On Election Day four years ago, I drove to my local firehouse to cast my vote for Joe Biden. But as I went to enter the building, I froze for a moment; my neighbor, a man who has a giant billowing Trump flag on his lawn, was manning the door. Each of us knew exactly who the other was voting for, and I briefly wondered if we ought to hate each other for it.
But by that point, I’d spent a decade as a Democrat living in Trump Country. And in that time I’d slowly come to reject the political prejudice so common among my tribe.
I live on a small family farm in Greene County, New York, south of Albany and on the wrong side of the Hudson River for a lifelong leftist type like myself. This area overwhelmingly votes Republican—in 2016, only 34 percent voted for Hillary Clinton; in 2020, only 41 percent for Biden. The morning after local elections, I’ll hear Democrats console each other: “Well, we lost by less than usual!” And at a meeting of local Democrats a few years ago, several attendees discussed the open secret that working for the county in any position requires you to at least pretend to be a Republican.
Before we moved here, my husband, our two kids, and I lived in Park Slope, Brooklyn, where almost everyone we socialized with was just like me: a loyal Democrat, passionately pro-choice, mostly atheist, and in favor of the most extreme gun control measures. (Once, after a school shooting, a friend wrote on Facebook: “Why does anyone need a gun, ever?”) These were my people, but I wanted to escape the city. I wanted more living space and enough land to grow our own food.
I assumed that moving upstate would mean living in proximity to conservatives. But I figured we’d find a town that had a community of liberal ex-urbanites we could befriend. Those other people—the bad ones, who probably lived in trailers and shot squirrels for fun—would exist on the periphery of my social experience. I hadn’t counted on falling in love with a farm in Greene County, with its seemingly nonexistent liberal presence—but fall in love I did.
Still, as we settled into our new lives, I became increasingly depressed and alarmed. Neighbors just two houses down had a Tea Party banner on their lawn. A few years later, almost every house in our area had a red-lettered lawn sign denouncing the NY SAFE Act—a gun control measure that, opponents claimed, had been passed in a secret meeting called by devious, lying Dems.
Our differences went beyond politics and voting. They were cultural. At a birthday party my daughter attended, another mom questioned my reflexive mention of climate change and dismissed my desire to build a rainwater-collection system as pointless. (“We don’t live in a drought-prone region.”) People looked after their children differently, too: Parents tended to be more hands-off than in Park Slope. When another of my daughter’s friends got stung by numerous wasps at our house, her mother shrugged and said she’d be fine. Even young children were given the message that it’s best to stop crying and get back on the horse—sometimes literally. Some of this made sense to me. My alliance to Brooklyn began to weaken.
But then, in 2016, Donald Trump ran for president. My husband and I thought his candidacy was a rude joke. But Trump flags, banners, and signs sprouted across Greene County almost overnight, many of them handmade. The family across the street from my farm put up a banner so large I could see it from the farthest corner of my sheep pasture. Our daughter was coming home from school describing kids chanting Trump’s name so fervently the teachers couldn’t stop them, and a mock election in which Trump won by a landslide. On the real Election Day, a close friend of hers showed up to school in head-to-toe Trumpwear, including socks and a MAGA hat.
The morning after, my upstate Facebook friends were just as shocked as my Brooklyn friends and family—but unlike all of us, they were ecstatic. “Woke up to an early Christmas present!” wrote one farmer. The mood of the entire county felt jubilant. I felt isolated again—a feeling that lasted most of Trump’s term.
But nothing is constant, even political feelings. By the time Biden announced his candidacy, I’d been living upstate for 10 years. A decade of farming had made me less aloof, because farming entails emergencies, and so often my neighbors were there to help. It’s hard to care where someone stands on politics when they race to your house to save a dying lamb. When their wife helps search for your runaway dogs. When they deliver and stack 50 hay bales within hours of your asking for it, and afterward make pleasant chitchat. This is the gift of living in a rural area: I keep finding reasons to see my political adversaries as human.
And when it came time to vote in 2020, my Trump-supporting neighbor held the door of the firehouse open for me, and we exchanged hellos as I went through it.
