In recent years, families have fragmented and friendships have been fractured by clashing political ideologies and beliefs. What’s happening on the micro level is happening on the macro level, too: Secessionist sentiments are strengthening as American politics becomes ever-more polarized.
The secessionist movement in Oregon hints at a much larger split in the United States—one that exists in multiple states: An ideological political chasm that divides large cities from small towns and rural areas within states. Indeed, when looking at electoral maps of the United States after recent presidential elections, one can’t help but notice the striking predominance of red, signifying counties where Republicans won a majority of votes with scattered spots of blue marking the urban counties where Democrats prevailed. Clearly, if presidents were elected by acreage rather than by head count, Republicans would win national elections by landslides.
There’s a stark divide in state after state. Take Philadelphia out of Pennsylvania, the Big Apple out of New York State, Detroit out of Michigan, Chicago out of Illinois, Milwaukee out of Wisconsin, St. Louis out of Missouri, etc., and a lot of blue states would instantly be red. Indeed, whereas secession in the 19th century divided the country between north and south, today the fault lines lie between urban and rural parts of the country. While nobody realistically anticipates a separation of large cities from the states of which they are currently part, if the United States were to realign itself along ideological lines, one can see the makings of two distinct political entities: a League of Liberal Cities and a Confederation of Conservative States.
What explains the pronounced partisan/ideological divide between urban and nonurban areas?
Another plausible explanation for our major cities being solidly Democratic is more innocent and unintentional. I’m not sure whether to categorize this factor as psychological, but it has to do with how urban dwellers perceive how the world works. Those perceptions are often different from the way people out in the hinterlands see the world.
Those who live in cities are relatively insulated from how difficult and challenging it can be to produce the food, energy, equipment, devices, etc., that urbanites often take for granted. In their urban cocoons, city-dwellers have grown to expect that what they want will be there at the click of a mouse or the sending of a text. Push a button and—presto!—you’ve got what you want. And if there are things that you don’t have, well, why not vote for political candidates who promise that they will make it easier for you to have them?
Many well-to-do, educated urbanites see no downside to supporting stricter regulations and higher taxes on energy producers. To them, energy is something that’s always there at the flip of a switch (although the growing trend toward brownouts and blackouts will hopefully awaken some of these people from their self-delusions).
Rose Wilder Lane, the daughter in the “Little House on the Prairie” stories, who later became a globetrotting journalist (even traveling alone to Vietnam to report on the Vietnam War when she was 78 years young) remarked on the illusions that can beguile urbanites long ago. In her 1943 book, “The Discovery of Freedom,” Lane blasted the myth that government can and should guarantee economic security that’s so prevalent among progressives today, writing:
“Anyone who says that economic security is a human right, has been too much babied. While he babbles, other men are risking and losing their lives to protect him. They are fighting the sea, fighting the land, fighting diseases and insects and weather and space and time, for him, while he chatters that all men have a right to security and that some pagan God—Society, The State, The Government, The Commune—must give it to them. Let the fighting men stop fighting this inhuman Earth for one hour, and he will learn how much security there is.”
Here’s a thought experiment for you: If, magically, large American cities were to split off from their states and become independent political entities, which would suffer most from such a secession, the cities or the states? Don’t you think the cities would need supplies from the rural parts of the state to survive more than vice-versa?
But no such secession is on the horizon, despite the pronounced urban/rural ideological split. Thus, we can expect America’s metropolises to continue to be painted blue in upcoming elections. The people in my theoretical League of Liberal Cities will continue to vote for candidates seeking to impose pernicious progressive policies on their more conservative fellow citizens in the outlying red regions of their respective states.
