By Frank F Islam & Ed Crego, September 5, 2024 (Image credits: Tom de Boor, DALL-E 3, et al)

In the United States of America in 2024, there is unquestionably an urban-rural divide politically, with Republicans dominating in rural areas and Democrats dominating in urban areas.

This divide is not recent. It has been developing for some time, but it has expanded considerably in this 21st century.

Suzanne Mettler, professor of political science at Cornell University, and her student, Trevor Brown, point this out in their 2022 Annals of Political Science article:

Throughout the middle decades of the twentieth century and as recently as the 1996 presidential election, urban and rural Americans voted in sync, but the difference between them has grown ever since. By 2020, roughly two-thirds of people who lived in rural areas voted to re-elect President Trump, while just one-third of urbanites did.

Mettler and Brown go on to caution:

Given that only 14 percent of Americans live in areas deemed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture as rural, this growing fissure might not seem problematic. However, because American political institutions are organized geographically and give more power to sparsely populated areas, this division, as we show, can not only generate political polarization but also threaten democracy.

Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, Professors of Government at Harvard University, examine the beneficial consequences of that urban-rural divide for Republicans nationally in the electoral college vote, the U.S. Senate, the U.S. Supreme Court, and in state legislatures across the country in their 2023 book, Tyranny of the Minority.

In the Introduction to their book, Levitsky and Ziblatt state:

Designed in a pre-Democratic era, the U.S. Constitution allows partisan minorities to routinely thwart majorities and sometime even govern them. Institutions that empower partisan minorities can become instruments of minority rule. And they are especially dangerous when they are in the hands of extremist or antidemocratic partisan minorities.

They conclude the Introduction warning, “Our institutions will not save our democracy. We will have to save it ourselves.”

Given these analyses and the research and commentary of other academics and political analysts, it appears that the urban-rural divide could be fatal for the future of our American democracy.

There is no question that the size and current nature of the divide, in conjunction with those in positions of power and influence who would magnify the divide to separate us even further, rather than working to bring us together, put our democracy at risk.

We believe that examining the current situation in and between rural and urban areas in more detail provides an alternative perspective. That perspective is that there is the potential to narrow the divide and to strengthen our democracy.

The Rural and Urban Crises

We first commented on the similarities between rural and urban areas in two blogs we posted in October 2023.

The Rural Crisis

We began our blog “The Rural Crisis: Challenges in and for Our Country” by observing that:

The urban-rural divide has become a popular catch phrase in this 21st century to describe the increasing distance politically between Democratic supporters, who reside primarily in urban areas, and Republican supporters, who reside primarily in rural areas.

When it comes to the respective conditions in both of these areas today, however, there is no divide. There is a significant amount of un- or under addressed physical and human needs in both.

We went on to note that while the label “crisis” has been employed frequently in referring to problems in urban areas, and has garnered most of the public and political attention over the past several decades, the problems in these rural (non-metro) areas are multi-dimensional and crisis-like as well.

In a report updated in January 2020, using data from 2019, the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) observed:

Rural communities face challenges related to demographic changes, workforce development, capital access, infrastructure, health, land use, and environment and community preservation. Compared to their urban counterparts, rural areas have less internet access, fewer educational institutions, see more hospitals close, and experience less economic growth.

Those are just some of the challenges confronting rural America and Americans today. There are numerous others. Among the most significant current challenges are: health care; mental health; housing; and homelessness.

The Urban Crisis

Challenges abound in urban areas as well. We examined the nature and locations of those challenges in our October blog, “The Urban Crisis: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow.” We opened that blog with the following quote from a blog on the urban crisis we posted in 2015:

Are America’s major cities dying? The answer is yes, no, and maybe, depending on the city and where one looks within it.

Many of our large cities are places where the infrastructure is decaying, neighborhoods are deteriorating and hopes are dimming for a large number of citizens. Many of them are also places where each one tells a tale of two cities — for the wealthy few it is the best of times, for those of lesser means it is the worst of times.

