The origin of this flyover designation for the North is both economic and cultural. Yet the standard explanation is almost exclusively the former, with nearly all analysis and policy focus directed at economic decline. Broadly speaking let us call this the ‘place hypothesis’ – that if only the North had what it needed as a functioning economic ‘place,’ then equity with the South of England would be restored, and decline reversed.

It is certainly the case that the North has woefully insufficient connectivity, with poor railways, roads and tunnels, and it has acre upon acre of sub-standard 19^th century working-class housing.  And some might additionally argue that it lacks investment, interest and the radical governance/devolution structures to turn it all around. But if we really want to understand the North’s decline then focusing solely on the economic is a mistake, as most of this only really arose as a problem during the last forty years or so, whereas the North’s decline began much, much earlier.

If we wanted to maintain the ‘place’ explanation, we might with more merit argue something like the following. The decline of the North is probably due to its unprecedented global and regional success in the 18^th and 19^th centuries – the massive innovations in commodity production and its transportation focused all the investment and expertise on production in industries like shipbuilding, cotton, coal, and steel. Then when, after the First World War, the global economy shifted and northern British commodities became uncompetitive against both new international competition and revived trade barriers, the North proved incapable of adapting.

Instead it was the South that moved towards services and complex manufacture like planes and cars. And in adapting to this structural shift it was the South that captured, through deploying ideas and innovation, the future of production. Whereas the North, overly invested in a now defunct and low skill raw production model, remained too far from the global innovative frontier for it to catch up.

I think all of the above is true, but I also believe it is insufficient in explaining how the North became “flyover” territory. For it was not so much a dearth of place, but more of people. After all, the Industrial Revolution happened in Northern England, and not elsewhere, largely because of the people.

The rightly celebrated work of economic historians like Robert C Allen may highlight the material explanations for the Northern English location of the Industrial Revolution – the enormous coal deposits lying near the surface, and the high wages and cheap energy that created an incentive to develop machines that replaced expensive people with inexpensive coal. But the North of the 18^th century also had decentered capital, lots of opportunistic merchants looking to invest, and a phenomenal mass grouping of innovators and inventors in Northern towns who founded small scientific and technical clubs in places like Wigan and Preston, as well as the big cities such as Manchester and Liverpool. This is the mix of human talent and local capital that allowed the North to give birth to the industrial age.

It is the loss of an active and engaged middle and upper class – highly educated, high status and heavily invested in the private as well as the public sector – that propelled the North into a century of decline. And it is getting back the talented, technical, entrepreneurial and artistic classes that can alone reverse it. All of which means that much of current policy towards the North which is almost exclusively place, needs to become people based if it is to have any meaningful and subsequent effect.

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And finally: the good news from flyover county

By Peter Franklin

This is not just conjecture. In a brilliant paper based on the study of ancestral surnames and birth and mortality data, Gregory Clark and Neil Cummins conclude “that the decline of the North is mainly explained by selective outmigration of the educated and talented.”[1. Gregory Clark and Neil Cummins, ‘The Big Sort: Selective Migration and the Decline of Northern England, 1800-2017’, LSE, May 2017]. The decline of the north is to be found in its makeup of people, not in its place.

This is best understood by recognising the scale of inward migration. Between 1800 and 1900 the population of northern England quadrupled, with massive immigration from Scotland, Wales, and most especially Ireland. But this was mostly the inflow of relatively unskilled labour that came to work in the new industries.

Fascinatingly, it appears the outflow of the educated and higher skilled from the North had already begun in the mid-19^th Century, even when the Northern industries were prospering. Perhaps because this commerce did not demand or require high levels of skill or education those endowed in both went South were their services were in demand. So, as Clark and Cummins put it, as the educated left “the North retained its unskilled population, and attracted unskilled migrants, leading to a decline in the average skill and education level of the Northern population.”

Largely as a result of this prolonged and selective migration out of the North, the North is now at the level of population share that it had before the Industrial Revolution, with much of its population remaining below the average skill and educational levels of the country and especially the south. The resulting impacts on the multiple inequities of health, wealth and opportunity remain to this day for all to see.

So much of flyover country – from the American mid-western rust belt to these abandoned Northern towns – has something of this character. They share an over-concentration on a single type or pattern of industry and its this lack of socio-economic diversity that makes them so vulnerable to economic shocks.

The question therefore, is what can be done to renew these areas? A clear lesson is that while the hard infrastructure “ask” of the North is no doubt needed, even if the investment is forthcoming it is unlikely on its own to narrow the gap between North and South. There must additionally be a focus on human capital: attracting it, retaining it and creating it locally. And politicians and policymakers concerned with regional inequality need to recognise that the working class monoculture that exists in many of the most deprived areas in the North is also part of what has cut off the white working class off from opportunity.

Just as racial apartheid is rightly abhorred, we now need to turn that disgust into revulsion at the class apartheid that marks too much of the North too strongly. We need to build back into these areas institutions that mix classes, peer groups and career pathways to create a socio-economically diverse North that can better look after, nurture and educate its people.

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No, Britain is not over-run with fascists or racists or bigots...

By Peter Embery

The “build it and they will come” approach is not sufficient to help these isolated communities – the shiny new buildings erected in cities like Manchester and Liverpool are no substitute for a genuine focus on creating, restoring and, of course, recognising northern culture. The North has to become deeply attractive to the people it needs to bolster its technical, entrepreneurial and educational reach. And culture in its broadest sense is the pull for such people, as it is what makes a place worth living in. But educated families and skilled people won’t remain in, or relocate to, the North unless it has the institutions and culture they expect to enjoy.

Our northern universities, particularly the higher performing ones, remain introverted institutions largely focused on their own development while ignoring the wider social and economic renewal that  they could both facilitate and benefit from. And we need even more desperately and urgently to save northern children from the long tail of underperforming, below average schools that endlessly depress the aspiration and achievement of their pupils – and probably one of the things that could help them is a mass influx of middle class families and their children.

