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/…