I think a mistake "we" often make is tending to think everywhere is sort of like where we live, and what we know, and places we know that are different are just viewed as contemptible, in the main. A New Yorker is apt to look down his nose at anyone from Owasso, OK, and probably think they are inbred hillbillies with no symphony of any note.
We stayed with a friend in Boston for a week who is an OB/GYN, super nice guy. I could tell from his book collection he was pretty liberal, though we never talked politics except he brought up guns fairly often, he was against them. He mentioned he had visited a friend in Montana and noted it was "really a different country, everyone had a gun, it was frightening".
I just agreed while noting that life in the country was a lot different from life in Newton, MA. He was well traveled, has an apartment in Paris, but he didn't know much at all about rural US. And he didn't care to.
I imagine someone in Owasso, OK, can probably get by with a lot less income than someone in Newton, MA, and that person likely shops a lot at Walmart, which no Newtonian would ever do.
I tend to be leery of "one size fits all" edicts and mandates coming down from DC. Maybe so, maybe not. I'm about finished with a biography of Grant and find it interesting how his Presidency increased the power of Federal government by quite a bit, in theory, but later Presidents chose often not to exercise that power, much, to protect specifically Freedmen in the South. Getting out of slavery was good of course, but what followed was in some ways worse. Grant was also sympathetic to the cause of the Native Americans, but had a hard time governing folks like Sheridan and the white settlers exploding into the West. Sheridan wanted all the bison killed off so as to control the Indians.
