Urban vs Rural

People often comment that the Left-Right divide in America is now a matter of urban vs rural, rather than between distinct regional blocs (such as the North and South in 1861). They’ll point to an electoral map, with its sea of red and dots of blue that match the distribution of the national population. And they are correct in a general sense. The urban stands at odds with the rural in starker and starker terms — politically, culturally, ethnically. But this is because the modern American city has become completely detached from the hinterland.

Part of this is due to the Industrial Revolution, which created a gargantuan appetite for “productivity” that demanded massive amounts of human capital. The cities became powerful drivers of material output in additional to their age-old roles as centers of politics and trade, and they required population draws from the hinterlands of such size and velocity that the rural regions became drained and demoralized. The relationship between them was always parasitic - the urban feeding on the blood and soil of the rural. But the divide has widened.

The Right claims (correctly) that the rural is the true strength of the nation. Not only does it provide the raw natural resources that fuel the engines of urban productivity, but it provides the overwhelming majority of human capital that urban centers demand. The rural people are fertile and the cities are infertile, both due to cultural differences and simple labor dynamics. A large family was an asset on a farm — cheap labor with a clear collective interest. In the cities those large families are liability, especially in modern post-industrial cities. More mouths to feed, more school tuition to pay, with next to zero economic productivity. In places like New York, you now have wealthy families who have more children as a sort of status symbol - look at these “luxuries” I can afford as the cost of living skyrockets.

The rural is also foundational to national strength because it contains people with a much stronger connection to tangible wealth found in the land. There’s a reason that the most important signifier of wealth for all of human history until the last century was land ownership. It was everything, for in one way or another, it contained everything. The progression of seasons is of greater concern than the capital business cycle, leading to longer time horizons and more time to sit within the community and develop social bonds. Cultural traditions remain firm when protected from a more aggressive pace of change, and this stability thus provides a bedrock that keeps the nation together and prevents the cities from spiraling into decadence.

Tolkien understood that the modern industrialized city is naturally at odds with the pastoral. In his Lord of the Rings books, Mordor is a crowded industrial furnace populated by creatures born not of families but of inhuman brood sacks pulled from the mud. This is contrasted against the Shire, a sparsely populated land replete with healthy farms, nuclear families, and a sense of living in nature. The two cannot coexist indefinitely within that paradigm, as Mordor’s expansion chews up the forests and burns up its population via material productivity and war.

Civilizations in their ascent certainly have cities, and those cities serve as engines of culture and wealth that contribute to the grandeur of the society. What is Rome without the Circus Maximus or the Pantheon or the Coliseum. But the cities work on top of a much larger foundation of rural countryside and small towns that provide the rooted energy that keeps the greater population cohesive. Some “melting pot” dynamics could take place in the cities -— rapid interchange that can ping back and forth amongst the concrete and brights lights as rapid boom-and-bust profit cycles take place constantly, and everything seems to take place above the ground on which you walk. But when the cultural chaos becomes too great, when the ground falls aways and the wealth dries up, the cities fall too. Rome was indeed a titanic civilizational accomplishment, but as the empire declined, so too did the city. In the third and fourth centuries, her population fell about 2% every ten years. By the late fifth century, much of her streets were deserted. (Many American cities have experienced a similar rate of decline since the 1980s.)

And so the deindustrialized cities of the modern United States are strange beasts. They still draw the best and brightest from the small towns and rural hinterlands to be churned in the urban furnace, but they do so in service of a globalized, financialized post-industrial economy that makes these cities into floating islands that loom over a forgotten national foundation that decays under their rule. The cultural tethers between the urban and rural are always stressed to some extent, but they are now just about completely cut, threatening something like 1789 France or 1940s China.

Those people may be right to point to those electoral maps as illustative of the current national divide. But if an age of conflict dawns, it may surprise some of them to find out which one is more in need of the other.