At the time, my old tribe was prepping for war. I kept reading on Facebook and in other venues about Democrats who refused to do business with people who had voted for Trump. They fired their realtor or stopped shopping at a certain store. Even after Biden was elected, this attitude persisted. In 2021, Virginia Heffernan wrote a column in the Los Angeles Times about her conflicted feelings when a Trump-supporting neighbor plowed the driveway of her “pandemic getaway.” In it, she wrote that she couldn’t “give my neighbors absolution,” adding: “Free driveway work, as nice as it is, is just not the same currency as justice and truth.”
But personally I’ve been stunned by the depth of my neighbors’ generosity. “I saw you and your husband out here with that little mower,” one guy knocked on my door to tell me. “It’s ridiculous.” He said he was coming over with his massive sit-on mower. He made quick work of our lawn, then waved away my profuse—and unconflicted—thanks. Another neighbor practically screeched to a halt when he saw us clearing snow off our driveway with handheld shovels. He just happened to have a snowplow attachment on the ATV he was hauling on the platform trailer attached to his truck. Within minutes he’d unloaded it and was clearing our driveway.
And then, last winter, my son, then 24, was driving a few miles from the house when he found himself sliding off the icy road into a snowbank. Hopelessly stuck, he gunned the engine of his little sedan, to no avail. Then, two trucks pulled over and three burly guys got out. After ribbing him a bit for his pathetic predicament, they motioned him out of his car. One hopped in the driver’s seat while the other two pushed and heaved. When that didn’t work, all three got behind the car and essentially lifted and shoved it back up to the road. My son thanked them; the apparent leader of the trio said, “I lost my job today. I was looking for something good to do.”
I know that in this part of the country, white men who work manual jobs will likely vote overwhelmingly for Trump. Increasingly, I hear Democrats describing such voters as not simply bad people but evil. The men who helped my son get back on the road are the people my lefty tribe claims are destroying our country. It worries me that, per The New York Times this week, the Americans who’ve moved since the last election seem to have overwhelmingly chosen neighborhoods where a higher percentage of people share their politics. And so, whatever the next administration has in store, fewer Americans will be exposed to the kindness, the sheer humanity, of people who don’t share their political beliefs. That doesn’t bode well for the nation.
I, for one, am grateful to have had such exposure. My mind has been opened, and I like to think I might have opened a few minds, too. During the last election cycle, my daughter announced one day: “Lucas said he’s not coming to our house anymore. He said he didn’t know we were liberals.” The fact that Lucas was a 14-year-old boy in a BMX cap and only a casual friend of my daughter didn’t lessen the sting. I’d just hosted this kid, and a whole rowdy group of ninth graders, for an entire afternoon. Sure, I couldn't expect him to see the nuance in my political positioning—that in recent years I had been deeply questioning the progressive project, seeing hypocrisy and rigidity where I once saw solutions and optimism. But I would have hoped for a little appreciation regardless of my political affiliation.
Lucas had seen the telltale signs—which were, he had informed my daughter, a bag of organic blue-corn chips and a book with the words “Western liberalism” in the title. (It was a critique of liberalism! But that didn’t matter.) It was tough to realize that this 14-year-old boy was treating me with the same disdain that I abhorred in my own friends and family’s treatment of the right—a stance I’d only recently begun to quit myself. But now it was finally time for me to put in some effort to bridge the gap.
One thing I’d noticed about Lucas was his love for dogs. When he first got to our house, he made a beeline for our aging shepherd, Cleo, and lavished attention on her. So a few weeks after he’d rebuffed my family, when we needed a dog walker, I asked Lucas if I could hire him. He agreed, and began biking over to our house to take her for a walk on the days when everyone would be out.
A few months into this arrangement, the time came to euthanize Cleo. I let Lucas know. “Can I come say goodbye to her?” he messaged back. His father drove him over that night and waited in his truck while Lucas sat on the floor of our living room for a very long time with Cleo’s tired, white-faced head on his lap, petting her and telling her what a good girl she was.
I haven’t seen Lucas since then, but I’m still friends with him on Facebook. It’s not clear whether he still spurns those who vote differently from his people. But I like to think it’s gotten a little harder for him to do so. I know it has for me.
Larissa Phillips lives on a farm in upstate New York. Her sensational first piece for The Free Press was “What City Kids Learn on My Farm.” Follow her on X @LarissaPhillip, and learn more about her work on the Honey Hollow Farm Substack.
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