view the rest of the comments
Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Please don't post about US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
Exactly where I was going to go with it. This question comes with a lot of assumptions about causation rather than just examining the correlation of political views and population density.
It's as weird as asking the question as "why are conservatives moving to the middle of nowhere?"
Tbh I was considering flipping the question and asking, "Why aren't leftists moving to rural areas?" but that seemed a similarly mucked up form of the question.
The question wasn't aiming to be academic, so wasn't carefully formed to account for causation and examining demographic details, but regardless, it could be better. I'm simply not sure how I might better ask the sort of question I'd like to ask to get the kind of info & responses that would satisfy my curiosity concerning this area.
Despite the malformed query, some of the responses here have given some useful insights, direct or indirect as they may be.
Edit:
Also, despite several of the anecdotes about moving to the city and city life influencing them to more left-leaning views, part of what influenced this question is experience in rural areas and developing as a leftist there among other left-leaning folks.
I think if you had asked " “Why aren’t leftists moving to rural areas?” " you'd get a lot of "because rural areas suck" answers. Because holy shit unless you're there specifically for nature and isolation they're inferior on every metric.
I’ve lived in both rural and urban areas. Rural areas do indeed suck. People there lead boring purposeless lives so they’re always up in your business. If you keep to yourself they’ll just make shit up. This is not a problem in the city.