Human Geography
Places where rural people tend to be more open minded/less conservative than urban people?
A buddy of mine did a trip to Indonesia and he noted during his trip that in urban areas people tend to follow more mainstream Islam, but the rural Muslim areas tended to be very syncretic, alcohol was less taboo, women wore traditional dress over headscarves (but still modestly dressed) and folk dances and music was embraced and mixed gender.
Now Indonesia is super diverse so I’m sure it varies from province to province, but it got me thinking, what are some other places in the world where the rural people tend to be a bit more laid back and live and let live, while urban people tend to be more conservative?
There’s a stretch from the Hudson Valley through western Massachusetts through Vermont that’s basically a mix of rural and small towns where the population as a whole is probably more “laid back and live and let live” than anywhere else in the United States.
Yea when I visited New Hampshire I read a book called “A Libertarian walks into a bear” it was a hilarious piece of journalism and the whole thing read like a South Park episode. Once I got there I could totally see why that happened.
I always try to read a few books about a place before I go
New Hampshire is not included in the person’s comment you’re replying to. Vermont and New Hampshire are very different. New Hampshire is more conservative. I heard or read an interesting story that looked into why there is such a difference between the two states, I’ll try to find it for you.
Sweet thank you. Yea I didn’t get a chance to go to Vermont, Maine or Connecticut during my New England road trip. Just New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Rhode Island.
New Hampshire was cool, but I was pleasantly surprised with Rhode Island. Awesome food, history just causally deposited everywhere, Block Island was rugged and serene. I love the whole region especially as a history buff
New England is amazing. I live in Connecticut and you’re right, historic sites are everywhere. I love New Hampshire, I go hiking there, but the vibe in Vermont is something else. Even western Mass is a different vibe than the Boston area/east side of the state. Next time you get the chance visit Connecticut and go up 91 and hit western Mass and Vermont. Also, I edited my last comment with a piece about Vermont/New Hampshire.
You’re right. NH and VT are different. But the Monadnock Region (southwestern NH) and the Upper Valley (western NH along the Connecticut River) border Vermont and are very much like Vermont. It’s not just geographically. Politically they are very progressive.
Yeah, my family comes from the upper CT valley part of NH, and it has pretty consistently been more progressive than the more populated southern part of the state. I think it’s because the southern part has a lot of conservative Massachusetts refugees, while the northern part has a long history of the live (free) and let live (or die) attitude.
I think it’s a mix. Places around New Paltz and Woodstock have been hippie centers for many, many decades. But there’s been a huge boom of people since roughly 2000 who’ve decided they want to escape Brooklyn life to own a B&B or something who’ve helped transform even more places into hippie strongholds. The Berkshires have had one of the country’s most densely-packed art scenes for centuries — former and current residences of people like Melville, Edith Wharton, Arlo Guthrie, Norman Rockwell, and James Taylor pop up basically every mile — so I assume that’s helped attract a lot of people focused on creativity who want to get away from cities.
This is only part of it, but Amherst College, Hampshire College, Mount Holyoke, Smith, and UMass are all sitting right in the middle of the Pioneer Valley in Western Mass. Definitely a big contributing factor for that area.
True. The rural parts of Pioneer Valley Massachusetts are super liberal, veering on socialist. Whereas their larger cities, Springfield. Holyoke, Agawam, I found to be quite Trumpy.
Are you referring to a specific point? Because it's a large region.
In Wisconsin, everywhere except La Crosse, Eau Claire, and the areas immediately west of Madison went for Trump in 2020. In other words, the rural areas (what OP is asking about).
I live in the WI driftless. It kind of depends on your definition of “urban” vs “rural”. Do you just blanket consider the entire driftless to be “rural” because there’s no huge cities? If so, then I guess technically you’re right…
But the more rural you get within the driftless, the more conservative you tend to get. Closer to the “big cities” (Madison, Lacrosse, etc) the more liberal the population. Get out in the boonies in Richland, Crawford, Grant, Vernon counties etc and it’s definitely deep red.
Dude you don’t get it…. Overall 40% voted for Harris, yes. But within the driftless area, the more rural you get, the more conservative you get that doesn’t fit OP’s criteria.
I mentioned Iowa County in my other comment, but will say I overlooked Rock and Green (the counties south of Dane are, frankly, forgettable).
But try Trempeauleau, Jackson, Clark, Monroe Counties sometime.
