> National governments debate and mostly dither. Cities act, cities do.
This is very similar to a sentiment that was shared by Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel[0]. He made a case for running for mayor of a, albeit third largest city in the country, Midwestern city after being Chief of Staff in the Obama administration based on his feelings that meaningful change can no longer being effected on a federal level -- that cities are the correct place to start pulling levers and pushing buttons.
Are things that screwed up at the federal level, or is it just because we have largely become complacent at best and apathetic at worst? Or is it that politicians see an easier track to entrenched power on a local level?
The US federal gov’t overrereptesents the interests of the rural.
Each state is given two senators regardless of population.
Despite cities being the economic heart of the US and doing much better than rural areas, al of of policy making is driven by the economically backwards states.
The same can be said of the Japanese system --but even moreso. Their rural areas have an exaggerated influence in national politics. Not saying I agree but it's proof a country can do relatively well despite many disadvantages (geography, demographics, int'l politics, etc) and playing to the countryside.
If we look toward Mexico, we can say the cities have an oversized influence in the politics and the frustration form the countryside can boil over into internal conflict.
I feel like the Nikkei index would disagree with you insofar as a stock market index is an indicator of economic prosperity. That said, the US system was designed to protect less populous (rural) states from being bullied by the more populous (urban) states. It is hard to say that the system is not working as intended.
Their problems will be ours in 30 years' time. All industrialized nations will face declining populations and automation --given their demographics, I say they are doing a pretty good job. I don't think there are many economies which faced with Japan's demographics (together with their lack of natural resources, arable land, etc) would do as well as they are doing in their circumstances.
Now, work culture, that's a different topic. They definitely could improve their work/life balance and their gender disparity, etc.
> All industrialized nations will face declining populations and automation
We like to complain so much about automation, but I think the main driver of our current economic woes is outsourcing. When Americans have to compete against people in countries that have $1/hr minimum wage, there's no way our lower class can compete. Not everyone has the skills or aptitude to make it to the middle or upper classes. Should they see a declining quality of life just so corporations can see larger profits?
> They definitely could improve their work/life balance and their gender disparity
Japan has a low amount of economic inequality and a high quality of life, so I see little reason why it should change. In most countries, it's still considered a fact that men and women are different. I think it may be your Western values determining what you think should change in a culture completely different from our own.
> Not saying I agree but it's proof a country can do relatively well despite many disadvantages
Japan is far from doing well. It's in recession now, its demographics profile is going down the toilet, they have a massive public debt that they can never hope to repay, and a social security system that's constantly in the red. It's not going to end well no matter how optimistic you are.
There is no question they are going through a demographic restructuring and automating and becoming an elder-centered economy in the future.
I don't think granting the countryside the power they have has contributed negatively to their economic outlook.
What I am saying is allowing the countryside an outsized say in the politics of the country writ large does not seem to have negatively affected the economy given the structural realities.
Although, granted, the countryside with their bloc keeps successfully thwarting any agricultural reforms (import tariffs). On the other hand, buy local and grow your own critical sustenance (cuz embargoes: see Qatar).
> Although, granted, the countryside with their bloc keeps successfully thwarting any agricultural reforms (import tariffs). On the other hand, buy local and grow your own critical sustenance (cuz embargoes: see Qatar).
I'd rather have "make peace with your neighbors, promote commercial exchange instead of putting tariffs everywhere making eating fruits a luxury for 90% of your population".
Seriously, agriculture in Japan is retarded. Productivity is extremely low compared to any other developed country, and they use tons of pesticides (way more than anywhere else), because JA forces folks to use them if they want to sell in their right channels. It's just a big mafia at the national level.
If we were to make stuff at home, everything would be much more expensive (you would never get cheap smartphones like you have now) and the level of life would decrease sharply for everyone. Specialized regions for specific products, with proper exchange of goods is what has worked to make everyone richer in the end.
But how do you know they are doing well because of it or despite it?
They're also in terms of a country more likely to live around cities, and much more densely since Tokyo is one of the, if not most, densely populated megacities.
I would say any economic power they do have is because of the density and progressiveness of their cities.
Yes, cities are the heart of America, but the country produces the blood. Urbanization is only possible through hyper-efficient exploitation of rural resources. We owe every technological advance, every great work of art, every soldier who defends us, to a farmer who refused to give up on a thankless, unrewarding career. Not being a rural guy myself, I feel like I owe them.
maybe 100 years ago, but not today. before the great depression, ~30% of the population worked on a farm. today, that number is closer to 3%. and most of them work on industrial farms where they can have a career. im not saying that we shouldnt be grateful, but i think folksy nostalgia of family farms and shit blind us from the realities.
Wow dude, go outside more often. Sure there are less farmers, but they are no less important. That is ignoring the natural resources, and your disagreeable prejudices.
im a self-described fat-ass, i eat constantly. im not ungrateful to people who work in the agricultural industries, but im no more grateful to them than i am to those who work in energy, water or telecomms. they are all necessities, and farmers aren't that special.
Sure. The rise of civilization has always had a fairly direct correlation with how efficiently we could extract food from the land. When we all lived as hunter-gatherers, we didn't get much done other than some cave art. With the rise of farming came the priestly class, and Ur, the first city. Plows, granaries, preservation, crop rotation, selective breeding, refrigeration, and so on, further increased the number of people a single farmer could feed. As fewer people were engaged in the act of feeding everyone, more craftsmen, artists, administrators, and so on, could push civilization forward. As a nearby comment notes, over the history of the US, we have increased the efficiency of our farms by a factor of ten, and a tiny fraction of people are actually needed to work the land.
That said, farming is still a brutal business. For being an industry that determines whether hundreds of millions will live or die, farmers are typically faced with enormous debt burdens, long work days, and second jobs. It's a pretty screwed up situation.
But nobody is forcing farmers to continue farming. If it's that brutal, drop the shovel, sell the tractor, fuck the cows, let's go trucking!
And yes, for some reason society/civilization has a "market based" approach to food security. Why? Because it works better than the planned economy version. Maybe because it forces people to optimize, to make the hard choices of what do you really want, do what you're good at or do what you love.
That said, markets are not in a vacuum, so we can and we ought to help people. Not just farmers. Because every time we try to help them we end up helping "Big Agribusiness". And if some people want to do farming, but it doesn't make them enough, okay, we can think about that, but I don't see what that has to do with food security, which comes from big industrialized farms, environmental protection, land management, food safety regulations, distribution chain tracking and inspections and so on. (To help small farms, you need scale. You need to pack them densely, have them share equipment - usually the combine that used only at harvest is owned by a 3rd party, and so on. They need insurance for climate events like against flood, hailstorm, tornadoes/hurricanes, spring frostbite and so on. So you end up running a farmer-K12.)
