Life in Hillary’s Village

“It takes a village,” declared then-First Lady Hillary Clinton in 1996, asserting that child-rearing could not be left in the hands of families but required state intervention. Along the same lines, I suggest it takes a collective effort—consisting of local and state authorities, joined to cultural norms and aided by the Church—to destroy a village. Let’s call it “Hillary’s Village,” and let’s see how things have changed here in the past 30 years.

There’s a torrent of news about the rise of socialism in America and especially its capture of New York City. But focusing on the large cities misses an important part of the picture. Like many Americans, I live in a rural part of a blue state. Yes, I live in New York, but it is six hours and many cultural differences away from the once-great city of that name. We are not alone in this dichotomy. Other states are dominated by large cities in thrall to progressive politics and all their pathologies. Think Illinois and Chicago, Washington and Seattle, or Georgia and Atlanta.

The solution, according to some, is to move back to the land. But the infection is everywhere now, as I found out in 2017 when, after 15 years in the greater Seattle area, I returned to my native place: New York’s rural North Country region. The socialists have not staged a coup here like they have in NYC, but a potentially fatal program has been corroding life here for decades. From what I can see, it is the same rot infecting vast swathes of nonurban America. Too many of us are being forced to live in Hillary’s Village, with its mistaken ideas.

First mistaken idea: focus on infrastructure rather than people. Villages work hard to get grants to spruce up their downtown, or beautify their streets, or tear down buildings. The idea has merit but misses the point. Without people, all that work means nothing. The village where I reside has been declining in population for decades. Moreover, those who remain are aging. The school-age population has not grown, but plans for new school buildings keep coming up.

The trends are no different in the local Catholic parish. Children are increasingly rare at Mass. For over five years, there has been no Catholic school here. And why would families want to move here? During this decade, the local hospital system has shut down maternity services so that a woman giving birth now has to travel at least 35 miles—perhaps in severe winter weather—to give birth in a maternity ward.

Assuming a family does manage to survive and have children, what then? Hillary’s Village, it turns out, is in no condition to offer real help. What job can the father get in order to support the family? The options are mainly two: the public sector or large retail. Neither one is truly conducive to family life.

The prison system, for instance (one of the few remaining places someone can get a job with decent pay and benefits without a college degree), is under threat from political and cultural forces. Prison work is dangerous. And I’ve never met any prison employee who sings the praises of his employer or shows any enthusiasm for his work. Most other areas of public (government and education) work have been feminized, presenting potential roadblocks to a father.

Indeed, workforce issues are rampant throughout the village and surrounding hinterlands. The overemphasis on college education creates its own problems. Local young adults who make it through college usually don’t return to their hometown. There is also still sometimes a stigma attached to career education. The implication is that the teens learning construction, HVAC, welding, culinary, and other skills, are less valuable or capable than their college-bound peers. They become the Hillary’s Village equivalent of India’s Untouchables: the “basket of deplorables.”

Even if those kids succeed, they are swimming against the current. Small business success rates are abysmally low in Hillary’s Village. The work ethic has been undermined. Here are two examples. First, New York—of which Village Commissar Hillary was once a U.S. Senator—has long had a five-cent deposit on many beverage bottles, mainly soda, water, and beer. In the last century, that was an incentive for enterprising people and/or the marginalized to collect and return them for the money. But a nickel isn’t a worthwhile incentive now; the number of bottles littering roadsides and sidewalks makes that case.

Second: in the past decade, I have only once had a kid come by and offer to shovel my sidewalk and driveway during winter. In Hillary’s Village, kids aren’t often seen outside during winter. They are being raised not by the village, with its tradition handed on by elders, but by screens. It is almost impossible to shovel snow or swing a baseball bat with a phone attached to one hand.

Here is a second bad idea: under the guise of economizing, cut down on local content in the newspaper. In 1999-2000, I was a reporter for our daily paper, which published six days a week at that time. Our staff: four or five reporters, a sports reporter, two editors, and a photographer. There was a local newsroom, and the paper was printed on-site. Reporters were expected to submit at least one story a day and had local boards and issues to cover. We had a weekly page of religious news, mostly from wire services but also local. It was common to get into discussions on issues and stories presented in the paper.

In 2026, the paper is down to publishing only five days a week (for now). There is no local newsroom, and printing occurs somewhere else. There are two reporters, and they rarely seem to physically cover stories outside the village, relying instead on news releases and social media for their information. A large percentage of the “local” news is from significant distances away.

The editorial content is almost entirely liberal in nature. There is no good television coverage of our locality. The AM radio station no longer devotes itself to local news, and a regional NPR station has all the biases known to be attached to that network. Thus, media has only reinforced prevailing (in metropolitan circles) political and cultural attitudes rather than allowing for diversity in viewpoint.

Sadly, the Catholic Church, once both enricher of the culture and bulwark against destructive trends, is no help in this struggle to resist the totalitarian nature of Hillary’s Village. The most egregious example is the local parish ignoring the yearly “Pride” celebration held in front of the church building dedicated to Our Lady. The church is situated on the village green, now for several years the site of an annual pride event. The church’s parking is used for that event. No one is suggesting some sort of confrontation; however, there is apparently little inclination to even do outreach during the event or to have public prayers in reparation for the sins against the Sacred Heart. I have been told that very thing by a member of the local Knights of Columbus.

But the Church has surrendered or messed things up in other ways. There were once religious (Ursulines, in this case) in the village, but they decamped for their retirement home years ago. Thus, children no longer have interaction with consecrated religious and, perhaps, the opportunity to get the notion of a vocation.

There is also the postconciliar innovation of the “anticipated” Saturday Mass counting for the Sunday obligation. In the village and most other local places, that Mass is at 4 p.m. on Saturday. That deformation of the Church’s liturgical cycles, added to a downplaying of Holy Days of Obligation, makes Catholicism seem all-too-accommodated to the rest of life in Hillary’s Village. The message? No need to worry. Mass can somehow be fit in around other activities.

The situation might be slightly more tolerable if Hillary lived in her titular village. Then we would know that she at least had to endure a little bit of her own medicine. But, of course, she would never live here—just like Mamdani and Gates and the virtuous plutocrats who fly their private jets to climate conferences and never have to suffer the consequences of the policies they set in motion. Nor do feckless Catholic bishops have to load up children into a van for an hours-long drive to and from a Traditional Mass.

If conservatives—whether in politics or in the Church—want a worthwhile project, they might consider reclaiming the village before it’s too late. We probably can’t last another 30 years.