Alienation rates in politics higher in rural areas than in cities

A new poll finds a stark geographic division in the nation’s culture and politics. The study was conducted by Gallup for the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. The polling finds deep distrust in the nation’s institutions and leaders. For example, less than 5 percent of all respondents to the survey believe America is “strongly improving” while nearly six out of 10of those polled agree that the “American way of life,” which is undefined in the poll, “is rapidly disappearing.”  Distrust in American institutions — Wall Street, government, science — has been rising since at least the mid-1960s. Indeed, a decline in trust is a feature in all industrialized countries. A good number of Americans feel powerless and marginalized. What this poll finds, however, is that the levels of personal alienation differ with population density.  “Alienation rates are twice as likely to be very high in the most rural areas as in the denser cities; three-and-a-half times more likely if you have only a high school diploma than a graduate degree; and four times more likely if you are in the lowest income bracket than if you belong in the highest income bracket,” write James Davison Hunter and Carl Desportes Bowman. Hunter and Bowman make it clear that all Americans are dissatisfied with the way things are going. But, they add, “When one considers all dimensions of disaffection together and looks to their cumulative impact, one sees the greatest intensity of total disaffection in a population that tends to be more male than female, disproportionately represented among Baby Boomers, and among those who reside in the lowest density parts of the country, though not in any particular region of the country.”  The poll finds that “about half (53%) of all who have a very high disaffection live in the lowest two levels of population density. If you live in the least populated rural areas, you are twice as likely to be in the highest category of disaffection.”