Urban-rural polarization is a problem that extends well beyond America’s borders, and adequately answering it may be beyond the Democrats’ capacity. EricLevitz writes
World war. Photo: Geoff Robins/AFP via Getty Images Blue America is a nation with an ever-shrinking countryside. In 2008, Barack Obama won 875 U.S. counties; in 2020, Joe Biden won 527, thanks largely to the rightward drift of rural jurisdictions.
All this has prompted much debate about how Democrats can stem their losses in rural areas. Some, like Pennsylvania lieutenant governor John Fetterman, have criticized the party for ignoring “the forgotten, the marginalized and the left-behind places” and have called for greater investments in rural outreach. Others, like former North Dakota senator Heidi Heitkamp, have implored the party to distance itself from “far left” political forces, such as the movement to “defund the police.
The political scientist Ronald Inglehart attributed this development to economic modernization: As human beings grow more prosperous and personally secure, they become more tolerant of ethnic diversity, sexual noncomformity, and social difference. By contrast, under conditions of scarcity, in which relations among groups appear to be zero-sum, humans tend to embrace in-group chauvinism and more socially authoritarian sentiments. A large body of public opinion research has buttressed this theory.
Finally, some political scientists argue that the city itself serves as an agent of progressive value change. For one thing, by bringing diverse groups into close proximity, cities facilitate the rapid dispersion of new ideas and values across diverse subpopulations.
This is consistent with the notion that, under liberal democratic conditions, the late stages of industrial development tend to promote a proliferation of progressive social values in cities, which is not accompanied by a similarly profound liberalization in rural social attitudes .
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