But you're still viewing farming in a vacuum. Whether you're punching the clock for Monsanto or scrabbling to run a private farm, you still need a grocer, a post office, a restaurant, a barber, and so on. A farming community is a whole ecosystem, and rural America makes up about 18% of the country.
One of the reasons America was organized the way it is, as a republic, and not a democracy, was to prevent a tyranny of the majority. And no racial, ideological, or religious minority is as necessary to protect as the minority that feeds all of us.
You're right, farmers can quit any time they like, and many have, and are. It's one of the forces driving the automation of agriculture. But we're not at a point where we can take the farmhand out of the equation safely, so let's give them some incentive to stay. While I agree that planned economies are dumb, because of the simple fact of information density, the government is also a market force, and we need to prevent government from working against the people who feed all of us.
Nothing wrong with the rural land or people, but the people in less dense parts of the US are overrepresented. Which means a person not living in the city has more say in government, while paying the same or less in taxes.
City dwellers are all getting their food from the rural, economically backwords areas, that's why. And that is precisely why floating cities are a pipe dream: no land for agriculture. They'd have to resort to fishing, clam farms and eating seaweed.
Even if your reasoning is true it's not justification for a person living outside of the city or densely populated areas to have less of a vote in government. Everyone should have an equal vote, no?
It's unfortunate that urban and rural populations both see the other as parasites and themselves as the more important actors. Just as urban populations resent redistribution towards the countryside, rural populations resent what they see as city folk meddling in affairs they don't understand.
This is actually a great argument for the rise of the city state - without a shared governance structure that has to balance interests of such different voting blocks, city states could set any rules they wanted within their borders and deal with the rural population strictly through the markets.
City politics can arguably be too provincial. I feel individual cities in the SF Bay area are too provincial and a more unified regional area governing body would serve the pop better as it pertains planning and development of infrastructure (transport, housing, jobs, zoning, etc.) When SF thinks development they think "Peninsula should develop" Or, "what will make SF transit/housing better "rather than "what will make bay area transit/housing better".
From an administrative PoV some cities might benefit from being re-organized as prefectural-level cities or even direct-controlled municipalities (though, given W D.C. governance, I'm not sure it would fly in the US)
And Rahm has not improved things in Chicago as far as I can tell. What non "optics-minded" improvements has he made there?
The bizarre US insistence that places like San Francisco and Oakland are somehow separate cities baffles me.
Look at it from space, there's clearly only one damn city in the SF Bay Area, and it goes from San Francisco down to somewhere south of San Jose and back up to Richmond. That's a big city, but not one of the biggest.
Well, they are separate cities, since they have geographical boundaries and distinct city governments...
But yes, if the San Francisco Bay Area were merged into a single megacity with a unified, powerful municipal government, some of its persistent and increasingly painful issues (imbalance between commercial and residential real estate development, broken public transit system, etc.) might have a better chance of being solved.
I mean you could legally declare that my legs and upper torso are different people, but it would be silly.
I realise there's history and San Francisco wasn't always joined to San Jose by unbroken urbanity, but arbitrary legal structures should keep up with geography.
I think if you looked at cities as density of buildings and people living/working as a set of gravity wells, then defining which direction things flow towards and from how far away would make where to draw the real lines less ambiguous.
In that respect places like New York, The (SF) Bay Area, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Chicago and Seattle would make a lot more sense; and most of these mostly would be within one state.
Problematically cities spanning state lines would be obvious. DC, Portland (Oregon), Kansas City and St. Louis spring to mind as examples.
I believe it to be unfair for workers to escape the taxes of a city by driving across some human chosen line.
I believe it to be unfair for insular communities to exclude "less desirables" by NIMBY actions.
I believe we could actually solve congestion if these mega-city regions had regional planning and zoning to encourage a range of affordable housing close to the jobs, addressing the commutes instead of trying to fund their expansion.
I agree, there is an argument for broader regional governance (whether it's the bay area, or western King County in Washington), in between the city and state level... whether through expanding existing bodies (reforming city borders) as regions develop or forming new layers of legislative change.
For example, Seattle has a problem where the urbanized area around lake washington support expanding our public transportation - but we're chained down by eastern King County, largely rural citizens who don't want or need subway lines. However, rural districts depend on taxes redistributed from urban areas to fund programs like public education... so it's not clear that breaking up the district is the answer either. Ideally we'd have some type of adaptive democracy, where each issue is regulated by the scope of people impacted by the decisions.
There are plenty of nimbys around Lake Washington. Even if one was to improve transit more on the east side of the lake, population density is low enough because of the lack of multifamily housing that it's a losing game.
People with long commutes that don't want the corresponding increase in traffic are probably justified. I personally wanted light rail to go out to Redmond, but that seems hung up on three counties (not just King).
I left Seattle just before Capital Hill and the U-District were served by light rail though. Maybe things have changed.
Do mayors in the US actually control the whole city? Here in Melbourne, the Lord Mayor of Melbourne is actually just a local government position (despite the grand-sounding name), only managing issues in the CBD area (36 sq km of greater melbourne's 9990 sq km). Whole-city issues are managed by state-level politicians. I ask because I can't see our Lord Mayor actually being able to influence city-wide policy; I assume US city mayors have more grunt.
It depends on the city and the rules in the state where the city is located. Larger cities are pretty independent with taxation, police, fire, education, sanitation, and health services. Smaller cities can be overseen by regional governments. The smallest unincorporated cities buy services from larger neighbors. Lots of variation!
Cities in the US don't get militaries (but, technically, the federal military isn't allowed to carry out military operations inside cities).
That's not universal in Australia. Brisbane encompasses all of the surrounding suburbs up to the satellite cities like Ipswich and Gold Coast, Frankston and Geelong would be the Melbourne equivalent of these I think but it's hard to say, I think Brisbane is much larger (in Area) than Melbourne. In the 00's Queensland pushed through council amalgamations state wide. I believe NSW has tried to do the same and the result was a mixed bag.
From what I understand looking around the world, the age of a city seems to define it's boundaries. Cities that were populous prior to the car are much smaller.
The US is usually broadly categorized as "strong mayor" (very consolidated power) and "weak mayor" (board of supervisors form a coalition) depending on the municipality.
