That seems like a lot of divisions, except it worked out to be only one main division, major cities voted one way and rural areas voted the other. In England, most of the people voted to stay in the EU and outside the city most people voted to leave. The same with the United States election big cities voted for Clinton and rural regions voted for Trump. And it was the same type of people in both cases: less educated, poorer, prejudiced and fearful people who were convinced that they were taking back their country from the foreigners. People who had never really interacted with anyone who was a foreigner or people who bought into the idea that the foreigners were taking away their livelihoods. Which they weren't.
In England it was fear that that EU was telling Britain how many refugees they had to take in. That foreigners were taking their jobs, which they weren't, because they lived mostly in London and other big cities. The people were not exposed to the foreigners and never grew to understand that they were people just like them with problems and fears similar to them. In America, Trump created a campaign based on the prejudices of those people. Foreigners were dangerous, and he was going to get rid of them. He was going to build a wall to keep illegal Mexicans from crossing the boarder, even though most illegal Mexicans fly to America. He was going to deport Islamic people and stop any from entering, even though most Muslim people are peaceful and never commit acts terrorism. More Americans have been killed in the United States by Americans than by Muslims since 911, by a very wide margin. Indeed, I bet that if Donald Trump does what he says he will do, he will recruit more Muslims to the cause of terrorism than any other person.
The truth of everything is that protectionism of economies does more to endanger world peace than everything else. When economies are linked, problems that affect one nation affect all the trading nations. The more isolated a country becomes, the less safe it is. That was America's take away from the world wars: isolation means that they will not have any control of the activities outside its boarders and those activities will most certainly have an affect on them. Some of Trump's policies seem seductive, that he would scrap free trade agreements and impose tariffs on foreign goods to stimulate his nation's industry and create jobs. On paper this makes sense would this work except then why has there been a big push over the last thirty years to do the opposite? Protectionism isolates the country and forces it to rely upon itself and is not efficient. It reduces innovation, because products do not have to be better to compete.
The problem that caused those two election failures many. They are isolated populations. They are isolated physically and media wise. They consume media that tells them that their viewpoint is the correct one. The media they see tells them that they are right and people like to be correct. They never get to see the counterpoint to the argument. They never get to see the productive members of a minority population doing stuff like them because they don't live near them, typically. They have media sources that exposé them to lines of immigrants looking for social services, beside non immigrants, but the turban or the niqab is more visible. They see news cycles of the very rare cases if Islamic terrorism, but are blasé to the most recent mass shooting perpetrated by an angry white guy. In short their ideas are reinforced and social media and google reinforces these things as well.
It is the urbanite's fault as well, because we don't engage these people, we just dismiss them as ignorant country people. We look down on them. Look at the Redneck Good Ol'boy and his antiquated racist ideas. You can't change people, but you can let them know that there are other ideas out there and the people around them will see this too.
And there is the false news sites that enflame and polarize each side. There are sites that are obviously fake like the Onion and there are other sites that try to look legitimate and post false information for their own purposes, like ABC.co and many others. Part of the problem is that we get so much information these days that we don't read past the headline and we agree with that headline and pass it on, or we disagree and don't. These companies don't make money if you don't pass it on, so they make their headlines flashy and hardly anyone reads below the headline.
We need to engage in this country. All countries. We all need to interact with everyone and keep people connected with each other. And we can't become complacent when there are elections, if we think our side is winning, we need to get out and vote anyways, because the other side that we think is losing will vote. How many elections have been won in years past because losing side thought it was their election won and therefore their vote was not needed? I remember one election five years ago where one party won a majority with 16% of the possible vote.
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