I saw one article that attempted to describe the de facto cold civil war in our country as that between the heartland and urban areas. I would qualify that description
by saying that the conflict is between heartland culture and urban culture
people. The heartland is a state of mind
as much as a zip code. There are heartland
culture people in urban areas, but they are often out-numbered by urban culture
people who have more institutional power including corporate, economic,
political, and bureaucratic power. In contast, heartland culture people dominate in more rural areas.
Fashion is normally understood in the realm of style,
including clothing, music, architecture, hair, etc…, when fashion should be
thought of in terms of both moral fashion and style fashion. Moral fashion is
fashionable ideas about what is good and bad, right and wrong, ok and not
ok. While style fashion can be morally
agnostic, shifts in style fashion usually reflect shifts in moral fashion.
Urban culture people are fashionable people, morally and stylistically. Within urban culture it as a fundamental moral obligation to be aligned with the latest moral ideas, which are considered to represent moral progress. To fall behind the latest in moral fashion, is to falter in one’s moral progress, and to be “unfashionable” and in moral error.
Urban culture people have walked backwards into a form of religion, in the name of rejecting traditional religion, and have created quasi-religious terms to describe moral fashion piety. To be “politically correct” or now to be “kind” is to be aligned with the latest morally fashionable idea. To be “woke” is to be enlightened into the deeper ideas that lie beneath political correctness. To be “phobic” is to be in a state of misalignment and quasi-sin. To be “hateful” is to act out of ones “phobia”.
If the urban culture collective has started to follow an idea, there is no higher or competing realm of truth for that idea to be measured against. There are no competing goods or higher transcendent moral obligations that provide internal guardrails for morally fashionable people who are in hot pursuit of what is morally fashionable, whether it be canonizing George Floyd, embracing CRT, hoisting umbridled and unconsidered contempt on vaccine decliners, etc....
Heartland culture people are fashion resistant, particularly in the realm of
moral fashion. They tend to be working
class, or recent (legal) immigrants, and/or practitioners of traditional
religion, mainly Christianity or Judaism, who have consciously resisted
wokeness.
In this part of the 21st century, urban culture has become so intensely morally fashionable with ever more accelerated and ever more radical and outlandish "woke" ideas that they have thought their way into a headspace that has no room for any respect or acknowledgement of heartland culture. Fashion resistant heartland culture is the moral antithesis and nemesis of what modern urban culture has become, and heartland culture people are moral fashion infidels.
To the extent that urban culture people have entered positions of institutional power they act out the obligations of their urban fashionable moral universe, and so they serve only the interests of the morally fashionable. This has become a zero sum game where gains for the morally fashionableness mean losses for the heartland, and there are no rights endowed to heartland people by their Creator that are not expendible in the relentless pursuit of moral fashion by the movers and shakers of urban culture. Members of the urban moral fashion collective have become increaslingly vocal that heartland fashion resistant people are domestic enemies, while heartland culture people are increasingly seeing the urban culture collective as a vast domestic enemy.
As urban culture moral fashionableness is spinning out of
control, it is leaving behind more and more urban people who would not have
heretofore considered themselves to be more aligned with heartland culture people.
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