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The flyover town that dodged decline

By Henry Olsen

The planned relocation of Channel 4 is an example of what is needed to attract these families and individuals – a high performing cultural institution moving its creative functions outside of London (at the laudable behest of government). We need much, much more of this; along with the sort of investment capital that the rich merchants of the Industrial Revolution invested in the North. Might a regional capital gains tax relief help facilitate this?

The more that the North escapes its working-class monoculture by bringing back the people who left, the more the working classes will benefit, because a diverse social mix is exactly what will create opportunities for the young people currently and cruelly being left behind.

You can’t flyover where you live, and the mark of the North’s success will only really be found when the middle classes who left it some 100 years ago return.

But this only provides so much distraction from a more troubling story: that of the economy. Improved overall growth figures cannot conceal the ongoing rise in precarious and poorly paid work which increasingly characterises the Spanish economy.

Rents in Spain have been rising 12 times faster than salaries; the typical salary of young workers entering the labour market is 33% lower today than it was in 2008; and about 90% of new employment contracts signed in 2015 were for temporary positions. Unemployment peaked at 27% in 2013 and has since fallen, but it remains twice that of the Eurozone average. And the country also holds the unenviable distinction of having the third highest rate of child poverty in the EU (after Romania and Greece).

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Has populism failed in Italy?

By Michael Burleigh

But these broad-brush statistics don’t tell the full story. Others have done pretty well out of Spain’s descent into recession a decade ago: the wealthiest 1% saw its share of national wealth increase from 17% in 2011 to 20% in 2014, according to the Bank of Spain. Indeed, it is the poorest 25% who have suffered the biggest loss of wealth since 2011, with the bottom quarter in debt by an average of €1,300.

It’s a disparity that can be seen starkly in the contrast between the undeveloped south, areas such as Andalusia and Murcia, and cities such as Madrid and Barcelona. The average salary in the Madrid suburb of Pozuelo de Alarcón is €73,000, while in Torrevieja, a province of Alicante, it is just €13,000. A summer holiday resort that attracts its fair share of British pensioners in search of sea, sun and sangria, Torrevieja experiences challenges similar to towns like Blackpool, with many of the local jobs vanishing during the winter months. The nearby city of Elda, another tourist destination, was listed as having the highest number of residents out of work in the whole of Spain in 2015, with an astonishing 40% of residents without a job.

The south east, you could call it flyover Spain, was particularly badly hit by the decline of construction. And white elephants – all those abandoned building projects – dot the landscape after toxic debt burst the building bubble and brought down the country’s banks.[1. The most notorious example is the empty Cuidad Real airport, which sits 235km south of Madrid. Built in 2008, the airport went bankrupt in 2012, and sits abandoned to nature and the elements. It is a ghostly testament to the irresponsible and over-priced projects which helped to cripple Spain’s construction sector.]

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Poles apart: what’s driving Poland’s populism?

By Ben Sixsmith

Nor is it only rural areas that are still suffering. Despite being nominally Spain’s third city, Valencia is very much treated as flyover country by Spanish elites. New home stock in the city has fallen by 35% since 2009. With the disappearance of new building projects, large numbers of jobs – and with them incomes – have disappeared too. In 2014 it was estimated that a quarter of all Valencia’s inhabitants were living in poverty. And once you are on the way to the bottom it often takes very little to sink a few more rungs. A street count carried out in Valencia in 2016 by the homelessness charity Bokatas found that over 400 people were sleeping rough in the city – far more than the official estimate of 79 people made the previous year.

The rise of outsider parties in Spain was undoubtedly rooted in the inability of mainstream parties to deal effectively with this fallout, generated by the financial crash, and the growing inequality in the country. But equally, the Left has spectacularly failed to take the lead on dealing with the corruption scandal currently engulfing the Rajoy government – El País has called it “the largest corruption scandal in Spain’s democratic history” – nevermind the wider economic malaise.

As a result, Pedro Sanchez’s opposition Socialist Party (PSOE) continues to underperform in the polls – though Sanchez may yet win power through a vote of no confidence to oust Rajoy. And much of the ruling Popular Party’s (PP) disillusioned support is peeling off to the new centre-right party Ciudadanos. Indeed, a Metroscopia poll taken earlier this year found that Ciudadanos, led by the 38-year-old lawyer Albert Rivera, would receive the most votes were an election to be held today, with the party on course to secure 27% of the vote. This would be a hugely significant result for a party that was only founded in 2005.

Ciudadanos has benefited significantly from its staunch opposition to Catalonian independence and its tough talk on corruption. In Catalonia, where the party first emerged, it has taken a harder stance on immigration, and proposed burqa and niqab bans in public spaces. But it is also attracting middle class voters with a Macron-esque promise of cosmetic rather than radical change.

Perhaps emphasising the extent to which populism in Spain is increasingly dominated by the centre-right is the plight of Podemos. The insurgent left-wing party finished third with 20% of the vote at the 2015 election. It has since slipped back into fourth place and can now rely on the support of around 17% of the electorate. As I predicted for UnHerd last year, the party’s decision in 2016 to forge an electoral pact with the old Spanish Communist Party (PCE) has put a ceiling on the number of voters it could attract from the centre.

What is more, Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias has been accused of hypocrisy after it was revealed that he and his partner, the party’s parliamentary spokeswoman Irene Montero, purchased an exclusive property worth over half a million Euros situated on the outskirts of Madrid. So much for Iglesias’ – and by extension Podemos’ – wider reputation as modest, self-abnegating idealists, especially at a time when so many in Spain are struggling.

The struggle of Spain’s hard-up classes will sound familiar to many voters across Europe. But so too the inability of the Spanish Left to capitalise on the discrediting of elites – and more broadly to figure out what its purpose is in the twenty-first century.

