A shrewd US analyst yesterday said the gun issue in the US is a battle between urban and rural America. Which…

A shrewd US analyst yesterday said the gun issue in the US is a battle between urban and rural America. Which you can see here. I Tweeted this week that the Australian politics of pragmatism is largely due to us being so heavily urbanised. Urban = urbane. /1 https://t.co/xQy8XVgtB9

I think the battles between Left and Right in politics are really something else. They’re mostly battles of demography and geography. Battles of ageing populations, and of territory and how we occupy land. For example most Western countries are ageing badly, and have…/2

…shifted ‘Right’ (conservative) as they’ve aged. That’s not uncommon, older people tend to be more conservative in their beliefs, you’re not looking to change the world as you age, you’re looking to relax and enjoy the world you already know. But there’s more to this. /3

Look at the US electoral map. The rural heartland is so often conservative politically. The urban coast progressive. The same pattern we see in Australia. How you inhabit or occupy land matters in politics. The ‘shift to the Right’ in Western politics has been driven by both…/4 https://t.co/M57RrJRvVk

…the ageing of our populations, and the reassertion of rural life in our politics. It’s easy to see rural worldviews as a bit simple, as backwards in some way. They think daylight saving will fade the curtains, etc. (They don’t.) But a connection to land is something we…/5

…don’t understand well now. In our urbane metropolises, where land is more an address and an investment. But as we’re seeing with climate change, how we occupy land matters. More than anything else. It always has been a deep part of our actual identity. Our rural…/6

…populations are reminding us of that. This isn’t to say they retain some more authentic connection to land than the rest of us, because the urban/rural split itself is artificial. It’s not a chicken and egg question; the rural didn’t come first, followed by cities. /7

They emerged at the same time, they’re two sides of a single coin. We used to grow more of our food in our cities, and still do in some areas, where property developers haven’t won. The point is that flogging housing for capital gains has driven most of our land-connected…/8 https://t.co/yfxIPlriEH

…activities like growing food into more remote parts of the country, and the challenges and complexity of managing connection with our landscapes has been pushed out of our urban/urbane view in the cities. There’s politics around that, hard politics. Calling it ‘Right’…/9

…politics doesn’t say anything really useful. It’s partly the politics of how we occupy our land, which we in the West struggle now to understand. When our rural seats consistently vote conservative, it’s so often a vote against urban life. While in our cities we negotiate…/10

…an increasingly atomised politics of identity, and vote to shift clocks to give ourselves longer BBQs after work in summer, in the regions some basic physical realities of sunshine and water and soil never budge. So much of Left v Right politics seems this deeper battle. /end