Sitting in a downtown Cleveland, Ohio, coffee shop in early December, Julie Goulis is still in shock.
“Some of the soul-searching I’ve been doing after the election has been about how I can understand people outside of my bubble,” she tells me. “I was so ashamed Ohio went for Trump.”
Like many US cities, Cleveland is overwhelmingly progressive in its politics and traditionally elects Democrats at all levels of government, despite hosting last year’s Republican National Convention. But partisan divisions in the US increasingly correlate with geographic differences, leaving many cities like Cleveland as liberal bubbles distinct from the vast conservative US hinterland. The looming inauguration of US president-elect Donald Trump has left many city dwellers grappling with just how distant much of their country seems.
Illustration: Louise Ting
I meet Goulis in Tremont, a neighborhood overlooking the Cuyahoga River as it cuts through Cleveland’s revived downtown district. After an influx of European immigrants in the late 1800s, Tremont was a thriving and diverse working-class community for the first half of the 20th century before it gradually atrophied alongside the local steel business in a familiar post-industrial spiral.
Goulis, a freelance copywriter who grew up in a town about 64km west of Cleveland, moved here 12 years ago in search of a more walkable and diverse community.
“I reject the suburbs,” she says.
In the years since the housing market bottomed out, Tremont and other pockets of Cleveland have witnessed a tenuous revitalization thanks to newcomers seeking city lifestyles and new investment in 21st-century industry. Meanwhile, other neighborhoods, particularly communities of color, continue to suffer from the long-term effects of deindustrialization, disinvestment and systemic racism. The dichotomy is familiar in many US cities.
Still, economically and racially diverse metropolitan areas stand as one in US politics. In Ohio, progressive urban centers like Cleveland and Columbus put up fierce opposition to Trump, who carried the state by running up huge margins in ex-urban and rural regions. The election only accentuated this divide in political culture, bringing a national spotlight to urban-rural tensions that have long simmered at the state level.
“I love Cleveland, but I’ve always considered it separate from Ohio,” Goulis says. “I just feel different than my friends far out in the suburbs and the rural areas. We just have different ideas about what makes a good life.”
Such conflicting perspectives stretch back to the foundation of US democracy. Urban areas — places of dense social diversity — have long been the backbone of the Democratic Party, coalescing around a stronger safety net, liberal social policies, climate science and more open immigration laws. Outer suburbs and rural regions, meanwhile, are a bastion for conservative Republicans, with largely white communities rallying around traditional values, lower taxes, fewer regulations and a more static notion of US culture.
But the trends driving these divisions have quickened in recent decades, particularly during an uneven economic recovery in which many small towns were devastated and a few megacities roared back.
These kinds of demographic and economic factors that deepen the political divergence largely mirror those in liberal cities and more conservative countrysides in Europe, as the UK’s Brexit vote demonstrated. In the US, the election of Trump has ushered these urban-rural divides onto the national stage like no other time in modern history.
Nowhere has the reaction been more stark than in New York City, Trump’s stomping ground and the US’ cosmopolitan flagship. Thousands of New Yorkers took to the streets in the days following his election in November last year, shutting down main thoroughfares as they chanted slogans like “New York hates Trump.” A wall on the Union Square subway station was covered until recently with myriad neon post-it notes displaying both rants and inspiration: “No human is illegal,” “Save our country,” “The future is female.” Occasional protests continue outside of Trump Tower in Midtown Manhattan where the president-elect has been working to form his government.
Following a meeting there with Trump in November last year, New York City mayor and Democrat Bill de Blasio told reporters that Trump’s harsh proposals on immigration “flew in the face of all that was great about New York City, the ultimate city of immigrants, the place that has succeeded because it was open for everyone.”
De Blasio and other urban Democrats have already pledged to remain as so-called “sanctuary cities” that provide some protections for undocumented immigrants.
The New York progressive has organized a coalition of mayors into a pro-immigration reform group called Cities for Action, and in December last year officials urged US President Barack Obama’s administration for action before Inauguration Day. Trump, in response, has vowed to curtail federal funding to sanctuary cities, setting up another fault line should he pursue his hardline campaign promises.