More on populism in Spain...

Mainland Europe's most important radical party doesn't just seek seats - but 'hegemonia' too

By James Bloodworth

As with most Western democracies, however, the fruits of success are not apportioned equally. Some places, and some people, have done better than others. The success of the Law and Justice (PiS) party in Poland’s 2015 elections had a lot to do with voters’ frustration with the Civic Platform (PO) government’s perceived complacence in improving the communities and lives of those left behind. This, combined with cultural change, is producing an increasingly divided Poland.

The most famous conception of Poland’s sociocultural divides is “Poland A” and “Poland B”, with the former being richer and more metropolitan and the latter being poorer and less developed. Geographically, “Poland A” is traditionally described as being to the west of the Vistula (and including Warsaw and Kraków as well as Łódź and Wrocław) and “Poland B” to its east (including Lublin and Białystok as well as much of Poland’s agricultural land).

More on flyover country...

Flyover France – the forgotten frontier

By Peter Franklin

There is some truth to the divide between the west and east. Historically Poland was divided, literally – between Prussia, Russia and Austria. “Prussian” Poland, which now makes up much of Poland A was industrially powerful while “Austrian” and “Russian” Poland, which now make up much of Poland B, were poorer and less developed. Infrastructure – which now includes roads, airports and Internet access – has remained stronger in the west, cities in the west attract greater investment than those in the east.[2. Grzegorz Węcławowicz, ‘Urban Development in Poland, from the Socialist City to the Post-Socialist and Neoliberal City’, 2016]

The divide has also been reflected in voting patterns. The more socially and economically liberal party, PO, dominated in the west in the 2007 elections while the socially conservative and economically populist PiS dominated in the east.

Yet, it would be wrong to think of Poland in these sweeping binary terms. Ideas of the richer west versus the poorer east are compromised by the existence of struggling regions like Warmian-Masuria in Poland A and thriving cities like Rzeszów and Lublin in Poland B. Nor is Poland A uniformly liberal – PiS made significant inroads into the west during their triumphant 2016 election campaign.

While Poland A and Poland B retain some conceptual power, the starkest class and cultural divides in Poland are now between the rich and relatively cosmopolitan major metropolises, which have enjoyed the fruits of a globalised economy, and the poorer rural areas and smaller towns and cities which have struggled to replace declining industries and trade.

It is this that has led to rural Poland being described as “the second Poland” and “the different Poland”, characterised by poverty and cultural conservatism. PiS are most popular here, winning more than half the vote with promises of economic redistribution and traditionalist Catholic principles. Despite government and European Union investment, economic improvements have been “temporary and fragmentary.”[2. Dariusz Żmija, ‘Economic Poverty in Rural Areas of Poland’, 2015]   Jobs are still in short supply and education is still lacking inadequate.

But it is not just rural communities that are being left behind, urban areas are at risk as well. I live in the Katowice Urban Area: a group of towns and cities that make up one of the most populated regions in Poland. A bus ride through the area reveals serious inequalities. Katowice is thriving, with its mines and steelworks, and national and international businesses, yet smaller cities suffer from what Dr Robert Krzysztofik has called “multiple and overlapping problems: economic, demographic, social, infrastructural and spatial.” Jobs and people have disappeared, leaving these cities struggling to fulfil their human, cultural and economic potential.

New developments have brought new opportunities, such as the construction of a giant shopping and entertainment centre in nearby Bytom, but investment alone is not enough. For rural and provincial Poland to thrive – as Henry Olsen points out in relation to Pennsylvania’s Levittown –  meaningful development cannot be achieved top-down. Local people, businesses and institutions must be given the power to reform their communities according to themselves.

In the future there will be new divides, between Poles raised after communism and before communism. The UK has seen a rift between left-leaning and remain-voting millennials and their far more conservative and Brexit-sympathetic elders. Poland is unlikely to have a clear political divide, but it is on course to have a generational one.

Poland has one of the lowest birth rates in Europe, and an ageing population. Young Poles, still struggling with some of the higher youth unemployment and youth poverty rates in Europe, will face steep social care costs in the future.

Also like the UK – and other advanced economies – many young people are struggling financially. But there is also a clear cultural divide. Poles who lived under communism had access to Western culture, as well as their own art and entertainment, but Poles who were raised after communism have been saturated with Western music, television, cinema and social media.

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The flyover town that dodged decline

By Henry Olsen

These engines of secular individualism have had a mixed effect on generational opinion. Young Poles attend church in lesser numbers than their parents and have more liberal opinions on matters of personal choice. On the other hand, they still oppose abortion on demand and are hostile to non-European immigration. It remains to be seen how these opinions will evolve, but one effect that Western media has undeniably had is to make emigration even more attractive.

Youthful dissatisfaction with “traditional” politics was reflected in the fact that more than half of Poles between the ages of 18 and 26 voted for outsider candidates: the maverick rock star Paweł Kukiz, the eccentric Eurosceptic Janusz Korwin-Miike and the struggling parties of the Left. Differing opinions on social and economic matters are unlikely to make young Poles a coherent voting bloc but their animating concerns of self-interest are likely to disrupt Poland’s social and political life if they are not given a real stake in the nation’s future in terms of jobs, homes and the potential to start families.

Poles are patriotic people and despite their political disagreements, as fierce as they are, they have maintained a remarkably stable and cohesive nation. But as new divides take hold – between the haves and the have nots, and between the young and the old – there is no place for complacency.

Populist Sweden...

Is Sweden about to have its Trump moment?

By Tino Sanandaji

Social Democratic dominance of Swedish politics has long rested on the working-class. The Social Democrats have averaged over 42% of the total vote since the introduction of universal suffrage in 1921, and often some two-thirds of the blue-collar vote. Their strength in industrial regions and among working-class voters has allowed the Social Democratic Workers’ Party to form the government in 80 of the 101 years since the introduction of democracy, often ruling alone. The party’s hegemony was so psychologically entrenched that former Social Democratic minister Marita Ulvskog remarked that the 1976 loss following 44 years on uninterrupted rule “felt like a coup d’état”.

