The free time of people in rural areas is not quite as important, politically speaking, as the free time of people in cities. By the very nature of cities, peop

The free time of people in rural areas is not quite as important, politically speaking, as the free time of people in cities. By the very nature of cities, people inside them can reach other people more readily and social movements will spread quicker in cities than in thinly populated areas. So, in the earlier time when people in rural areas had a lot of free time they couldn't really do a lot with that free time in a political sense. But after industrialization caused a huge migration towards cities, some of the people took their newfound free time after WW2 and used it to rally people towards ideological causes. Obviously this is a threat to entrenched interests who don't want any new ideologies to gain momentum as they benefit from the status quo. The article makes the claim that by making mindless entertainment available to all, many of these ideological shifts were deprived of energy and this stabilized society somewhat.