How the Democratic Brand Turned Radioactive in Rural America

This is an edited transcript of an episode of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.

I think there’s a particular lens worth using right now. As we watch the Trump administration deploying the National Guard from red states into blue cities, we are viewing a rural political coalition militarily occupying urban centers.

It is moving armed troops in over the objections of their residents, of their mayors and of their governors. Here’s JB Pritzker, the governor of Illinois:

Archived clip of JB Pritzker: Let me be clear: Donald Trump is using our service members as political props and as pawns in his illegal effort to militarize our nation’s cities.

The Trump administration is doing this while describing these cities as something like enemy territory. They need to be liberated, recaptured, taken back. Trump said this to a room of America’s top military leaders:

Archived clip of Donald Trump: It seems that the ones that are run by the radical left Democrats — what they’ve done to San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles — they’re very unsafe places. And we’re going to straighten them out one by one. And this is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room. That’s a war, too. It’s a war from within.

Trump also said that the people in these cities resisting this occupation, these deployments, should be understood as insurrectionists.

Archived clip of Trump: We have an Insurrection Act for a reason. If I had to enact it, I’d do that. If people were being killed and, uh, courts were holding us up, or governors or mayors were holding us up, sure, I’d do that. I want to make sure that people aren’t killed.

For years, I have been skeptical of warnings that America was at risk of a renewed civil war. There were all kinds of reasons to not take that particularly seriously. But when I see troops being sent into cities over the objections of the people elected in those cities and states, when I hear them talked about in this way, I think you have to take those warnings more seriously now.

Archived clip of Trump: And I told Pete: We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military — National Guard but military.

A massive rural urban divide has opened in our country’s politics. Urban and rural voters used to vote pretty much in lock step. But then in the 1990s, that split. Urban voters became reliably Democratic, and rural voters became overwhelmingly Republican.

We treat this as an inevitability in our politics, but it is only a few decades old, and our political future and stability might rest on reversing it. Certainly for the Democratic Party, any durable political power rests on reversing it. Reversing it isn’t going to be easy. But it begins with understanding it and taking seriously the resentments that fuel it.

“Rural Versus Urban,” a new book by the political scientists Suzanne Mettler and Trevor Brown is the best place I’ve found to start.

So I asked Mettler to join me on the show to walk me through how we got here — and whether we can find a way out.