I come from a small, rural town in Wisconsin-- the kind of place where the high school mascot is sacred, the churches outnumber the stoplights, and the local diner still offers political commentary with your scrambled eggs, all filtered through a Reagan-era lens of rugged individualism and bootstrap theology. It's a town that raised me, yes-- but also one I outgrew, not out of arrogance, but out of an insatiable curiosity that was simply not compatible with fences and familiar last names.
My childhood was an oddity in that place. While most of my peers stayed anchored in the gravitational pull of local norms and traditions, my parents handed me a passport and pointed outward. Road trips across the US turned into train rides through Eastern Europe. I was the kid who collected fossils and insects instead of baseball cards, who could name capitals but not quarterbacks. Later, I moved abroad. I pursued higher education. I immersed myself in history, science, philosophy, and the relentless pursuit of knowledge and understanding, trying to understand not just the world, but why people move through it the way they do.
And then, like some tragic protagonist in a novel about the perils of nostalgia, I came back.
If distance grants perspective, then returning to the town of my youth was less like coming home and more like stepping into a diorama. The streets hadn't changed, but I had. What once seemed wholesome now felt performative. The patriotism wasn't pride-- it was ritual. The friendliness wasn't openness-- it was surveillance. And beneath it all ran a silent, suffocating current of fear: fear of change, fear of the other, fear of being left behind.
This divide isn't just geographical. It's evolutionary.
For 95% of our species' existence, we lived in small, kin-based bands where survival was contingent on cohesion, predictability, and suspicion of outsiders. Tribalism wasn't a flaw-- it was a feature. It kept us alive. To be skeptical of the unfamiliar, to prioritize the known over the unknown, was adaptive. But we don't live on the savannah anymore. The threats we face are no longer predators or rival clans, but climate collapse, income inequality, and information warfare. Still, the reptilian brain lingers. And it does not care about nuance. It cares about belonging.
Rural America, in many ways, remains a living museum of this tribal wiring. In places where diversity is minimal and ideas circulate slowly, identity calcifies. Community becomes echo chamber. It's not that people don't think critically-- it's that critical thinking is punished. Conformity is rewarded. Outsiders-- literal or ideological-- are threats to the fragile cohesion of a community whose worldview has not been tested by difference but merely reinforced by repetition.
This is the root of the urban-rural divide-- not intelligence, not morality, but exposure. In cities, survival demands adaptation: to new cultures, new technologies, new ways of seeing. In rural communities, survival demands continuity. And so when the firehose of modernity blasts through cable news and social media, it's not processed as information-- it's processed as attack.
And the right wing has weaponized this brilliantly.
They've learned that fear is easier to manufacture than hope, and far more profitable. That a brain wired for tribal survival will always choose the strong lie over the complicated truth. That it's easier to sell paranoia than policy. In my town, like so many others, they claim to be patriots who love their country, but they'll vote for the man who promises to burn it down. They don't believe in climate change, but their crops are drowning and their wells are poisoned. They don't want to be ruled, but they're desperate to be led-- by someone who speaks in absolutes, who confirms their suspicions, who reflects their anger back to them like a funhouse mirror.
And this is the part that stings the most: these are not all bad people. They are people trapped in a feedback loop that exploits the very instincts evolution gave them to survive. They have been trained to confuse subjugation with strength, cruelty with conviction. To them, surrendering their rights to a strongman is not cowardice-- it is tribal loyalty. It is faith.
So when I walk those old streets of my youth now, it feels less like homecoming and more like fieldwork. I see not just neighbors but a case study in inherited fear. A once-hopeful people turned against themselves by a machine that knows them better than they know themselves. A culture that clings to its myths not out of ignorance, but out of necessity-- because without them, the whole house of cards collapses.
And the tragedy is this: the world they're fighting to preserve no longer exists. The 1950s never really happened-- not the way they remember them. What they mourn is not the loss of a country, but the loss of an illusion. And in their desperation to reclaim it, they have become foot soldiers in a war against their own future.
But still, I hope. Because if evolution has taught us anything, it's that adaptation is possible. That fear does not have to rule us. That our tribal instincts, while ancient, are not immutable. That exposure, education, and empathy-- slow, hard, and human-- can expand the circle of who we call us.
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