re: North/south divide in England vs America: English friend says England gap is wider

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If I recall correctly, this is because of the absolutely massive unemployment and general disastrous economy in the North during that time, right?

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Indeed. It's weird because most of my experience in this area comes from the perspective of the north but I'm more naturally inclined toward the culture/attitudes of the south.

But Thatcher for better or worse viewed English industry in the north as a lost cause and dying and not worth propping up if it wasn't sustainable.

The political and economic attitudes of people in Northern England are interesting and not terribly comparable to anything here IMO. It's like if you took miners and out of work factory guys from our mostly-rural parts and packed them into urbanized areas and gave them the political leanings of Che shirt-wearing college kids.

Not sure they'll ever top the Brit-Irish animosity.

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A lot of this is because a lot of European countries are made up what were once very distinct independent areas that were pieced together to form a country.

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For sure, and Italy is the poster child for this. Northern Italy and southern Italy were two extremely different entities with different histories and accents and everything else (and even ethnicities) for about a thousand years until a modern independence movement smashed them together about six generations ago. The socioeconomic and cultural gap there is about as wide as it gets in the Western world.

In both France and Spain large sections of the country didn't even speak the same language until the 20th century, and some sections still have a lot of non-French speakers - in France Breton, Occitan, Alsatian, and Basque are still around, as an example.

The independence movements in northern Spain are very real and very legitimate. That's not some random state legislator trying to get a movement off the ground.

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American isn’t so much a North/South divide anymore.

It is an Urban/Rural divide.

I think the urban/rural divide is much more prevalent than the old Mason/Dixon divide, but it’s still there.

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t has never been anything other than an urban/rural divide. It was never a North/South divide pre 1860 or post 1890 or so other than in the media.

The South simply didn't have that many large urban areas from Reconstruction until the first half of the 20th century. As soon as the South's urban areas caught back up to the Northern urban areas, the same exact political situation developed as exists now.
Th

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^^^This
I lived in rural Nevada and New York and Idaho and other than the lack of southern accent most of these folks are the same as the rural south with regards to culture

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If you’re from the south and spend any amount of time outside of the south, you’ll quickly realize that even non-southerners in flyover country look down on the south and have a natural distrust of southerners as well as assume anyone with a southern accent is stupid. Southerners really are viewed by a substantial percentage pf the population in America as almost sub-human, sorta second-class citizens.

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The Northeast has a very biased view of the South. The guy that installed our new dishwasher the other day tried to tell us that Durham, NC is a racist place. The wife and I pretty much told him "uh, no, we get more racist crap up here than we ever did in Carolina."

I've been watching a bunch of UK crime thrillers on Netflix, and it has made me want to visit that part of the world very badly. Beautiful countryside in the UK.

I heard the most ridiculous stereotypes of alleged Southern racism from a former roommate from Cleveland. Meanwhile, he would drop n-bomb after n-bomb behind closed doors.

I used to purposely take him to restaurants in Old South Baton Rouge and Plank Road just to watch how nervous he’d get around black folks. That yank hailed from some lily white ritzy segregated suburb, but wanted to lecture us dumb southerners on racism. Dude could barely talk to black people he was so scared of them.