It's not elites vs. populists. It's cities vs. the countryside.

 

Across the West, from the U.K.'s Brexit to the rise of Donald Trump in the U.S., societies are dividing along similar fault lines. But we can't quite agree on how to describe it: Neoliberal centrists vs. antiliberal extremists? Elites vs. populists? Globalists vs. nationalists? The establishment vs. the working class?

Each of those dichotomies captures something about our present moment, but none of them gets at the fundamentals — the sociological core of what we're all living through, which is a growing socio-cultural chasm pitting the city and the countryside against each other.

In an important essay for The Washington Post, Will Wilkinson recently examined President Trump's consistent rhetorical hostility to cities and noted the salience of the urban-rural divide for understanding the outcome of the 2016 election. "The bigger, denser, and more diverse the city, the better Hillary Clinton did in November. But Trump prevailed everywhere else — in small cities, suburbs, exurbs, and beyond."

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