Like, I kind of assumed they were a artificially cultivated long con by American (or perhaps anglo in general) politicians made up to consolidate power but it sounds like they’re kind of a recurring thing across several civilizations
Absolutely. The challenge in overcoming them is what gave us the iconic hammer and sickle. :hammer-sickle: Hammer for urban workers, sickle for agricultural rural workers.
lets take for granted that historically, urban/rural divide pretty incontrovertibly developed basically everywhere. lifestyles just are different between people who grow things to live and those who work on other stuff & use compensation to feed themselves. the amount of difference can vary wildly from period to period
so here’s the interesting observation you’ve made: urban/rural divide in the modern US is a lot more artificial, isn’t it? people outside the urban areas aren’t subsistence farmers, they’re wage workers too. rural and urban people have the same material culture of manufactured goods, and they access the same communication networks.
urban/rural divide in the modern US is a lot more artificial, isn’t it?
Post-WW2 things get complicated quickly because of how much meddling private interests were able to do through the state. The US undertook very specific policies aimed at increasing urban strife, ultimately red-lining minority neighborhoods, and doing everything possible to promote white flight to Levittowns.
In some sense they were drawing on both theory and real world examples to stymie labour unrest. Re-segregate the urban proleteriat, give the workers some skin in the game/a mortgage, mar the agrarian areas with those workers’ newly built environment because those were the staging grounds of revolutions in the past. It’s hard to say how much awareness the architects of this had at the time, though some RAND corp & other :blob-no-thoughts:-tanks’ alumni who went into academia have correspondence and papers and journals which can be requested from their institutions. Some claimed it was as benevolent as spreading the population to make the country less vulnerable to nuclear weapon attacks. Been meaning to put everything together and publish it for a while.
Yeah, I think the big thing that was confusing me was how pronounced the difference is (or rather, is made out to be) here. Shit couldn’t possibly be that different between cities and rural regions, but a lot of people make this stuff out to be oil and water.
people outside the urban areas aren’t subsistence farmers, they’re wage workers too. rural and urban people have the same material culture of manufactured goods, and they access the same communication networks.
But it ties into the divide that’s existed in the US since Europeans started showing up: Race. Urban areas are typically more culturally and racially diverse. Rural areas tend to be white and Christian. This is the real divide, imo.
oh definitely, that’s what i think the greatest cleavage is—i just wanted to leave the door open for other directions.
its not simply where non-white people live though, places are very much racialized in ways that don’t conform to demographic realities. white rural folk and suburbanites think predominantly white cities are “dominated” by minorities because of the segregationist policies of the 20th century, and this is confirmed in their heads by the fact minorities are actually visible in day-to-day life; instead of enduring the very worst conditions & labor in their communities just out of sight @ rural meatpacking plants and agricultural labor
literally as old as settled agriculture
Raymond Williams - The Country and the City
Short version tho, yes, there’s always been a relationship between settled (urban) land and productive/agricultural land. However, different social/material conditions reconfigure these tendencies.
For every reactionary rural society, there’s also utopian/communitarian ones. For every shitlib urban real estate situation, there’s also proletarian power.
Edit: Relevant :citations-needed: https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/episode-130-heartland-middle-america-and-us-medias-vaguely-nostalgic-racialized-code-for-white-grievance
