The Beginner Guide to Dooming in America

To illustrate the DOOMMM Club's thinking on the Bundy rebellion and the US urban rural divide in general, I picked a few maps from the web. While some of these have unclear sources, they do confirm to trends identified by serious analytical articles on the subject.

We start with the simple fact that the rural conservative minority presides over a lion's share of the country.

Elections 2012. Red Counties voted Republican. Blue voted Democrat



Source

Geographically, the minority is an overwhelming majority. It's not so in numbers. The next map reflects better actual electoral power by expressing population density in urban elevations. Blue spots that were drowning in a sea of red in the previous map are actually densely populated electoral giants towering over thinly populated flat red planes.



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Next we have a map of trending counties. Those countries gravitated towards one of the parties from 2004 to 2012. The longer the arrow the faster the county's been trending. To see the arrows better, click on the map



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More counties are obviously trending republican than otherwise. Again, the geography is misleading and obscures the actual numbers, but it does reflect the growing urban rural divide.

Here is another view on the same thing. The average magnitude of the shift. Rural counties trending more conservative. The cities, however, are turning liberal at an even greater rate.



Source

To be sure, this is in relative terms. That is, they can perfectly be all turning more liberal, but because they are not doing it with the same speed, the gap between them is growing. The maps above measure the shift in terms of party preferences, not in absolute terms of how people actually poll on specific issues.

The maps/graphs above are what can be called geographical polarization. Cities turning more liberal, the countryside trending conservative. Political polarization along the urban rural fault line. The second component of this process, however, is even more important. It is the sheer intensity of the polarization.

Here is a good illustration from Pew Research. It's not only counties increasingly voting this or that way. People themselves are moving away from the political center. Conservatives growing more conservatives, liberals more liberal. They are not only increasingly clustering geographically. Their views are trending away from the center.



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Now if you are betting on polarization to work its magic, growing divides are not enough. After all, what matters about the rise of the Trump/Sanders duo is not only their views but how these two and their supporters are perceived respectively on the other side of the divide. Liberals detest Trump, conservatives can't stomach Sanders. The following graph by the same Pew should confirm your intuition. Mutual political animosity has been escalating over time.



Now two maps to illustrate the issue of the federal land. It's basically concentrated in western states and it's probably not a coincidence that Bundys hail from Nevada where 80% of land is owned by the federal government.





It's easy to imagine the subject of the federal land ownership eventually blowing into a nationwide fallout between the two camps because it's related to one more general debate around which much of the current polarization is being created. That is, whether the government can be trusted with running things.

This issue should evoke almost archetypal political imagery for both sides. For the liberal/progressive crowd, here is the government responsibly protecting people and environment against the horrors of unchecked capitalist greed, balancing the need for economic growth against more humanistic concerns. On the other side of the divide, it's a story of a big and overbearing government driving into poverty hard working people with its inept and absurd regulation. And not just people. Rural Americans. The salt of the earth.

It's important to keep in mind that, both in terms of political geography and in terms of intensity, the urban rural divide has been steadily growing. The Bundy rebellion is interesting not only because of its particular circumstances, but because it's a point in time on a steadily escalating curve of political/geographical polarization. This curve points towards a certain destination in the future... It may be a very near future.

PS

On a personal note, I've been an avid observer of urban rural conflicts all over the world for years which is very obvious from the following link I co-authored with Aymenn in 2012: Demography Is Destiny in Syria

Red State, Blue City: What you are is very much about how dense is your place

This is an important background article. Those interested in America's growing urban rural divide may want to read this report in its entirety. Just a few points

1. The claim that "people don't make cities liberal -- cities make people liberal" may be exaggerated but this is still an exaggeration worth making to drive home the point. There is a very strong correlation between population density and ideology. From our perspective what matters is the correlation since it's fundamental to the city/country clash. How exactly this correlation is produced is of secondary importance.

2. The divide has been steadily growing

3. He is generally dismissive about the separatist potential in America but this is because this article predates the last wave of new secessionist movements that played out precisely along the urban rural divide. I may expand on this subject later in comments.

BY JOSH KRON (Atlantic) {

Date = NOV 30, 2012

Source = Red State, Blue City: How the Urban-Rural Divide Is Splitting America

The voting data suggest that people don't make cities liberal -- cities make people liberal

Electoral cartograms by University of Michigan physics professor Mark Newman show the power of Democratic counties based on population density. Spreading each vote out, his illustrations portray the hidden truth of the conventional electoral map, and why the much smaller number of dedicated blue counties is outmatching the more geographically numerous red counties.

Meanwhile, the states with constitutional amendments banning gay marriage are often among the least densely populated in the country, such as South Dakota and Idaho.

[...]

Starting before the Civil War era, America's political dividing lines were drawn along state and regional borders. Cities and the then-extensive rural areas shared a worldview North and South of the Mason-Dixon line.

Today, that divide has vanished. The new political divide is a stark division between cities and what remains of the countryside. Not just some cities and some rural areas, either -- virtually every major city (100,000-plus population) in the United States of America has a different outlook from the less populous areas that are closest to it. The difference is no longer about where people live, it's about how people live: in spread-out, open, low-density privacy -- or amid rough-and-tumble, in-your-face population density and diverse communities that enforce a lower-common denominator of tolerance among inhabitants.

The only major cities that voted Republican in the 2012 presidential election were Phoenix, Oklahoma City, Fort Worth, and Salt Lake City. With its dominant Mormon population, Mitt Romney was a lock in the Utah capital; Phoenix nearly voted for Obama. After that, the largest urban centers to tilt Republican included Wichita, Lincoln, Neb., and Boise.

The gap is so stark that some of America's bluest cities are located in its reddest states. Every one of Texas' major cities -- Austin, Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio -- voted Democratic in 2012, the second consecutive presidential election in which they've done so. Other red-state cities that tipped blue include Atlanta, Indianapolis, New Orleans, Birmingham, Tucson, Little Rock, and Charleston, S.C. -- ironically, the site of the first battle of the Civil War. In states like Nevada, the only blue districts are often also the only cities, like Reno and Las Vegas.

For years, this continues: Urban and rural counties jostling with a small pool of counties which go back and forth every couple of elections. There's no real realignment, just a constant tug of war as the nation grows further divided. }