Trump’s America is doomed

America is not

After the 2016 election, The New York Times published two helpful maps illustrating the utterly disconnected worlds we now live in.

The map of Trumpland—in which parts of the U.S. that went for Trump comprise the landmass and Clintonland is water—looks roughly similar to the U.S. map as it is, vast swaths of the country dotted with little water features like Dallas Pond and big bites taken out of the coast in places like Los Angeles Bay and the Connecticut Strait. 

By contrast, Clintonland looks like a ghost, the rough outlines of the familiar map like parentheses bracketing an archipelago nation of tiny islands speckled throughout vast interconnected seas. In Clinton’s America, denizens of Oklahoma live at the center of a landless waterworld called the Great American Ocean. 

The maps illustrate just how bifurcated our country has become.

As liberals sift through the election results searching for answers about how they lost to a punchline with a fake tan, one thing is crystal clear: more than by gender, race, or class—the country is starkly divided between urban and rural. Cities went for Clinton. The pattern even holds within Tulsa County, where Trump won with nearly 60 percent, but Clinton did gangbusters in precincts surrounding the denser urban core. Clinton did better in precincts around downtown Tulsa than she did in California. 

A related divide was also revealed in the election results: college graduates voted Clinton and the less-educated voted Trump. Whereas Trump did about as well as other recent Republican nominees with blacks, Latinos and women, people without a college degree broke hard for the GOP this year. Trump won by a gobsmacking 39 points among one group in particular: non-college-educated whites.

College graduates are clustered in cities and even within cities in denser urban areas, like north Brooklyn or midtown Tulsa. Young people in general are also expressing a similar though less-pronounced preference for cities. Clintonland, by any objective metric, has a younger, better-educated population than Trumpland. And although Trumpland represents 85 percent of the country’s landmass, Clintonland holds 54 percent of the population. And that’s not even considering Clinton’s margin of two million in the popular vote. 

In other words, Trumpies may have the guns, but liberals have the numbers. And the brains. And the money. And the future. And in Middle America Trumpies don’t even have all the guns. Lined up next to each other, these facts begin to paint a fearsome vision of the future for the working class people who got scammed by Donald Trump this year. 

The multiculturalism and cultural liberalism that Trumpies rejected in the latest election emanate from cities, and cities aren’t going anywhere. Urban areas will continue to be cauldrons of creativity where wealth is created and concentrated and the future of the United States is decided. Trumpies voted to make America great again because they feel like they’re losing their country, and they are. And it’s the thankless job of liberals to keep inviting them with open arms into a future that is already here. The country needs unity but there will be no meeting in the middle on white nationalism or contempt for democratic norms. We’ll unify around the same place Americans have always unified: small-L liberalism and an inclusive, hopeful, smart and bright-eyed vision of the future.

Floating as they are deep in the Great American Ocean, family to Trump voters and more familiar than any Manhattanite with defending liberalism in argument, liberals in Middle America are positioned to lead this country out of the dank, willful stupidity of Trumpism. The GOP will have to be rebuilt into a party with real conservative principles that embraces change but preserves what is best in our culture, including liberal values like individual liberty, honest debate, and free markets. 

And the Democratic Party will need to be rescued from the identity politics of the regressive left and the shrieking sensitivity of pointy-headed social justice warrior types. People in Middle America with liberal ideals, whether Republican, Democrat or something else, are the ones to step up and inject decency and common sense back into our politics. 

And it will take both sides. 

As the great Tulsan Daniel Patrick Moynihan once put it: “The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.”

For more from Denver, read his two open letters after Trump.