Small towns: Time's Joe Klein writes that Palin has exploited America's myth of the frontier and the small town. According to Joe, this is pure nostalgia. America of the past 50 years has suffered the same kinds of defeats the South did from 1965 through the Civil Rights Era, so we yearn for the innocent days of Little House on the Prairie.

Realism, by contrast, lies in the urbane figure of Barack Obama. He is the 21st century.

In my view, this is the liberal fantasy of the Black Man. Modern urban life produces Obamas--thank God for it.

But let's get real. More often the big city gives us the black hustler. The absent black father. The black predator. Looking at the General Social Survey, 32.1% of black males in cities of at least 500,000 admitted to having been arrested, at least once. The corresponding number in towns under 25,000 is 23%. Arrest is a pretty good indicator of a dim future, so for every two guys that go down in towns like Wasilla, Alaska, three go down in the Big City.

Allow me an anecdote to illustrate my view that small towns produce less dysfunction, especially for blacks. My best friend when I was a kid was Henry, one of the only black boys in our small town. There was zero black subculture. Henry grew up in a close-knit white world, and there was no place to go if he didn't like it. And I don't think it was an accident that he turned out to be such a great guy. He got excellent grades in school. He never got into trouble. Henry was an incredible athlete. He graduated from a nearby university and ended up earning his MA. Last I heard, he is a working as a... okay, I think it's something like a community organizer, but we can live with that.

For all the injustices they suffered, black families showed much less dysfunction before achieving legal equality, and some of this, I think, was due to the fact that many blacks hadn't moved to the city yet, and small town life is good for people. There's more informal social control, an absence of deviant subcultures, and blacks especially seem to thrive in this kind of environment.

I might sound like a social engineer here, but at least I'm not pretending that all groups of people react to a given environment in the same way.

Klein seems pleased to see this old way life fading into the sunset, but we need more, not fewer small towns.

Small-town folks are not clinging, they're de-clinging

Obama's claim that small town people cling to guns and religion because of job difficulties reveals elite Americans' over-use of economic explanations for behavior. Don't get me wrong--money is important--but there are many other things that drive behavior as well.

I come from that part of America and have watched those folks embrace gun culture and religion through the good times and the bad times--it didn't matter. The simplest explanation for these traditions is... uh... tradition. People have been doing these things for a long time, and many see no reason not to continue.

But that's not exactly right. I suspect that the Andy Griffiths types are "clinging" less to these activities as modern culture increasingly has its way with them. As usual, let's look at the General Social Survey.

Mean church attendance score for small-town working class

1972 4.44

1982 3.97

1993 3.81

2002 3.61

2006 3.41

Four means "once a month" and three means "several times a year." There has been a big drop in attendence among these folks.

Look at the graph above to see the same kind of story for guns. While small-town people are still more likely to have guns than urban dwellers, the numbers have fallen significantly since the early 70s. It really shouldn't surprise you very much: their WalMarts sell Playstations too.

So this demographic is not reacting against economic troubles: it is gradually joining the secular Couch Potatoes found in the rest of the country.