This background is essential in understanding the political earthquake Sweden is currently experiencing. Even if the Social Democrats do finish first, polls predict they may “win” with only 23 to 26% of the vote, their worst result for over a century.

This is all the more striking given that the government has benefited from a favourable business cycle, with declining unemployment and a budget surplus. Sweden has experienced a credit boom with low interest rates, solid wage growth and declining unemployment, as well as benefiting from the global recovery with rising exports. This would normally guarantee re-election, but for the first time in Swedish electoral history, it is immigration and crime that top voter concerns. And Swedes are not happy with the Social Democratic record on those issues.

Only 27% of Swedes believe the country is heading in the right direction, while 50% think that it is going in the wrong direction.[1. ‘SOM-SEMINARIET 2017’, Goteborgs Universitet, 2017] Other surveys confirm widespread discontent, which tends to be higher outside major cities.[2. David Ahlin, Björn Benzler, ‘DN/IPSOS POLITISK BAROMETER’, Ipsos, 20 February 2018]

The meltdown in support for the centre-left is also hitting the Social Democrats’ coalition partner, the Greens. The Greens are a socially liberal party, and only four years ago were predicted to ride the wave of cultural progressivism to become Sweden’s third largest party. Today polls suggest they risk getting less than 4% of the vote, and thereby dropping out of parliament altogether.

The crisis of the Swedish Left has not been driven by a rise in support for the traditional centre-right block. The pro-market Moderate party – Sweden’s equivalent of America’s Republicans or Britain’s Tories – has recovered in the polls but only after abandoning its previous pro-immigration stance and moving toward the right on migration issues. Despite this, polls show it likely to receive only 21 to 24% of the vote, about what it received in the last elections in 2014. Overall, however, the centre-right so-called “Alliance” is weak and disunited, with the Centre Party moving so far to the left on migration that many speculate that they may join the Social Democratic block.

More on flyover country

Trump won because he cared – lessons from Levittown

By Henry Olsen

The cause of this shake-up is a new third block, driven by the anti-immigration and socially conservative Sweden Democrats, with historic roots tainted by xenophobia. Defying the historic stability of the Swedish party system, the Sweden Democrats have roughly doubled their vote share in each election since 2002, when they scored little more than 1%. The average of recent polls puts them around 19 to 23%. In fact, this may be an underestimate, since polls have in the past significantly undercounted their vote share.

The rise of populist and anti-establishment sentiment has invited comparisons with Donald Trump’s success – he won despite performing poorly in coastal cities by winning rural voters and blue-collar voters in areas hit by economic deterioration.

This line of reasoning is common in the United States. President Obama famously attempted to explain the cultural sentiments of working-class voters in old industrial towns decimated by job losses:

“They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Sweden has experienced similar economic trends, such as rising income inequality and deindustrialisation in former labour strongholds. Just as Trump voters were represented by the image of rusting GM plants, can Swedish populism be explained by bankrupt Saab-factories in flyover country?

The short answer is no. Attributing opposition to immigration to underlying bitterness with economics is as common among the Left in Sweden as in America, since they too would prefer not to confront the underlying tension in their movement. Swedish blue-collar workers are generally economically left wing, but right wing in their views on multiculturalism, whereas left wing party elites tend to lean left on both.

Swedish media has written stories on why the Swedish equivalent of “deplorables” or “white van man” have abandoned the Left. The tone of those stories – as with many in America and Britain – is revealingly reproachful. But nothing suggests that these voters are confused on the issues or scapegoat migrants for their own economic woes. The generous refugee migration championed by parties on the Left was not particularly popular in the first place, never really enjoying majority support outside culturally liberal urban areas. Today, opinions towards restricting migration and the generous support migrants receive has hardened among all segments of the Swedish population, and is particularly strong among blue-collar union members.

In-depth polling indicates that the majority who favour restrictive refugee migration policies are fairly well informed.[3. ‘Novus survey on the reason for the attitude to Asylum’, Novus, 23 May 2018] Most express sympathy for refugees, but offer specific arguments for restrictive policies. Many offer some version of the view that Sweden can help refugees in other ways. In polls, very few Swedes express fear that migrants take native jobs, but tend to point to crime, pressure on the welfare state and, most importantly, the lack of integration into Swedish society. These views are not unique to low-educated rural voters, although they may be more common among them, but rather are held by many people across social and educational groups.

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Immigration into Britain hasn't fallen much at all. It still endangers our security, culture and well-being

By Douglas Murray

Another problem with attempting to explain opposition to migration in terms of economic distress is geographic. The stronghold of the Sweden Democrats is in southern Sweden, centred on affluent Scania County. These provinces historically belonged to Denmark and appear to have retained some Danish conservative nationalism. The most plausible explanation for the strength of the Sweden Democrats in southern Sweden is more cultural than economic.

Initially, the Sweden Democrats had difficulty growing outside of this area, despite their attempts to appeal to blue-collar voters in the industrial belt in the centre of the country.[1. The metal sector of ore-rich Bergslagen still largely defines Swedish industry, now export steel, guns, cars, trucks and engineering products.] One reason is that these voters have a long tradition of social democratic values centred around solidarity, anti-fascism and tolerance. To understand this better, it helps to think of Swedish small-town mentality as closer to Minnesota-nice than tough, rowdy Appalachia.

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The centre-left will never defeat European populism if it fails to first understand it

By Henry Olsen

They therefore viewed Sweden Democrats as racist and socially taboo, or at the very least mean. It took Sweden Democrats a long time to break into these regions, where they still meet harsh resistance – although it became somewhat easier as the party gradually (and reluctantly) reformed, kicking out members making openly xenophobic statements. But the growth of the Sweden Democrats owes much to the fatal strategy pursued by the Social Democrats of silencing and antagonising their own core-supporters expressing the majority opinion on immigration.