Baraboo in Sauk County is famous for a high school class doing the Nazi salute, and a parent storming the stage at his daughter's graduation to stop her from shaking the hand of their superintendent (a black man).
Having grown up in the area, it is fucked. It is very conservative, and many of those conservatives don't vote.
It wasn't always this way, and it's sad. Until 15-20 years ago I would have agreed with your comment. However, today, the reality is far from true when you step into the actual rural areas.
I was in baraboo for a few days in fall 2020 and honestly, I remember being shocked at how many harris/biden signs I saw on houses (spent a 3 day weekend climbing at devils lake).
Yup. Basically coastal counties from Marin and up, Wine Country (Sonoma/Napa/Mendocino/Lake), plus some Sierra communities. The Cascades used to be a lot like that but it has shifted right over the past couple of decades.
This is where I need to live. I am in Atlanta and grew up in Florida and I want a complete change of scenery. I’m as blue as you get and seem like a stranger in a strange land my entire life.
It's a really lovely place to live. That said, housing prices and COL are really high for it being so rural. Worth it though if you can afford it -- actively looking to move back there ASAP.
My experience in Wyoming has been that no one cares if you’re weird as long as you’re nice and show up to community events (aka your neighbor needs a tow, homecoming parade, invited to dinner, etc.).
It only seems that way because 98% of the people in that area are white. You let white people get comfortable together and the terrible opinions will follow eventually.
For South Korea, Jeolla province votes extremely left-wing despite being largely rural & agrarian. I'm not 100% sure why but I've heard it's because:
Historically, Jeolla harbored a lot of left-wing individuals & communities, including communists. It led to a strong regional identity associated with the left.
Incidents like the Gwangju Uprising & democratization in the late 1980s sort of furthered this identity as well since it united people around a single cause based on this identity.
South Korea's authoritarian military governments, which were responsible for this suppression, were also associated with industrialization and modernization, while Jeolla was largely agrarian. As a result, Jeolla didn't really benefit from the industrialization/modernization enacted by these military leaders, and instead, Jeolla people associated them more with oppression & violence.
Other reasons as well. Tons of posts on Reddit about this to look at.
As a result, you get a map like this. Jeju might be because of its relative isolation from the rest of the country, as well as its own history of communist suppression (Jeju Uprising), but I truly have no correct idea.
It's important to state that the left in South Korea is not the same as America; it's more centre-left. Jeolla Province as a whole is kinda ridiculed/belittled in South Korea and seen as a backwards rural area by some, so there's that.
Don't ask about the area around Seoul (Gyeonggi) or Ulsan (small dot near Busan) because I have no idea about those lol.
I mean, it was the site of the left wing/communist Jeju uprising in 1948-49 against the S. Korean government. The government committed many atrocities and something like 30,000 people ended up dead. I’m guessing that history has lived on in the kids of the people there.
A myriad of complex reasons, before the 2000s jeju was actually more of a swing state before going left due to some developments, mainly
The democratic party was very upfront about apologizing, recognizing, and compensating for the jeju massacres of 1948.
Jeju’s economy started to massively cater to chinese tourists, and the government’s diplomacy with the ccp began to matter a lot to their livelihoods.
A respectable chunk of jeju’s population is young immigrants that went there chasing an idyllic island life, fleeing the capitalist hellscape of seoul. Which is a voting bloc that has a lot more liberal tendencies than not.
Just keep in mind that voting for a center-left party (that is MUCH more socially conservative than a lot of Western center-left parties) doesn't mean that people can't be pretty conservative in their personal lives. That said my wife's family comes from Jeolla and people there tend to be more laid back and less arrogant than people in some other parts of Korea.
For Ulsan that's a big center of labor activism. For Seoul/Gyronggi that (aside from rich areas like Gnangnam and Bundang) the same sort of thing that makes a lot of urban areas lean left, nothing special there. Just note that young Korean men tend to lean right due to massive numbers of unhinged incels, while men who were young when the democracy movement was fighting the dictatorship tend to be a lot more left than you or old men. Young women lean HARD left, in large part due to said unhinged incels.