Where this distinction gets muddled is when a metro area is sprawling enough to have many governments. For example, City of Los Angeles has a mayor, but it only represents some of the major neighborhoods of the metro area, while Los Angeles County, which spans multiple cities, has a board of supervisors providing oversight on a more regional scale.
In contrast, San Francisco is a combined city and county with both mayor and board of supervisors: but the Bay Area has 9 counties(more if you count certain outlying cities) with a multitude of city governments, and there is no equivalent to the LA county board unifying representation at the "millions to one" scale - those issues are duked out between different county agencies or pushed up to the state level. Accordingly, Bay Area cities have some more individual freedoms but are much less inclined to cooperate on regional issues and will frequently export problems onto each other.
The stated objective of the Republican congress during their 6 Obama years was obstruction. For the 2 years before that Obama was able to get the stimulus and Obamacare. Before that Bush was able to get huge legislation around medicare and taxes as well as his wars. Clinton before him was also able to get through a bunch of legislation. Trump is pretty incompetent and is wasting his window to get big things done but he'll probably get something through. My point is that the last 6 years of total gridlock is a historical aberration.
On the other hand, conservatives have wanted the destruction of the federal government for a long time, maybe they've won and we're entering a new era.
The Dems seem to have take up that role now, so I think you may be right on Obama's presidency opening up a new era of sorts wherein the minority party just tells the majority party to pound sand.
exact opposite. NYC subway is in disarray partly because it is controlled by the state and the state political interests are not the same as the cities. The city effectively funds the state as NYC pays more in taxes than it takes out. Not true for upstate.
NYC has a majority power over the state purse strings and Albany has the majority of what's left.
If you want a mountain of money for the subway all you need to do is earmark it at the bottom of a repeal of NY-SAFE (or whatever you call that gun law that the rest of the state hates).
Power, which he implicitly defines as the force backing a nation's border, is not premised solely upon the sweat of our technological brows, the way we disrupt and revolutionize economies in pursuit of sky-high GDP.
Power also flows from the barrel of a gun.
The most populous city-state in the world, Hong Kong, has been swallowed by the People's Republic of China. Why? Because China's planned women's army by itself exceeds the population of the United States. Because Deng Xiaoping told the British their troops would cross the bridge with or without a handover.
Contrary to the tone of this article, China is vigorously contesting territory in its sphere of influence. Go look at the sand they're pouring into the south China sea: does that look like dithering?
And even if China, Russia, India, etc. decline within fifty years, that doesn't mean city-states will fill the vaccuum.
It means the remaining players, the ones that have kept their cities and their country together, will have the power. And they will eat these new nimble players alive.
There's a reason the majority of our armed forces hail from the south and midwest and not from the north and west. [1]
Finally, to address the unsaid assumption behind this article: the decline of nations, if it happens, will not be a tea party. The last time a worldwide economic crisis engulfed our planet and threatened the very concept of a nation state, we had the bloodiest war in human history.
[1] As a bit of trivia, when the U.S. government commissioned a study concerning the long-term consequences of full-blown nuclear war, they predicted Latin American gunboats would be pillaging our coasts within 3-4 months. Fun.
> There's a reason the majority of our armed forces hail from the South and not from the coasts.
Careful. You are likely confusing two different statistics.
There is:
A) Recruits by state which reflects (roughly) the state from which they hail
B) Residency of current military personnel which reflects (roughly) where the military bases are.
While your statement might be true per capita (although http://www.statemaster.com/graph/mil_tot_mil_rec_arm_nav_air... makes even that seem a bit doubtful), the sheer difference in population size of California, Texas, and New York probably swamps that.
Also be sure not to get civilian employees mixed up in the statistics.
> There's a reason the majority of our armed forces hail from the south and midwest and not from the north and west.
Less confusion of statistics and more poor language on my part; the distinction should be between the areas thought of as rural versus the areas which are fully urbanized. Florida being the obvious example of a coastal state that is less developed compared to the North and West and overrepresented in military demographics.
A supermajority of recruits (65.7%) comes from the South and Midwest [1].
More recent sources (Statemaster's data is from 2004) confirms that not only the South and Midwest still form the majority in recruiting, but also forms majorities in active duty service men and other key metrics [2]. I would continue tabulating and analyzing, but at this point, I'll take the secondary sources at their word. [3]
To be clear, I am not advocating for rural-over-urban or south-over-north or some-weird-political-agenda.
Instead, I would caution against minimizing the contributions of these states to our (the US's) national defense. Especially in the South, military service is, not unduly, enshrined as a part of their culture and identity.
[1]:
This graphic in addition to the state's individual wikipedia articles guided how the groupings of the spreadsheet:
Um, you picked off almost 59% of the population with your categories, you know? If you are average, you would see 59% of the representation--that should be your baseline. This is the standard "look, everything is concentrated where the population is" graph problem.
However, even after accounting for that, I stand corrected as having been wrong. There seems to be a systematic bias in the range of 5-8% toward the Southern and Midwestern states.
Warmaking is not as profitable as it used to be. And its only decreasing. What has China to gain from invaded HK ? Problem solvers will just move to another region. If its aggressors vs problem solvers, later does not need former at all. To defend PS dont need gun, embargo will work just fine.
A few years ago, I vaguely recall english-speaking redditors living in East Ukraine ridiculing the prospect of Russia, a friendly neighbor, ever laying a hand on their country.
And two city-states competing for the same natural resource will share it with each other in enlightened cooperation? No, that isn't how the primate territorial instinct works.
Assuming we are talking about city-states of problem solvers. Than they will neither compete nor cooperate. They will just pay the market value for a barrel of oil.
Instead, the fierce and low-margin/high-risk compitition actually exist between aggressors 1. for the control of same region (eg Saudi Arabia) and, 2. providing same product (eg crude oil).
Handling "the barrel of a gun" does not mean you have to fire it. China just made a combination of statements (notably the fact that the New Territories reprensenting 75% of HK's land were on a lease expiring in 1997, that they would not negociate on) and threats that resulted in the UK handing over HK on a platter. At that time (1997) HK by itself represented 15% of all of China's GDP, so Beijing definitely gained quite a lot by acting tough, even if they never had to pull the trigger.
Land or GDP are not gain. So exactly what has China gained ? HKese will not pay more taxes than they were paying. And if forced they will just leave (again) and take GDP with them.
You may not fire it but there is cost of creating and maintaing a gun. Yes there might be skirmishes during birth of City-as-a-Service industry. But it will stablize as military states fails to find enough revenue to sustain itself while also maintaing welfare spending.