We went on to state that, until the COVID pandemic, people living in or near the central business districts (CBDs) were doing very well and those living in the neighborhoods were not doing very well at all. The pandemic impacted the CBDs, with offices closing and people living in expensive residences in or near downtown moving out. But, as we will discuss later in this blog, many CBD’s have already begun to do better.

The same cannot be said for most of the neighborhoods in urban cities. They remain places, as we have been emphasizing in blogs for nearly a decade, where there is abject poverty, broken families, terrible living conditions, fewer community and public schools, and a nearly complete lack of economic mobility and opportunity.

No one can predict the future of those urban neighborhoods with certainty. It seems safe to say, though, that without significant local planning and targeted interventions and investments directed at changing their conditions, and the situations of people living there in the future, will be bleak and possibly even bleaker.

Rural Rage and Rural Sage

The same can be said for those living in rural areas and small cities across this country.

Unfortunately, this year, due to the reaction to a book titled White Rural Rage: A Threat to American Democracy, written by Tom Schaller, a professor at the University of Maryland, and journalist Paul Waldman, more attention is being paid to the politics and mindsets of those living in rural areas than to their economic and social circumstances.

In the Prologue to their book, Schaller and Waldman write:

Rural Americans have suffered greatly in recent decades. Layered upon cultural resentments that are nearly as old as our country, this suffering has produced powerful antipathies that are aimed not just at certain groups of Americans, but often at the democratic system itself.

The concluding sentence of their Prologue reads,

Without a change, the politics of rural America will become meaner and more opposed to the foundations of American democracy — and more of a threat to us all.

White Rural Rage has generated “rage” from many readers, critics, and academics because of the charges made in the book, the rhetoric that it employs, and its flawed research methodologies. Two of the most prominent pushbacks against the perspective provided in White Rural Rage came from Nicholas F. Jacobs and Daniel M. Shea, professors of government at Colby College, and Tyler Austin Harper, assistant professor of environmental sciences at Bates College.

Jacobs and Shea are the authors of The Rural Voter: The Politics of Place and the Disuniting of America. Their book, based upon the findings from their Rural Voter Survey of more than 10,000 rural voters across the country, presents a much more nuanced picture of who they are and what they want than Rage.

After Rage was published, Jacobs and Shea had an opinion editorial published in The Washington Post on the book, in which they characterized white rural rage as a “political stereotype.” In their op-ed, they declare:

As two scholars of rural politics, who have spent the past three years poring over thousands of survey interviews with rural Americans, this caricature of the rural rabble-rouser is deeply puzzling. Instead of threats to democracy, or rebellious politics, or reflexive anger, we keep finding something different: pride in rural living, a sense of communal belonging, a shared fate that intertwines the economic well-being of rich and poor in rural communities. Yes, there are resentments, especially toward government officials and experts. But resentment is not a stereotype. It’s a motivation, a story.

Tyler Austin Harper was much harsher than Jacobs and Shea in his assessment of Schaller and Waldman’s work in his lengthy book review for The Atlantic. In the opening paragraph, he opines, “White Rural Rage is a screed lobbed at a familiar target of elite liberal ire.”

In his second paragraph, he takes his criticism further, drawing upon input from academia to state:

I spoke with more than 20 scholars in the tight-knit rural-studies community, most of them cited in White Rural Rage or thanked in the acknowledgments, and they left me convinced that the book is poorly researched and intellectually dishonest

Near the end of his piece Harper asserts, “This book… will likely pour gasoline on rural Americans’ smoldering resentment, a resentment that is in no small part driven by the conviction that liberal elites both misunderstand and despise them.”

Rural Resentments

While there is a serious disagreement as to whether those “white” citizens who live in rural areas are in a state of rage, there appears to be general agreement that they have resentments.

This distinction is an important one because as various dictionaries explain, rage is “uncontrollable anger” and can be “violent.” By contrast, resentment is a “feeling of anger or indignation” for being treated unfairly.

