Anti-urban bias

David Brooks has a new column about John Thune, a cookie-cutter Republican. According to Brooks, Thune "is down-the-line conservative on social, economic and foreign policy matters". What makes him so remarkable?

The first thing everybody knows about him is that he is tall (6 feet 4 inches), tanned (in a prairie, sun-chapped sort of way) and handsome (John McCain jokes that if he had Thune’s face he’d be president right now). If you wanted a Republican with the same general body type and athletic grace as Barack Obama, you’d pick Thune.

The gist of the column is that Thune is handsome, "unfailingly genial, modest and nice", so he would be a good face for the conservative policies that the country rejected in 2008.

What I found interesting about the article was how it revealed a little bit about Brooks.

His populism is not angry. He doesn’t rail against the malefactors of wealth. But it’s there, a celebration of the small and local over the big and urban.

The opposite of small is big. And the opposite of local is urban. Because nobody lives in urban areas. According to Wikipedia, 70% of the American population lives in urban areas. 30% of these people (21% of the total population) live in city centers, and the other 70% (49% of the total population) live in the suburbs.