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Urban-Rural Divide in American Politics

47 points by jgwil2 7y ago

drinane 7y ago
This is the red v. blue dichotomy... this is why I think they need to admin gubment at another split level... urban rule set V rural rule set
- MegaButts 7y ago
  I am not a lawyer or a policy expert, but I do not understand how this would work. Can you elaborate?
  - thrower123 7y ago
    To some extent, I think we could use some redrawing of the borders and reallocation of the states to better map to actual metro regions and group areas that have common interests together. It'd be a bit ticklish to get right, and leave everything functional, but there are some wicked schisms between areas of our historical states, and other places that are spliced up into multiple states that probably should be joined together.. It'll never happen, but it's a fun thought experiment. I don't think things are going to get better on this front by themselves, as the economy seems to be centralizing more and more, such that even the second and third rate regional cities are hollowed out and population and money clusters ever tighter. It's already evident that the urban areas can throw their weight around and vote in pretty much whatever they want in a lot of places, and the rest of the state has to mobilize completely to defeat them. I'm from Maine originally, and it's been a constant battle lately to keep the Portland metro area from passing ballot initiatives that make sense in their little neck of the woods, but are insane when you get off the I-95 corridor.
    - eropple 7y ago
      > I'm from Maine originally, and it's been a constant battle lately to keep the Portland metro area from passing ballot initiatives that make sense in their little neck of the woods, but are insane when you get off the I-95 corridor. I'm also from Maine, and this is true. And I agree that some redrawing is necessary, because the reason things work as you describe in Maine is tha the Portland metro area is almost half the state's poptulation. They kinda should get what they want if we're talking about this like it's a democracy. As you note, dividing things up and creating new levels of administration to better reflect this would be a real problem--'cause now Maine-minus-Portland opens their wallet and a couple flies fly out. (I'm on the "federalism is broken" bandwagon, though, so, eh. I dunno.)
    - cybersnowflake 7y ago
      The best answer is to decentralize and devolve power as much as feasible. That way, everybody can go their own way as much as possible. Of course some people/groups don't like that and want to impose their way of doing things everywhere.
      - Retra 7y ago
        All groups do that. Even you're doing that with your comment right here. "Everybody should do X." That's what humans do with our shared moral languages. It is inevitable. But you probably think it's different when you're proposing a decentralization rule like this, because it is about empowering people, not oppressing people. Of course, you'll empower people who want to oppress people, but you'll have shirked any responsibility for actual consequences, so it's all ok, isn't it? You're not advocating for your country to be divided and conquered, just divided. So you won't be responsible for the inevitable conquering that occurs afterward. You have solved the problem of personal responsibility, but social responsibility still exists, and you haven't proposed anything to manage it.
        cybersnowflake 7y ago
        Asking that power be decentralized as feasible with more local levels and ultimately the individual as the default repository may be a moral exhortation like a call to communism in semantic sense but the end result if successful certainly wouldn't be the same. I'm not asking for anarchy so we can still have our roads and bridges but for stuff like forced SSM cake baking I think we can take a page out of the prog playbook when they were arguing against the Religious Right and say that morality, beyond whats necessary for basic stability should be a private affair, and not actively managed and instilled by the State.
        iamnothere 7y ago
        Different people have different values, and one person's tolerance is another's oppression. (The more authoritarian sides of the Left and Right each see opponents as "too tolerant" of different things.) Recent studies have suggested that there may be some fundamental cognitive factors that control political alignment. They may even be genetic. If this turns out to be true, are you still OK with forcing the other side to live by your "correct" rules? Isn't that just tribalism and conquest?
crooked-v 7y ago
I've seen some studies that indicate this is less about regions and more about exposure to high population densities and everything that goes with it, though I can't find the links now.
- eropple 7y ago
  I've heard the same, and Ezra Klein recently had on an interesting guest, Will Wilkinson from the Niskanen Center, who discussed political sorting and population density in some detail. https://cms.megaphone.fm/channel/theezrakleinshow?selected=VMP8633970355 https://cms.megaphone.fm/channel/theezrakleinshow?selected=V...
- cybersnowflake 7y ago
  I think its a mix between exposure and affinity. People migrate to what they like or want to take advantage of then their mindset is reinforced by like minded people and conditions.
- war1025 7y ago
