Why is the urban-rural "gap" in shared cultural understanding so much bigger in the US?

[𝕭𝖆𝖕𝖙𝖎𝖘𝖙𝖆 𝕸𝖎𝖓𝖔𝖑𝖆]

1. I get most of the points, but where exactly are the people who think public education is a satanic conspiracy?

2. "If you drive just a few hours away from that major city"... you probably end up in another major city?

3. I feel like many of the answers are applicable to other nations as well.

4. This kind of discussions tend to drive me nuts because I live in a small city and small cities usually seem erased from the argument.

[𝕭𝖆𝖕𝖙𝖎𝖘𝖙𝖆 𝕸𝖎𝖓𝖔𝖑𝖆]

There's also the argument that in urban areas people are generally more dependent on public services. You know; public transport instead of card; shared recreational areas; challenges in the housing market; often much more visible inequality and so on all mean that people are more open to viewing the role of a more visible state more positively. It's not just cultural, as there are also transactional reasons why city dwellers would opt for left wing parties more than people in the country side would.

As for the question at hand - the US is obviously massive compared to any European country, therefore almost mechanically tends towards a broader range of cultural outlooks, even within rural areas, that a two party system like the US has would tend to hide. Even then, I'm not sure it contrasts that much. If there isn't as much of a distinctive gap on some US culture wars issues like religion or Black Lives Matter or LGBT rights its because these aren't pertinent issues in the way they are in the Europe. For example, religion is fundamentally much less culturally relevant as a force in Western Europe than it is in the USA, which obviously means that a cleavage focused on religion is not going to be as stark or emotional.

You only need to look at the Gilets Jaunes in France to see that there can be huge cultural and political difference in between cities and countryside in Europe. I mean, compare Berlin with the village in Saxony that vote 40%+ AFD; Paris with the village in the Haute-Marne where Le Pen won 70% plus of the vote or head from Bern, where 70% of people voted against the Minaret ban to the small alpine village where 85% of the population voted the other way. Those difference are there, they just tend to be applied in Western European countries' own cultural and economic anxieties. Which aren't always the same as American ones.

Well, while I agree with most of your post, your third paragraph feels like you are cherry picking the most extreme examples.
I feel like this gap is generally undeniably smaller or less clear in Western Europe. Or, at least, it is insofar as it applies to party politics. Maybe it just has not polarized totally along certain axes yet. Or maybe never will.

[𝕭𝖆𝖕𝖙𝖎𝖘𝖙𝖆 𝕸𝖎𝖓𝖔𝖑𝖆]

There's also the argument that in urban areas people are generally more dependent on public services. You know; public transport instead of card; shared recreational areas; challenges in the housing market; often much more visible inequality and so on all mean that people are more open to viewing the role of a more visible state more positively. It's not just cultural, as there are also transactional reasons why city dwellers would opt for left wing parties more than people in the country side would.

As for the question at hand - the US is obviously massive compared to any European country, therefore almost mechanically tends towards a broader range of cultural outlooks, even within rural areas, that a two party system like the US has would tend to hide. Even then, I'm not sure it contrasts that much. If there isn't as much of a distinctive gap on some US culture wars issues like religion or Black Lives Matter or LGBT rights its because these aren't pertinent issues in the way they are in the Europe. For example, religion is fundamentally much less culturally relevant as a force in Western Europe than it is in the USA, which obviously means that a cleavage focused on religion is not going to be as stark or emotional.

You only need to look at the Gilets Jaunes in France to see that there can be huge cultural and political difference in between cities and countryside in Europe. I mean, compare Berlin with the village in Saxony that vote 40%+ AFD; Paris with the village in the Haute-Marne where Le Pen won 70% plus of the vote or head from Bern, where 70% of people voted against the Minaret ban to the small alpine village where 85% of the population voted the other way. Those difference are there, they just tend to be applied in Western European countries' own cultural and economic anxieties. Which aren't always the same as American ones.

Well, while I agree with most of your post, your third paragraph feels like you are cherry picking the most extreme examples.
I feel like this gap is generally undeniably smaller or less clear in Western Europe. Or, at least, it is insofar as it applies to party politics. Maybe it just has not polarized totally along certain axes yet. Or maybe never will.

