In my effort to grasp a better understanding of those in the poles of our political society (far right and far left), I have several questions. This one in particular pertains to the circumstances that cause a person to be on the left or right. Here we go...
Very Rural=very conservative
Rural=conservative
Suburban=mixed
Urban=liberal
Dense City=very liberal
Ok you say obviously right? My question is WHY. So I started to take it a bit further...What are the major differences between people in cities and people in rural areas? Well I found TWO common denominators: income and education.
Your premise is based on completely unfounded assumptions and perhaps an outdated view of citizen mobility and the geography of work location vs. home.
If, for instance, you go by people who WORK in DC or NYC as opposed to those who actually LIVE there after 9 p.m. every day, you'll come up with a completely different picture of income and education. Outside isolated exceptions for the quite rich in places like Manhattan or Philly's Main Line, the highest average education and incomes generally end up outside the most highly urbanized areas.
On just a couple of other points, I'd note that central cities are not the engines of job growth they once were (Despite the fact that so much of our economic and government institutional infratstructure still acts like they are, since they were built when it was true and the assumption is hard-wired into them), and that being poor in a rural area is a whole different thing than being poor in an urban one with entirely different individual and societal coping mechanisms and costs.
I don't disagree with your very last sentence, in that both Liberals and Conservatives do tend to see things as more absolute than they really are, but you don't deal successfully with an adverse party by staking out a position firmly in the middle while they start on the extreme, or you'll end up halfway into their extreme before it's over in a negotiative process like representative democracy.