At the core of it, shifting Swedish politics is simple, and has little to do with either deindustrialisation, racist deplorables or bitter clingers – however emotionally appealing it is for progressives to blame these factors. Sweden’s highly generous refugee policy never had majority support among voters, including Social Democratic voters. Blue-collar voters who dared to express even mild protest were bullied and branded as hateful or ignorant by their own party. The only outlet for that built-up resentment has been the Sweden Democrats, and while in the run up to the election the Social Democrats have moved sharply to the Right on migration and crime issues, the mistakes of the past years may prove difficult to repair for this once invincible party.

Levittown, Pennsylvania, could have been one of those towns. Once economically reliant on five large manufacturers, the 55,000-person community could have fallen and stayed down when those employers left or downsized. But unlike other towns, Levittown got up. Today its houses are well-kept and protect new young families, and its high streets, though different, still cater to people with jobs and a future. If you didn’t know its history, you would think it was the sort of place that healthy countries always have – one that gives ordinary people comfort, hope, and community and that allows those with greater talents or ambition a start to achieve something more – and you’d be right.

More on Levittown

Trump won because he cared – lessons from Levittown

By Henry Olsen

I went to Levittown recently to discover why its residents, White and working-class for the most part, abandoned their long-time voting patterns to embrace Donald Trump. But I also went to find out why Levittown avoided the fate of countless communities who suffered from America’s de-industrialisation. What I found was something I did not expect. Levittown survived and renewed itself because of the spirit of its people.

Of course, that wasn’t the only thing that contributed to the town’s rebirth – private and public investment also played a role. Alberto,[1. The names of all interviewees are pseudonyms, which I provided them by agreement to encourage candour in our discussion.] a sixty-ish college drop-out and community activist, for example, told me about how smart government had aided the town’s comeback. He told me about how the county and township governments cooperated to offer tax incentives for smaller companies that wanted to locate there. These entities also cooperated with state government to reposition a port once used by US Steel into a hub used by many businesses to ship or import what they build or use. Today, steel has been replaced by concrete and asphalt going out and sand coming in to be taken by truckers to the burgeoning oil and gas fracking fields in northern Pennsylvania’s Marcellus shale fields.

Levittown also bounced back because of shrewd decisions made by US Steel. “Once the old plant declined,” local politico Greg told me, “US Steel became a land developer because of all the property it owned.” With state and local help, the old steel plant became home to hundreds of small manufacturers, especially those involved in chemical production or refining. “Lots of tool and die shops here too,” Greg said as we drove past a couple of them. At its height the old US Steel plant employed 10,000 workers. Today, Greg says, the property provides over 7,000 jobs among over 100 different employers. These new jobs don’t pay as much as the old manufacturers, but they also don’t require a college education and, perhaps combined with a spouse’s earnings, provide a solid middle-class income.

Levittown’s location also helped. It sits only five minutes from two major thoroughfares, I-95 – America’s main north-south road on the East Coast – and Route 1, a significant local road. This doesn’t just attract small businesses: many independent truckers choose to live in Levittown, taking advantage of the affordable homes and easy access to the roads they earn their living on. Frequent rail service is available from local railroad stations for commuters heading into bigger cities. And as well as the local port, Philadelphia’s own port and international airport sit only 30 minutes away.

Local schools also played their part by emphasising vocational education for the town’s children. Greg drove me to Lower Bucks Technical High School. It’s a huge, modern building, a far cry from the smaller and older technical high school that services the much wealthier and larger suburban Washington suburb in which I live. Here kids who won’t go to college can be trained for jobs in a wide variety of industries from cosmetology, to auto body repair, to air conditioning unit servicing. Apprenticeships with area employers ensure graduates quickly get real jobs making real money. “21-year olds here can make $50,000 to $70,000 a year starting out in these jobs,” Greg said. He fretted that perhaps that was too much money for people so young. “I’m not sure I could have been trusted with that much pocket money when I was 21,” he confessed. But we both agree that’s a better problem for a community to have than the alternative.

More on flyover country...

Flyover France – the forgotten frontier

By Peter Franklin

None of these factors, however, completely explain why Levittown lives where other, similar places are dying away. I lived in the Philadelphia region for over a decade, and I can name many old, industrial communities that look just like the decaying towns of the hinterland. They had tax credit incentives; they sit near good roads and Philadelphia’s port and airport. One old town on the Delaware River, Chester, has received state and local funding for a host of redevelopment projects over the years, including a prison built there in the 1980s to help provide jobs for the local inhabitants. Yet Chester remains a troubled town with abandoned homes, boarded up buildings, and a population about half what it was at its height. The future once happened there, but today it is still happening in Levittown.

Which brings me back to the spirit of Levittowners. Everyone I met was bouyant and optimistic. There was certainly nostalgia for the old days, but no one complained they were down and out. They glowingly spoke of things much of America has lost: neighbours who knew their neighbours, kids playing together in the streets, block parties every summer. Here people still knew and trusted each other, there was no trace of giving up.

I ended my trip in the living room of Charlotte, a local nurse married to a fireman. We were joined by Brendan, a local policeman, and Judy, a mom who now works in an office. When I asked about how Levittown came back, they kept talking about the spirit of its people. Those men and women had come from far and wide to settle there 60-some years ago, leaving old coal towns and the big cities of New York and Philadelphia. In one sense they were immigrants, leaving an old life they knew for a new one they could only conceive of. And, like other immigrants, they had the grit and drive to make a go of it in their new hometown even when times turned tough. “Levittowners are survivors,” was how Charlotte summed it up, her friends nodding in agreement.

