I think Joseph has this one right. I was surprised to see how quickly the champions of the urban versus rural took on the mantle of 'tax-payers' - all conflict between social classes in cities overshadowed by the more urgent issue of geographical equity, and the most important issue was the control of the federal budget. Of course one imagines that this kind of thinking starts out as a deliberate parody of republican "proposition 13" type rhetoric, but it ends up being its mirror image, the same argument just with the terms urban and suburban reversed.
And isn't Michael Yates' travelogue of small town depravity the exact mirror image of the horror stories people were writing about degenerate New York in the 1980s? (Or indeed what Ms Palin is saying today). This kind of schlock horror reportage is easy to see through when it is about muggers, crack-whores and drive-by shootings - but when it comes to stA the same one-sided dismissal of ordinary people's lives seems wholly acceptable.