In The Lies of the Land, Steven Conn has undertaken to write a corrective—a revisionist history that dismantles certain mythologies over the role, influence, and nature of rural America. Unfortunately, in his eagerness to describe rural America as little more than an artifact of four forces (militarization, industrialization, suburbanization, and corporatization), he ends up simplifying rural America into a tawdry two-dimensional caricature. He sets out to describe “the collapse of the Jeffersonian myth of the yeoman farmer” and instead reveals his own disaffection with those selfsame Jeffersonian ideals.
The book is a palpable and oh-so-au courant historian’s gambit to engage in an activist history, with its predictable slings and arrows at “Capitalism” writ large. “Rural people,” he says, “continue to promote the very forces that led to their demise: free enterprise and capitalism.” Ah, well there you have it. At least Conn isn’t shy about his political leanings: he feels the 2016 election was a “vertiginous and surreal fever dream … with a result as unthinkable as it was unlikely.” Trump’s win exposed for Conn a fundamental urban-rural divide that spurred him (egged on by his baffled leftist colleagues) into conducting a post-mortem of this “unlikely” election. He wrote the book to try to understand why it was that “rural America took its revenge on the rest of us for having been ignored, or left behind, or otherwise insulted.”
Conn’s overarching premise is that “far from being some differently paced alternative to the national mainstream, rural America is a pure product of this country.” Whatever that means. It’s hard to say if this is intended to be a profound insight or a self-evident truism, but Conn’s professed ambition, meanwhile, is to describe rural America with such fresh historical insight that, “by seeing [rural] spaces more clearly, we can have more productive conversations about the future of rural America.” While the ambition is commendable, and a fair handful of useful tidbits may be gleaned from the project, the work as a whole remains distinctly unconvincing, most glaringly because it so patently seeks to grind out a basic rural/urban distinction that “the rest of us” are intuitively and keenly aware of.