medium | For
several years now, political journalists, analysts, and pundits have
been arguing that U.S. politics has increasingly turned into a struggle
between urban and rural voters. Regional differences were once
paramount, Josh Kron observed in the Atlantic
after the 2012 election. “Today, that divide has vanished,” he
declared. “The new political divide is a stark division between cities
and what remains of the countryside.” Two years later, the Washington Post’s Philip Bump wrote
that there are “really two Americas; an urban one and a rural one,”
going on to observe that since Iowa was growing more urban, Democrats
could count on doing better there. Instead, an ever-more urbanized and
diverse nation turned not just toward Republicans, but also toward the
authoritarian nationalism of Donald Trump, prompting further
hand-wringing over the brewing civil war. “It seems likely that the
cracks dividing cities from not-cities will continue to deepen, like
fissures in the Antarctic ice shelf, until there’s nothing left to
repair,” concluded a lengthy New York story on the phenomena this April.
I
don’t disagree that the United States is in crisis, with fissures
breaking apart our facade of national unity and revealing structural
weaknesses of the republic. Our federation — and, therefore, the
world — is in peril, and the stakes are enormous. As the author of American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America,
however, I strongly disagree with the now-conventional narrative that
what ultimately divides us is the difference between metropolitan and
provincial life. The real divide is between regional cultures — an argument I fleshed out at the outset of this series—as it always has been. And I now have the data to demonstrate it.