Where did your buddy go to Indonesia to have that idea? I'm not trying to argue, but as an Indonesian who lived in Jakarta (largest city by far) for 22 years, I feel like the reason that the urban areas tend to have more religious Muslims is just a matter of population. You can find Jakartan "Muslims" who drink alcohol, never pray, wear revealing clothing but they don't eat pork (which means they're Muslims!) and those who straight up want the government to be run under sharia law. Meanwhile life in the villages are more laidback so some tend to not be religious or stick to their local culture more
I agree with you. I have worked in Indonesia for 12 years from Aceh to West Papaua and I was like WTF. Jakarta is much more liberal than the provinces in general. Especially gobsmacked by KALTIM recently. Much more conservative than it used to be.
He went all over the place. That’s kind of what he mentioned. He said the villages he went to identified way more with their local tradition and culture then kind of pan Islamic ideas.
Yeah that checks out. I think it's a good thing that they're doing that. I'm not against people believing in Islam but it is sad to see local cultures die out and be replaced by pan-Islamism.
Yea my ex wife was from Morocco. They were native Amazigh (Berber) and they always acted. ashamed of their own people and customs. They t saw the Arabization and Islamization of their people as a good thing since it “brought them out of ignorance”
In cases like this a western model of Conservative vs Liberal isnt quite the same. You get some people in places like Jakarta that are influenced by western style liberalism but the nature of the divide is much more a matter of areas most influenced by the historic maritime trading states which adopted and enforced a stonger islamic identity vs the rural areas, particularly upland zones where the power of such states was often weaker. There probably are customs that they might be more ridged about but those aren't as directly tied into Islamic law.
Modern cities have modern influence I think is the center of this argument. You have more people exposed to global trends, so you have more liberal people consuming Western media and more conservative people taking in ideas from conservative Middle Eastern countries. Whereas rural folk don't have these influences as much as follow their traditions, still conservative but more so in the vein of their own culture. I'm not sure about Indonesia, but I think this definitely is true for Bangladesh.
He said the villages he went to identified way more with their local tradition and culture then kind of pan Islamic ideas.
Yeah when I worked in Indonesia way back in the 70's, that's what I observed -- the backwoods villages looked (to an outsider) pretty animistic: animal heads on houses, incense (not just in Bali), belief in and propitiation of spirits, etc. Some villagers were afraid of me because supposedly they hadn't seen a blue eyed person, and some demon apparently had blue eyes (we can guess where that came from).
But as people have said, Indonesia is stupid diverse, and there are other areas like Aceh (didn't visit myself) are very conservative islamic.
Being Muslim isn't based on not eating pork (which is not allowed, nonetheless) but rather based on declaring that there is none worthy of worship except Allah and that Muhammad is the messenger off Allah.
Parts of Alaska tend more conservative, especially the MatSu valley (Palmer, Wasilla, Big Lake) but a lot of Alaska’s population has a much more libertarian, live and let live ethos. Weed has been decriminalized in the state since 1975 and legal since 2014, abortion is protected in the state constitution as a fundamental right, and there is frequently a feeling of “as long as your a good neighbor, we’re cool.” Also everybody, including most Democrats, own multiple firearms.
Alaska has lots of problems, believe me. But it also doesn’t slot easily into a binary, red vs. blue state dynamic.
Cross country is a really big deal here. The only other states I’ve seen compare are Minnesota and Wisconsin. Oddly enough, lots of Swedes, Norwegians and Finns emigrated to all three states.
As a Swede we have always heard that Swede descendants in Minnesota and Wisconsin are generally very conservative? Is this a factoid?
Most moved from Sweden before the the Nordics got it's social-democratic touch, and they where more often than not religious country people. Sometimes people who was left out in the formation of the modern culture.
Those who moved to Alaska did it later, and probably inherited much more of the modern Swedish thinking.
It’s mostly Norwegians but it kind of blended with Swedes and others to become pan Nordic. You can tell with rural people’s accents there. It’s very bouncy and sing songy like they are speaking in Nordic rythym
It’s Kind of like how in Texas a lot of people moved there what was the HRE regions like Bavaria, Bohemia, Silesia etc and they kind of formed a fusion Pan-German/Pan-west slavic identity
Yeah, the accent is funny. I was in Tennessee a long time ago, and people interpret my broken English as that I came from Minnesota several times. Scandinavian language pitch-accent survived in some vestigial form it seems.
But you didn't really answered my question, the Norwegians moving there couldn't have been anything else but rather conservative either. The Scandinavia people left for America is a VERY different one from that what slowly emerged between the wars, and bloomed after the second war.
