Rural aesthetics are in, from cowboy boots to country albums by pop stars to pastoral idealism peddled by influencers. The New York Times Opinion editor Meher Ahmad speaks to the columnist Tressie McMillan Cottom and the contributor Emily Keegin about what these cultural touch points mean for our politics and society at large.
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This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Meher Ahmad: I’m Meher Ahmad, and I’m an editor for New York Times Opinion. I’m here with the columnist and sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom, who often writes about culture, and the photo editor and creative consultant Emily Keegin. Welcome.
Emily Keegin: Hi. It’s great to be here.
Tressie McMillan Cottom: Hello, a pleasure to be here.
Ahmad: Both Tressie and Emily are keen observers of the cultural zeitgeist, and in their own spheres they’ve been noticing an ongoing mainstreaming of all things country and rural. Think shows like “Yellowstone” and “The Hunting Wives”. Pop stars like Beyoncé and Sabrina Carpenter produce country songs as part of their repertoire. And tradwife influencers like Hannah Neeleman, popularly known on social media as Ballerina Farm, has now more than 10 million followers.
So what does the mainstream embrace of this aesthetic say about our society and about our politics?
Emily, Tressie, just so we’re all on the same page, I’d love for each of you to give some examples of where you’re seeing the country aesthetic showing up. What makes you define these trends as rural, and what are the specific signifiers you’re seeing?
McMillan Cottom: OK, I’m going to try not to take on all of them, although I know I won’t. So reality TV shows jump out there. There’s a show where a farmer takes a wife —
Keegin: I love that show.
McMillan Cottom: Yes. So many people contacted me when the show premiered — which says that I have a brand, and I was very proud of that.
But you can even get into shows that aren’t as character driven, where the rurality is actually a character. So then you’ve got shows where there are alligator hunters in Louisiana, a show called “Swamp People.”
I see it in sort of everyday, accessible, middle-market design aesthetics. I’m one of those people in the middle of decorating my home — because how much more basic can I get?
Farmhouse and midcentury modern are over. It’s all about cottage — modern cottage, cottage chic, granny cottage — all of that. Just sort of appealing to that idea.
I see it in comedians. There’s this crop of country-inflected comedians. Someone like Leanne Morgan. So you see it in comedy. I think it is very popular in social media. And then, of course, all the pop stars that you mentioned.
Ahmad: Emily, what about you? Were there one or two aesthetic trends that kind of made you sit up and notice: Whoa, this is everywhere now?
Keegin: Yes. I think we’ve had a very long romance with rural aesthetics in this country.
And after the second Trump win, what I noticed was there was a big cowboy trend that took off. Denim is big. Western culture is big. “S.N.L.” this season had a musical act in a hayloft. Realtree coming in and dominating the sweatshirt world.
Ahmad: Just for people who might not know: What is Realtree?
Keegin: Oh, it’s hunting camouflage. So it’s like —
McMillan Cottom: All of our listeners will be very clued in to hunting camouflage.
Keegin: Well, OK. Where would you have seen it? You would have seen the pattern on the merch of Chappell Roan. She has a hat that says “Midwest Princess.” And Midwest Princess, I think, is part of this trend, as well. That was picked up by the Harris Walz campaign. If you recall they also had a Camo hat.
Ahmad: So part of this is also these are cultural signifiers. But are there political undertones to these trends? Does it signify a left-right divide or a geographical divide?
McMillan Cottom: Trends are trends, and they’re always cycling through. What matters is whether or not a trend hits a political moment — and that’s what I would argue we have happening now.
Cowboy boots will circle right back around in seven, 10, 15 years — whatever. But we may not have the politics to imbue that trend at that moment as a political signifier. I have argued that this is one of those moments, however, where, yes, the cultural turn is mirroring the political turn.
When we’re talking about being romantic for rural life, we’re really talking about an imaginary place. This isn’t really the rural life that actual people who live in rural America tend to be familiar with. These are signifiers that are maybe less about a physical place, a geography.
I would say the divide is between nostalgia and today’s politics. It manifests in many different ways. But when you say something like “Make America Great,” that’s a backward-looking vision. That is not about the future — although it’s trying to own the idea of what the future should look like. It is really calling to a nostalgia for an imagined American past where all families were “traditional” and all women were real women and home life looked this way.
