As I was trying to say...

And Kevin Drum does a much better job:.

Rural-urban splits are common in just about every country, and I continue to think that in many ways it's the most basic split of all. The problem is that densely populated cities require a fundamentally different type of governance than thinly populated rural areas, but since we haven't really come to grips with this we end up turning these differences into moral crusades. It's perfectly reasonable, for example, to suppose that big cities ought to handle gun ownership differently than farm communities, but instead of simply acknowledging this as a garden variety governance issue to be handled differently in different places, it's become part of a nationwide culture war.

It seems like there's an opening of some kind here for a politician who forthrightly admits that city and country have different needs but that we don't have to split into warring factions over it. It's worth a thought, anyway.