David Leonhardt's "Democracy Challenged: Twin Threats to Governing Ideals Put America in Uncharted Territory" appeared on the front page of the New York Times over the weekend. I'm highlighting here just the references Leonhardt makes to rural America, explicit or implicit.
The economic frustrations and cultural fears have combined to create a chasm in American political life, between prosperous, diverse major metropolitan areas and more traditional, religious and economically struggling smaller cities and rural areas. The first category is increasingly liberal and Democratic, the second increasingly conservative and Republican.
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The Senate today is split 50-50 between the two parties. But the 50 Democratic senators effectively represent 186 million Americans, while the 50 Republican senators effectively represent 145 million.
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This similarity meant that the small-state bonus in the Senate and Electoral College had only a limited effect on national results. Both Democrats and Republicans benefited, and suffered, from the Constitution’s undemocratic features.
Democrats sometimes won small states like Idaho, Montana, Utah and Wyoming in the mid-20th century. And California was long a swing state: Between the Great Depression and 2000, Democratic and Republican presidential candidates won it an equal number of times. That the Constitution conferred advantages on residents of small states and disadvantages on Californians did not reliably boost either party.
More than a decade ago, I published an article discussing some of these issues, in particular those observed in the first paragraph above. It was titled The Geography of the Class Culture Wars.
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