Causes of Polarization: Rural-Urban Divide and the Role of Elites

Credit: Minnesota Star Tribune

Two different value systems, reflected politically, represent the cultures of people living in rural versus urban areas. Largely university-educated, liberal, global elites residing primarily in cities view their reality as primal and sacrosanct. Rural dwellers, who tend to embrace traditionalism, religiosity, and a slower and more practical lifestyle often tied to the land, also see their reality as foundational, if not fundamental.

Technology and travel allow the urbanites (who are similar to what British journalist David Goodheart calls “the Anywheres”) to connect with one another around the world, creating one pan-global urban progressivist culture that is disconnected from their own rural co-nationals.

Rurals who find themselves increasingly alienated from their city cultures (similar to whom Goodheart calls “the Somewheres”), tend to view such progressivism with skepticism and suspicion. The result is two pillars of citizenry with different visions of their society that vie with one another and seldom overlap.

This is not unrelated to the phenomenon of civilizational decline. As prosperity rises and living becomes easier, urban elites develop greater allegiance to a global network from which they draw status, attention and funds. At the same time they disconnect from a distant rural base with differing values, which they both take for granted and perceive as irrelevant and having less to offer. Rather than attending to their hinterlands, the urbanites learn to obsess on intra-elite divides. They become less concerned with the effects of policies on the rural space, or on maintaining a healthy social and cultural fabric for all, which contributes to polarizing tension, conflict and jealousy between them and their co-nationals.

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Read our next post in the series: Causes of Polarization: Increased Immigration and Migration.