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How Much of My Progressive Lifestyle Is Really About Elitism?
Turns out, more than I want to admit.
A few weeks ago, I was coming back from a long road trip and stopped for gas at a small town in eastern Montana. The man at the pump front of us clocked my Washington license plates and started chatting to me. It was an odd conversation from the get-go. He started by telling me how much his sister hated living in Washington. I shrugged and agreed that the rain was pretty depressing. Then he vented about the Covid restrictions in Washington, how not-free it is there, how much better life is in Montana. I shrugged again, trying to avoid further igniting his obvious foul mood, skirting his questions with awkwardness until we left.
As we drove away, my boyfriend (a recent California transplant from Wisconsin) told me the man had been trying to start a fight.
“Why?” I asked, perplexed.
“Because people in rural America hate people from the coasts,” he said. “They think you’re elitist assholes who are taking all the resources and power away from the rest of the country.”
Being a good radical Leftist, I agreed that that was accurate: the bourgeois coastal cities are sucking the rural working class dry. What I didn’t say then was that the other part of the man’s judgment was accurate…
