In addition, when they talked as if city people lived by different values, they were not emphasizing abortion, or gay marriage, or the things that are typically pointed to as the cultural issues that divide lower-income whites from the Democratic Party. Instead, the values they talked about were intertwined with economic concerns.

And as he dug, he wept. He saw Hari's animated face, and numberless dead men, and the hatred on the faces of the sepoys . . . and it suddenly seemed to him that he could see clearly the basis of all conflict and misery, something mysterious which grows in men at the same time as hair and teeth and brains
and which reveals its presence by the utter and atrocious inflexibility of all human habits and beliefs, even including his own.

I like rural areas.

...but these backwaters of existence sometimes breed, in their sluggish depths, strange acuities of emotion... ("Afterward")

You still want to keep the county relatively rural, so that it's an attractive place to live.

It's rural America. It's where I came from. We always refer to ourselves as real America. Rural America, real America, real, real, America.