The ongoing turmoil in U.S. politics is part of a larger political crisis that is shattering old alignments of left and right in North America and Western Europe. On both sides of the Atlantic, embattled establishments are besieged by populist insurgents. The rebellion takes different forms in different countries—the election of Donald Trump in the U.S., Brexit in the U.K., the revolt of the yellow vests in France. But the underlying dynamic is the same: the revolt of alienated, mostly but not exclusively native and white working-class voters against post-national metropolitan elites.

This is the new class war. Forget the familiar three-way social diagram, with a big middle class bracketed on either end by a small upper class and small lower or impoverished class. The deepest cleavage in Western democracies yawns between college-educated managers and professionals—a third of the population, at most—and the majority who lack college educations. The new class divide is manifested in striking cleavages along the lines of geography, family relationships and politics.

The major geographic divide in Western democracies is not between urban and rural areas but between expensive hubs or urban cores where professionals and immigrant service workers cluster, on the one hand, and exurbs and satellite towns on the peripheries of metro areas, where most working class people find jobs and low-cost housing.

Credentialed professionals are the most likely to move long distances to pursue careers in hub cities that specialize in particular sectors—Silicon Valley in tech, New York and London in finance, Los Angeles in entertainment. But it is a snobbish mistake to assume that people in “left behind” regions should simply “move to opportunity.” Why should members of the working class move? The jobs that are being created in the greatest numbers in the U.S., including home health aide, retail clerk and restaurant worker, do not require college degrees and can be done almost everywhere.