I would opine though, that part of the reason Beijing is able to govern as effectively as it does is due to good relations with local government. Notably, Chinese citizens do not have unlimited freedom of movement within China, though that rule is only enforced during periods of high unemployment. If we look at trends for internally displaced people due to things like extreme weather events, it seems fairly clear that cities will need to have a say in how quickly they allow their population to increase.
Some sharing of power obviously needs to take place between central and local authorities - the idea that more power will remain with central authorities due to the larger armies they can field seems based in a twentieth century view of warfare.
America has many nations and the lack of dedicated voters and the large difference between rural and city voters continues to expand. Just look at NYC compared to New York State during the Presidential Election. People see things as "US" vs "THEM" and that gives way to the City State right here in America.
As someone intimately familiar with the politics and culture of Ohio, boy howdy does this chart fuck up really badly on the edges. For instance, Guernsey and Noble counties not considering themselves Appalachian is absurd. A case could maybe be made for the ones like Muskingum despite all the stuff named after the mountains in Zanesville, since it does import a bit of culture from Columbus, but some of these are just egregious. Franklin and Delaware counties both being labelled as Appalachian despite encompassing the greater Columbus metropolitan area as a whole is pretty laughable, as Columbus is the most Midwestern city in Ohio.
I don't know if you can call this spot on if similar mistakes are made all over the borderlands of this map.
Generalizations all are lost at specifics. Like looking at a landscape painting and then looking with a microscope. The painting is a landscape and it captures the emotions and feeling. The microscope is looking for something totally different.
Well Borderlands are just that border lands. I lived on the Mexican border and you go 15 miles North or South and it was a completely different culture.
The US has a lack of dedicated voters because of it's voting system. There is not much point voting in a Presidential election in California or New York. That encourages people to think their vote doesn't matter. If every vote actually counted you'd have more dedicated voters.
The south in general has a militaristic legacy, I could tell you why, but you probably know why. This is not to say that the rest of the country can't or won't step up, that mistake has been made in the past.
This is my line of reasoning, not necessarily the OPs.
There's a book called Thinking that (I think) covers this topic.
I'm assuming you're a well educated man that had a good upbringing. As that man, do you want to go to war and kill people? Most likely not. Killing for war is morally a very grey area. A lot of well educated, intelligent people understand this. Why risk your life or your mental and physical health when you can go work an office job for six figures?
Now imagine everyone in the USA was as educated as you. They all think the same thing. I don't want to be in the military.
Not everyone has the opportunities you've been given. A lot of people in the south and Midwest have very little choices and opportunity in life. The military is most people's best option.
Treating the USA as a single country means you get the military might from the less educated and the innovation from your more educated.
The north won the war. And now they get people from the losing states to fight their new wars for them. Same thing happened with e.g. the Romans getting auxiliary soldiers from conquered lands to fight for them, or the Brits getting soldiers from India to fight in the world wars. Typical imperialism.
I don't fully support what my country (China) do in South China Sea but there is a critical context: around 2011, then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton basically announced in that US would do whatever she liked in Strait Malacca if necessary. Her announcement scared sh*t of lots of people, especially amongst leadership in China.
I understand people normally project their countries as the major source of good. Sadly it's not the case for both US and China.
As I understand it, the Strait of Malacca is international waters. "We'll go to international waters and do whatever we like" doesn't seem threatening, it seems self-evident.
<And climate change, internet governance and international crime all seemed beyond the nation-state’s abilities.>
This has more to do with powerful lobby groups and corporations controlling politicians.
Politicians should be doing the peoples bidding but they are more about furthering their own, not to mention banks like Goldman Sachs inserting people in positions of power.
I see the future or perhaps the far future less as large groups of nation states but rather as a decentralized world power/government (UN with actual power) with centralized city-states simply due to increased globalization (even if some are rejecting it as currently right now, its not like people can reverse globalization) meaning less importance of national powers, increased diversity/multi-ethnic populations/cultures gathering around large urban cities such as seen in Singapore and increased importance of global hubs being cities where the cities bring talent together instead of the countries themselves such as New York for Finance, Silicon Valley, etc. and also the massive powers of transnational corporate companies who hold sway due to their abilities to employ people, influence economies and make technological and societal change.
Moreover, its not like you can really stop cities from gaining power, urbanization used to be and still is a symbol of development for most countries so its not like nation-states are against the idea of large cities. Nation-states aren't actively trying to decrease the size of cities and push people out of it simply because they would become too powerful. As well, nation-states will seek to only make certain cities powerful to be strategic instead of trying to make every city or location in the nation powerful which in turn brings to power powerful city-states.
Its also stated that military occupation is a powerful deterrent for city-states taking over nation-states. I argue that simply starting a war decreases the importance of a city-state and you reach the stage where you scare away the talent and economical activity that gave meaning to the importance of a city-state simply by starting a war. There is not much economical and development going on when you are fighting or even threatening a war which would mean that you can not really take over a city-state without destroying it or basically have to pour money in to just resuscitate it, like in Syria or places in Middle East that are constantly threatened.
City-states will not get us off the planet in any significant way; nation-states are struggling to as it is. As far as I'm concerned, any step away from world government is retrograde. I no longer believe I'll see it in my lifetime though.
I'd say the opposite is true. World government may become a dictatorship (you can see the process in Turkey, Poland and the US) and the only viable individual action against a dictatorship is voting with your feet.
If you don't have somewhere to go to, you're f'ed.
As the article mentions - it's not a coincidence that the most innovative and prosperous states in the past were city states (Athens, Florence, Venice, Genoa, the German states later on, ...) because they had to be nice to their citizens, otherwise they'd just move that 30 km away.
In a way, many small states resemble a rich supply of "states" where you can live in.
Having a world government is asking for a power monopoly and you know how these tend to behave.
They were not however geographically confined to their city-state, but controlled militarily a number of outposts , making them mini-empires in places where there were yet no borders.
I think the minimum distance from any point within the territory to a border is more important for this dynamic to hold than the maximum distance between two points in the territory.
I would rephrase it, slightly. Will a world made up of nation states do better at getting us off the planet than a world of city states, or one that includes them.
It's hard to say much about a world divided up completely differently, but I do think a higher resolution political world is likely to aggregate efforts a lot more.
Isn't a WORLD government far worse than 200 democracies? I can imagine 3.5 billion people oppressing the other 3.5 billion others. With nation-states at least you can choose your oppressors.