  I think you could generalize that to "population density", since there are reasons people in low-density areas think the way they do, just the same as there are reasons for people in high-density ares to think like they do.
bhupy 7y ago
> In most European democracies, geography doesn’t matter in the same way. Legislators are elected from larger districts, each with multiple representatives, granting parties proportional power. If a party wins 50 percent of the votes, it doesn’t matter much if those votes are evenly spread around or tightly clustered. Comparisons with European democracies strike me as counterproductive; the US is a federal republic, whereas most European democracies are unitary states. I'd be interested in an analysis that compares the urban-rural divide in the US with that of the EU, which are both similarly large, similarly heterogenous, similarly Federal in nature, and (perhaps most importantly) have similar structures of government. The US's Senate looks less like the upper houses of most European democracies, and a lot more like the EU's Council of the European Union[1], which is the upper house of their (essentially) bicameral legislature. Like the Senate, it grants equal representation to its states. I'd also be interested in an analysis that compares the US with Switzerland, whose structure similarly favors decentralization. The Swiss Council of States[2] distributes its seats by state (canton), rather than by population. [1] https://europa.eu/european-union/about-eu/institutions-bodies/council-eu_en https://europa.eu/european-union/about-eu/institutions-bodie... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_of_States_(Switzerland) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_of_States_(Switzerland...
- cybersnowflake 7y ago
  Not to mention theres still a huge rural conservative/urban liberal divide in Europe. Its practically every where you look in the world and reaches back to at least the French Revolution.
- petschge 7y ago
  While the majority of countries in the European Union are not federation of states, there is several that have exactly that structure: Austria, Belgium, Germany, Denmark, Finland, France and the Netherlands. Austria, Germany, Finland and France being republics, the other ones with a (ceremonial) monarch as head of state.
  - bhupy 7y ago
    Sure, and the majority of States in the US are themselves federations of yet smaller administrative subdivisions. 49 out of 50 US States have bicameral legislatures. The point still stands, the US looks less like Austria or Germany or Denmark, and more like the EU, as a whole.
SolaceQuantum 7y ago
I belive FiveThirtyEight covered disparate living areas between democrats and republicans within city lines, also [0]... There were several projected theories for this, although I don't believe any were provided with significant evidence/links. 0. https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/republicans-democrats-cities/ https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/republicans-democrats-c...
Animats 7y ago
"Rural sprawl" from a century or two ago is biting back. Much of the growth of the US was driven by agriculture. The early version of the American dream was finding cheap land and farming it. That filled much of a continent. Small rural towns were built to support farmers nearby. Larger towns and cities supported small towns. Today US employment in agriculture, forestry, fishing, and hunting is only 1.5% of the US workforce.[1] That's all. A century ago it was around 50%. A profitable farm today is a lot of land, a lot of machinery, and very few people. The small towns and small cities built to support farming still exist on the ground. But there are not enough farmers to support them. Which is why they are dying. Plus, of course, the remaining farmers use Wal-Mart, Amazon, UPS, and the Internet to get many of the things they need. Much less need to drive into town. Which is probably half boarded up anyway. [1] https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/employment-by-major-industry-sector.htm https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/employment-by-major-industry-...
- bduerst 7y ago
  Much of the regression from agricultural professions happened in the early 20th century, due to automation from the combustion engine. The phenomenon talked about in this article is much more recent, and more likely due to rural areas being susceptible to polarization after not recovering after the recession.
sneakernets 7y ago
This is very simple: One side wanted a more agrarian nation with hard manual labor (The Protestant work ethic)to prove self worth, while the other side wanted a more industrial nation with all the automation and efficiency that went with it, which in turn fueled the arts and sciences. There may be some overlap, but these divisions are nearly as old as the nation itself.
ergothus 7y ago
I was talking with a coworker from India at lunch about 7 years ago. He talked about the extreme urban/rural divide in his country - to the point that movies were made for different audiences - and asked about it here in the US. I said how rural communities tended to be more conservative and urban ones more liberal, but in terms of mass-media and entertainment none of those differences appeared to be very significant. Either I was naive or I broke the universe, because ever since then it seems like everything wants to prove me wrong on this point. I browse headlines from many publications, and I can often see a divide between what is being covered. Just today I read that PBS had a "Arthur" episode with a gay marriage and Alabama isn't airing it.
