Like, I kind of assumed they were a artificially cultivated long con by American (or perhaps anglo in general) politicians made up to consolidate power but it sounds like they're kind of a recurring thing across several civilizations

  • chickentendrils [any, comrade/them]
    ·
    1 year ago

    urban/rural divide in the modern US is a lot more artificial, isn’t it?

    Post-WW2 things get complicated quickly because of how much meddling private interests were able to do through the state. The US undertook very specific policies aimed at increasing urban strife, ultimately red-lining minority neighborhoods, and doing everything possible to promote white flight to Levittowns.

    In some sense they were drawing on both theory and real world examples to stymie labour unrest. Re-segregate the urban proleteriat, give the workers some skin in the game/a mortgage, mar the agrarian areas with those workers' newly built environment because those were the staging grounds of revolutions in the past. It's hard to say how much awareness the architects of this had at the time, though some RAND corp & other :blob-no-thoughts:-tanks' alumni who went into academia have correspondence and papers and journals which can be requested from their institutions. Some claimed it was as benevolent as spreading the population to make the country less vulnerable to nuclear weapon attacks. Been meaning to put everything together and publish it for a while.