Columbus, Ohio, saw the light of liberalism only decades later, not because of some grand political realignment but as a by-product of creeping prosperity. A varied economy of largely white-collar employers is now drawing a population that is increasingly young, diverse, well educated, and addicted to pleasant living. “When I first moved there 20 years ago, Columbus was a dull, sleepy midwestern city, a solidly Republican city. It isn’t anymore,” says Steven Conn, a history professor at Miami University in Ohio and the author of Americans Against the City: Anti-Urbanism in the Twentieth Century. “People are interested in better public schools and better urban amenities like bike trails and so on, and the Republican Party is against everything they care about week to week.” In some areas, that process is ongoing. Just this month, in a single congressional district in one of the reddest states, Sedgwick County, the Kansas jurisdiction that includes Wichita, swung to the Democratic underdog in a special election; he was swamped by the surrounding rural vote and lost, but not by much. [...]
Trump — like many Americans who duck from house to car to office to mall — rarely experiences an unplanned encounter. He has spent much of his life in gilded rooms, surrounded by people he employs. His idea of transit consists of elevators, limos, helicopters, and private jets. Until he moved into the White House, he hardly set foot in a place he didn’t own. Maybe that’s why he knows so little and appreciates less about his own hometown, why a president who was born and bred in New York City spends his time stoking ancient fears about it. When he started planning Trump Tower in the late 1970s, it was an expression of confidence in the deluxe appeal of midtown Manhattan at a time when a seemingly ungovernable city had bled nearly a million people. Now, when urban crime sits in the eerily low range in many cities, when companies follow their most desirable employees into revitalized downtowns, and when many metropolitan areas are more worried about housing shortages and gentrification than about falling apart, the president has revived a vision of cities suppurating with violence and sin. Once he sold urban real estate to customers who wanted to live there; now he sells fantasies of urban horror to those who prefer to shudder from afar. [...]
The political gulf between city and non-city has deepened even as the physical boundaries between them have blurred. Cities have become more suburbanized and suburbs more citified, pushing the dividing line farther and farther from downtown. These two contrary currents have been in motion at least since the 1940s, when the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company built Stuyvesant Town as a verdant middle-class enclave in the middle of Manhattan, its blocky, high-rise architecture softened by planted courtyards and the absence of cars. More recently, ubiquitous mall brands, an influx of educated young transplants, and a citywide tree-planting spree have given formerly gritty parts of Brooklyn an almost bucolic air. [...]
Conflict between urban and rural areas is a worldwide phenomenon. The Brexit vote shocked Londoners into the realization that they are outnumbered. The right-wing party of Marine Le Pen represents rural France’s revenge on Paris. Tokyo grows while Japan’s population shrinks, and India’s exploding cities are leaving its villages ever poorer, sicker, and less educated.
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