Most of the the political divides today are due to urban vs rural communities.
I grew up in a small village of about 300 people and my worldview fits that background. I support the nationstate, I support low levels of immigration, I support local businesses and don't expect to be surrounded by people speaking different languages to me. Everyone I know from these places shares these same beliefs, but I've noticed we're being maligned by liberal urbaners who are globalist, who believe in melting pots and universalism. Many rural people feel themselves the 'losers' in the globalist economy. It feels as though we are being mocked and punished for wanting a national identity, it feels especially hard to convince people that being 'English' is not a racist identity marker. Flying an English flag is not racist.
What can be done? These views are totally incompatible.
Across Europe too, there are signs that many different political systems are adapting to this new cleavage, and an increasingly spatially divided electoral geography is emerging (Agnew and Shin 2020; Hooghe and Marks 2018). France is a much-cited exemplar of this trend. There is a growing political divide between the large urban centres – ‘globalised’, ‘gentrified’, and increasingly inhabited by cosmopolitans and ‘bobos’ (bourgeois bohemians) – and the banlieues populated by immigrants of recent arrival, and the remaining medium and small-sized cities and rural areas, where longtime immigrants and the ‘white’ working classes experience economic decline and are increasingly disaffected with the political system (Bacqué et al. 2016; Cusin, Lefebvre, and Sigaud 2016; Eribon 2013; Foa et al. 2020; Guilluy 2016; Ivaldi and Gombin 2015).
Similarly, England has witnessed a gradual ‘bifurcation’ (Jennings and Stoker 2016) in political terms between people with higher education and good employment opportunities who live in metropolitan areas and those living in ‘backwater’ areas associated with economic decline, hostility to immigration and the EU, and a stronger sense of English identity (Garretsen et al. 2019; Kenny 2014, 2015). While there is a strong regional dimension to the geography of discontent in Britain (Garretsen et al. 2018; McCann 2016, 2019; Tyler et al. 2017), in the UK and elsewhere, the urban-rural fault-line has become increasingly prominent.
[...]
As an example, ‘typical’ ‘left-behind’ Brexit supporters have been described as “older, working-class, white voters […] who live on low incomes and lack the skills that are required to adapt and prosper amid the modern, post-industrial economy” (Goodwin and Heath, 2016, p. 325).
@Augustus
I grew up in a small village of about 300 people and my worldview fits that background. I support the nationstate, I support low levels of immigration, I support local businesses and don't expect to be surrounded by people speaking different languages to me. Everyone I know from these places shares these same beliefs, but I've noticed we're being maligned by liberal urbaners who are globalist, who believe in melting pots and universalism. Many rural people feel themselves the 'losers' in the globalist economy. It feels as though we are being mocked and punished for wanting a national identity, it feels especially hard to convince people that being 'English' is not a racist identity marker. Flying an English flag is not racist.
What can be done? These views are totally incompatible.
Across Europe too, there are signs that many different political systems are adapting to this new cleavage, and an increasingly spatially divided electoral geography is emerging (Agnew and Shin 2020; Hooghe and Marks 2018). France is a much-cited exemplar of this trend. There is a growing political divide between the large urban centres – ‘globalised’, ‘gentrified’, and increasingly inhabited by cosmopolitans and ‘bobos’ (bourgeois bohemians) – and the banlieues populated by immigrants of recent arrival, and the remaining medium and small-sized cities and rural areas, where longtime immigrants and the ‘white’ working classes experience economic decline and are increasingly disaffected with the political system (Bacqué et al. 2016; Cusin, Lefebvre, and Sigaud 2016; Eribon 2013; Foa et al. 2020; Guilluy 2016; Ivaldi and Gombin 2015).
Similarly, England has witnessed a gradual ‘bifurcation’ (Jennings and Stoker 2016) in political terms between people with higher education and good employment opportunities who live in metropolitan areas and those living in ‘backwater’ areas associated with economic decline, hostility to immigration and the EU, and a stronger sense of English identity (Garretsen et al. 2019; Kenny 2014, 2015). While there is a strong regional dimension to the geography of discontent in Britain (Garretsen et al. 2018; McCann 2016, 2019; Tyler et al. 2017), in the UK and elsewhere, the urban-rural fault-line has become increasingly prominent.
[...]
As an example, ‘typical’ ‘left-behind’ Brexit supporters have been described as “older, working-class, white voters […] who live on low incomes and lack the skills that are required to adapt and prosper amid the modern, post-industrial economy” (Goodwin and Heath, 2016, p. 325).
@Augustus
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