- learc83 7y ago
  I live on the edge of the divide, and there are differences, but everyone farther out from the city than me still sees the Avengers just like everyone in the city does. The rednecks driving jacked up trucks are just as likely to listen to rap as they are to country. If you stop at a red light in the city on a nice day, you're still likely to hear someone singing about pickup trucks and beer from the car next to you. And 95+% of Americans bought something from Walmart last year. I remember visiting relatives on the other side of the country in Burbank as a kid, and if anything the culture is far more homogeneous than it was then.
dwiel 7y ago
While I do agree there are differences between urban and rural voters, this analysis is still ignorant of quite a bit of subtlety due to the simplistic red vs blue framing. The article does try to address this slightly, but they fail to explain the fact that rural Democrats voted for Bernie Sanders in the primary and urban voters for Hillary. This two axis red vs blue kind of thinking puts a large amount of rural America in this theoretical "center". This misunderstanding is what results in centrist Democrats in these places not getting votes. The answer isn't shifting the "center" further right or distancing from AOC.
- cybersnowflake 7y ago
  "The answer isn't shifting the "center" further right or distancing from AOC." Then I guess its a good thing for them that they're doing the exact opposite.
  - equalunique 7y ago
    I can understand why someone who watches Fox News, and/or listens to a lot of Ben Shapiro / Lauren Southern / Charlie Kirk / Candace Owens, and/or is subbed to r/The_Donald might believe this. (Sorry if I'm being presumptuous) These sources push the narratives that "The Left" is trapped inside of their own radicalizing echo chamber, but don't go far enough to acknowledge that "The Right" is not immune to that problem either. What's dominating US political discoure is the bases of both sides focusing their outrage on a small percentage of the other. Both sides say that the other is becoming more radical every day. When it comes to the Democrats, however, the vast majority of candidates vying for the nomination are really the "centrist" (translation: "swampy") types.
    - cybersnowflake 7y ago
      You're totally right. I miss the transgender bathroom promoting microaggression concerned Republicans from 50 years ago.
- noobermin 7y ago
  The study cited is by a fellow at the Hoover Institute. His bias is in favor of blue-dogs (like HRC who lost in 2016) so that they keep losing.
FiatLuxDave 7y ago
People vote their wallets, and we have two very different economies in America currently. We are in a period of history with a lot of similarities to the gilded age, and one of the big issues of that time was "Free Silver": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_silver https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_silver. Back then, there was desire by the mostly-rural side to allow a silver-based monetary standard. This would effectively increase inflation. Today, we see significant inflation disparities between the big coastal cities like NY and SF and the rest of the country. Essentially, the fed rate is too low to have low inflation in the cities and too high for economic growth in the rest of the country. This becomes a self-reinforcing effect, as the relative cost of borrowing is lower in the cities. So, the city and the country are just not going to agree about what to do economically.
- war1025 7y ago
  Your last paragraph is very similar to what I've read is going on in the European Union with the Euro. (I don't remember what book I read it in) Basically their argument was that it works in America because the federal government is strong enough to redistribute wealth to places that can't keep up. In Europe the federal government is weak, so the southern countries have an economy they can't keep up with. I don't remember the specifics, but that was the gist of it.
  - jgwil2 7y ago
    I've read that another problem is that unlike in the US with its relative cultural homogeneity, people in Europe are less willing to move where jobs are. The result is less efficient population distribution. EDIT: fixed typo.
    - aeternus 7y ago
      That may not be entirely desirable. In the US that ability to move where the jobs are is creating a concentration of prosperity in certain cities. Often those with above average skills are able to move, leaving the others behind. This leads to overcrowding in cities like NY and SF. Layer in economies of scale, increased competition, and better talent pools, and it becomes increasingly difficult for other areas to compete. Creates a kind of feedback loop which increases the geographical wealth disparity. The only thing that seems to balance that is the increase in cost-of-living in those areas.
ncmncm 7y ago
