> ...While the most salient demographic fact about America is that it is
> becoming more diverse, Republican districts actually became less diverse in
> 2012. According to figures compiled by The Cook Political Report’s David
> Wasserman, a leading expert on House demographics who provided me with most
> of the raw data I’ve used here, the average House Republican district
> became two percentage points more white in 2012.
>
> The members of the suicide caucus live in a different America from the one
> that most political commentators describe when talking about how the
> country is transforming. The average suicide-caucus district is
> seventy-five per cent white, while the average House district is
> sixty-three per cent white. Latinos make up an average of nine per cent of
> suicide-district residents, while the over-all average is seventeen per
> cent. The districts also have slightly lower levels of education
> (twenty-five per cent of the population in suicide districts have college
> degrees, while that number is twenty-nine per cent for the average
> district).
>
> The members themselves represent this lack of diversity. Seventy-six of
> the members who signed the Meadows letter are male. Seventy-nine of them
> are white.
>
[WS:] The rural-urban divide may be a part of the story, but there is also another part - the ability of politicians to custom design their districts to make them more homogeneous, aka "gerrymandering". This insulates them from any consequences of their destructive behavior - they may wreck urban economies of the Eastern seaboard and urban economies of their home states, but they will be viewed as heroes in their gerrymandered districts, and there is not much than can be done about it within the current legal and political system.
Stated differently, every country has a certain segment of the population that falls for a reactionary anti-intellectual, anti-urban, anti-international ideology and politicians who cater to this crowd. Most parliamentary democracies will offer them proportional representation, but will also prevent them from wrecking the whole country. The US is an exception - its antiquated political system amplifies the power of this electorate well above their actual share of the population, and worse yet, doe not have a safety mechanism allowing dissolution of a political assembly i.e. congress when these elements render it dysfunctional.
Let's face it, the US political system is outdated and dysfunctional and it will either be overhauled or else it will eventually destroy the entity known as the US of A.
-- Wojtek
"An anarchist is a neoliberal without money."