Rural Versus Urban: The Growing Divide That Threatens Democracy

How the urban-rural divide drives partisan polarization

Why have Americans living in different places come to experience politics as a battle between “us” and “them”? In Rural Versus Urban, Suzanne Mettler and Trevor Brown argue that political polarization is not just about red states and blue states, or coastal elites who alienate those in fly-over country. Instead, polarization permeates every region and every state—and has become organized through a pernicious rural-urban division. Mettl...