Traditionally, one advantage of living in rural America was the ability to escape insufferable leftists. The trade-offs were obvious: fewer jobs, fewer restaurants, less entertainment, and fewer institutions built for upward mobility. But distance from liberal cultural centers meant the average community could preserve a sane, conservative, patriotic outlook — the kind of place where normal people could still breathe without asking permission from their urban cultural commissars.
That escape has narrowed. As media and universities became more radical, their disciples moved into rural America through government-mandated institutions like schools and libraries. Progressivism became harder to avoid no matter how far someone moved from the city. Thus the hicklib was born.
The fail-lib was promised luxury and elite influence. Now she serves people she despises while searching for any opportunity to make their lives worse.
The hicklib is usually a social outcast, a failson who needs a moral explanation for why he hates the community he never fit into. His resentment searches for a theory that will dignify his rage, and the progressive missionaries installed in local institutions are happy to provide one.
Teachers tell the hicklib his country is evil. His family and neighbors are racist, sexist, backward religious fanatics destroying the lives of minorities who do not even live in town. The white Christian culture that dominates rural America is primitive and responsible for the evils of the world. The hicklib’s failure to fit in becomes proof of moral superiority.
So the hicklib shows up at town council meetings in a Black Lives Matter shirt to denounce minority oppression in a community with no actual black people. That absence, naturally, becomes further proof of the town’s intolerance. He loudly organizes Pride events attended by two other hicklibs. The clique stages protests, distributes flyers, and imitates urban activist rituals.
By practicing the sacraments of their faith, they hope to summon the spirit of the age to judge their reactionary little town.
The hicklib has become one of rural America’s petty plagues. But as the value of college degrees collapses, a new breed is emerging: the fail-lib.
The fail-lib worked hard in high school and gave progressive teachers every approved answer. She wrote her college entrance essay on the oppression of transwomen of color in coal mining. On campus, she became an activist. She secured a degree in some woke humanities discipline and earned straight A’s by repeating everything her communist professors told her.
The path to success was laid out before the fail-lib was born. She followed it perfectly. All that remained was the cushy corporate HR job and her rightful place making ordinary people miserable.
Then the plan failed.
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The college degree that cost $100,000 was supposed to guarantee success. The debt would be worth it because the credential would deliver a salary large enough for an apartment, a car, and monthly student loan payments. But the degree was not merely about financial security. It was also a symbol of status. College graduates were supposed to rule over the simple plebs who never left home.
The degree would confer wealth, power, and privilege. Instead, it turned out that too many people held degrees and too few jobs required them. Corporations began cutting HR departments that wasted resources and reduced productivity. Poor oppressed immigrant workers somehow found work while the fail-lib remained unemployed, though a good progressive would never complain. She could never explain how, but she knew the white Christian patriarchy was responsible for this injustice.
Earlier generations of college students had an insult for the ordinary residents of college towns: townies. The townie was contemptible because he was not merely passing through before collecting a credential and moving on to rule the world. He belonged to the place the student planned to use and abandon.
The arrogance required to insult the permanent residents of a community while you are a temporary visitor is staggering, but the slur was common. It revealed the sneering condescension of the would-be liberal elite. Now the tables have turned.
The college degree was once a ticket to the top. Now it is an expensive lottery ticket with worsening odds. More graduates emerge from extended stays in higher education with mountains of debt and few prospects.
The fail-lib spends a year unemployed, desperately seeking even the entry-level positions her fancy degree was supposed to let her bypass. After burning through savings and taking on more debt, she accepts a management job at the local Starbucks or retail outlet. If she gets lucky, she might run the local Apple Store.
The hicklib may be insufferable, but the fail-lib is worse. She was destined to leave the college town behind and move to a big liberal city like New York. She was supposed to be the person ordering lattes and $30 burrito bowls for important work lunches, not the person making them. Once, she mocked the parochial townies trapped in their backward existence. Now she is stuck among them with no escape.
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The fail-lib is not merely trapped in the backwater town. She is poor and low-status. A management job at Target might provide a decent life in a small town where prices remain low, but the fail-lib has a mountain of student debt she can never repay on a retail wage.
Plumbers, cops, firefighters, and mechanics all seem to make more money and enjoy more status in the community. The fail-lib was promised luxury and elite influence. Now she serves people she despises while searching for any opportunity to make their lives worse.
Artificial intelligence will intensify the problem. The bureaucratic make-work jobs progressive college graduates once dominated are among the easiest to automate, consolidate, or eliminate. The bitter entitlement of a psychology major with $100,000 in debt helping you find the cereal aisle will become more common.
The fail-lib may make less money than you. She may be less respected than you. She may even be despised by the townies she once mocked. But in her heart, she knows she is superior.
Nothing could convince her otherwise.
And she will spit in your burrito just to remind you who was supposed to be in charge.
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