I made this exact argument to a friend a few days ago when I was visiting Portland. Following an observation about the fact that the mostly rural far right would have to pry the city out of the cold dead hands of its inhabitants, I was struck by the fact that cities are poised to become massively more powerful as globalization accelerates.
Any major port city (assuming it isn't under water) is going to look to its nearest inland neighbors and its other major trade partners, deem the federal government to be full of shit, and build the infrastructure needed to move goods between the two -- because they will have the capital to invest to do it. More importantly they have the data and the political flexibility to negotiate with other 'city states'. If you are going to live in the middle of nowhere, it is going to start costing much more, and I can imagine a future where if you aren't a tax paying citizen of cities that have banded together to fund infrastructure development, you will be paying a steep fee to make use of it.
The solution to the US's infrastructure woes is in the hands of cities, and I suspect that if they choose to act, the country is going to look very different in 30 or 40 years. Add to this the fact that the federal govt is no longer tampering with normal settlement patterns by subsidizing suburban living, and the rich and powerful are going to congregate in cities. Sure they may own a second house in the middle of nowhere, but the vast majority of their productivity will be created while in the city.
I also suspect that cities that do not invest in social infrastructure (e.g. housing, and zoning regs) will ultimately fall behind, network effects aside. An anecdote I heard was that Portland rents have been rising at nearly 20% per year, and many people simply cannot find a place to stay, and wind up on the street (SV exporting their finest social features?). But Portland is building housing all over the place so I think it has a chance. Cities that cannot figure out how to maximize their productivity by providing good social infrastructure will become the new backwaters.
Try to see, a city as a brain, with the people beeing neurons, containing potential ideas.
For a city the most interesting thing to happen, is new connections between the people, in two forms. Personal Connection (very important to realize allready existing new ideas) and contact of a person with new things/ideas.
A city could further the interpersonal conntact, by creating partys, festivals or a sort of (non-relationship) speed-dating.
But how can a city further the contact of persons with new ideas? What if the person in need of new ideas, heavily resists having contact with them?
This does seem to be where the US government is heading: Conservatives are doing everything they can to destroy federal power so they can create communities around traditional values (or just exploit deregulation to socialize the costs of getting rich), which leaves local governments to step into the void. When you take the idea much further, there are a lot of troubling implications:
Who has power in the areas between the cities? What rights do urbanites have outside their city and who upholds those rights? How do we avoid rural areas devolving into economic wastelands or being exploited by monied interests in the cities? What criminal code could we agree on on a large scale and who enforces it? How can a rural community control access to abortion (for example), when such a service is a short drive away? Would the difference in wealth and opportunity just create a permanent rural underclass without redistributive social policies to offset it? How would a city state respond to something like wage slavery on its doorstep? Who pays for and protects federal lands, parks, and the commons? Who feeds the city? How do cities defend themselves?
That last part is my question. What prevents a group from taking up arms and attacking a city in it's own interest? IN the case of the U.S., certainly not the U.S. Military (no such thing exists.
Wtf. The US military does indeed exist, even to quash internal rebellion. The national guard is the branch that would deal with such a threat. The number of armed citizens alone might suprise you as well. So all in all, I am not sure what you mean. Anyone could 'attack a city in their own interest', but there are quite a few organized parties very invested in resisting that with their lives.
If you want to declare something to be independent from a nation-state and its laws, you need one of the following conditions to be true:
1) you are small enough or insignificant enough that nation states are not interesting in showing you your place,
2) you are powerful enough so nation states will not mess with you, as the cost will be too much for them.
Point 1 is always temporary. Point 2 is more interesting — for now, there are no private powers that could stand the military assault of nation states, especially larger ones. But such power does exist, and we are periodically reminded about it in recent news reports.
Classical Greek civilization was the high point of the 'city-state', but the poleis could only survive if there was no strong nation-state messing around with them. They rallied together to prevent Persia moving Westwards, but simply could not get their act together to stop an old-fashioned imperial kingdom, Macedonia. And once the Romans expanded, they had no hope of regaining autonomy.
I've come to similar conclusions but not for the exact same reasons.
In my state (and it seems, most others), the cities are progressive and forward-thinking (renewable energy, climate change is not a hoax, equality, education is good, universities are generally good etc) and the rural areas are essentially the opposite, and the divide is growing under Trump. Anything progressives are for the rural areas are against almost by default.
The main thing holding cities from progressing further is that the state is so gerrymandered (or has been, they redrew the maps but will likely be similarly bad just in different ways) that the rural (conservatives) control the state government almost entirely. As a result, cities abilities to govern themselves has been reduced.
I'm not happy with the way things are going but its also difficult to see them changing. Those in progressive areas vote for more education funding, more access to higher education, better access to healthcare - all things that benefit rural areas as much or more than populated areas (cities generally having better paid, better educated and therefore more healthy people). Where I grew up (in an extremely rural area), diabetes, obesity, heart disease etc are extremely common and access to quality healthcare is lower. What needs to happen is some kind of reconciliation or at least a recognition that we have essentially matching values despite what those who would like to keep us divided might say.
The fact that wearing my NPR shirt is seen as basically the same thing in conservative areas as an Infowars shirt would be seen in liberal areas makes me question how likely any of that is.
There's a key flaw in the idea of resurgent city states and that is the fact that to coordinate production you have to secure the infrastructure which is between the cities. Imagine all the complex relationships that goes into making an iPhone. Mines, oil wells, farms, factories, and so forth are all over the planet and not in just one place. Cities thrive because of those complex relationships being relatively secure. And without that security they falter.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 171 ms ] threadThis is very similar to a sentiment that was shared by Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel[0]. He made a case for running for mayor of a, albeit third largest city in the country, Midwestern city after being Chief of Staff in the Obama administration based on his feelings that meaningful change can no longer being effected on a federal level -- that cities are the correct place to start pulling levers and pushing buttons.
Are things that screwed up at the federal level, or is it just because we have largely become complacent at best and apathetic at worst? Or is it that politicians see an easier track to entrenched power on a local level?
[0]: https://www.marketplace.org/2017/05/09/economy/make-me-smart...
Edit: after re-reading what I wrote, damn those options are cynical and depressing.
Each state is given two senators regardless of population.
Despite cities being the economic heart of the US and doing much better than rural areas, al of of policy making is driven by the economically backwards states.
If we look toward Mexico, we can say the cities have an oversized influence in the politics and the frustration form the countryside can boil over into internal conflict.
Now, work culture, that's a different topic. They definitely could improve their work/life balance and their gender disparity, etc.
