The Hicklib Phenomena
"Shucks pardner, I just wandered here from San Francisco to start me an organic chicken farm!"
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The Hicklib Phenomena
There is a certain Liberal archetype known colloquially as the “hicklib”. When corporate offices closed down during COVID, this person spread throughout rural America.
In the mountains of Northern California, I am surrounded by these people. In most cases, they are Bay Area transplants looking for something “real” and “tangible”. They bring their “partner” and their one Waldorf-educated child to the mountains and purchase fifty acres of land.
They build a chicken coop, buy Wrangler jeans and old worn vintage, trade in their Tesla’s, and lease a brand new electric Jeep or Ford Bronco. The women develop a sudden fondness for wide-brim hats, and the men unbutton their shirts and buy a stiff-stetson hat from the local tack shop.
Prior to this sudden transformation, the hicklib spent most of their days commuting to and from co-working spaces in urban and suburban area. They wore Hoka running shoes and Lululemon athleisure.
They are product managers, digital sales representatives, account executives, HR directors, and “trust and safety” leads. Typically older millennials, the hicklib has spent a majority of their adult life chasing the dream of “respectability”. They grew up in secular Democrat households with two working professional parents. They got into college just before it became a worthless institution, and snagged attractive tech jobs before the era of mass layoffs, AI, and corporate downsizing.
They share many similarities with the hippie-cast-away boomers of the late sixties and early seventies who transformed from loud social activism to a “back to the land” rural lifestyle.
Like their Boomer cohorts, the hick-lib came of age in a period of “hope and change”. They were young adults or teenagers during the Iraq War. The first president they voted for was Barack Obama. They slid into careers before race, sex, and class became the de-facto job sorting method.
They hold on to a naive egalitarian, “arms wide open” left-wing dream of America. It is their only real belief system. Kindness, empathy, moral relativism, and equality. This is their religious, cultural, and personal identity.
But for all their talk about cultural appropriation, the hicklib is adept and becoming a chameleon in new environments.
Prior to becoming a folksy “trad-rancher”, the hicklib lived and adored the gritty “realness” of the diverse and multicultural city. For a while, they felt at home there. They went out to Drag Queen night at the local bar. They joined book clubs highlighting “marginalized voices”. They pick up “goat tripe” at the African market so they can go home to “cook something new and unique”.
They crave an identity, a culture, a “why”, but they are unable to connect any dots. They have been trained to stand and pray at the altar of vague concepts like justice, equal rights, and diversity. They love being the “cultured ones” in their friend group, even if that means concealing real preferences and exclusionary feelings.
Victims of a kidnapping or violent assault often develop “Stockholm Syndrome”. This takes the form of an emotional attachment to their captors. This is a survival mechanism, and it’s often expressed in self-loathing.
“Well, I shouldn’t have put myself in that situation in the first place...”
On a broad scale, this same mindset is very common in Hicklibs.
Rather than look at the schizophrenic freely defecating next to them on the subway, or at the gangs of young males robbing jewelry stores and breaking into their cars and seeing it as a violation of public trust and decency, the hick-lib has been trained to blame the “system”.
It’s for this reason that the hicklib is loathed by the community to which he migrates.
Despite growing up in an upper-middle-class family, the hicklib is terrified of being an “elitist”. In his mind, it’s elitist to enforce basic city-wide quality-of-life laws. It’s cruel to forcibly take homeless drug addicts off the street and put them in jail or rehab. It’s morally bankrupt to not let children choose their own gender.
Based on their egalitarian religious programming, the hicklib is unable to acknowledge the necessity of judgment. Rather than fix the problems he and his ilk create in urban and suburban communities, the hick-lib foregoes responsibility and moves to an environment that has consciously avoided his specific worldview.
The hick-lib brain is so broken that he will look at a small, quaint, religious, rural, ethnically homogenous community, and say:
“Wow! It is so beautiful and quiet here. This is how people are supposed to live!”
Because the hick-lib has a natural antipathy to rural America—seeing them as backward, morally broken, and stupid—his foray into “rural living” makes him the community punching bag. Out of arrogance, he thinks: “Of course, I can raise livestock and plant a garden. If they can do it how hard can it be?”
Despite managing overseas teams of minimally paid Vietnamese and Indian software developers and virtual assistants, the hick-lib still feels a “solidarity” with the worker’s rights movements of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
He adopts a rural, folksy, “heya folks!” affectation, but his hands are as soft as a babi’s ass. He flies the pride flag in place of Old Glory. He’s desperate to be part of a “real culture” but lacks the self-reflection to realize that in order to assimilate, he needs to throw out the tenets of his empathy-driven and social justice programming.
The primary danger of the hicklib invasion doesn’t come from the fact that they are fruity, annoying, bad drivers, and corny costume-wearing people.
It comes from one simple fact:
Rural communities are dying under the weight of bad state and federal policy. The last hope they have is a unified community. At the very least, they can control their own town and county government in a way that preserves and nurtures their values.
When the hicklib arrives, it’s the beginning of the end.
As always, thanks for reading
-Joe
This is extremely prevalent in Vermont, Maine, and NH. I call it working class cosplay.
Good Lord, you nailed it. Exactly the same in Colorado where once conservative rural communities have been invaded with bay area transplants. They often get on school boards and community groups and begin to poison everything they touch. You see pride flags flying in all the small towns now. Very sad.