The American urban-rural divide in the US maps pretty neatly to who is dependent on AM radio for information. US AM radio is a cesspit of disinformation operated by extreme-right-wing billionaires who have found it is remarkably cheap to manage populations, and get them to vote for benefits to billionaires at the direct expense of those voters. This was the fond dream of Edward Bernays, inventor of modern PR and propaganda. (One of his early successful campaigns got women addicted to tobacco.) He worried deeply about democracy's ability to decentralize power, and strip it from elites, so he set out to invent a way to subvert it. He was immensely proud of inspiring Josef Goebbels's work to drum up enthusiasm for Hitler's project. Rural voters are the most valuable target for disinformation campaigns because, by a historical quirk in American electoral politics, their votes count for quite a lot more than urban voters', and because they are more isolated from one another and so easier to keep on track. Urban voters have easier direct, face-to-face contact with one another that makes lies more expensive to sell.
- s_y_n_t_a_x 7y ago
  Rural voters vote in their interest, which is more closely aligned to the Republican party. Both parties appease their billion dollar donors and both take part in propaganda. The Democratic Party is not a party of saints, in many cases they can be worse. Both have their flaws, but at the end of the day you have to choose between the two.
  - ncmncm 7y ago
    Rural voters used to vote their interests. Now they vote against their own interests, and for billionaires'. This is a big change.
    - refurb 7y ago
      Ahhh... the old "those people are too stupid to know what's good for them, so we should decide for them."
      - AnimalMuppet 7y ago
40acres 7y ago
Call me a big city liberal but in my view small states have way too much power and Congressional reform is needed to balance it out. If demographics stay on trend eventually we'll have something like 70% of Senate seats going to 30% of the population. The arbitrary limit of 435 House of Representative seats is not enough to accurately model the population growth of this country and ensure that the ratio of representative : constituent is feasible. We cannot keep operating on a constitution built for a completely different country and expect to grow with the challenges of the 21st century.
- rayiner 7y ago
  Or we need to split up the US into blocks that have less divergent values. The urban rural divide within Maryland is present but manageable. The divide between urban Maryland and rural Alabama is unmanageable.
  - petschge 7y ago
    What will stop rural Alabama from devolving into a third word country? Or do you still expect the successful urban blocks to pay for the backwaters blocks, but now without any input into their political structure?
    - rayiner 7y ago
      Fun fact: Alabamans are richer than most Western Europeans. But that aside, I’m proposing letting Alabamans govern Alabama and Marylanders govern Maryland. The states wouldn’t subsidize each other or have input into the laws governing each other’s internal politics. Maybe there would be a military coalition like NATO.
      - noobermin 7y ago
        To be honest, apart from huffing and puffing, I really find there isn't really any motivation for an actual divide of the country at the end of the day. Also, the divide is often within states, not just amongst the states, just look at California.
drak0n1c 7y ago
Australia is experiencing the same trend. Quillette has an interesting analysis of the trend - both sides have their own empathy deficits, but when the deficit pits the party against electorally significant populations, losses inevitably follow. This phenomenon exists regardless of whether "electoral significance" stems from direct democracy (popular votes) or republic (electoral college, region-based voting). https://quillette.com/2019/05/20/at-australian-ballot-boxes-the-lefts-empathy-deficit-came-home-to-roost/ https://quillette.com/2019/05/20/at-australian-ballot-boxes-...
jweir 7y ago
Here in Oregon the Democrats are further working to create a divide. Oregon allows electronic signatures for ballot measures and petitions - which benefits rural areas and marginalized neighborhoods. But the Democrats are going to outlaw this for the next four years. The reason is to avoid a ballot measure on a new tax increase which the public might not approve. Democrats have a super majority in Oregon. https://www.wweek.com/news/2019/05/20/as-critics-of-the-new-corporate-tax-increase-ponder-referring-it-to-voters-democrats-seek-to-hinder-signature-gathering/ https://www.wweek.com/news/2019/05/20/as-critics-of-the-new-...
- AcerbicZero 7y ago
  Having recently left Portland for Seattle, its pretty easy to see how precarious the situation is out here. Oregon seemed to do a better job of keeping "Portland" laws in Portland, whereas Seattle is doing its legal work at the state level and forcing it on down to everyone. If Oregon isn't careful they'll end up with Portland running the entire state, and the consequences of that are pretty obvious.
AcerbicZero 7y ago
The last thing we need is another 2D way of looking at politics. Left/Right Red/Blue Urban/Rural may all be useful* ways of visualizing generalities about data, but without a holistic approach obvious things get missed, and every other person is a corner case. A 2 axis chart is a good start, but even that lacks the nuance to really nail down something as complicated as a multi-tiered federal republics' politics. Right now there are more layers of bureaucracy between an individual and true political power than ever before. At the same time, the emotional state of those individuals has never been more important to the political class. Using legislation as a weapon against your political enemies based not on principal, but emotional will of your base (or the emotional reaction of your opponents, etc) is likely to end badly for everyone.
JohnClark1337 7y ago
NYTimes trying to rally the troops for 2020

