Increasingly, our connection to people in other places shapes identity.
This is republished from the substack The Future of Where. Please consider subscribing.
My wife and I often vacation in a small resort town in the Adirondack Mountains in Upstate New York where my parent retired and are buried. (Old Forge, N.Y., “the snowmobile capital of the Northeast.”) It’s friendly town where everyone knows everyone else, regular visitors are welcomed, and everyone struggles with the fact that the town is getting too expensive for the people who work there.
Lately, however, I’ve observed a new addition to the Old Forge landscape:
Confederate flags.
As someone who grew up in Upstate New York and has been a regular visitor and property owner in Old Forge most of my life, I cannot tell you how incredibly weird this seems.
First of all, Old Forge is not in the South. It’s at about the same latitude as Toronto.
Second, the Adirondacks has, until recently, been a swing region, going back and forth in congressional races between Democrats and Republicans. (Think Elise Stefanik before she was reborn as a Trumper.)
Third, Upstate New York was well known around the time of the Civil War as a center of abolitionism – a place where escaped slaves found refuge. (My hometown of Auburn was also the hometown of William Seward, Lincoln’s secretary of state, and the northern hometown of Harriet Tubman.)
And finally, Old Forge didn’t even exist at the time the Confederate flag was flying over Southern states. It was settled by French-Canadian guides in the early 1900s.
But none of that matters anymore. Because flying the Confederate flag is no longer an expression of support for the Confederacy or all the things the Confederacy stood for, such as the continuation of slavery.
Instead, it’s an expression of solidarity with rural and exurban folks everywhere who are ticked off at the way things are going and the urban elites that seem to run things. For many folks, flying the Confederate flag is probably more important than being a New Yorker or a Northerner. Cultural identify has become more important to some people than geographical identity.
What Does San Francisco Have To Do With Arkansas?
To somebody as where-oriented as me, this is pretty alarming, because I believe that for society to work – for cities and towns and villages to work – different groups of people who share a specific geographical location have to share a common sense of identity. And that’s breaking down.
My longtime friend Mike Madrid (who writes the Substack newsletter The Great Transformation) put this in stark relief last week when he was in San Diego to give a speech at UC San Diego promoting his new book, The Latino Century. Mike is known as one most astute observers of Latino voting patterns in the United States, but he spent a lot of time talking about bigger picture trends – especially the breakdown of geographical identity in political leanings.
In particular, one thing Mike said stuck in my brain: “A college educated professional in San Francisco has more in common with somebody in London than with somebody in Arkansas.” Or, Mike might have added, Madera or Redding.
This is a big difference from just a couple of generations ago. Despite vast differences, people in close proximity to one another used to see their state as the vehicle for a common destiny. In the Upstate New York of my youth, people may have hated New York City, but they shared a vision of New York as the Empire State. In the California of my young adulthood, Republicans like Pete McCloskedy were antiwar mavericks while Democrats like Jim Costa (still in Congress, but an endangered species) were conservative pro-business politicians. But they all believed in California as the Golden State offering up endless opportunity.
The Geography of Pennsissippi and Yorkabama
No more. And to paraphrase the 1980s House speaker Tip O’Neill (or perhaps bury his legacy once and for all), all politics is no longer local. It’s national – or even international. Even within states, political divides run deep. Extremely red areas in formerly blue states identify more with the South than they do with people in the blue areas of their own state. Which is why we are now talking about states like “Pennsissippi”.
Indeed, I should have seen this coming in my own political career. My time as a mayor coincided with the rise of the Tea Party. “Tea” supposedly stood for ‘’Taxed Enough Already,” but the Tea Party quickly turned into a proto-MAGA movement rife with conspiracy theories, in particular the idea that the United Nations’ “Agenda 21” sustainable development goals would soon force Americans to give up their single-family homes and live in cramped apartments. The whole notion of “Smart Growth” – with which I was closely associated – was supposedly just a stalking horse for this UN conspiracy.
Many of my constituents bought into this idea, especially after a national Tea Party conspiracy theorist swung through town and pointed the finger at me. In other words, people who had known me for decades and supported my political career turned on me because somebody they had never heard of before said I was part of a vast international conspiracy.
That’s part of the reason why what Mike Madrid said the other night resonated so deeply with me.
Mike’s clear message was: People across countries may have more than common with each other than people within countries. And that’s going to break down the social glue that holds together people who share a geographical location but not a political viewpoint.
We saw this in the striking connection between the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom in 2014 and the original election of Donald Trump two years later: a dramatic geographical split in which rural parts of the UK found more in common with the rural US than with London. Call this the “Yorkabama” phenomenon.
The biggest fear Mike Madrid has is that national identities might break down, as people in different countries believe they have more in common with each other than they do with hteir countrymen.
This phenomenon probably won’t literally lead to the disintegration of nations, especially not the United States. But it would lead to political activity that crosses boundaries, thus strengthening the cultural identity at the expense of the geographical identity. In fact, Mike Madrid argues, this is already happening in a way, as authoritarians in different countries share political strategy.
This general trend will accelerate as people spend more and more time shaping their political and cultural views through the Internet, especially via videos and social media, rather than by face-to-face contact with their fellow townspeople.
Which is why the whole idea of where is more important than ever. Yes, as I have written before, people are increasingly sorting themselves into geographical communities that match their political views.
But you can’t wall yourself off completely from people who disagree with you. To succeed – culturally, politically, socially, and especially economically – a community needs people from different backgrounds, with different skills and experiences, who probably also have different political beliefs.
You can’t just import the people you disagree with during the day to do work in your town and then shove them out at the end of the day – that’s just a modern version of the “Sundown Town”.
That’s why I work so hard to suggest that where is important – that the actual, physical, geographical community you live and work in is just as important as (or maybe more important than) the online communities and cable TV shows you identify with. In the end, real human connection is necessary for people of different backgrounds to get along. Even in Pennsissippi.