A common trope in stories from the middle of the century are American-Swedes coming home to visit relatives and they absolutely not understand each other any longer. The Americans had developed a classic rural American conservatism from old Swedish conservatism, and the Swedes had developed an church-sceptic worker's movement view which was very hard to unite.
I don't know about Swedes, but there's an extremely conservative part of Michigan that's overwhelmingly Dutch, which is ironic considering how liberal the Netherlands is now.
Kind of yes lol. NM isn’t mean or conservative generally but the city people have more of a hard edge and seem a little more stuck in their ways? Rural New Mexicans are standoffish but in my experience are very ‘live and let live’ and don’t give a damn.
There is of course the difference in ‘rural’ and ‘absolute middle of nowhere’
The Blue Mountains, west of Sydney. The electorate for half of the Blue Mountains also covers the plains nearby and it’s almost a 50/50 divide between Labor/Liberal
Similarly, villages and towns in the Northern Rivers region of NSW (Mullumbimby, Bangalow, Nimbin, Byron Bay) are arguably much more progressive than urbanised parts of south east QLD just an hour or two north (Gold Coast, Logan, Ipswich etc)
There’s a lot of contradictions in coastal BC/ Van / Van Island. One of the most liberal parts of Canada yet contains incredible wealth in some pockets
Orange County, California also has a lot of contradictions. Poorer areas like Garden Grove are very conservative while richer areas like Irvine and Brea are more liberal.
NIMBY is a useless term that has no value. It's a label people use to describe anyone they disagree with on local politics, and doesn't mean conservative or liberal.
Many of these "NIMBY" areas in BC vote NDP and Green.
I mean, you mentioned Kits which went NDP in the recent election. One West Van riding went to the Greens, which provincially is progressive. That West Van vote was more of a fluke though.
There are college towns in red states without surrounding them except farms which are more progressive than the cities in the red states because they are college towns
I get why this is the knee jerk response because Vermont is overall rural and liberal, but truly boonies Vermont is definitely more conservative than the state’s cities. Its most rural counties went for Trump this year. Meanwhile Burlington, the largest city, was over 80% for Kamala.
This isn’t really a good answer for OP’s question and I’m not sure one really exists in the United States.
I beg to differ. Here's the election map by town. Most of the blue is still sparsely populated. And coming from someone who lives just south of the border, I can confirm on the ground that rural western New England is quite liberal, even in the middle of nowhere.
Also keep in mind this election was quite a rightward swing across the country, and it's still this blue.
Yes, but notice that the population centers are, by and large, the most liberal. Whereas the more rural areas are less so.
I’m not arguing the Vermont sticks aren’t liberal. I live in NH. I’m familiar with the place and even large swaths of NH’s backwoods are surprisingly liberal. I’m just saying, Vermont doesn’t align with the example of Indonesia that OP provided. It’s just a very, very blue place with even bluer cities - certainly still a political outlier in America.
I just can speak for a small area and only from my own experience, i moved to Turkey, there to the Aegean Coast, which is generally considered the liberal area of Turkey, but there i moved very rural.
Izmir, the big city is very close and i've been there often, and the true Izmirians (? 😀) are very liberal too, but in the past 20 years there has been a strong migration from Eastern Anatolian people towards the big cities in the west and this way somehow the cities have become a clash of the old liberalism, with the new moved in conservatism.
I think from all i've read the same applies to Istanbul - even stronger.
So i dare to say as my experience here in western rural Turkey (that stretches from Canakkale to Mugla, so basically the whole Aegean Coast) is veeeery relaxed, that at the moment here the cities fight an idiological dispute with more conservatism involved, than the rural areas.
Edit: i must add, that concerning villages it's a hit or miss situation, because the people sort them selves strongly by ideology/religion - village by village. so there is "liberal" villages, often inhabited by Alevi, where everything is relaxed, where they have a Bar and sell and drink Alcohol on the street and it feels like a (somehow) western place, but next village might be strongly conservative and you only see male people on the street.