47 points by jgwil2 7y ago

This is the red v. blue dichotomy... this is why I think they need to admin gubment at another split level... urban rule set V rural rule set

MegaButts 7y ago
I am not a lawyer or a policy expert, but I do not understand how this would work. Can you elaborate?
- thrower123 7y ago
  To some extent, I think we could use some redrawing of the borders and reallocation of the states to better map to actual metro regions and group areas that have common interests together. It'd be a bit ticklish to get right, and leave everything functional, but there are some wicked schisms between areas of our historical states, and other places that are spliced up into multiple states that probably should be joined together.. It'll never happen, but it's a fun thought experiment. I don't think things are going to get better on this front by themselves, as the economy seems to be centralizing more and more, such that even the second and third rate regional cities are hollowed out and population and money clusters ever tighter. It's already evident that the urban areas can throw their weight around and vote in pretty much whatever they want in a lot of places, and the rest of the state has to mobilize completely to defeat them. I'm from Maine originally, and it's been a constant battle lately to keep the Portland metro area from passing ballot initiatives that make sense in their little neck of the woods, but are insane when you get off the I-95 corridor.
  - eropple 7y ago
    > I'm from Maine originally, and it's been a constant battle lately to keep the Portland metro area from passing ballot initiatives that make sense in their little neck of the woods, but are insane when you get off the I-95 corridor. I'm also from Maine, and this is true. And I agree that some redrawing is necessary, because the reason things work as you describe in Maine is tha the Portland metro area is almost half the state's poptulation. They kinda should get what they want if we're talking about this like it's a democracy. As you note, dividing things up and creating new levels of administration to better reflect this would be a real problem--'cause now Maine-minus-Portland opens their wallet and a couple flies fly out. (I'm on the "federalism is broken" bandwagon, though, so, eh. I dunno.)
  - cybersnowflake 7y ago
    The best answer is to decentralize and devolve power as much as feasible. That way, everybody can go their own way as much as possible. Of course some people/groups don't like that and want to impose their way of doing things everywhere.
    - Retra 7y ago
      All groups do that. Even you're doing that with your comment right here. "Everybody should do X." That's what humans do with our shared moral languages. It is inevitable. But you probably think it's different when you're proposing a decentralization rule like this, because it is about empowering people, not oppressing people. Of course, you'll empower people who want to oppress people, but you'll have shirked any responsibility for actual consequences, so it's all ok, isn't it? You're not advocating for your country to be divided and conquered, just divided. So you won't be responsible for the inevitable conquering that occurs afterward. You have solved the problem of personal responsibility, but social responsibility still exists, and you haven't proposed anything to manage it.
      - cybersnowflake 7y ago
        Asking that power be decentralized as feasible with more local levels and ultimately the individual as the default repository may be a moral exhortation like a call to communism in semantic sense but the end result if successful certainly wouldn't be the same. I'm not asking for anarchy so we can still have our roads and bridges but for stuff like forced SSM cake baking I think we can take a page out of the prog playbook when they were arguing against the Religious Right and say that morality, beyond whats necessary for basic stability should be a private affair, and not actively managed and instilled by the State.
      - iamnothere 7y ago
        Different people have different values, and one person's tolerance is another's oppression. (The more authoritarian sides of the Left and Right each see opponents as "too tolerant" of different things.) Recent studies have suggested that there may be some fundamental cognitive factors that control political alignment. They may even be genetic. If this turns out to be true, are you still OK with forcing the other side to live by your "correct" rules? Isn't that just tribalism and conquest?

crooked-v 7y ago

I've seen some studies that indicate this is less about regions and more about exposure to high population densities and everything that goes with it, though I can't find the links now.

eropple 7y ago
I've heard the same, and Ezra Klein recently had on an interesting guest, Will Wilkinson from the Niskanen Center, who discussed political sorting and population density in some detail. https://cms.megaphone.fm/channel/theezrakleinshow?selected=VMP8633970355 https://cms.megaphone.fm/channel/theezrakleinshow?selected=V...
cybersnowflake 7y ago
I think its a mix between exposure and affinity. People migrate to what they like or want to take advantage of then their mindset is reinforced by like minded people and conditions.
war1025 7y ago
I think you could generalize that to "population density", since there are reasons people in low-density areas think the way they do, just the same as there are reasons for people in high-density ares to think like they do.