So what happens is when that nostalgia is present and the politics are also enabling a set of ideas that are mobilized through that culture, then I think we can say: All right, so the culture is reflecting something — and, more important, the politics are trying to reflect the culture. And I think that’s one of those things that we have happening right now.
Keegin: I think our culture generally moves by whoever we think is powerful at any given point in time. So we’re very curious people, and we’re also really interested in power and the stories of the people who we think are holding power. And that tends to shift with the narrative that we give our political moment. So when we have large elections and a narrative is built around the reason for whoever wins, we follow those guides within our culture.
We look at how culture changed through the Clinton years and what was on TV. And when the rural revolt happened in 1994, we had a narrative around that about a shift in a rising conservative culture in this country — which was absolutely true. Narratives are based in truth. And our television shows followed that. We get shows like that Brett Butler show —
McMillan Cottom: “Grace Under Fire.”
Keegin: Yes. What happens in 1996 is that Clinton wins again, and that upsets this narrative that we are in a moment of a dominant rural culture. Instead, we have what is kind of a rural and urban culture mix.
I’m glossing over a lot here, but if we think about our culture as three different groups of storytelling: We have storytelling from Washington and what’s coming out of our political narratives. We have storytelling coming out of our entertainment culture. And then, we have storytelling coming out of our news and journalism.
How those mix, I think, is where our culture ends up landing.
Ahmad: Inherent to what I’m hearing from both of you is that a large part of this trend has to do with our political moment, which is the era of Trump. But Trump himself is a New York City cultural icon.
Emily, you wrote a piece for the Opinion section about how he has dipped the White House in gold. Nothing about his personal aesthetic seems very rural at all. To me, he’s very much a city figure and always has been, but there’s no denying the relationship between MAGA and the country aesthetic.
Do you see that as a contradiction?
McMillan Cottom: I don’t see it as a contradiction. This is, again, about keeping in mind that when we talk about Donald Trump being a sort of a quintessential New York urban figure, that may be true in his biography, but we’re not talking about real places when we talk about urban versus rural.
And when you appeal to rural, you are always, always, calling up the idea of urban. These two things exist at the same time. So that’s the first thing.
The second thing is: I would say that what Donald Trump does — the way he enters into the rural imagination: He does it through Southernness.
Now you can talk about the South. The South has plenty of urban places. Atlanta is a major international city. But when we talk about the South the way we would — rural or urban — as an idea, an imagined place, a set of beliefs, what we mean is the South holds this idea of the quintessential past that we can be very romantic about, even when it’s a dark romance. We’re talking about slavery and violence and a civil war and all of that. It is still steeped in a romanticism.
I think that what Donald Trump does is he becomes associated with rural life because of how often he has appealed to Southernness, when he, of course, raises the specter of racism or raises the specter of genteel womanhood — all of those things that the South is kind of known for.
They came in the figure of Donald Trump and his rhetoric, so we keep this big treasure chest — a repertoire of ideas in the South. And when somebody wants to call them up, they can go and open the toy chest, and there it is. You can pull out the Confederate flag, and you can pull out songs of the South or whatever it is.
And suddenly, people’s imagination is in the South. Well, once you are in the South, in the imagination, you are just a — if you’ll forgive me — you are just a hayride away from rural America.
And so those two things, I think, are happening simultaneously with Donald Trump. Appealing to nostalgia will always have political power, especially when people are very anxious and afraid, which is what I would argue people are — for many, many reasons. And that’s why I think Donald Trump reads as rural to some people.
Although I’d pay money to see Donald Trump in actual rural America, for what it’s worth.
Keegin: Have you seen him put on a cowboy hat?
McMillan Cottom: No, I have not.
Keegin: He’s done it once. It doesn’t work. It really doesn’t work. I mean, it doesn’t fit.
McMillan Cottom: On that hair? Yes, I’m not surprised.
Keegin: It’s a look for sure. You know, Donald Trump shows the seams. You see where the makeup ends on his face. It’s very clear that his hair is done by himself, and you see the grease in it. There’s a photo of him where you see that he holds his tie together with tape.
McMillan Cottom: Oh, that was so embodied.
