The Road to Inequality: How the Federal Highway Program Polarized America and Undermined Cities

A conversation with Clayton Nall about partisanship, running an effective referendum, and the limits of federal power.

We’ve prematurely polarized. We’ve driven ourselves there, literally.

Politics doesn’t stop at the highway’s edge. Clayton Nall, assistant professor of political science at UC Santa Barbara, argues that it’s the highway itself that was/is a massive contributing factor to how Americans have sorted themselves into political regimes—whether those are left/right, liberal/conservative, left/far left.

For his empirical research, Professor Nall has studied the divide across actionable politics and meaningful voting records of Democrats and Republicans, the two dominant political parties that seem to define Americans more than any other factor.

He argues in his book, The Road to Inequality: How the Federal Highway Program Polarized American and Undermined Cities, that there’s a strong correlation between where and how we built our public roads contributed to the ongoing polarization of American politics—and how these attitudes continue to divide us. So much for the roads being the great conne…