This dynamic — a liberal metropolis pushing back against more conservative governments — has long played out at the state level.
Politicians from New York City consistently clash with representatives from suburban Long Island or upstate New York, a largely rural region peppered with occasional post-industrial towns that tend to vote Republican. The result is a centrist state government in which de Blasio frequently clashes with state elected officials over his avowedly liberal urban agenda.
In Ohio, where a Republican legislature has repeatedly cut taxes, reduced municipal revenue sharing and slashed statewide services, residents in some cities have voted in favor of new local levies and additional social programs.
“From a policy perspective, we are seeing some real divergence,” think tank Policy Matters Ohio executive director Amy Hanauer says.
The presidential election in November last year saw this state-level dynamic play out on the national stage like never before. Presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton rode a wave of support in urban areas — winning 88 of the country’s 100 most populous counties — en route to a popular vote lead of nearly 3 million. Perhaps more striking is that the mere 15 percent of counties she carried nationwide accounted for 64 percent of the country’s aggregate GDP, according to a Brookings Institution analysis.
Trump portrayed himself as a foil to the urban liberal elite, even if the stereotype belies continued stagnation of the urban working class. He spoke of cities as dystopian hellscapes while railing against the global-facing industries that fuel their massive economic output, including finance, tech and media.
“The political divide sets up a false, zero-sum game between urban areas and rural areas where investment and benefit for one is viewed at the expense of the other,” Brookings senior fellow Alan Berube says.
Anti-urban backlash Americans have had such political disputes stretching back to the nation’s founding. Thomas Jefferson, who envisioned the US as an agrarian democracy, warned that “when [people] get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, they will become corrupt as in Europe.”
The electoral college, which allowed Trump to win the presidency despite a sizeable loss of the popular vote, was established partly to prevent populous states from gaining too much power.
In the early 20th century, anti-urban backlash targeted crime and unhealthy living conditions as cities ballooned into overcrowded manufacturing hubs. That sentiment took on an anti-government flavor following the failure of misguided urban renewal policies, and then a racist tinge once many white Americans fled to the suburbs. Urban political corruption and financial mismanagement have only deepened tensions.
“Taken together, anti-urbanism adds up to an unwillingness to acknowledge the urban and metropolitan nature of US society and the refusal to embrace the essentially collective, rather than individual, nature of urban life,” writes historian Steven Conn, author of Americans Against the City: Anti-Urbanism in the Twentieth Century.
However, Brookings’ Berube sees cause for optimism in bridging the urban-rural divide in specific locations.
“The states where there is more progress and potential,” he says, “are those where the pie is growing and people see that their communities are positioned OK and don’t see themselves in a pitched battle for every last employment opportunity and investment dollar.”
One example might be found in the Sun Belt, where Austin, Texas’ long record of voting Democrat makes it a blue dot within Texas’ sea of red. The state capital’s unofficial motto “Keep Austin Weird” was coined nearly two decades ago as an impromptu ode to local funkiness in the face of breakneck economic growth.
Since then, the university town and live music mecca has emerged as one of the US’ 21st-century tech centers. And its liberal social culture, which is rare in the overwhelmingly conservative Lone Star State, has remained a selling point as multinational giants such as Google set up shop, highly educated millennials flood in and new high-rises spring up. The influx of young professionals has added a generational dimension to the differences between city and state, though it does not necessarily follow the usual party lines.
“That push-pull happens every legislative session, and it’s something that everybody has come to expect,” Austin Mayor Steve Adler says, speaking generally of the Republican-controlled state government. “In those instances, Austin tries to first reinforce the liberty argument, which is to say the city government is the level of government that is closest to the people. Our economics and our people are a little bit different — though not necessarily better — than other cities.”
The ascendent Austin, which is home to the seat of state government, may have more political clout than some of its urban counterparts across the country.
In Michigan, ancestral home of the US labor movement, state Democrats have lost much of their power to dictate the state policy agenda — and it is unlikely the balance of power will shift any time soon. States draw their own federal and state political maps after each decennial census, many of them putting governing parties in control. It is no surprise, then, that new boundaries in Michigan and other states tilt the odds in the governing parties’ favor.
