[The Week] What if the polarization of American politics and rise of right-wing populism in the Republican Party are a function of rural parts of the country becoming more like the historic South?That is the surprising suggestion of Will Wilkinson in a fruitfully provocative Substack post. Wilkinson is something of an expert on the subject, having done important empirical work on the role of population density in driving political polarization and populist backlash. His argument, in sum: Polarization and populism are caused by urbanization and its economic, social, and political consequences, with cities growing demographically and economically, and becoming more progressive, over time, while depopulating rural areas succumb to economic decline and zero-sum, reactionary politics.
| “Lookit those dumb, dead-end hicks who can’t get anything right!” Also, the writer is ignoring the recent mass movement from big, Progressive cities and states to the previously declining and depopulating Conservative ones in response to Covid lockdowns, work-from-home orders, and corporate flight. His next opus should be a doozy. |
So far, these are merely anecdotes, but if verified by more rigorous research they could point toward something real and important: Not just growing ideological unification across the rural areas of the country, but the drift of that ideology in the direction of the Confederacy. The point isn't that the American countryside increasingly wants to avenge the honor of Southern slaveowners for their loss in a war that ended over a century and a half ago. Rather, the people who live in these areas share with the historic South an intense distrust of the federal government, veneration of local law enforcement, resentment of city folk, suspicion of minorities and foreigners, hostility to technologically driven change, and a keen sensitivity to cultural slights.
