It wouldn’t have become so popularized if politicians like Sarah Palin and those of her ilk hadn’t saw fit to continue a longstanding American faux populist tradition with some xenophobic overtones of portraying small-town rural America and its residents as more “pro-American” and thus, “better” than large urban cities…especially those on the West Coast and the NE.
And it isn’t a coincidence that this faux populist tradition favors areas of the US which tend to be majority or completely White and Conservative and anyone who doesn’t fit that mode isn’t a “real American” as aptly illustrated by their attempts to label then Presidential Candidate Obama a “Kenyan Muslim”.