When she said that, I recalled a passage from Claire Berlinski’s biography of Margaret Thatcher, There Is No Alternative. Berlinski recounts her own visit to one of the coal fields shut down by Thatcher that had led to the momentous 1984-85 coal miner’s strike. She met two former coal miners on her journey. One had reinvented himself as an artist and was happy and making a healthy living. The other had never again found steady work, was dependent upon government benefit, and had suffered from multiple addictions and health problems. She wondered after her meeting why the mine closure could have such a different effect on two very similar people. Perhaps the answer was simply what Charlotte had recounted: one man had the resilience to survive, while the other didn’t.

As I left that night on the train, passing by the same decrepit communities and neighborhoods in the Philadelphia region I have been passing through for 30 years, I couldn’t help but wonder if maybe Charlotte’s statement was ultimately all that needed to be said. We’ve become so used in our modern age to look for material causes that we overlook the truth that lies right under our noses. Perhaps character really is king.

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Why Europe’s kids are revolting

By Henry Olsen

Don’t worry, all will become clear; but first we must start in America.

The red state blueprint

The original ‘Flyover country’ is, of course, American. It refers to that great swathe of the USA between the east and west coasts – or, to be more exact, between the ‘Bos-Wash’ corridor (Boston to Washington) and the big coastal cities of California.

As a phrase it’s surprisingly recent. The earliest references date back to 1980 – i.e. well after California’s establishment as a major economic and cultural centre and well into the era of commercial air travel.[1. Gabe Bullard, ‘The surprising origin of the phrase ‘flyover country’, National Geographic, 14 March 2016] Perhaps it had to wait for a crucial realignment in America’s political geography.

Before the Kennedy and Nixon eras the big divide on the electoral map[2. For the US electoral maps back to 1789 see   ‘Historical  Presidential elections’, 270towin.com,] was, broadly, between the Republican North and the Democrat South. The social upheavals of the 60s onward turned things upside down – North and South switching allegiances. By the dawn of the 21st century a new geography was fully established. The Democrats took the east coast down to Virginia plus the whole of the west coast; the Republicans holding the South and most of inland America – a.k.a. flyover country, ‘red state America’, ‘Jesusland’ etc.

More on flyover America...

Trump won because he cared – lessons from Levittown

By Henry Olsen

Donald Trump made the division even starker by breaking through into the Great Lakes region, previously a political extension of the east coast. His victory underlined the cultural estrangement of the two Americas. The flyover image of a jet-set bi-coastal elite literally looking down on the heartland has become more potent than ever.

With the rise of populism across the western world, analysts are busy mapping out flyover country in other countries. Which brings us back to France.

Six sides of France

As Nabila Ramdani explained in a piece for UnHerd in March, support for the hard right Front National follows a distinct geographical pattern.

France is roughly hexagon shaped – indeed the French refer to their homeland as L’Hexagone. Of the six sides, three are defined by coastlines: along the English Channel (La Manche); the Atlantic; and the Mediterranean. The other three sides are made up of land borders: with Spain in the south; with Italy, Switzerland and Germany in the east; and with some more of Germany, Luxembourg and Belgium in the north.

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What does Flyover France see in Le Front National?

By Nabila Ramdani

The Front has two strongholds: a narrow strip along the Med and a much broader band of territory delimited by the northern land border.[4. Gregor Aisch et al, ‘How France voted’, New York Times, 7 May 2017] It’s the second and larger of these two territories that is France’s flyover country.

British holiday makers may have driven through it, however. A road trip from Calais to the Rhine would put nearly 400 miles on the clock. Until you get the Vosges mountains, most of that is pretty flat – and leaves a lingering note of cabbage field.

The rust belt and the desert

As well as a whole lot of agriculture this is, or rather was, France’s industrial heartland – a place of coal fields, steel towns and manufacturing centres. This is the French rust belt, and an obvious conclusion is that the surge in support for the Front National is a reaction against industrial decline. Certainly, that’s part of the story, but not the whole of it.

As Henry Olsen explains elsewhere in this series, there’s a lot more to America’s flyover country than post-industrial cities like Pittsburgh and Detroit. Similarly, there’s a lot more to French flyover country than places like Lille and Metz. As with the American heartland, the overwhelming sense one has of north eastern France is of space and disconnection. Indeed, France east of Paris and up to the northern border represents one extreme of la diagonale du vide or the ‘empty diagonal’– an area of low population density that stretches from the north east of France to the south west.  This is the heart of the heart of western Europe, and yet so depopulated that the geographer Jean-Francois Gravier called it the ‘French desert’.[6. Jean-Francois Gravier, Paris and the French desert, Portulan, Paris, 1947]

Gravier opposed the concentration of political and economic power in Paris and the surrounding Ile-de-France region – the result of which, he said, was to suck people and investment out of the rest of the country.

There are many in Britain who feel the same about ‘L’Ile d’Angleterre’ i.e. London and its surrounding region. However, there is a subtle though important difference between the French and British situations – which is the latter doesn’t have a flyover country. The UK certainly has its share of economically and culturally disconnected communities, but, unlike America, they’re not hemmed-in between comparable centres of gravity on either side of the country.  There is no looked-down-upon heartland – just London versus everyone else.

The Blue Banana

France, however, does have a counterweight to Paris. It’s not any other French city (none of which are big enough), but a very different feature of human geography – the so-called ‘Blue Banana’.[7. Frank Jacobs,  ‘The Blue Banana – the true heart of Europe’, Big Think]

This refers to a boomerang-shaped concentration of people and economic activity that s tarts in the densely populated low countries, (think Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Brussels, Luxembourg); it then angles around the Franco-German border (taking in the Saarland, the Ruhr and southern Germany), before coming to a mountainous conclusion in Switzerland.[8. A longer version of the banana starts in London (or even Manchester) and ends somewhere around Milan]

This arc of prosperity is the continent’s economic backbone; the old frontier of the western Roman Empire; the fruitful interface between latin and teutonic Europe.