Keegin: I think when we boil down what a rural aesthetic is, regardless of who is engaging with it, it is about the human hand and showing what humans create — versus the urban aesthetic, which is based in machines and in technology. We think about our urban centers: That is where we produce a lot of our culture, but they’re also the center of our governments and our financial centers.
All of the aesthetics that we associate with urban life come from those occupations, which are about the mind over the body. This is not where you are toiling and making things with the human hand and with your physical self. And that is the schism. When I look at Trump, I think: Yes, there are a lot of things about him that are very rural — because he’s not slick.
We look at Gavin Newsom, for example ——
McMillan Cottom: Oh, yes.
Keegin: Gavin Newsom, to me, despite being ——
McMillan Cottom: Quintessential urban guy.
Keegin: Right, and I think it’s just because he uses hair gel.
McMillan Cottom: Strongly agree.
Keegin: And in the 1990s, we were really having this battle between what we thought was virtuous with what we wanted to support as a nation. We made a choice that people with hair gel were the bad guys.
McMillan Cottom: Yes.
Keegin: If you ever watch “The Mighty Ducks,” the second one, you know that when you don’t have hair gel, you are the hero. You’re connected to nature.
This is kind of going back to the debate about the center of the American Revolution and the story of America. What does the king represent? It represents a power that is not related to the rural struggle and the physical relationship to nature.
McMillan Cottom: I love this idea of Donald Trump, however, being manual as opposed to mechanical, the idea of —
Keegin: He doesn’t use a computer.
McMillan Cottom: His being manual is just absolutely fantastic.
He’s very embodied in a time when everything from technology to this end of rational science is very much enamored with being disembodied. The idea that he shows up and his body is just so physically present does lend itself to thinking about people who work with hands and work with bodies, which is fascinating.
Ahmad: I wanted to talk a little bit about country music. Tressie, you’ve written extensively about country music. Do you think the renaissance of country music fits into this rural aesthetic? What does it indicate about the politics of the moment — especially when it comes to race?
McMillan Cottom: First of all, I have to acknowledge, I saw what you did there: “the Renaissance” and “country music.”
Ahmad: Tipping my hat, so to speak.
McMillan Cottom: Listen, we cannot get away from the fact that we are cycling through, again, the trend in country music of moving between pop and country.
These intercultural wars about authenticity are endemic to country music. So that part is not new. It has been true since its invention. Country music was invented as a consequence of anxiety about race. You have to call it country to separate it from what was, at the time: early R&B or “race music.”
But before Beyoncé does “Cowboy Carter,” there had been several years of Black artists, queer artists, Hispanic and Latino artists, especially, who were trying to make a claim that country music was authentic for them, as well. That, I think, produced a lot of anxiety in the industry. A lot of it was, yes, about racism.
Whether or not you could sell country music to the typical country music listener. Whether or not you could sell to that audience a sort of multicultural, rural imagination panicked a lot of people in the music industry — who make a lot of money off how easy it is to bracket what is and is not country music.
At the same time, a political moment came along where there were a ton of political opportunists who were willing to take that anxiety and turn it into a cultural war moment. If anybody attended the “Cowboy Carter” concert — I did — one of the nights in Atlanta, there was a whole part of Beyoncé’s set where she was just playing people who are talking about how she’s ruining the country through country music. They had leveled up the rhetoric of what was really a pop album to the level of political discourse.
I really found that juxtaposition very interesting. Because when Dolly Parton goes pop in the ’70s and ’80s, yes, it was considered a violation maybe of the genre’s boundaries — but it wasn’t considered a political challenge.
The idea of someone like Beyoncé doing it was seen as political. And a lot of that — I don’t assume that’s in good faith. I think a lot of that is opportunism. But the fact is that we had that moment, and you had so many political opportunists — that is about our political climate.
Keegin: My memory of that moment was going out to brunch with a friend of mine talking about the album, and we were both listening to it nonstop, and she’s saying to me: But she knows it’s an election year, right? She has come out with a cowboy hat on — you know what that means, right? Because when you look at when country hits the top of our Billboard charts, it means that Republicans are going to win.
And there was this sense that something was afoot in this nation that wasn’t being spoken to in our current politics, somehow, if we were having country back on the table.
So that’s my memory of that moment. It was a pretty high-anxiety moment, I think.