bhupy 7y ago

> In most European democracies, geography doesn’t matter in the same way. Legislators are elected from larger districts, each with multiple representatives, granting parties proportional power. If a party wins 50 percent of the votes, it doesn’t matter much if those votes are evenly spread around or tightly clustered. Comparisons with European democracies strike me as counterproductive; the US is a federal republic, whereas most European democracies are unitary states. I'd be interested in an analysis that compares the urban-rural divide in the US with that of the EU, which are both similarly large, similarly heterogenous, similarly Federal in nature, and (perhaps most importantly) have similar structures of government. The US's Senate looks less like the upper houses of most European democracies, and a lot more like the EU's Council of the European Union[1], which is the upper house of their (essentially) bicameral legislature. Like the Senate, it grants equal representation to its states. I'd also be interested in an analysis that compares the US with Switzerland, whose structure similarly favors decentralization. The Swiss Council of States[2] distributes its seats by state (canton), rather than by population. [1] https://europa.eu/european-union/about-eu/institutions-bodies/council-eu_en https://europa.eu/european-union/about-eu/institutions-bodie... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_of_States_(Switzerland) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_of_States_(Switzerland...

cybersnowflake 7y ago
Not to mention theres still a huge rural conservative/urban liberal divide in Europe. Its practically every where you look in the world and reaches back to at least the French Revolution.
petschge 7y ago
While the majority of countries in the European Union are not federation of states, there is several that have exactly that structure: Austria, Belgium, Germany, Denmark, Finland, France and the Netherlands. Austria, Germany, Finland and France being republics, the other ones with a (ceremonial) monarch as head of state.
- bhupy 7y ago
  Sure, and the majority of States in the US are themselves federations of yet smaller administrative subdivisions. 49 out of 50 US States have bicameral legislatures. The point still stands, the US looks less like Austria or Germany or Denmark, and more like the EU, as a whole.

SolaceQuantum 7y ago

I belive FiveThirtyEight covered disparate living areas between democrats and republicans within city lines, also [0]... There were several projected theories for this, although I don't believe any were provided with significant evidence/links. 0. https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/republicans-democrats-cities/ https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/republicans-democrats-c...

Animats 7y ago

"Rural sprawl" from a century or two ago is biting back. Much of the growth of the US was driven by agriculture. The early version of the American dream was finding cheap land and farming it. That filled much of a continent. Small rural towns were built to support farmers nearby. Larger towns and cities supported small towns. Today US employment in agriculture, forestry, fishing, and hunting is only 1.5% of the US workforce.[1] That's all. A century ago it was around 50%. A profitable farm today is a lot of land, a lot of machinery, and very few people. The small towns and small cities built to support farming still exist on the ground. But there are not enough farmers to support them. Which is why they are dying. Plus, of course, the remaining farmers use Wal-Mart, Amazon, UPS, and the Internet to get many of the things they need. Much less need to drive into town. Which is probably half boarded up anyway. [1] https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/employment-by-major-industry-sector.htm https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/employment-by-major-industry-...

bduerst 7y ago
Much of the regression from agricultural professions happened in the early 20th century, due to automation from the combustion engine. The phenomenon talked about in this article is much more recent, and more likely due to rural areas being susceptible to polarization after not recovering after the recession.

sneakernets 7y ago

This is very simple: One side wanted a more agrarian nation with hard manual labor (The Protestant work ethic)to prove self worth, while the other side wanted a more industrial nation with all the automation and efficiency that went with it, which in turn fueled the arts and sciences. There may be some overlap, but these divisions are nearly as old as the nation itself.

ergothus 7y ago

I was talking with a coworker from India at lunch about 7 years ago. He talked about the extreme urban/rural divide in his country - to the point that movies were made for different audiences - and asked about it here in the US. I said how rural communities tended to be more conservative and urban ones more liberal, but in terms of mass-media and entertainment none of those differences appeared to be very significant. Either I was naive or I broke the universe, because ever since then it seems like everything wants to prove me wrong on this point. I browse headlines from many publications, and I can often see a divide between what is being covered. Just today I read that PBS had a "Arthur" episode with a gay marriage and Alabama isn't airing it.

