But, underlying all that is a basic disconnect between these two groups. It was this group of Northern, Republican, Industrial, elitists versus the Southern, Democrat, Agrarian, populists. That was the beginning of the shift from an agrarian economy to an industrial economy.
The populists lost and the geography shifted/expanded and conflicts came back with the rise of the great prairie populist democrat Williams Jennings Brian who not only exemplified his economic populism but also later his cultural populism when he prosecuted the Scopes monkey trial.
And eventually, after the Wall street crash and depression, the populists won with Roosevelt and his New Deal.
Not long after that the elitists split with the cultural elitists taking over the dem party while the economic populists stayed in the GOP. Then, using Nixons southern strategy, the GOP brought the cultural populists out of the dem party into the GOP.
Today, those two coalitions of (1)economic elitists & cultural populists in the GOP and (2) cultural elitists and economic populists in the dem party are both wearing thin.
Populists waves come with the changes.
So in the 19th/20th century these changes accompanied the integrating of the national economy and shifting from agrarian to industrial plus advances in communication and transportation.
In the 20th/21st century the changes come with integrating the world economy and shifting from industrial to information technology plus advances in communication and transportation systems.
Populists? The planters who led Southern politics were anything but.
People love to portray history as a battle between rich, arrogant Easterners or Northerners and poor, downtrodden Southerners, as in the 1890s or the 1930s, but that wasn't always the case.
The antebellum South was a rich place and its leaders were often very rich men. Some of them ferociously snubbed the "rude mechanics" of the North (and their own backwoods).
Maybe it's not exactly the case now either. For all the snobbery and condescension you find in Northerners directed at the South, there's a distinct current of the same elitism going in the other direction.