The Rustic Belt

I’m up at Bloggingheads talking American “rustics” with Jim Pinkerton — folks I sometimes refer to, in a spirit akin to Hunter Thompson’s, as “rubes.” One big question is whether Mead’s much-discussed foursquare categorization of Americans — Hamiltonian, Jeffersonian, Jacksonian, and Wilsonian — is good enough today at capturing what’s going on in “rustic” America. Probably not, I think. I can’t be the only one who looks back on Thompson radicals of ’70s Colorado and sees an embryonic coalition: Freak Power and Rube Power. Echoes, perhaps, of what Reihan alludes to with the motto Keep America Weird — borrowed from a place where you can find rubes as well as freaks: Austin, TX.