One of the most salient features of recent electoral politics is the mutual incomprehension between urban progressives and rural dwellers. We saw this with the US presidential election of 2016—which gave us the term “deplorables”—as well as with the Brexit vote of the same year, and again with the US election of 2020. Examples of this widening urban-rural divide can also easily be found in other countries. If one restricts oneself to studying politics over the last few decades, then this seems like a new trend; in truth what we are seeing may be the return of a phenomenon nearly two centuries old.