The geographic prestige narrative of American taste flipped in the 2010s.

Evidence

For much of the twentieth century, conservatives romanticized rural America as an idyllic heartland of small towns and good people, contrasting it with the supposed moral decay of big cities. By the 2010s, this narrative had flipped: Cosmopolitan urban centers had become consumer paradises stocked with exotic cheeses and imported hams, while rural Americans languished under the weight of drug addiction and industrial decline. … Kids were dying in the Rust Belt of Ohio and the Bible Belt of Tennessee … Some of the worst of it was in Charlotte’s best country club enclaves. It was in Mission Viejo and Simi Valley in suburban Southern California, and in Indianapolis, Salt Lake, and Albuquerque, in Oregon and Minnesota and Oklahoma and Alabama. … The urban professional classes had little sense of just how desperate life had become in much of the country. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 431

Categorization

• XREF: Relevant to the reader’s argument that economic hardship correlates with cultural geography; complements the ADDENDUM on ‘Grafting & Growth’ only weakly, and connects to the ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ piece’s theme of class-stratified cultural signaling.