We like to complain so much about automation, but I think the main driver of our current economic woes is outsourcing. When Americans have to compete against people in countries that have $1/hr minimum wage, there's no way our lower class can compete. Not everyone has the skills or aptitude to make it to the middle or upper classes. Should they see a declining quality of life just so corporations can see larger profits?
> They definitely could improve their work/life balance and their gender disparity
Japan has a low amount of economic inequality and a high quality of life, so I see little reason why it should change. In most countries, it's still considered a fact that men and women are different. I think it may be your Western values determining what you think should change in a culture completely different from our own.
Japan is far from doing well. It's in recession now, its demographics profile is going down the toilet, they have a massive public debt that they can never hope to repay, and a social security system that's constantly in the red. It's not going to end well no matter how optimistic you are.
I don't think granting the countryside the power they have has contributed negatively to their economic outlook.
What I am saying is allowing the countryside an outsized say in the politics of the country writ large does not seem to have negatively affected the economy given the structural realities.
Although, granted, the countryside with their bloc keeps successfully thwarting any agricultural reforms (import tariffs). On the other hand, buy local and grow your own critical sustenance (cuz embargoes: see Qatar).
I'd rather have "make peace with your neighbors, promote commercial exchange instead of putting tariffs everywhere making eating fruits a luxury for 90% of your population".
Seriously, agriculture in Japan is retarded. Productivity is extremely low compared to any other developed country, and they use tons of pesticides (way more than anywhere else), because JA forces folks to use them if they want to sell in their right channels. It's just a big mafia at the national level.
If we were to make stuff at home, everything would be much more expensive (you would never get cheap smartphones like you have now) and the level of life would decrease sharply for everyone. Specialized regions for specific products, with proper exchange of goods is what has worked to make everyone richer in the end.
They're also in terms of a country more likely to live around cities, and much more densely since Tokyo is one of the, if not most, densely populated megacities.
I would say any economic power they do have is because of the density and progressiveness of their cities.
Can you expand on that a bit?
> ... to a farmer who refused to give up on a thankless, unrewarding career.
Why? How? What? Because food is relatively cheap? (Because supply is high?)
That said, farming is still a brutal business. For being an industry that determines whether hundreds of millions will live or die, farmers are typically faced with enormous debt burdens, long work days, and second jobs. It's a pretty screwed up situation.
And yes, for some reason society/civilization has a "market based" approach to food security. Why? Because it works better than the planned economy version. Maybe because it forces people to optimize, to make the hard choices of what do you really want, do what you're good at or do what you love.
That said, markets are not in a vacuum, so we can and we ought to help people. Not just farmers. Because every time we try to help them we end up helping "Big Agribusiness". And if some people want to do farming, but it doesn't make them enough, okay, we can think about that, but I don't see what that has to do with food security, which comes from big industrialized farms, environmental protection, land management, food safety regulations, distribution chain tracking and inspections and so on. (To help small farms, you need scale. You need to pack them densely, have them share equipment - usually the combine that used only at harvest is owned by a 3rd party, and so on. They need insurance for climate events like against flood, hailstorm, tornadoes/hurricanes, spring frostbite and so on. So you end up running a farmer-K12.)
One of the reasons America was organized the way it is, as a republic, and not a democracy, was to prevent a tyranny of the majority. And no racial, ideological, or religious minority is as necessary to protect as the minority that feeds all of us.
You're right, farmers can quit any time they like, and many have, and are. It's one of the forces driving the automation of agriculture. But we're not at a point where we can take the farmhand out of the equation safely, so let's give them some incentive to stay. While I agree that planned economies are dumb, because of the simple fact of information density, the government is also a market force, and we need to prevent government from working against the people who feed all of us.
Even if your reasoning is true it's not justification for a person living outside of the city or densely populated areas to have less of a vote in government. Everyone should have an equal vote, no?
This is actually a great argument for the rise of the city state - without a shared governance structure that has to balance interests of such different voting blocks, city states could set any rules they wanted within their borders and deal with the rural population strictly through the markets.
From an administrative PoV some cities might benefit from being re-organized as prefectural-level cities or even direct-controlled municipalities (though, given W D.C. governance, I'm not sure it would fly in the US)
And Rahm has not improved things in Chicago as far as I can tell. What non "optics-minded" improvements has he made there?
Look at it from space, there's clearly only one damn city in the SF Bay Area, and it goes from San Francisco down to somewhere south of San Jose and back up to Richmond. That's a big city, but not one of the biggest.
But yes, if the San Francisco Bay Area were merged into a single megacity with a unified, powerful municipal government, some of its persistent and increasingly painful issues (imbalance between commercial and residential real estate development, broken public transit system, etc.) might have a better chance of being solved.
I mean you could legally declare that my legs and upper torso are different people, but it would be silly.
I realise there's history and San Francisco wasn't always joined to San Jose by unbroken urbanity, but arbitrary legal structures should keep up with geography.
In that respect places like New York, The (SF) Bay Area, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Chicago and Seattle would make a lot more sense; and most of these mostly would be within one state.
Problematically cities spanning state lines would be obvious. DC, Portland (Oregon), Kansas City and St. Louis spring to mind as examples.
I believe it to be unfair for workers to escape the taxes of a city by driving across some human chosen line.
I believe it to be unfair for insular communities to exclude "less desirables" by NIMBY actions.
I believe we could actually solve congestion if these mega-city regions had regional planning and zoning to encourage a range of affordable housing close to the jobs, addressing the commutes instead of trying to fund their expansion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_megalopolis
For example, Seattle has a problem where the urbanized area around lake washington support expanding our public transportation - but we're chained down by eastern King County, largely rural citizens who don't want or need subway lines. However, rural districts depend on taxes redistributed from urban areas to fund programs like public education... so it's not clear that breaking up the district is the answer either. Ideally we'd have some type of adaptive democracy, where each issue is regulated by the scope of people impacted by the decisions.
People with long commutes that don't want the corresponding increase in traffic are probably justified. I personally wanted light rail to go out to Redmond, but that seems hung up on three counties (not just King).
I left Seattle just before Capital Hill and the U-District were served by light rail though. Maybe things have changed.
Cities in the US don't get militaries (but, technically, the federal military isn't allowed to carry out military operations inside cities).
From what I understand looking around the world, the age of a city seems to define it's boundaries. Cities that were populous prior to the car are much smaller.