Rage is difficult and impossible to overcome. Resentments, on the other hand, can be reversed or reduced by addressing and correcting the reasons for the feelings of being treated unfairly.

There are numerous reasons for rural resentments. Jim Nowlan provides an interesting perspective on these resentments in his February 9 Chicago Tribune opinion piece, “The Resentments and Realities of the Rural-Urban Divide.”

Nowlan is a politician, professor, essayist, and author who has lived most of his 82 years in rural Illinois, but his work takes him into Chicago regularly. He opens his piece stating, “Rural and urban Illinois live in starkly different worlds, and the former resent it, though they don’t clearly understand why.”

He goes on to observe, “The differences are sure wealth, income, education, and family cohesiveness, but more important, expectations and aspirations — with much less of all these in rural Illinois than in metro Chicago.”

He points out that it didn’t use to be that way, commenting:

When I was growing up in small-town America post-World War II, each little burg tended to have a small manufacturer, a banker, a couple of lawyers and Main Street businesspeople. Back then, their kids returned home after college to run the businesses and lead the town. No longer. The kids of any leading citizens go to college and never look back. Now they live in the ’burbs, maybe soon to be hunkered behind gated communities.

Late in his piece, he advises:

Government programs will never lift rural America out of its doldrums. Only the kindling of higher expectations and aspirations for one’s children will do the trick. Those who do well as a result may leave town for good. Yet maybe the electricity in a community that is striving hard to achieve will draw new families to the laid-back small-town lifestyle, some of whose kids may stay.

We concur with Nowlan that government programs by themselves will never lift rural America out of its doldrums. They can, however, provide resources that local leaders can use to develop programs that will help revitalize rural places.

Changing Rural and Urban Geographics and Demographics

Interestingly, what Nowlan hopes for in terms of changing the composition of rural places has already begun. And it appears to be occurring in urban places as well.

William H Frey, Senior Fellow with Brookings Metro, provides considerable evidence in this regard in his research findings posted on April 15. Drawing upon census data for the estimates in population changes for rural areas through April 2023, compared to the COVID pandemic period changes (2020–2021), Frey found:

Non-metropolitan areas — the aggregation of counties that lie outside of metro areas — continued a pattern of population gains since the pandemic, which is a sharp reversal of their negative or miniscule gains for most years in the 2010s decade. Among the nation’s 1,958 non-metropolitan counties, 949 lost population in 2022–23, compared with 1,003 in 2020–21.

Frey explains:

The major demographic player in non-metropolitan areas was domestic migration. Prior to the pandemic, these areas saw overall out-migration. However, in-migration to these areas rose sharply in the peak pandemic year and remained high in the two years since. This rise in domestic migration more than offset these areas’ sharp pandemic-related rise in natural decrease (the excess of deaths over births)

The U.S. Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service (USDA) in its Rural America at a Glance: 2023 Edition states that:

Based on previous research, this increase in “amenity migration” (people choosing locations to live based on quality-of-life factors) is not surprising, given that baby boomer retirement is reaching its peak and remote work is allowing more locational freedom for working-age adults.

In addition, the USDA reports that, “The rural population is also experiencing declines in poverty, with 9.7 percent fewer nonmetro counties in 2021 experiencing persistent poverty compared with a decade earlier.”

William Frey also examines the renewed growth curve in urban areas and concludes:

The new census estimates do not paint the rosiest of scenarios for a revival of major metropolitan areas and their urban cores — that will take a few more years to assess. What they do show is a fairly widespread demographic improvement in terms of reduced population losses or shifts from losses to gains in some of the areas the COVID19 pandemic hit hardest. Domestic migration has rebounded to some degree. New census data hints at an urban population revival, assisted by immigration overcoming the “urban doom loop” prognostications from right after the pandemic. Natural increase has also rebounded almost everywhere, as the earlier spike in COVID-related deaths has subsided and births have risen a bit. And international migration appears to be the “magic bullet” not previously foreseen as a contributor to urban population gains.

