Hello, I'm City Journal editor Brian Anderson.

Thanks for joining us for the 10 Blocks podcast featuring urban policy and cultural commentary with City Journal editors, contributors, and special guests.

Hello, this is Aaron Ren, contributing editor at City Journal.

I'm delighted to be joined today for the podcast by my fellow contributor to City Journal, Victor Davis Hansen.

He's here to discuss his article, Trump and the American Divide, how a lifelong New Yorker became a Tribune of the Rustics and Deplorables. Victor, thanks for joining me.

Thank you for having me. A lot of the article is about the urban, rural divide. And you have a lot of credibility on that. I just want to make sure that I got it right, that you actually live in a rural area in California yourself.

Yeah, I'm speaking to you from farmhouse, my great grandmother built, halfway between Fresno and Vicely and Central Valley on a 40-acre farm.

Wow. I live in New York today, but I grew up about four miles outside a town of 29 people in

rural southern Indiana.

So this was an article that I really appreciated getting to hear about the rural side of the

equation.

You talk about the very different concerns and even starkly different conversations that you would have,

sometimes on the very same day, in your rural community and five hours away in Palo Alto.

What are some of the differences of the concerns and the ways that people talk in urban and rural areas?

How does this divide play out?

Well, I'm more interested rather than just the politics, the comportment and the manner in which people speak and think. So I can find liberal people out here, not very many of them, but I can find liberal people in the country. And then I can find conservatives, not very many of them, where I work on the Stanford campus.

But what is different and doesn't seem to be reconcilable is that people here, they have a lot more muscular life.

And to the degree that people in the Stanford area are muscular, they're not the people who come to your attention.

In other words, the larger culture is Silicon Valley, Stanford University, coastal insurance, finance, high-tech education.

Whereas out here, even when you see people who may live in Fresno, for example, they're working with drip irrigation companies or they're going out in the country to service tractors or they're attuned to what the weather is because it affects the local almond or raisin, and that will affect them. So it's just a

more pragmatic, practical experience. I think it's true. It has been since antiquity that people

in the country, not because they're more virtuous necessarily, but because they have no other

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