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By Henry Olsen

Here’s another way of looking at it. First, get yourself a dinner plate. Then put an apple at the centre of it and a banana along one edge. Congratulations, you’ve made yourself a map. The apple represents Paris; the banana is the Blue Banana; and the gap between the two is French flyover country.

The people who live there can look up and watch their rulers wing their way from Paris to Brussels, Frankfurt or Zurich, but on the ground, there’s nothing much going on. De-industrialised and or depopulated, investment and people are pulled inward to Paris or outward to Europe’s economic backbone. It is in this trough between two zones of vitality that the Front National prospers.

Consumed by history

I make it sound like a wasteland, but much it of it is lovely. I know one part of it, the Department of the Meuse, very well, because that is where my mother’s family is from. The Chef-lieu of the department, i.e. the county town, is Bar-le-Duc – the upper part of which is the Ville-Haute, a minor masterpiece of renaissance architecture. It’s a place consumed by its history – on occasion, literally so, when gardens subside into long-forgotten cellars, tunnels and other remnants of the town’s medieval incarnation.

In recent decades, a lot of money has been spent doing the town up – for instance, by sand-blasting centuries of soot from every listed building (which, in the Ville-Haute, is almost all of them). With doors and shutters smartly painted in a palette of pleasing colours, it’s an off-the-beaten-track gem.

And yet a spacious townhouse can be yours for the price of pokey flat in an English commuter town. Some properties stay on the market for years unable to find buyers. On the main square there’s a terrace of four-storey sandstone houses that stands permanently empty – windows broken, balconies rusting.

Where the fabric of the Ville-Haute has received the care it deserves much of it is financed by the state – either directly, through grants and regeneration schemes, or indirectly through the salaries and pensions of the teachers, doctors, lawyers and civil servants who live there.

Employment prospects in the town are bolstered by France’s generously-funded public sector, but, in the rest of the department, joblessness is well above the national average – if not quite as bad as the worst unemployment blackspots elsewhere in French flyover country.[8. Jeremy Smith, ‘Mapping France – the link between unemployment, GDP and voting Front National’, Prime, 10 June 2014] Across the whole Lorraine region, of which the Meuse is a part, GDP per head is among the lowest in France and on a par with the very poorest parts of the UK.[9. ‘2015 GDP per capita in 276 EU regions’, Eurostat, 30 March 2017] Over the last fifty years the population of the Meuse has dropped while that of France has increased – and is less that 60 per cent of what it was at its 19th century height.

Mort pour la France

Heading north out of Bar-le-Duc is the Voie Sacrée (the Sacred Way) – the road to Verdun. In the First World War it was this vital artery that kept the French frontline supplied with fresh troops; and brought back the fallen. It is around Verdun that one finds the most depopulated parts of the Department: several villages that were so damaged by shelling that they were never rebuilt. They still exist as ‘communes’ (the most local administrative tier), but with official populations of precisely zero. The French call them “mort pour la France” – they died for France. 

The ghost villages remind us that flyover France is contested territory. Millions have died on its soil to make it, and keep it, French. It seems to me that in this country, as in others, populism thrives on old battlegrounds and invasion routes, behind uncertain borders and shifting frontiers… Oh, and beyond the big cities, of course.

Writing in the New York Times, Philip Auerswald and Joon Yun quote a truly remarkable statistic, which is that across every continent bar Africa, the entirety of the world’s population increase is taking place within the 500 biggest cities. Outside of these cities the global population is now shrinking (again, Africa excepted).[10. Philip Auerswald and Joon Yun, ‘As population growth slows, populism surges’, New York Times, 22 May 2018]

It’s not that big cities are especially fertile places – quite the opposite, in fact.[11. Ali Modarres and Joel Kotkin, ‘The childless city, City Journal, Summer 2013] Rather they grow through absorption. If flyover populations see the metropolitan influence as dehumanising, it’s because it’s literally true.

Geography matters

For the liberal elites there’s an obvious answer to depopulation: immigration. They see how immigrants contribute to the constant churn and reinvention of metropolitan economies and assume that the same would be true elsewhere. But it should be clear by now that geography matters. The capacity of a global city to benefit from globalisation doesn’t extend out in all directions. As Paul Embery has pointed out, it doesn’t even extend across the whole of the metropolis – let alone the hinterlands beyond it.

After all, there’s a reason why the elites fly over flyover country.

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By Paul Embery

Levittown, a medium-sized suburban community north of Philadelphia, was created by developer William Levitt, starting in 1951, as one of America’s earliest affordable suburban communities. Over sixty years after its first house was sold, it remains a White, working-class town, but unlike better-known Trump-friendly, White blue-collar places like Pennsylvania’s Lackawanna County or Ohio’s Mahoning County it is still economically well-off. Yet despite this relative affluence, it behaved just like these other places, moving dramatically away from a traditional Democratic voting history to make Trump the most successful Republican nominee in these areas in the last thirty years.[2. Trump received 45.6 percent of the vote in Levittown the highest share received by a Republican nominee since at least 1988. Mitt Romney, the 2012 nominee, received less than 38% of the vote and lost by over 24% to President Obama. Trump, however, lost by less than 6%, an improvement of over 18% on the margin. Trump’s improvement over Romney on the margin was roughly 24% in Lackawanna County and about 25% in Mahoning County. See https://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/]

My visit unearthed just how complicated and varied Trump’s appeal to these voters is. Some people mentioned economic concerns as an explanation for Levittown’s shift, while others mentioned immigration and the cultural and economic issues it raises. But more than anything people mentioned a deep psychological resonance that made Levittowners feel Trump understood and cared about people like them. They may not like Trump’s tweets, but his brash manner and his open embrace of the value of work was for them a breath of fresh air in an otherwise long-stale political climate.