Demographics alone is not the only measure of how well metro areas and cities are doing economically, especially since remote work, though less pervasive, is still occurring. But demographics do matter, and the new Census Bureau numbers make the case that major metro areas and cities are showing signs of coming back, with an important contribution from international migration.

The Citizens’ Role in Narrowing the Rural-Urban Divide

This resurgence in growth in urban and rural areas across the country is encouraging. As Frey suggests though, it should not be misinterpreted.

It is not a sign that there will be a return to an era of “urban supremacy” or creation of a new era of “rural supremacy.” What it indicates is that there is the potential for both urban and rural areas to strengthen and achieve a stabilized and sufficient state, which benefits all those residing in those locations.

If there are areas that will achieve supremacy in the future, it is the suburbs. In this 21st century, the suburbs have been growing, attracting more middle class, wealthier and diverse residents, and becoming more politically powerful.

Given this context, there is an economic, social, and political need to shrink the rural-urban divide. In our opinion, the beginning point for shrinking that divide should be focused on the rural resentment and anxiety that has been stoked by the MAGA Republicans to make it a cudgel for moving our nation away from a democracy toward an autocracy.

As we have stated in earlier blogs, all of us who are responsible citizens, regardless of political orientation, must be the willing and ready to reach out to responsible citizens in rural areas to initiate the process of shrinking the divide. To be able to do that, we should heed the following advice from Professor Nicholas F. Jacobs and Daniel Shea: “To genuinely heal societal rifts and to find common ground, we have to dispel the myths of blind rage and focus instead on a common desire for recognition.”

As Farah Stockman, New York Times editorial board member can attest, there is definitely an opportunity for common ground and myths to be dispelled. In her April 23 opinion piece, “Rural Voters Can Be Progressive, Too,” she provides some results from a poll conducted for the Rural Democracy Initiative — a funding collaborative that invests “in civic infrastructure in small cities and towns to impact public opinion, elections, and redistricting processes.”

According to Stockman, that survey, answered by 1713 voters in 10 battleground states, suggests that “rural voters tend to be economic populists who would overwhelmingly support parts of the Democratic Party’s agenda — so long as the right messenger knocked on their doors.”

Issues the majority of the rural voters surveyed agreed upon included: women’s right to an abortion; raising of the minimum wage; the right to form a union, and making quality child care more affordable.

Stockman states, “The trouble is that a significant number of the respondents didn’t associate these policies with Democrats.” And that large numbers of respondents reported “that no one from the Democratic Party had reached out to them to offer information or ask for their support.”

Things have changed. The Democrats now have Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, who grew up in rural Nebraska and Minnesota, as their candidate for Vice President and Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate, and they are campaigning together in rural areas. It will be interesting to see whether that changes the perceptions and votes of some of the voters in rural areas.

We think it might. Stockman’s call for the “right messenger” resonated with us. We addressed the critical need for the right messenger and messages in our blog “We the People Need to Protect our Democracy in 2024” posted on January 11. We also outline a process that a concerned citizen can employ for developing her or his personal Political — Civic Engagement Plan (C-PEP) in that blog.

In the months since that blog posting, the central importance for a responsive and tailored approach to build the bridge across the rural-urban divide has become even more apparent. It is essential that that bridge be constructed in order to maintain our United States of America and to narrow the rural-urban divide.

It is also essential that the residents of poor and underserved neighborhoods in urban areas not be forgotten in this process. They are disadvantaged and need a hand-up as well.

On May 22, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson delivered his famous “Great Society” speech at the University of Michigan. In that speech, Johnson said:

… the Great Society is not a safe harbor, a resting place, a final objective, a finished work. It is a challenge constantly renewed, beckoning us toward a destiny where the meaning of our lives matches the marvelous products of our labor.

So, I want to talk to you today about three places where we begin to build the Great Society — in our cities, in our countryside, and in our classrooms.

Sixty years later, the Great Society remains a work in progress — in our cities, in our countryside, and in our classrooms. There is work to be done in all of those places to bring us together as one nation in order to continue making progress on our journey to create a “more perfect union.”