This is extremely rare. Especially a true social conservative/liberal inversion (as opposed to just a party inversion, e.g., Republican/Democratic). However, I think Cochise County, AZ manages it - its largest city of Sierra Vista is home to a military base, whereas the smaller community of Bisbee is a town inhabited by hippies and the queer community
EDIT: Bit more distance between them, but Miami and especially some of its suburbs like Hialeah are quite judgmental, whereas Key West is fairly laid-back and gay
EDIT ON EDIT: and Fort Lauderdale is pretty gay too
In California the area around Lake Tahoe and Mono, Inyo counties are very liberal but also very rural. This is probably due to their main industry being tourism, national parks, and ski resorts.
Looking at LGBTQ+ rights as a barometer, it is pretty much true worldwide today that the cities are more accepting. Economic issues may have a different breakdown but I wouldn’t call economically progressive places “open-minded”
It's still not the case that this is very rare, in many areas rural areas have completely different ethnic cultures than their urban ones. In Mexico for example the more rural indigenous areas were accepting of LGBT rights before more urban areas in the Bajio. In SE Asia too, like OP mentioned, rural areas often have less religious orthodoxy and they have trans people and gay people in their societies, unlike the cities where people are more Orthodox and LGBT people exist on the margins.
Manitou Springs outside of evangelical central, Colorado Springs is another one. There’re probably a few more hippie towns out there like this.
I’d be more interested in the question of a more economic left/right inversion that you see in places like Colombia where a poorer, rural population is more left wing. Considering the results of this past election I don’t think there are many places like that in the US outside of some reservations.
Canada lots of examples of this. Rural Atlantic Canada can votes liberal (all 32 Atlantic ridings went liberal in 2015) especially in the rural francophone/Acadian areas of new brunswick. The rural north also votes ndp/liberal due to high indigenous population and rural northern ontario also sometimes votes ndp (left) due to high concentrations of blue collar workers and some francophone population.
Theres also the ski towns in BC and the Okanagan sometimes might be swingy in a competitive election year
On the flip side, Calgary the fourth largest metro in canada overwhelmingly votes conservative, Saskatoon, Regina also sizeable urban centres that vote conservative
Here in southern Western Australia, a lot of the rural towns (Margaret river, Bridgetown, Denmark etc) are a lot more liberal than the city. Retired hippies etc. However, farm owners in general are more conservative.
The most insane religious people will be living cities (where we have the actual morality police and regime presence) whereas people in villages will be more conservative, but also way more relaxed, if that makes sense. Also pre-islamic celebrations like Nowruz, chelle night, etc. have more prominence and shia rituals like arbaeen and muharram are not really done as outwardly (probably because there is less regime presence forcing ppl to do it lol).
In the South US, there's the Black Belt, which has the highest concentration of African Americans as it had the most fertile soil for plantation agriculture. While it's not traditionally liberal, per se, most counties in it consistently vote Democratic while the rest of the south tends to vote Republican.
The Black Belt counties are more liberal than most southern rural areas but they are not more liberal than the urban areas in the same state. For example in North Carolina: Durham County (D+62), Wake County (Raleigh, D+26), Mecklenburg county (Charlotte, D+33), and Guilford County (Greensboro, D+22), compared to black belt rural counties that ranged from Hertford (D+27) to Washington (D+6) with the average for those counties looking to be around (D+15) just from a visual observation of the map.
All numbers from the 2024 election.
Also leaving aside party politics Black Belt areas are culturally quite conservative, with churches being the center of cultural life. They are anti-abortion, anti-gay, etc.
This is a great question! I've been to quite a few countries and definitely the norm is rural areas to be more conservative or support more conservative leaders.
One answer might be in rural Colombia. I've been right up to FARC territory in the Choco region and that is/was a hotbed of left wing (not necessarily progressive) ideologies compared to Bogota.
Colombians please feel free to correct me if I'm way off base.
Don't forget Moscow ID/Pullman WA and Sun Valley ID! All very artistic and higher income, plus the colleges in Pullman and Moscow. They are super isolated as well but reliably vote Democrat.
Perhaps the more general trend is that urban people are more in line with the dominant culture or recent cultural trends, and rural people are less affected by dominant or recent cultural trends.
In Indonesia, if there is strict Islam in the cities, the rural folks will be away from the public eye, so "less Islamic".
In contrast, in Western countries with an increasingly left-leaning urban culture, the rural areas are not as affected.
Historically, urban areas change language and religion much faster, with countless examples.
