Hint: Think of city dweller Lot's views on things (like giving virgin daughters to rapists) versus Abrahams view on things, and this Rabbi is pretty darn close to The Plain Truth!
Rabbi Daniel Lapin of the American
Alliance of Jews and Christians filled in on The Glenn Beck Program
Friday to explain why he believes cities tend to vote Democrat, and
rural areas Republican – and what it all means for the country.
After showing a county-based map of
election results, which is more indicative of rural vs. urban areas than
a state-based map, Lapin asked three questions:
1) Why are cities so much more liberal than the rest of the country?
2) Do cities attract citizens with
socialistic leanings, or do they tend to convert people who live in them
from conservative to left-leaning liberals?3) What can be done to change this?
Rabbi Lapin guest hosts The Glenn Beck Program on TheBlaze TV. (Photo: TheBlaze TV)
In answering the first two questions,
Lapin asked: “Where are people in closer contact with their neighbors —
rurally, or in an apartment in Manhattan?”
Overwhelmingly the audience noted that it’s rurally, despite the fact that the houses and living spaces are much further apart.
“One of the things the city does,
paradoxically, though there’s so many of us packed into a smaller space,
we have less communication with our fellow citizens,” Lapin said. “When
we have less communication with other citizens, automatically you
replace that with more communication with institutions…Government
becomes more of your communication center.”
The second reason cities tend to lean left, Lapin said, is because in a city you “lose touch with reality.”
“Conservatism is linked to reality,”
he asserted. “It is based in how the world really works. Liberalism is
based on how the world would be if we could wish it was something else.”
Whereas in a rural area you are
connected to how the world works at its most basic level — from the
phase of the moon to how food gets on the table — in a city, your
“reality” becomes your monthly water bill, whether the elevator is
working, and the “artificially structured” institutions around you,
Lapin said.
More than that, in a city you become
accustomed to relying not on yourself or your neighbors, but on the
“city systems.” Who cleans the sidewalk? Who provides clean water? Who
gets you from point A to point B?
“Everything is taken care of,” Lapin
said, “so much so that you relinquish your independence with things like
transport and security.”
“When you’re detached from reality,
you’re instinctively pre-primed to move towards liberalism, that’s what
happens,” Lapin asserted. “…In a city you don’t have self-reliance; you
don’t have freedom; you don’t have independence. All the things that
are the cornerstones, you just don’t have anymore.”
Watch more from the show, HERE