learc83 7y ago
I live on the edge of the divide, and there are differences, but everyone farther out from the city than me still sees the Avengers just like everyone in the city does. The rednecks driving jacked up trucks are just as likely to listen to rap as they are to country. If you stop at a red light in the city on a nice day, you're still likely to hear someone singing about pickup trucks and beer from the car next to you. And 95+% of Americans bought something from Walmart last year. I remember visiting relatives on the other side of the country in Burbank as a kid, and if anything the culture is far more homogeneous than it was then.

dwiel 7y ago

While I do agree there are differences between urban and rural voters, this analysis is still ignorant of quite a bit of subtlety due to the simplistic red vs blue framing. The article does try to address this slightly, but they fail to explain the fact that rural Democrats voted for Bernie Sanders in the primary and urban voters for Hillary. This two axis red vs blue kind of thinking puts a large amount of rural America in this theoretical "center". This misunderstanding is what results in centrist Democrats in these places not getting votes. The answer isn't shifting the "center" further right or distancing from AOC.

cybersnowflake 7y ago
"The answer isn't shifting the "center" further right or distancing from AOC." Then I guess its a good thing for them that they're doing the exact opposite.
- equalunique 7y ago
  I can understand why someone who watches Fox News, and/or listens to a lot of Ben Shapiro / Lauren Southern / Charlie Kirk / Candace Owens, and/or is subbed to r/The_Donald might believe this. (Sorry if I'm being presumptuous) These sources push the narratives that "The Left" is trapped inside of their own radicalizing echo chamber, but don't go far enough to acknowledge that "The Right" is not immune to that problem either. What's dominating US political discoure is the bases of both sides focusing their outrage on a small percentage of the other. Both sides say that the other is becoming more radical every day. When it comes to the Democrats, however, the vast majority of candidates vying for the nomination are really the "centrist" (translation: "swampy") types.
  - cybersnowflake 7y ago
    You're totally right. I miss the transgender bathroom promoting microaggression concerned Republicans from 50 years ago.
noobermin 7y ago
The study cited is by a fellow at the Hoover Institute. His bias is in favor of blue-dogs (like HRC who lost in 2016) so that they keep losing.

FiatLuxDave 7y ago

People vote their wallets, and we have two very different economies in America currently. We are in a period of history with a lot of similarities to the gilded age, and one of the big issues of that time was "Free Silver": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_silver https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_silver. Back then, there was desire by the mostly-rural side to allow a silver-based monetary standard. This would effectively increase inflation. Today, we see significant inflation disparities between the big coastal cities like NY and SF and the rest of the country. Essentially, the fed rate is too low to have low inflation in the cities and too high for economic growth in the rest of the country. This becomes a self-reinforcing effect, as the relative cost of borrowing is lower in the cities. So, the city and the country are just not going to agree about what to do economically.

war1025 7y ago
Your last paragraph is very similar to what I've read is going on in the European Union with the Euro. (I don't remember what book I read it in) Basically their argument was that it works in America because the federal government is strong enough to redistribute wealth to places that can't keep up. In Europe the federal government is weak, so the southern countries have an economy they can't keep up with. I don't remember the specifics, but that was the gist of it.
- jgwil2 7y ago
  I've read that another problem is that unlike in the US with its relative cultural homogeneity, people in Europe are less willing to move where jobs are. The result is less efficient population distribution. EDIT: fixed typo.
  - aeternus 7y ago
    That may not be entirely desirable. In the US that ability to move where the jobs are is creating a concentration of prosperity in certain cities. Often those with above average skills are able to move, leaving the others behind. This leads to overcrowding in cities like NY and SF. Layer in economies of scale, increased competition, and better talent pools, and it becomes increasingly difficult for other areas to compete. Creates a kind of feedback loop which increases the geographical wealth disparity. The only thing that seems to balance that is the increase in cost-of-living in those areas.

ncmncm 7y ago

The American urban-rural divide in the US maps pretty neatly to who is dependent on AM radio for information. US AM radio is a cesspit of disinformation operated by extreme-right-wing billionaires who have found it is remarkably cheap to manage populations, and get them to vote for benefits to billionaires at the direct expense of those voters. This was the fond dream of Edward Bernays, inventor of modern PR and propaganda. (One of his early successful campaigns got women addicted to tobacco.) He worried deeply about democracy's ability to decentralize power, and strip it from elites, so he set out to invent a way to subvert it. He was immensely proud of inspiring Josef Goebbels's work to drum up enthusiasm for Hitler's project. Rural voters are the most valuable target for disinformation campaigns because, by a historical quirk in American electoral politics, their votes count for quite a lot more than urban voters', and because they are more isolated from one another and so easier to keep on track. Urban voters have easier direct, face-to-face contact with one another that makes lies more expensive to sell.