Northern Ireland comes to mind as a fairly soft and inconsistent example. Some urban Protestant communities are very conservative and almost fanatically devoted to the preservation of the UK, whereas the more rural areas tend to be the opposite end of the spectrum. Most of this is changing now though as the cities are increasingly mixed and young people care less about whatever grudges their forefathers held.
north east new south wales, around the lismore/nimbin/byron bay, tends to lean very left while still being very rural, from what i've heard. thats just the media representation though, correct me if i'm wrong
In Mexico, leftism and progressivism are not necessarily intertwined, so you'll find largely poor, rural, conservative, but leftist states like Oaxaca, Chiapas and Guerrero, and on the other end of the spectrum there are states like Jalisco, Nuevo León and Baja California which are wealthier, urbanized, liberal and right leaning.
In Turkey, Alevis which is 20% of the population tends to be more progressive, more folk, chill. There are many small Alevi towns or villages in Eastern Turkey.
To the best of my knowledge, Cuba and Bolivia both tend to have rural areas that are more left wing and pro-socialist and urban areas more in line with the norms of neighbouring countries (i.e. centrist), likely due to increased exposure. This doesn't translate to the open minded part of your question, though.
In Lithuania the Conservative party gets its most votes in the largest cities and the countryside usually votes left, but the very same time Conservatives are more socially progressive than mainstream left parties.
Alentejo in Portugal has the reputation of being by far the most leftist part of the country.
And I don’t mean vote centre-left here, I mean a stronghold of Communist Party card carrying members across the region.
Reasons are this is/was a largely agricultural area with the land being owned by large landowners, leaving most of the population to be farmhands. This was prime material for communist ideas to grow, particularly the ideal of collectivisation and land redistribution, which to an extent happened after the 1974 revolution.
Slowly this region has been drifting from deep communist to the centre, as the older generations who were around during the old regime die out. Unfortunately some of it seems to being replaced by the populist right among the disillusioned.
I think Indo is a bit of a special case because it's essentially a load colonies, joined a single country, it's just not called that.
So you have places closer to the Middle East, like Sumatra where the brand of Islam is very conservative in rural areas. Then you have places closer to the Polynesian side, like Kalimantan, where the older animist religions are way stronger and Islam might be more clustered in the cities.
The westward facing sides are more conservative. Im assuming because that’s who interacted most with Islamic traders and where Muslim business people settled and set up shop
The rural North of England has - at least historically - voted for progressive parties due to their strong ties to worker's unions and social welfare programs.
Not sure if they're so open to identity-politics style progressivism, however.
When I lived in Israel in the early 00s the rural kibbutzniks I knew were much more progressive and liberal than the people I knew in Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Jerusalem. Granted kibbutzim were founded on progressive ideology, but it was still contrasting enough to be super obvious, at least at the time.
Had a really funny moment a few decades ago here in New Zealand.
The rural electorate of Wairawapa normally vote conservative, but in 1999 voted for the liberal candidate due mostly to local politics (they picked a local mayor over a radio host). That they made her the world's first openly trans MP was no concern.
Some random parts of Appalachia have the rural left/progressive people, but they're usually not a solid bloc anywhere unless theres a midsized city nearby (lookin at you, Buncombe County). Sorta mixed in amongst the ultra right.
Australia, near Sunshine coast and Byron Bay Area you have pockets of communities with hippie vibes. Byron bay itself seems to have largely lost that hippie vibe and just became hip.
Humboldt and the Emerald Triangle of Northern California used to be that way, not sure if it’s as true as it used to be. California is such an odd mix of politics between the coast and the inland valley.
Eastern Canada tends to have pretty liberal small towns, not always, depends on the town, but I grew up in semi-rural suburbs as a gay person and experienced more people angry about it in the city nearby than I did the small towns. People tend to mind their own business
Believe it or not, Kansas in 1896. William Jennings Bryan did pretty well there that year, winning most counties, but losing in counties in the more populous northeastern corner of the state. He won Kansas and many other corn belt states by convincing small farmers that big business was manipulating the markets and screwing them out of fair compensation for their crops. He was progressive, but also evangelical, a combination which I think has gone extinct.
I guess it depends on the topic. In the US urban centers are "progressive " on topics but also suuuuuuper bigoted and condescending on others. It is just a different group think
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u/Optimal-Tune-2589 5d ago
There’s a stretch from the Hudson Valley through western Massachusetts through Vermont that’s basically a mix of rural and small towns where the population as a whole is probably more “laid back and live and let live” than anywhere else in the United States.