Explaining the New Class Cleavages: Geography, Post-Industrial Transformations and Everyday Culture

The election of Donald Trump has been a jarring shock to the American political system. In this paper, I argue that to fully explain the political cleavages driving his victory, and populist trends more broadly, political scientists need to better understand the interaction between material circumstances and cultural identity, rather than seeing them as separate. I begin with the observation that post-industrial transformations have produced a starkly divided economic geography in the US, with cities growing ever more vibrant and rural areas dramatically declining across a variety of important indicators. Although this transformation is widely acknowledged, left unexplored is the impact that this spatial differentiation between regions has on the cultural construction of political cleavages. I propose that the material reality of this pattern of economic activity has generated cultural class bubbles that underlie today’s political polarization. Drawing on the practice turn in political science, I offer an argument about culture as everyday lived experience. This argument helps better account for how economic change translates through culture and identity to become manifest in new political cleavages.