On a blustery afternoon in April, I filed into a van along with 10 students from Harvard University. We had just spent the last two days in Chicopee, Massachusetts, where we had chatted with the police chief and his force, the mayor and his staff, small business owners, waitresses and firemen about their struggles living in small-town America. The undergrads were buzzing with their impressions. Chicopee is about 90 miles west of their prestigious university in Cambridge, but when it comes to shared experience, it might as well have been 1,000 light-years away. We were only a few days into...