Understanding populism

Why Europe’s kids are revolting

By Henry Olsen

Although the town is doing well – the median household income is over $72,000 a year above the US median – economics still resonates because of Levittown’s past. Many of its original residents worked for one of five large manufacturers, the largest of which was United States Steel. As elsewhere in the Rust Belt, the factories gradually closed down or dramatically reduced in size. Jane,[3. All names of interviewees are pseudonyms, allowing their ability to speak openly about their community] a sixty-year Levittown resident, told me that the U.S. Steel plant went from a high of nearly 10,000 employees in the 1980s to a current total of about 150. While Levittowners eventually adapted and found new jobs, they paid less and had less generous benefits than the old jobs that had gone. “Bringing manufacturing back was a big thing for Levittowners,” says Jane. It’s a now familiar refrain: “US Steel workers used to make $25 an hour [close to $50 an hour in 2018 money] and get up to 13 weeks of vacation each year. The jobs they have now don’t pay anything near that well.”

For Bill, a retired carpenter, Trump’s economic message was personal. Telling me about how his union couldn’t get work when competing against contractors employing foreign labourers, who may be in the US illegally, it was not hard to see why Trump’s message resonated so deeply. “If Trump had been President,” he says, wistfully, “I probably wouldn’t have had to retire.” Some people even think Trump will get them their old jobs back, says Jane, not just bring back manufacturing more generally.

The sense that these jobs were unfairly lost also helps explain this Trump-friendly narrative. Jane emphasises that US Steel’s foreign competition was subsidised by foreign governments. “We sent our jobs overseas and then we sent money [via foreign aid] to countries that turned around to stab us in the back,” she said. Bill went further: “immigration is a big thing because it is a big handout. We can’t get big handouts like they can.” It was a odd comment, US laws do not offer legal immigrants anything different from what it offers citizens and immigrants not here legally are often not allowed to receive many government benefits, but whether Bill and Jane are correct is beside the point – what matters from a political standpoint is that voters like those in Levittown feel like their government has abandoned them.

This sense of abandonment – of being “left behind” – came up time and again in my discussions with local people. “They want officials to pay attention to them,” Anthony, a young 30-year old anti-Trump Republican, told me. “They aren’t seeing any direct benefit from any of the policies” politicians talk about. In fact, the disaffection goes deeper. Levittowners, one astute local politico named Greg told me, tend to believe that “if I work hard and play by the rules it will work out.” But, as Greg said as we drove round the old steelworks, “there’s a sense that not everyone is playing by the same rules. Many of these folk think ‘I’m working my ass off, and this just isn’t working for me’.” That’s a common view among the White blue-collar workers who turned to Trump.

Disaffection with the status quo – the ‘establishment’ – drove voters to Trump the outsider: “The institutions that used to help you are now working against you, many people think. The game is rigged and it’s time to change it.” Interestingly, as both Bill and Greg told me, that outsider could just as well have been socialist populist Bernie Sanders. I was told about exchanges on primary day where Democratic voters told their GOP counterparts that they were voting for Hillary Clinton’s challenger, Sanders, but they were voting for Trump in November if Clinton won.

These pro-Trump feelings rarely extended to specifics. Time and again I would ask people what exactly voters thought they would get from Trump, and time and again I found only a general sense that things would get better for people like them.

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The elites missed populism's rise (but shouldn't have done)

By Henry Olsen

But perhaps they were already getting the specific thing they craved more than anything else: the feeling that someone in power cared. Bill surprised me by repeatedly saying that “Trump is a very compassionate person.” He mentioned a story he had heard from Trump’s personal airplane pilot about how Trump once sent his jet to pick up a young person who couldn’t get to a hospital for medical treatment he needed, but it was clear that this idea of caring extended well beyond that one specific example. “Supporting Trump was the second-best decision I ever made”, he said – quite a statement from a self-described “life-long Democrat” who voted for Obama in 2008.

To really understand this devotion-inspiring appeal, however, you have to look beyond the economic. For many blue-collar Whites, Trump’s pull was personal.  Greg put it this way: “Trump is telling them ‘it’s OK to be you’. The rest of culture is telling them ‘it’s not OK to be you’.”

As Greg told me, whether the message is economic – “you have to go to college to succeed” – or cultural – “I like to listen to AC/DC; what’s wrong with that?” – Levittowners and people like them have felt the brunt of elite disdain. In voting for Trump, these blue-collar workers were rebelling against the idea that America is no longer for people like them.

“Levittowners just want a good Christmas for their kids and go to the Jersey Shore for a couple of weeks. They want some acknowledgement that is OK,” Anthony said. Trump gives them that, and they are willing to overlook nearly everything else in exchange.

It is against this backdrop that another aspect of Trump’s appeal starts to make sense. Anthony told me that one reason his neighbours liked Trump was that he “says what everyone thinks”. And that even extends to some of his cruder comments. “If I was down at the bar, that’s exactly what people would say,” the young Republican says of Trump’s “shithole countries” remark. For these Americans, Trump’s blunt, crude talk is just another way of showing he understands and values their way of life.

I left Levittown with more questions than answers. How would Levittowners feel if the US economy wasn’t roaring? Would they still overlook Trump’s shortcomings if he suffers a serious foreign policy reverse that threatens America, such as in the dispute with North Korea? Most importantly, I wondered how deep this psychic longing for recognition was.

Like almost everyone I know, I am a college graduate with a good job who enjoys all the benefits the wide global economy brings. My life experiences are largely those that are treated with respect by media and academic elites, and the unsubtle message Levittowners, and blue-collar workers like them across the country, get is that their children should be more like me than like themselves. Returning to Washington from Levittown I couldn’t help but reflect on what it felt like to be, if not on the bottom, then on the downslide. Rather than viewing global blue-collar discontent through an economic lens, we ought to be looking at populist-backing voters more as people like us, holding similarly cherished identities and hopes. And maybe if we did that, we might all be a little bit better off.

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