I think the real fault line may be the same as the civil war, but it's no longer segregated by a large scale geographic border. The conflict is between the agrarian vision of America and the industrial/cosmopolitan vision of America.
Agrarian: traditional, religious, rigid social roles, rigid hierarchies determined by gender/race/etc., suspicion of change, and fiscally conservative with a suspicion of debt or loose monetary policy.
Industrial/cosmopolitan: fluid, either non-religious or liberal religion, fluid social roles, hierarchies only as-needed (e.g. corporate hierarchies that are opt-out), welcoming to rapid change, and fiscally liberal with a pragmatic attitude toward things like monetary policy and debt.
The wrinkle in this model is that the top of the hierarchy of "red America" seems to be located in urban centers. Trump is from New York. Most 4chan /pol users are in cities. The people operating Fox News and other further-right news sources almost all live in cities. So it's sort of like you have this minority of urban America either sympathizing with or puppeteering a rural revolt against modernity.
Of course I wonder if the civil war was different. Banks, governments, and major property owners in urban areas profited a lot more from slavery than poor and middle class farmers and skilled laborers in the South. Quite a lot of the profit from slavery ended up in New York, Boston, DC, and even London.
Maybe part of the answer to this is for rural Americans to turn off Fox News and OAN and the /pol orbit and all the rest of that "ruralist propaganda from urbanites" and figure out what they really think and articulate it themselves. What emerges may well be something toward which urban "elites" could be more sympathetic.
I didn't mention class because it doesn't break cleanly along class lines. Look at the capitol stormers... several were CEOs of medium sized companies or middle to upper middle class skilled workers. It wasn't a bunch of poor folks.
Agrarian: traditional, religious, rigid social roles, rigid hierarchies determined by gender/race/etc., suspicion of change, and fiscally conservative with a suspicion of debt or loose monetary policy.
Industrial/cosmopolitan: fluid, either non-religious or liberal religion, fluid social roles, hierarchies only as-needed (e.g. corporate hierarchies that are opt-out), welcoming to rapid change, and fiscally liberal with a pragmatic attitude toward things like monetary policy and debt.
The wrinkle in this model is that the top of the hierarchy of "red America" seems to be located in urban centers. Trump is from New York. Most 4chan /pol users are in cities. The people operating Fox News and other further-right news sources almost all live in cities. So it's sort of like you have this minority of urban America either sympathizing with or puppeteering a rural revolt against modernity.
Of course I wonder if the civil war was different. Banks, governments, and major property owners in urban areas profited a lot more from slavery than poor and middle class farmers and skilled laborers in the South. Quite a lot of the profit from slavery ended up in New York, Boston, DC, and even London.
Maybe part of the answer to this is for rural Americans to turn off Fox News and OAN and the /pol orbit and all the rest of that "ruralist propaganda from urbanites" and figure out what they really think and articulate it themselves. What emerges may well be something toward which urban "elites" could be more sympathetic.