You think there’s no culture in rural areas?

There is less cultural output because there are fewer people. There's probably a thousand new bands that started in Brooklyn this month. You just can't have those numbers out in the sticks because you don't have the people. There literally aren't enough singers.

Culture matters. People interacting and inspiring each other matters. It's not that there's nothing happening out in Wisconsin or wherever, but there's less. There are fewer people to be doing stuff!

I almost wrote a preemptive response about "where does your food come from". I don't think most of the people living outside of cities are farmers.

A quick search says

The Midwest rounds out the top five states with the most farmers:

    Missouri (162,345, or 5% of the labor force)
    Iowa (145,432 or 9% of the labor force)
    Ohio (130,439 or 2% of the labor force)
    Oklahoma (130,434 or 7% of the labor force)

I don't know if https://usafacts.org/articles/farmer-demographics/ is a real site but it would be awkward for someone to make up these numbers.

That's a lot of people in the sense of like "I couldn't have that many people at my birthday party" but not a lot of people compared to like, who lives in major cities. Bushwick, Brooklyn is one neighborhood and has like 130k people.

Food is important but probably not a justification for holding everyone else hostage. Especially when most people living in those areas aren't even growing food. (Some are second order involved, like the guy who works the Laundromat helps the farmer or whatever). Also especially when the efforts being stymied would help people, like student loan forgiveness or federally funded school meals.

The urban liberal doesn’t consider the rural conservative POV, and they want to apply their position nationally. Should the rural conservative have no useful defense against that?

The rural conservative POV is utterly poisoned by decades of racial violence and regressive policies. There's like a mass shooting every day. Climate change is going to fuck us. Conservatism is not an okay world view.

That said, the answer is probably local government for things that are actually local. Environmental issues cannot be local. You can't have this town dumping mercury into the water and pretending that's just fine. But for something like "we want a bike lane here" or "we want a library that's open weekends" that's doesn't need to be federal. But if "local" means "no queers allowed to get married here" then the locals can fuck themselves.

Guns are a whole separate wedge issue. I think they should at least be treated the same as cars- license, registration, insurance, mechanisms to remove the license like DUI. I don't know how close to reality that is.

I wrote this on my phone so it's not my best work.