Ahmad: Just keeping in line with that idea of when we hear country music, when we see cowboys: Are there other moments in history when cowboys in culture have been a flag of what’s to come, or a reflection of their political moments?
How does the cowboy at all fit in?
Keegin: I want to start by saying that a trend is not causation, necessarily. Shark attacks and ice cream sales are popular at the same time — it doesn’t mean that they cause each other. But if you look at, for example, 1980: a huge cowboy moment. There’s a big cowboy moment, obviously, in the year 2000 before the Bush election, who himself wore cowboy —
McMillan Cottom: Yes, he tried to embody a cowboy.
Keegin: Tried real hard. Yes.
McMillan Cottom: He did.
Keegin: The whole time. And then after Bush, it kind of went out of style.
We didn’t have a lot of cowboy aesthetics during the Obama administration. Or during the second half, I’d say, of the Obama administration. We don’t see a lot of cowboys. I think we do see a lot of interest in Washington and in finance and —
McMillan Cottom: In tech.
Keegin: And in tech. Look at the stories that we start to tell about Washington — like “House of Cards” and “Scandal.” The stories we’re telling are quite dark. It’s about a place that is not virtuous. It’s broken in some way.
McMillan Cottom: The cowboy figure is part of the rural imagination. But it’s kind of distinct in a way. Because it is a thread of continuity between American manifest destiny, and however, in any political moment, we want to borrow that framework to shape the future, however powerful interests want to shape it.
So power goes back and taps into the cowboy when it is saying there is some new horizon that we need to capture, tame and own, and it is dangerous. The reason we like the cowboy is because it is safety in a dangerous world.
The cowboy comes into a lawless land always full of a dangerous “other” — whether it is Indigenous people, whether it is immigrants. And cowboys are there to stand in the gap where law may not be the best solution, that sometimes you have to do some extrajudicial murder. You know what I mean?
But it’s somebody whom you can trust because you trust his individual moral code, and that gives you some sense of safety and security. And I would argue that one of the reasons we’re tapping back into the cowboy figure — shout-out to Taylor Sheridan here, who timed the market to an immaculate degree.
I think so much of this is generated by a climate-crisis anxiety of an unknown horizon where we do not have laws or norms yet to tell us how to manage. We don’t have any clear answers about how we’re supposed to manage all of this anxiety about this big, scary thing that is coming and that is clearly going to threaten to change our way of life — not end it but change our way of life. The cowboy is the figure that says: No matter what happens, America will still come out on top.
Ahmad: Yes, I’m glad you mentioned Taylor Sheridan. That’s where I was going to go next. Because I think those TV shows have that anxiety of what the future has built into it.
So the out-of-towners are moneyed tech people who are trying to take our land and change our way of life and change our cities. In the same sense there, it’s also that kind of idea of rugged individualism — triumphing over these big corporations of people who are all working together to take down the traditional idea of America.
So the good and evil characters in those shows are so clear-cut in that way. It’s really a strong distillation of exactly what you were describing, Tressie.
McMillan Cottom: When I think of a popular artist who shaped and captured our understanding of the political moment in popular culture — Obama — it is Shonda Rhimes.
I feel like Shonda Rhimes created this fictional universe that had all of Obama’s personal and political qualities and the hopes we were projecting onto that: colorblind casting, full of gender diversity, every kind of family imaginable.
The professionals and the elites weren’t in charge — highly expert people, but they were still a little messed up, like we were, so they were still a little relatable. Power is both distant and close — and we liked that idea.
What Taylor Sheridan was right on time with is: He produced a soap opera for Trump’s America with all of its anxieties. And yes, this is the idea of the dangerous “others” coming from outside the country. But also from within — so internal migration now becomes a threat. You now see how that gets leveled up to Trump’s national homeland security policies. Picking up on those nuances and turning it into a soap opera is its own special, maybe dark, gift. But Taylor really captured it in his cinematic universe.
Ahmad: So where do we go from here culturally? I know that this isn’t one to one, but if Democrats are interested in trying to take back power at a presidential level, do they harness these cultural trends or do they buck against them?
Keegin: Well, I think that there’s nothing in a trend that is inherently liberal or conservative in and of itself. What we’re talking about — all of these trends have a lot of contradictions. Any aesthetic can be contextualized in a lot of different ways to communicate one’s politics.
