It seems by casual examination of the 2016 election results that the city-countryside political divide in America is hitting a zenith (or nadir).
whorefinder writes what this could mean for the future of America as a single political entity.
When empires are on the verge of collapse, it occurs when the political divide in the country is between city and country—or, more definitely, when the city folks don’t care about the country folks and vice versa. Happened in the Roman Empire, happened in the Ottomon Empire, happened in Persian Empire.
I don’t know the cause of such divides, but it becomes strikingly obvious when you read history: when city and country are the dominant political divides, the country is doomed.
City mouse and country mouse rape!
The geographic divide in 2016 has shifted from where it had been for decades — North vs South — to East vs West. That is significant. (Agnostic has lots of posts explaining why this shift was predictable.)
But as significant as that geographic shift is, it pales in comparison with the stunning bifurcation in voting behavior we now have between America’s dense urban Diversitopias and her rural and suburban provinces that blithely cling to a slim White majority population profile. I’ve seen analysis that showed this election had the largest divide between city and countryside of any election in US history.
whorefinder is right; the city-countryside divide — or SCALE-COMMUNITY divide — is an ominous portent of American collapse.
Scanman reminds us that our current city-countryside divide is not unique in American history. (But perhaps its Trump-era intensity is unique.)
The divide has been there since before Jefferson and Hamilton but I don’t know if it has ever been so stark and raw. Rural nationalists vs (diverse) urban globalists.
My money will always be on the guys who can change their own oil and know how to hang a door.
whorefinder replies,
The divide was there at that time–it was why the union was so tenuous during and after the Revolution. Southern agrarians and citified Northerners were at odds, and the South was very hard to convince to rebel against Britain compared with commercial centers in the North. But during later periods the divide waned—midwestern farmers became allied with eastern banking interests, etc. In the 20th century the divide all but disappeared after FDR’s realignment. But it has reemerged in the last few decades with a vengeance.
The Trump phenomenon has been compared favorably to the rises of Andrew Jackson, Teddy Roosevelt, and Reagan, but I’ve been telling friends that Trump is most like FDR; a re-aligner who will, if he’s true to his word and character, usher forth the next era of classical egalitarianism of the kind the US had mid-20th Century during the “great compression”.
If Trump doesn’t succeed, and his successor is a Diversity Is Our Strength anti-White retread, then the urban-province divide will find a resolution in a second civil war; though this time the sanctimonious side won’t win. The military bleeds red state values, and the cities by themselves are easy to blockade and starve out.