Imagine you live in rural Montana. One hot August afternoon, you barbecue some meat on a grill. Your nearest neighbor, two miles away, decides to do the same. In fact, all your neighbors in a several square mile area … all two or three dozen of them … decide to barbecue that afternoon. Your individual actions create no problem.
Now move this thought experiment to Manhattan, New York. Thousands of people living on each city block in a neighborhood all decide to barbecue some meat. Now you have a problem.
There is nothing inherently wrong with barbecuing, and anyone who chooses to do so doesn’t pose a problem for anyone else. But when many people practice this freedom in densely populated areas, it can cause a problem.
It seems to me that increased population density creates both challenges, like the barbecue example, and opportunities, like the creation of mass transit. These realities require a degree and type of cooperation that is unnecessary in less densely populated areas; it’s not right or wrong, but different. Yet country folks view city dwellers as controlling, while city folks view country folks as anti-government and uncooperative.
Since the days of Barry Goldwater in the 1960s, the Republican Party has been deeply influenced by leaders from contexts of Western wide-open spaces. But the country is now heavily tilted toward a population that lives in densely populated areas.
I’ve seen other articles recently suggesting that we have less of a red vs. blue state problem and more of a city vs. non-city problem. Look at this chart from The Atlantic Cities taken from The Real Republican Adversary? Population Density:
Read the whole article, What Republicans Are Really Up Against: Population Density.
I wonder if this demographic shift may be a key component of the party divide. Cause and effect are always murky. Maybe people with particular leanings move to contexts that mirror their values, but I suspect a bigger influence is that our demographic context shapes our socio-political outlook. I’m not suggesting this is the determining issue in our divide, but I think it may play a bigger role than we realize.
What do you think?
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