Tuesday, November 22, 2016

How the Election Revealed the Divide Between City and Country

The 2016 election exposed a chasm between urban and non-urban America that will likely widen under a Trump administration.

Ronald Brownstein

Source: theatlantic.com

The earthquake that elected Donald Trump has left the United States approaching 2020 with a political landscape reminiscent of 1920.

Not since then has the cultural chasm between urban and non-urban America shaped the struggle over the country's direction as much as today. Of all the overlapping generational, racial, and educational divides that explained Trump's stunning upset over Hillary Clinton last week, none proved more powerful than the distance between the Democrats' continued dominance of the largest metropolitan areas, and the stampede toward the GOP almost everywhere else.

Trump's victory was an empire-strikes-back moment for all the places and voters that feel left behind in an increasingly diverse, post-industrial, and urbanized America. Squeezing bigger margins from smaller places, Trump overcame a tide of resistance in the largest metropolitan areas that allowed Clinton to carry the national popular vote, but not the decisive Electoral College.

This election thus carved a divide between cities and non-metropolitan areas as stark as American politics has produced since the years just before and after 1920. That year marked a turning point: It was the first time the Census recorded that more people lived in urban than non-urban areas. That tangible sense of shifting influence triggered a series of political and social conflicts between big cities teeming with immigrants, many of them Catholic, and small towns and rural communities that remained far more homogeneously, white, native-born, and Protestant.

In an extended tussle over the country's direction, forces grounded outside of the largest cities overcame urban resistance to impose Prohibition in 1919 and severely limit new immigration in 1924. The same fear of "a chaotically pluralistic society," as one historian put it, fueled a resurgence of religious fundamentalism and a revival of the Ku Klux Klan. Then, as now, the lines between city and country were not absolute: both Prohibition and immigration restriction drew meaningful support from within the urban professional and intellectual classes. But contemporaries like Walter Lippmann, the era's preeminent newspaper columnist, recognized that at their core these disparate disputes represented "the older American village civilization making its last stand against what to it looks like an alien invasion," as he wrote in The Atlantic in 1927.

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