One of the points that I probably should have made clearer is that not all Western European countries are the same, and not all rural areas are the same (which goes for the US too). There are plenty of such examples of rural areas that are extremely conservative relative in other countries, but also plenty of examples which absolutely aren't the case. You can easily find rural areas that are even more progressive or left wing than urban areas in Europe - but that's the case in the USA too.

Part of the story is that the US as a whole is a society that has an immense political and cultural polarisation - and that isn't the case to the same degree in Europe. But that isn't the same thing as an urban-rural divide not being significant (and, as you pointed out yourself, it ignores the roles of smaller cities, suburban and exurban areas). As in, it's quite hard to speak of one single "urban-rural" divide, by which I mean, the fact that the Val d'Aosta and rural villages in Apulia are politically very different places is much easier to pick up on in a multiparty system like Italy has.

I agree. In fact, in all of these countries, the urban-rural gap evidently is not really a "gap" so much as a continuum, where places of medium density or with smaller agglomerations are both unlike Manhattan & friends and unlike rural tiny villages.
And yes, I did not say that this divide is not significant, but that it is not as polarized in Europe.

Your Italy-themed example is pretty poignant except that Valle d'Aosta has the added layer of being inhabited (sort of, not really) by a linguistic minority, which means it has a localized politics with regional parties anyways. Let's use this: rural mountainous Lombardy is not at all like rural flat Apulia, politically and not only.

[𝕭𝖆𝖕𝖙𝖎𝖘𝖙𝖆 𝕸𝖎𝖓𝖔𝖑𝖆]

Fair enough. It seems what one may consider "rural" is about as varied as the use of the term "working class" around here. What I meant by vast emptiness, which was probably poor word choice on my part, was the fact that you could probably walk an hour in the woods and not run into any of other people. Of course, that's just an assumption. I frequently go hiking in the mountains and canyons around LA and there's a lot of natural beauty there, but at the same time, you're going to see or even run into multiple groups of people. I've actually met some awesome people this way, but again, it's probably not in the realm of what you're looking for.

Another aspect of my bias can be acknowledged by considering the type of rural person you might meet who moved to a large city. LA, in particular, attracts a certain "crowd". Nonetheless, I do think that to a certain extent such acknowledgement reinforces the self-selection argument I was trying to make.

Given that you live in what from my perspective is a gigantic city, I wonder if you would call "rural" a city of around 95,000 people which includes many sparsely populated hills and beyond which most is "empty" countryside, especially to the north. This describes where I live.
See also the photograph in my signature.

[𝕭𝖆𝖕𝖙𝖎𝖘𝖙𝖆 𝕸𝖎𝖓𝖔𝖑𝖆]

Fair enough. It seems what one may consider "rural" is about as varied as the use of the term "working class" around here. What I meant by vast emptiness, which was probably poor word choice on my part, was the fact that you could probably walk an hour in the woods and not run into any of other people. Of course, that's just an assumption. I frequently go hiking in the mountains and canyons around LA and there's a lot of natural beauty there, but at the same time, you're going to see or even run into multiple groups of people. I've actually met some awesome people this way, but again, it's probably not in the realm of what you're looking for.

Another aspect of my bias can be acknowledged by considering the type of rural person you might meet who moved to a large city. LA, in particular, attracts a certain "crowd". Nonetheless, I do think that to a certain extent such acknowledgement reinforces the self-selection argument I was trying to make.

Given that you live in what from my perspective is a gigantic city, I wonder if you would call "rural" a city of around 95,000 people which includes many sparsely populated hills and beyond which most is "empty" countryside, especially to the north. This describes where I live.
See also the photograph in my signature.

It depends, I suppose. 95k is quite a chunk of people and to be within 30-60 minutes from a similar size city I'm not sure that's really "rural". To me, rural is middle of nowhere, far from any kind of urban setting. Otherwise it's more suburban or exurban.

Interesting. I can agree with this, actually. Just wanted to hear this for curiosity as from your previous posts you seemed to have a broader conception of "rural".