Where this distinction gets muddled is when a metro area is sprawling enough to have many governments. For example, City of Los Angeles has a mayor, but it only represents some of the major neighborhoods of the metro area, while Los Angeles County, which spans multiple cities, has a board of supervisors providing oversight on a more regional scale.
In contrast, San Francisco is a combined city and county with both mayor and board of supervisors: but the Bay Area has 9 counties(more if you count certain outlying cities) with a multitude of city governments, and there is no equivalent to the LA county board unifying representation at the "millions to one" scale - those issues are duked out between different county agencies or pushed up to the state level. Accordingly, Bay Area cities have some more individual freedoms but are much less inclined to cooperate on regional issues and will frequently export problems onto each other.
On the other hand, conservatives have wanted the destruction of the federal government for a long time, maybe they've won and we're entering a new era.
Then why do cities have such a hard time implementing suitable public transportation? Even the NYC subway system is a mess these days.
You kind of just proved the point.
If you want a mountain of money for the subway all you need to do is earmark it at the bottom of a repeal of NY-SAFE (or whatever you call that gun law that the rest of the state hates).
Foremost is its portrayal of power.
Power, which he implicitly defines as the force backing a nation's border, is not premised solely upon the sweat of our technological brows, the way we disrupt and revolutionize economies in pursuit of sky-high GDP.
Power also flows from the barrel of a gun.
The most populous city-state in the world, Hong Kong, has been swallowed by the People's Republic of China. Why? Because China's planned women's army by itself exceeds the population of the United States. Because Deng Xiaoping told the British their troops would cross the bridge with or without a handover.
Contrary to the tone of this article, China is vigorously contesting territory in its sphere of influence. Go look at the sand they're pouring into the south China sea: does that look like dithering?
And even if China, Russia, India, etc. decline within fifty years, that doesn't mean city-states will fill the vaccuum.
It means the remaining players, the ones that have kept their cities and their country together, will have the power. And they will eat these new nimble players alive.
There's a reason the majority of our armed forces hail from the south and midwest and not from the north and west. [1]
Finally, to address the unsaid assumption behind this article: the decline of nations, if it happens, will not be a tea party. The last time a worldwide economic crisis engulfed our planet and threatened the very concept of a nation state, we had the bloodiest war in human history.
[1] As a bit of trivia, when the U.S. government commissioned a study concerning the long-term consequences of full-blown nuclear war, they predicted Latin American gunboats would be pillaging our coasts within 3-4 months. Fun.
Careful. You are likely confusing two different statistics.
There is:
A) Recruits by state which reflects (roughly) the state from which they hail
B) Residency of current military personnel which reflects (roughly) where the military bases are.
While your statement might be true per capita (although http://www.statemaster.com/graph/mil_tot_mil_rec_arm_nav_air... makes even that seem a bit doubtful), the sheer difference in population size of California, Texas, and New York probably swamps that.
Also be sure not to get civilian employees mixed up in the statistics.
> There's a reason the majority of our armed forces hail from the south and midwest and not from the north and west.
Less confusion of statistics and more poor language on my part; the distinction should be between the areas thought of as rural versus the areas which are fully urbanized. Florida being the obvious example of a coastal state that is less developed compared to the North and West and overrepresented in military demographics.
Taking a look at: http://www.statemaster.com/graph/mil_tot_mil_rec_arm_nav_air...
The top states in terms of numbers are: Texas-15,594 Florida-9,581 New York-7,523 Pennsylvania-5,756 Illinois-5,738
So, Florida is the outlier, not Southern states in general.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1_3pASjRsRXawSF4BgmSU...
A supermajority of recruits (65.7%) comes from the South and Midwest [1].
More recent sources (Statemaster's data is from 2004) confirms that not only the South and Midwest still form the majority in recruiting, but also forms majorities in active duty service men and other key metrics [2]. I would continue tabulating and analyzing, but at this point, I'll take the secondary sources at their word. [3]
To be clear, I am not advocating for rural-over-urban or south-over-north or some-weird-political-agenda.
Instead, I would caution against minimizing the contributions of these states to our (the US's) national defense. Especially in the South, military service is, not unduly, enshrined as a part of their culture and identity.
[1]: This graphic in addition to the state's individual wikipedia articles guided how the groupings of the spreadsheet:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_regions_of_the_United_...
[2]: http://download.militaryonesource.mil/12038/MOS/Reports/2014...
[3]: http://www.ozy.com/acumen/why-the-us-military-is-so-southern..., http://www.businessinsider.com/us-military-is-not-representa...
And so forth. There are a lot of articles about the overrepresentation of the South and Midwest in military demographics.
However, even after accounting for that, I stand corrected as having been wrong. There seems to be a systematic bias in the range of 5-8% toward the Southern and Midwestern states.
Warmaking is not as profitable as it used to be. And its only decreasing. What has China to gain from invaded HK ? Problem solvers will just move to another region. If its aggressors vs problem solvers, later does not need former at all. To defend PS dont need gun, embargo will work just fine.
They don't post anymore.
Instead, the fierce and low-margin/high-risk compitition actually exist between aggressors 1. for the control of same region (eg Saudi Arabia) and, 2. providing same product (eg crude oil).
Handling "the barrel of a gun" does not mean you have to fire it. China just made a combination of statements (notably the fact that the New Territories reprensenting 75% of HK's land were on a lease expiring in 1997, that they would not negociate on) and threats that resulted in the UK handing over HK on a platter. At that time (1997) HK by itself represented 15% of all of China's GDP, so Beijing definitely gained quite a lot by acting tough, even if they never had to pull the trigger.
You may not fire it but there is cost of creating and maintaing a gun. Yes there might be skirmishes during birth of City-as-a-Service industry. But it will stablize as military states fails to find enough revenue to sustain itself while also maintaing welfare spending.
Some sharing of power obviously needs to take place between central and local authorities - the idea that more power will remain with central authorities due to the larger armies they can field seems based in a twentieth century view of warfare.
I didn't follow you, what reason are you thinking?
Country people are connected directly to the land, and usually live near their relatives.
Which group of people is more nomadic? Which is more likely to fight for their land?
America has many nations and the lack of dedicated voters and the large difference between rural and city voters continues to expand. Just look at NYC compared to New York State during the Presidential Election. People see things as "US" vs "THEM" and that gives way to the City State right here in America.
I don't know if you can call this spot on if similar mistakes are made all over the borderlands of this map.
Well Borderlands are just that border lands. I lived on the Mexican border and you go 15 miles North or South and it was a completely different culture.
There's a book called Thinking that (I think) covers this topic.
