How The Social/Political Divide Of America Really Came Into Being

Ever since the advent of cities the great social and political divide has naturally manifested itself between rural and metropolitan peoples. Intellectual objectivity comes about via both education and being exposed to a diversity of everyday experiences. And so with the world’s great learning centers concentrated predominantly in metropolitan regions along with a wide cross section of cultural, racial, ethic and religious variations in close approximation there as well, sophisticated and progressive outlooks grow rapidly in the urban areas that in turn promote new ideas and change.

Conversely in the rural regions of nations where the pace of life of similar peoples, having parallel belief systems, moves along in slow, predictable ways, change and new ideas are not particularly welcomed — the dead hand of conservatism rules the day. In other words nothing more complex than geographical concentrations of humankind inevitably shapes minds and thus national cultural and political divisions.

If one accepts the premise that ego is the primitive foundation of the human mind and that it requires a certain level of enhanced intellectual objectivity to raise one out of one’s ego rut, you can easily see why there is such a noticeable cultural divide between city and country folks in America today.

Two factors accelerating this social divide is the exponential rate of technical and social change emanating from today’s metropolitan areas of the nation (mainly within the cities that line the East and West coast of America) and the opportunistic conservative media (Fox News and conservative talk radio) that fan the flames of rural resentment against a world they see as racing away from their 1950’s ideals.

Perhaps the most damaging aspect of one’s primitive ego, whose mandate is essentially promoting survival and advantage, is the negative offset of the tribal impulse for fearing and hating those unlike one’s self — the other. Thus you find within the rural community — lacking in intellectual enhancement — a propensity for violence. Some of America’s greatest military heroes (raw fighters) have come from the backwaters of American’s rural South — heroes like Sargent Alvin York from Tennessee, the most decorated American soldier of World War One, and Audie Murphy born to a poor sharecropper family in Hunt County Texas, the most decorated American soldier of World War Two — which under certain conditions can of course be a good thing.

Another side of an intellectually non-enhanced primitive ego is that it has a natural distain for democratic ideals, being interested only in seeking personal advantage, it is thus prone to embracing the “I will make American [for you White folks] great again” type rants of demagogues like Donald Trump.

When Democrats berate themselves for overlooking rural peoples they grossly misread the reason why the rural vote went heavily for Trump. It had nothing whatsoever to do with what metropolitan oriented Democrats did or didn’t do, short of wishing to appeal to rural xenophobia, and everything to do with the way that Trump and his conservative propaganda machine and the Russians fanned the flames of the natural resentment that rural folks have always had toward their more sophisticated city cousins.

As social and technical elements continue to accelerate, this city/country divide will only grow more intense no matter what political parties try to do. It cannot be changed, only exploited. Nixon and Regan appealed successfully to country elements — the silent majority and the so-called Southern Democrat strategy respectively. Currently Trump has the nation’s country based “White nationalists” as his core backing.

It’s always country vs. city stupid, as Billy Boy Clinton might whisper into the ear of his clueless wife. In this regard the vulgarities of the Electoral College still favor the country folk.