Fascinating articles on the US rural - urban divide and its history of secession. Really gives insight into American society and mindset (refusal to urbanize -> inability to get along with others / ingrained pervasive racism -> hostility and distrust of government):
History and path dependency play a big role in antipathy to urban life. Aide from port cities being where immigrants landed (i.e, creating poor and decidedly alien neighborhoods), poor sanitation has a lot to do with hostility to cities. Dickensian London was plagued with a fair number of open sewers.
When the U.S. was founded it was a rural country, and of course, a lot of that rural life, especially in the South, was slaveholding agriculture. Something like 6% of the population was urban at the time of the American Revolution compared to around 30% or more in Britain. We were set up that way. The founding documents were hostile to cities.
There’s something about our current capitalist system that produces inequality throughout the economy, especially in cities. Some of these economic forces are shared, but I think it’s heightened in the United States by political formations which are deeply tied to structural racism in our metropolitan areas.
The American form is to have a core city in a metropolitan area surrounded by often hostile, often mostly white suburbs, and that really distorts the returns from the economic engine that the city creates.
Inequality in terms of housing issues is easily visible in wealthy cities – a real exacerbation of housing prices. Affluent people will get enclaves or pockets within the core city in places like San Francisco, New York, and to some extent Los Angeles. That, I think, creates more overt conflict internally within the core city in terms of politics. Most residents can’t access those resources that have gone to the suburbs.
Mainstream urban economic analysis really misses four big things. One is the importance of industrial change. I’ve got three case studies in the book – New York, Detroit, and Los Angeles. They’ve all seen wrenching structural changes. In New York, it’s the loss of the unionized garment industry and its replacement with finance. In Detroit, it’s change in the automotive sector. In Los Angeles, it’s the loss of the aerospace sector and a wave of migrant workers who come to work in low-wage manufacturing. Mainstream economics doesn’t deal well with industrial structural change.
I have for 20 years, and I think that it is not just a “” scenario anymore. In “,” my co-author and I go beyond narrow discussions of secession and the Civil War to frame secession as an extreme end point on a scale that includes various acts of that have already taken place across the U.S.
Eleven states dub themselves “” and refuse to enforce federal gun restrictions. Movements aiming to carve off rural, more politically conservative portions of blue states ; 11 counties in Eastern Oregon and as “Greater Idaho,” a move that Idaho’s .
Hoping to become a separate state independent of Chicago’s political influence, over two dozen rural Illinois counties have passed . Some Republicans back “Texit,” where the state becomes an independent nation.
come from the Left, too.
“,” a plan for California to leave the union after 2016, was the most acute recent attempt at secession.
Last edited:
