The deep roots of America’s rural-urban political divide
The chasm of misunderstanding and animosity between rural and urban voters is one of the oldest divisions in American political life.
From the beginning of the United States republic, farmers and other country dwellers have viewed cities with political suspicion. Cities were filled with immigrants, the poor, and other people who didn’t fit the Jeffersonian yeoman ideal. Here’s Henry J. Cookingham, delegate to an 1894 New York state Constitutional Convention, disparaging urban voters and municipal corruption: “I say without fear of contradiction that the average citizen in the rural district is superior in intelligence, superior in morality, superior in self-government, to the average citizen in the great cities.”
As urban areas exploded in size and power, urban voters increasingly returned such disdain. Rural residents were rubes or hicks. Urban agglomerations were the economic future, country roads the past. In 1921 the acerbic Baltimore journalist H.L. Mencken envisioned new Republican President Warren Harding giving rural speeches to “small town yokels ... low political serfs.”
Today, almost 100 years later, the place-based insults are shriller than ever. The divide is getting wider. Polarized US politics – and politicians who exploit that polarization for their own gain – are pulling urban and rural voters farther and farther apart.
Take Wisconsin. Are the state’s rural voters more “real”? This December a Republican-controlled state legislature voted to strip powers from an incoming Democratic governor. One reason the move was legitimate, they said, was because Democratic voters are concentrated in Madison and Milwaukee. Republican votes came from all over the state. “If you took Madison and Milwaukee out of the state election formula,
From an agrarian to an urban nationBefore ‘one person, one vote’Divide widened in 2016Backlashes follow a shift in powerA fight over who ‘real’ voters areA real rift, but also blurry lines