I'm assuming you're a well educated man that had a good upbringing. As that man, do you want to go to war and kill people? Most likely not. Killing for war is morally a very grey area. A lot of well educated, intelligent people understand this. Why risk your life or your mental and physical health when you can go work an office job for six figures?
Now imagine everyone in the USA was as educated as you. They all think the same thing. I don't want to be in the military.
Not everyone has the opportunities you've been given. A lot of people in the south and Midwest have very little choices and opportunity in life. The military is most people's best option.
Treating the USA as a single country means you get the military might from the less educated and the innovation from your more educated.
I understand people normally project their countries as the major source of good. Sadly it's not the case for both US and China.
This has more to do with powerful lobby groups and corporations controlling politicians.
Politicians should be doing the peoples bidding but they are more about furthering their own, not to mention banks like Goldman Sachs inserting people in positions of power.
eg http://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/goldman-sachs-power-wh...
http://www.whiteoutpress.com/articles/q42012/list-of-goldman...
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/analysis-and-feat...
Moreover, its not like you can really stop cities from gaining power, urbanization used to be and still is a symbol of development for most countries so its not like nation-states are against the idea of large cities. Nation-states aren't actively trying to decrease the size of cities and push people out of it simply because they would become too powerful. As well, nation-states will seek to only make certain cities powerful to be strategic instead of trying to make every city or location in the nation powerful which in turn brings to power powerful city-states.
Its also stated that military occupation is a powerful deterrent for city-states taking over nation-states. I argue that simply starting a war decreases the importance of a city-state and you reach the stage where you scare away the talent and economical activity that gave meaning to the importance of a city-state simply by starting a war. There is not much economical and development going on when you are fighting or even threatening a war which would mean that you can not really take over a city-state without destroying it or basically have to pour money in to just resuscitate it, like in Syria or places in Middle East that are constantly threatened.
If you don't have somewhere to go to, you're f'ed.
As the article mentions - it's not a coincidence that the most innovative and prosperous states in the past were city states (Athens, Florence, Venice, Genoa, the German states later on, ...) because they had to be nice to their citizens, otherwise they'd just move that 30 km away.
In a way, many small states resemble a rich supply of "states" where you can live in.
Having a world government is asking for a power monopoly and you know how these tend to behave.
They were not however geographically confined to their city-state, but controlled militarily a number of outposts , making them mini-empires in places where there were yet no borders.
I would rephrase it, slightly. Will a world made up of nation states do better at getting us off the planet than a world of city states, or one that includes them.
It's hard to say much about a world divided up completely differently, but I do think a higher resolution political world is likely to aggregate efforts a lot more.
Any major port city (assuming it isn't under water) is going to look to its nearest inland neighbors and its other major trade partners, deem the federal government to be full of shit, and build the infrastructure needed to move goods between the two -- because they will have the capital to invest to do it. More importantly they have the data and the political flexibility to negotiate with other 'city states'. If you are going to live in the middle of nowhere, it is going to start costing much more, and I can imagine a future where if you aren't a tax paying citizen of cities that have banded together to fund infrastructure development, you will be paying a steep fee to make use of it.
The solution to the US's infrastructure woes is in the hands of cities, and I suspect that if they choose to act, the country is going to look very different in 30 or 40 years. Add to this the fact that the federal govt is no longer tampering with normal settlement patterns by subsidizing suburban living, and the rich and powerful are going to congregate in cities. Sure they may own a second house in the middle of nowhere, but the vast majority of their productivity will be created while in the city.
I also suspect that cities that do not invest in social infrastructure (e.g. housing, and zoning regs) will ultimately fall behind, network effects aside. An anecdote I heard was that Portland rents have been rising at nearly 20% per year, and many people simply cannot find a place to stay, and wind up on the street (SV exporting their finest social features?). But Portland is building housing all over the place so I think it has a chance. Cities that cannot figure out how to maximize their productivity by providing good social infrastructure will become the new backwaters.
Another great article on this is [0].
0. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/17/opinion/sunday/a-new-map-...
For a city the most interesting thing to happen, is new connections between the people, in two forms. Personal Connection (very important to realize allready existing new ideas) and contact of a person with new things/ideas.
A city could further the interpersonal conntact, by creating partys, festivals or a sort of (non-relationship) speed-dating.
But how can a city further the contact of persons with new ideas? What if the person in need of new ideas, heavily resists having contact with them?
Who has power in the areas between the cities? What rights do urbanites have outside their city and who upholds those rights? How do we avoid rural areas devolving into economic wastelands or being exploited by monied interests in the cities? What criminal code could we agree on on a large scale and who enforces it? How can a rural community control access to abortion (for example), when such a service is a short drive away? Would the difference in wealth and opportunity just create a permanent rural underclass without redistributive social policies to offset it? How would a city state respond to something like wage slavery on its doorstep? Who pays for and protects federal lands, parks, and the commons? Who feeds the city? How do cities defend themselves?
1) you are small enough or insignificant enough that nation states are not interesting in showing you your place,
2) you are powerful enough so nation states will not mess with you, as the cost will be too much for them.
Point 1 is always temporary. Point 2 is more interesting — for now, there are no private powers that could stand the military assault of nation states, especially larger ones. But such power does exist, and we are periodically reminded about it in recent news reports.
The case of Liberland raises another possibility: virtual nations based on affiliation rather than physical location.
In my state (and it seems, most others), the cities are progressive and forward-thinking (renewable energy, climate change is not a hoax, equality, education is good, universities are generally good etc) and the rural areas are essentially the opposite, and the divide is growing under Trump. Anything progressives are for the rural areas are against almost by default.
The main thing holding cities from progressing further is that the state is so gerrymandered (or has been, they redrew the maps but will likely be similarly bad just in different ways) that the rural (conservatives) control the state government almost entirely. As a result, cities abilities to govern themselves has been reduced.
I'm not happy with the way things are going but its also difficult to see them changing. Those in progressive areas vote for more education funding, more access to higher education, better access to healthcare - all things that benefit rural areas as much or more than populated areas (cities generally having better paid, better educated and therefore more healthy people). Where I grew up (in an extremely rural area), diabetes, obesity, heart disease etc are extremely common and access to quality healthcare is lower. What needs to happen is some kind of reconciliation or at least a recognition that we have essentially matching values despite what those who would like to keep us divided might say.
The fact that wearing my NPR shirt is seen as basically the same thing in conservative areas as an Infowars shirt would be seen in liberal areas makes me question how likely any of that is.