s_y_n_t_a_x 7y ago
Rural voters vote in their interest, which is more closely aligned to the Republican party. Both parties appease their billion dollar donors and both take part in propaganda. The Democratic Party is not a party of saints, in many cases they can be worse. Both have their flaws, but at the end of the day you have to choose between the two.
- ncmncm 7y ago
  Rural voters used to vote their interests. Now they vote against their own interests, and for billionaires'. This is a big change.
  - refurb 7y ago
    Ahhh... the old "those people are too stupid to know what's good for them, so we should decide for them."
    - AnimalMuppet 7y ago

40acres 7y ago

Call me a big city liberal but in my view small states have way too much power and Congressional reform is needed to balance it out. If demographics stay on trend eventually we'll have something like 70% of Senate seats going to 30% of the population. The arbitrary limit of 435 House of Representative seats is not enough to accurately model the population growth of this country and ensure that the ratio of representative : constituent is feasible. We cannot keep operating on a constitution built for a completely different country and expect to grow with the challenges of the 21st century.

rayiner 7y ago
Or we need to split up the US into blocks that have less divergent values. The urban rural divide within Maryland is present but manageable. The divide between urban Maryland and rural Alabama is unmanageable.
- petschge 7y ago
  What will stop rural Alabama from devolving into a third word country? Or do you still expect the successful urban blocks to pay for the backwaters blocks, but now without any input into their political structure?
  - rayiner 7y ago
    Fun fact: Alabamans are richer than most Western Europeans. But that aside, I’m proposing letting Alabamans govern Alabama and Marylanders govern Maryland. The states wouldn’t subsidize each other or have input into the laws governing each other’s internal politics. Maybe there would be a military coalition like NATO.
    - noobermin 7y ago
      To be honest, apart from huffing and puffing, I really find there isn't really any motivation for an actual divide of the country at the end of the day. Also, the divide is often within states, not just amongst the states, just look at California.

drak0n1c 7y ago

Australia is experiencing the same trend. Quillette has an interesting analysis of the trend - both sides have their own empathy deficits, but when the deficit pits the party against electorally significant populations, losses inevitably follow. This phenomenon exists regardless of whether "electoral significance" stems from direct democracy (popular votes) or republic (electoral college, region-based voting). https://quillette.com/2019/05/20/at-australian-ballot-boxes-the-lefts-empathy-deficit-came-home-to-roost/ https://quillette.com/2019/05/20/at-australian-ballot-boxes-...

jweir 7y ago

Here in Oregon the Democrats are further working to create a divide. Oregon allows electronic signatures for ballot measures and petitions - which benefits rural areas and marginalized neighborhoods. But the Democrats are going to outlaw this for the next four years. The reason is to avoid a ballot measure on a new tax increase which the public might not approve. Democrats have a super majority in Oregon. https://www.wweek.com/news/2019/05/20/as-critics-of-the-new-corporate-tax-increase-ponder-referring-it-to-voters-democrats-seek-to-hinder-signature-gathering/ https://www.wweek.com/news/2019/05/20/as-critics-of-the-new-...

AcerbicZero 7y ago
Having recently left Portland for Seattle, its pretty easy to see how precarious the situation is out here. Oregon seemed to do a better job of keeping "Portland" laws in Portland, whereas Seattle is doing its legal work at the state level and forcing it on down to everyone. If Oregon isn't careful they'll end up with Portland running the entire state, and the consequences of that are pretty obvious.

AcerbicZero 7y ago

The last thing we need is another 2D way of looking at politics. Left/Right Red/Blue Urban/Rural may all be useful* ways of visualizing generalities about data, but without a holistic approach obvious things get missed, and every other person is a corner case. A 2 axis chart is a good start, but even that lacks the nuance to really nail down something as complicated as a multi-tiered federal republics' politics. Right now there are more layers of bureaucracy between an individual and true political power than ever before. At the same time, the emotional state of those individuals has never been more important to the political class. Using legislation as a weapon against your political enemies based not on principal, but emotional will of your base (or the emotional reaction of your opponents, etc) is likely to end badly for everyone.

JohnClark1337 7y ago

NYTimes trying to rally the troops for 2020