This has come at a pivotal time for Michigan’s largest city, Detroit. In 2013, residents watched as the state installed an emergency financial manager to bring the city back from the brink of financial collapse. The official guided Motown through bankruptcy, though his appointment arguably disenfranchised local voters from having a say in government.
Such moves carry an ugly connotation. In Detroit, as with so many other US cities, racism cannot be dissociated from politics and development. Black workers were barred from enjoying the full fruits of Detroit’s manufacturing heyday, while black prospective home buyers were prevented from pursuing the US dream of single family home-ownership. White flight wrought demographic devastation, with the city’s population falling from about 1.9 million in 1950 to 700,000 today.
Even now, largely black residential neighborhoods still suffer the long-term effects of this urban crisis despite the nascent resurgence of downtown Detroit, and to businessman and activist Jonathan Kinloch, the election made clear that many Americans have not even begun to grapple with that history.
“This was a test here in Michigan, in many black people’s opinions, of how far we’ve come,” Kinloch says. “The message that black people heard coming from Trump and what suburban and rural white folks heard were two different messages. This set race relations back a long way.”
A man riding a wave of implicitly anti-urban populism will now lead an increasingly urban country. His pledge to repeal Obamacare would disproportionately affect low-income and minority communities.
His pick to lead the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Ben Carson, has no government or housing policy experience, once described poverty as a choice and in 2015 compared an Obama administration fair housing rule to “mandated social-engineering schemes.” Trump’s hardline stances on trade and immigration stand against the philosophical underpinnings of urban economies and culture.
The new president will assume power over diverging urban and rural Americas after accentuating the very things that separate them — a blunt departure from the once-lofty rhetoric of his predecessor. In a hyper-partisan environment in which Republicans control both houses of Congress and a vast majority of state governments, the question now is to what extent the US’ metropolises will wall themselves off — new city-states in a divided empire.
Recently, China launched another diplomatic offensive against Taiwan, improperly linking its “one China principle” with UN General Assembly Resolution 2758 to constrain Taiwan’s diplomatic space. After Taiwan’s presidential election on Jan. 13, China persuaded Nauru to sever diplomatic ties with Taiwan. Nauru cited Resolution 2758 in its declaration of the diplomatic break. Subsequently, during the WHO Executive Board meeting that month, Beijing rallied countries including Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Belarus, Egypt, Nicaragua, Sri Lanka, Laos, Russia, Syria and Pakistan to reiterate the “one China principle” in their statements, and assert that “Resolution 2758 has settled the status of Taiwan” to hinder Taiwan’s
Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s (李顯龍) decision to step down after 19 years and hand power to his deputy, Lawrence Wong (黃循財), on May 15 was expected — though, perhaps, not so soon. Most political analysts had been eyeing an end-of-year handover, to ensure more time for Wong to study and shadow the role, ahead of general elections that must be called by November next year. Wong — who is currently both deputy prime minister and minister of finance — would need a combination of fresh ideas, wisdom and experience as he writes the nation’s next chapter. The world that
Can US dialogue and cooperation with the communist dictatorship in Beijing help avert a Taiwan Strait crisis? Or is US President Joe Biden playing into Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) hands? With America preoccupied with the wars in Europe and the Middle East, Biden is seeking better relations with Xi’s regime. The goal is to responsibly manage US-China competition and prevent unintended conflict, thereby hoping to create greater space for the two countries to work together in areas where their interests align. The existing wars have already stretched US military resources thin, and the last thing Biden wants is yet another war.
Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, people have been asking if Taiwan is the next Ukraine. At a G7 meeting of national leaders in January, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida warned that Taiwan “could be the next Ukraine” if Chinese aggression is not checked. NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg has said that if Russia is not defeated, then “today, it’s Ukraine, tomorrow it can be Taiwan.” China does not like this rhetoric. Its diplomats ask people to stop saying “Ukraine today, Taiwan tomorrow.” However, the rhetoric and stated ambition of Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Taiwan shows strong parallels with