Americans yearn for normalcy after divisive 2020 elecions

WASHINGTON -- A drive from New York City, down to Washington DC and through America's rural landscape reveals a cavernous gap in living standards.

New York draws an economic class that is exponentially better off than many rural Americans, and the suburbs of Washington D.C. over the past few years have seen an explosion of newly constructed homes whose starting price sits at around $800,000.

That's a sharp contrast with rural areas nationwide, where jobs are scarce, and where once idyllic small towns now look like rural ghettos.

DEEP-SEATED POLARIZATIONS

The stark political divisions, compounded by a raging COVID-19 pandemic during the 2020 elections, between urban Americans -- many of them liberal -- and rural Americans -- many of them conservative, were not there overnight, but run deep for years, even decades.

"The rising polarization has unfolded slowly over the last 40 years," Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Darrell West told Xinhua.

In different ways, each president going back to Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton increased partisan antipathy and made it more difficult to work across party lines, said West, "Trump elevated polarization to new heights, but the trend developed long before him."

"The loss of jobs and the challenges of providing sufficient economic opportunities to many Americans is a major problem in our current political divisions," West said. "People feel like they are not doing well and jobs are going abroad and this makes them angry and feel like the system is rigged against them."