Burgum is practicing a version of small-town identity politics. “Small-town values have guided me my entire life; small-town values are at the core of America,” he says. “And frankly, big cities could use more ideas and more values from small towns right now.”

The glorification of small towns is a familiar political trope, repeated so often that most of us don’t bother to question it. As one pair of scholars put it, “Rural America is sometimes viewed as a kind of safe-deposit box that stores America’s fundamental values.”

But it’s about time we do question it.

Imagine how refreshing it would be to hear a candidate touting their “big-city values” and explaining how important and useful the things they learned in the city can be. Plenty of U.S. presidents — William Howard Taft, Barack Obama, Donald Trump — came from cities. But they were more likely to extol the small towns they didn’t hail from than to argue that the city is where the tools of governing can also be cultivated.

What exactly are the small-town values that are supposed to be not only so admirable, but also so useful for governing? If you ask their advocates, you’ll usually get answers that are vague to the point of meaninglessness. In small towns, we’re told, people tell the truth, they work hard and they lend a hand. All of which are good things, but there’s no evidence that those virtues are any more common in small towns than in big cities or the suburbs (and when politicians praise “small towns,” they’re definitely not talking about the suburbs).

There are undoubtedly things that distinguish the small town from the city — and when it comes to the demands of governing, the distinctions favor the lessons one can gain in urban environments.

If you grow up in a city, you’ll learn to navigate a complex world. You’ll deal with people of diverse backgrounds, languages and religions — just like America. You’ll negotiate with their desires and interests, because when you’re all packed together, you have no choice. And you’ll learn to react to change.

That’s one of the central facts of urban life: Cities are and always have been about change. Immigrants come in from abroad, migrants flow in from other parts of the state and the country, and the changing population constantly remakes the city’s politics, its food, its music and every other part of its culture. Even the landscape is remade as old buildings come down and new ones rise up.

In the small town, by contrast, the slow pace of change is precisely what many people value. The rural ethos is saturated in nostalgia, the desire to hold on to or recapture the way things used to be. That nostalgia is often about simplicity, a yearning for a time when the world wasn’t so complicated, change didn’t happen so fast and you could count on life being pretty much the same for you as it was for your parents and grandparents.

Which might be fine for a person to value, but it won’t help you navigate the complexities of policymaking in a dynamic nation of almost 335 million people. For that, you’d do better to cultivate big-city values.

Let’s return to Burgum, who wants to bring his small-town values to D.C. He did come from a small town. But the most important factor in his business success is probably this: He left.

That’s true of ambitious people in small towns and rural areas everywhere: To find opportunity, they often have to go elsewhere. Cities are full of people who grew up in small towns but decided to leave, either to fulfill their economic ambitions or because they found small-town culture stifling and intolerant.

After finishing college, Burgum headed to Silicon Valley, attending Stanford Business School. After a stint as a management consultant in the big city of Chicago, he returned to North Dakota and started a software company — not in his hometown of Arthur (pop. 328), but in Fargo, the largest city in the state.

Democrats are constantly asked why they aren’t doing more to “reach out” to rural and small-town voters, to approach them with open ears and respectful hearts. Nobody ever asks Republican presidential candidates to do the same with urban voters. Maybe if they did, they’d learn a thing or two about the country they aspire to govern.