I think that people all over this country want our representatives to fight for them and fight for their interests. And when they look at the national culture — and that’s the propaganda and stories that are coming out of Washington and the stories coming out of Hollywood — and they don’t see themselves in some way, they revolt and choose whoever is the opposite of what they’re seeing.
So I think the stories that are coming out of this government right now — I don’t know who sees themselves there. I truly don’t because it isn’t clear. Who is it they are actually fighting for?
Ahmad: It’s interesting to consider the markers of these shifts, as well. In a certain sense, does the recent blue wave indicate another aesthetic that we’re about to experience?
I think about someone as magnetic — whether you like him or not — as Mamdani, and whether that is going to change, to some degree, how people are perceiving these trends or if it’s making a difference in this era of nostalgia for a bygone America that maybe never existed.
Maybe I’m asking you to trend forecast a little bit. Do you see something coming down the pipeline that’s a little bit different than what we’ve been talking about?
McMillan Cottom: I’m with Emily. I think that I will know when the new character emerges and enters the national scene. Anyway, I think there are lots of really interesting figures regionally. It’s state level, that kind of thing politically.
But I think when we’re talking about a metastory or the single story — because that’s what a politician has to do, especially in our fragmented, mediatized world — it becomes harder and harder to do. That’s one of the reasons you can have someone as magnetic as a Mamdani, and it won’t quite become a national stock figure.
It is very hard the amount of charm and power you have to wield to compel a single audience out of our millions of tiny, little media worlds. It gets harder every political cycle.
I think that’s one of the things at the level of storytelling that is the Democrats’ problem. I feel like we’ll know when that character falls from the sky.
But I think the era of looking for the antihero is over — or needs to end quickly. I think if we learned anything from the Marvel cinematic universe, it should have been: We can only metabolize so much darkness right before people go to reissue Superman. I don’t even care if it’s good — just give me a flying dog. I’m over it.
I do think that the era of the antihero and the political storytelling is over, and that means looking to cast someone new. I’m not sure I have seen it yet.
Ahmad: Emily, what about you? Do you have some trend forecasts, both political and in the cultural sense?
Keegin: Well, I think honestly, the only thing that matters when you’re voting is whether or not the person in front of you feels “authentic.” And that is such a loaded word. We know that is an incredibly loaded word.
But I think that for us, in this country, authenticity often has to do with whether or not they feel like the person in front of them is handmade and shows the seams and in that way, has a rural aesthetic — even if they aren’t coming from Arkansas. We’ve got L.B.J., Carter, Biden, Obama and Clinton — and a high number of those men were rural and had a rural aesthetic.
McMillan Cottom: Associated with the South, yes.
Keegin: Obama wasn’t really rural. I mean, here was this lawyer from Chicago who shouldn’t resonate. But not only is he an incredible talent but he, in his first campaign, made sure to telegraph an interest in connection to rural America and also was incredibly, authentically himself in so many ways. So when we think about whether or not the Democrats can win, I think they have to be connected to our American sense of self — which includes ruralness.
Ahmad: So what I’m hearing is: Realtree is the answer.
Keegin: Yes, I mean, that’s basically it. Head to toe.
Ahmad: We still need the Realtree.
McMillan Cottom: Love this idea of looking for the handmade candidate. We know how much artifice goes into shaping a political candidate. But I think Emily is right: Something needs to resonate with voters that there is something real there — even if it is constructed. We want the Etsy candidate, y’all.
Ahmad: Well, also that this idea of authenticity can sometimes be synonymous with country is also what I’m hearing from both of you. That if authenticity is a value, that we look at country in America and think it’s authentic.
McMillan Cottom: That’s it. That’s right. Yes.
Keegin: We’re still recovering from the Enlightenment, really. The debate over the value and virtue that is found in nature.
Ahmad: Well, thank you both for joining me. This is a lovely and very insightful conversation.
Keegin: It’s been great.
McMillan Cottom: I had a great time. Thanks for having me.
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This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Vishakha Darbha. It was edited by Alison Bruzek and Kaari Pitkin. Mixing by Pat McCusker. Original Music by Pat McCusker and Carole Sabouraud. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. The director of Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.
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