Brexit, Trump, the rise of national populism in the United States and Europe, and the crack-up of the old center-left and center-right — all of these are manifestations of larger trends in what might be called local geopolitics: the politics of place within countries rather than among them.
Until recently, partisan divisions in the U.S. and many other Western democracies have tended to track geographic and longtime ethnic cleavages: North versus South in America, a similar north–south divide in Italy, the Anglo-Saxon southeast versus the Celtic periphery in the U.K. These older divisions are fading in importance compared with new partisan maps on both sides of the Atlantic, in which the most important divide is between large, stratified, multi-ethnic cities and the less diverse, less economically stratified territories that surround them. The county map of national elections in the U.S., with its blue urban dots in a sea of red, looks remarkably like maps of the Brexit vote in the English portion of the U.K., with the Leave vote dominant almost everywhere outside of London.
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