“Urban-rural splits have become the great global divider,” the Financial Times’ Gideon Rachman writes in an interesting column Tuesday. Rachman notes that’s an old story in countries like the United States and Britain, where everyone knows that that rural conservatives do battle with urban liberals at the ballot box. (Take a look at this map, published by the New York Times last week, which lays out the split in graphic detail. You can even see the divide in small cities.)
Rachman notes, however, that “Less often noticed is that the same divide increasingly defines politics outside the west—spanning places with very different cultures and levels of development, such as Turkey, Thailand, Brazil, Egypt, and Israel.”
Istanbul’s hipster liberals loathe pious Erdogan, who is beloved in the countryside. Secular Tel Aviv has a left-wing mayor, far out of step with Israel’s national politics. Rachman might have added Russia, too: Vladimir Putin is much less popular in Moscow and St. Petersburg than he is in the vast countryside. (One odd exception— as usual—is Japan. Tokyo, the world’s largest city, elected the virulently nationalist Shintaro Isihara as its governor four times between 1999 and 2012.) The divide is usually cast as one between decadent urban elites, and pious, socially conservative rural dwellers.
Where Rachman errs is by suggesting that this is somehow a new phenomenon: that urban-rural splits are “now” defining our politics, as if in contrast to the past. In truth, the urban-rural split is literally an ancient one.
Tacitus, the great historian of Rome under emperors Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero, recounts in his Annals a typically grotesque display from Nero, and the encouragement he received from his urban audience:
But then, the historian notes:
In other words, “Red State Romans” could not abide Nero’s decadent ways.
