickup trucks to the guy flying a “Fuck Biden” flag from his front yard on a major street. (The U and C are covered by an American flag, but this is still an obscenity I could not imagine when I grew up.) There was lots of talk about The Sound of Freedom, evidently a big hit there. Paranoid Fox narratives ran deep. I told someone who saw it that people were buying out whole theaters for it. They assumed it was a ploy by “them” to “keep people from seeing it,” not an effort to artificially boost its box office.

During our trip we took my parents on a little trip to the Black Hills and the Badlands, where I got to see more of this national rural conservative culture. We got sandwiches at a great local place in North Platte, across the street from a Christian book store. That store had some openly Christofascist iconography out front:

In the same town a local motel marquee crowed that it was “American Owned and Operated,” which I could only take as a reference to the many hotels in the area owned by South Asian immigrants. In the Black Hills, a vacation spot attuned to small-town ways, I saw plenty of bumper decals and t-shirts featuring assault weapons, including a design I saw multiple times with the stripes of the American flag rendered as different rifles. There was the usual tourist t-shirt store in the town where we stayed, but it flew a blue line flag out front and had MAGA paraphernalia front and center. This included a t-shirt that showed Trump as “the Good” Biden as “the Bad” and Kamala Harris as “the Ugly,” just to throw in some misogynoir.

I found this atmosphere disheartening since it made me feel like an unwanted outsider the region of my birth and childhood. I texted a friend living in a different small town in Texas where I once lived, and he told me, very simply, “MAGA won.” Even if Biden is in the White House, he is right that MAGA politics dominates large swathes of the country. My home state recently passed the usual passel of laws restricting abortion and trans care and shoveling money from public to private schools under the banner of “choice.” One state official is currently waging a McCarthy-esque crusade against “social emotional learning.”

At the same time, there is a petition sponsored by public school teachers to put the bill giving money to private schools on the ballot so it can be overturned. I have family members in the state fighting for this cause, and when I was downtown in my hometown one canvasser was gathering signatures. On our trip through the Nebraska panhandle we stopped in tiny Lewellen, which had a cafe selling artwork and a Pride sign outside. When we went to the Crazy Horse Memorial a Lakota speaker gave a talk about culture and history but also made sure to denounce South Dakota’s gutting of its Native American history curriculum. I appreciated her guts, considering that a super-majority of that audience were MAGA types. People on the coast often don’t understand that the reddest of red areas still have people resisting the MAGA storm against long odds.

A ballot initiative is a smart way to fight back because a lot of voters in the middle might pull the level for Republicans, they don’t actually agree with a lot of Republican orthodoxy. For example, a few years ago the state legislature refused to raise the minimum wage, but voters voted for it. There is a counter-campaign to get people to not sign the petition because its backers know a majority of people in the state don’t want their public school tax dollars diverted to rich families’ private education. Those Republican voters who vote against conservative policies, however, seem unlikely to turn into Democrats. (I’ll leave a discussion of the potential reasons for another time.)

My hometown and Nebraska generally has always been conservative, but it used to be small-c conservative, more about a mentality than an ideology. This kind of conservatism still believed in supporting public institutions, for example. My state used to routinely elect moderate Democrats to the governorship and Senate. The change I have witnessed towards an aggressive and extreme conservatism that attacks public schools and turns guns into fetish objects has less to do with conditions in the town, and more with the aforementioned nationalization of Fox-MAGA politics. Talk to someone in my hometown who is conservative and invested in public affairs, and you will soon hear Fox talking points. Those in this bubble are constantly having their viewpoints reinforced.

For example, I went to Mass with my parents, and heard that the IMAX theater at the local museum (one of my town’s many booster efforts) was showing an anti-abortion film (Lifemark) sponsored by a local pro-life group. On our trip through Nebraska to South Dakota we visited various historical sites related to Western history. The Crazy Horse Memorial was the only one that did not try to erase Native Americans or treat them in noxious, old-fashioned ways.

It’s something I witnessed time and again. At the Fort Kearney historical site the interpretation has not been updated since I started going there in the 80s, with references to the “Red Man.” I went to the Fur Trade Museum in Chadron, Nebraska, excited to see a site devoted to such a crucial and overlooked part of American history. The museum had some great artifacts, but did nothing to discuss the impact on Native communities, or how their role in the fur trade shaped global affairs. The Mount Rushmore site may as well be frozen in amber. There was no discussion in the museum of the meaning the mountain had to the Lakota, for example. The aged museum film narrated by Tom Brokaw praised Thomas Jefferson as a prophet of freedom for “all men” while not mentioning the hundreds he held in literal bondage. It even referred to the Civil War as “The War Between the States”! The angry-looking white men with their Punisher skull shirts I spotted there could get their nationalist fix without any thoughts made to this country’s very real contradictions.

While the conservative epistemic bubble disheartened me, once we got back from our trip, my time in my hometown revealed the internal divisions and differing trajectories. The whole time I was there, public spaces felt vacant, even inside of my parents’ church, which had far fewer attendees than in the past. It wasn’t until I went to Wal-Mart to grab a phone charger for my car that I saw the crowds. It was a far more diverse place than the social circle of my parents and their friends. The same goes for the local public pool, which also had a much younger demographic.

With youth and newcomers can come a new spirit and new blood. New businesses keep popping up downtown, started by entrepreneurs who would be priced out of starting businesses here in Jersey. I went out on the town with my friend and his husband, and they showed me a new basement cigar bar that we enjoyed for its fantastic whiskey selection. We ended at a flashy new restaurant serving things far more sophisticated than chicken-fried steak. When I stepped inside I could not believe this place was in my hometown.

While seeing new, hip businesses in a town surrounded by corn fields was interesting, they also reflect a growing class divide in my hometown related to the larger one nationwide. Like everywhere else, the middle is being hollowed out. The number of high-end restaurants is increasing, but so are the number of dollar stores. If you want to buy clothes at a brick and mortar store there’s only Wal-Mart, dollar stores, and the old-school men’s store downtown that still tailors suits. While I was at home I heard that the local country club was expanding their swimming pool, likely a way to make it easier for the town’s upper crust to avoid the hoi polloi. In any case, the big new houses are located outside of city limits, full of affluent children who will attend the school outside of town originally built for farm kids, and undercutting the public schools in town in the process.

Since I’ve been back in New Jersey, the contrasts to my hometown have been striking. Yesterday I made a Costco run, and as I walked the aisles I heard several different languages spoken by people from different races and nationalities. Today I took my kids to a couple of local town centers which had many more people on the streets. While I appreciate the diversity and amount of stuff to do, my hometown trip did remind me of some things I wished I could bring home. Here in my affluent Jersey suburb, the pressures around status and social hierarchy can be suffocating. I will miss the more easy-going, open relationships of the Great Plains and its lower tolerance of bullshit. At the same time, I relish my adopted homeland’s greater tolerance for the existence of different kinds of people. I think that’s the better trade-off.