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The great divide--actually, the "chasm"--which exists between most Americans in the vast geographic area between the fringe left and right coast city populations can be seen by viewing the voting map of Hillary voters in 2016!

The populations of that vast area continue to value the enduring ideas which motivated the Founders and Framers of America's Constitution over 200 years ago to seek, above all, FREEDOM (liberty) for individuals.

Even today, words matter, and the words of the Declaration of Independence mean something to those who value that document's claims.

On the other hand, Progressive actions to devalue those documents and words are rejected, as evidenced by that voting map.

In an effort to explain what may highlight the "chasm," that great author of The Conservative Mind," Russell Kirk, is quoted below:

". . . the intelligent conservative endeavors to reconcile the claims of Permanence and the claims of Progression. He thinks that the liberal and the radical, blind to the just claims of Permanence, would endanger the heritage bequeathed to us, in an endeavor to hurry us into some dubious Terrestrial Paradise. The conservative, in short, favors reasoned and temperate progress; he is opposed to the cult of Progress, whose votaries believe that everything new necessarily is superior to everything old.
"Change is essential to the body social, the conservative reasons, just as it is essential to the human body. A body that has ceased to renew itself has begun to die. But if that body is to be vigorous, the change must occur in a regular manner, harmonizing with the form and nature of that body; otherwise change produces a monstrous growth, a cancer, which devours its host. The conservative takes care that nothing in a society should ever be wholly old, and that nothing should ever be wholly new. This is the means of the conservation of a nation, quite as it is the means of conservation of a living organism. Just how much change a society requires, and what sort of change, depend upon the circumstances of an age and a nation.
". . . The great line of demarcation in modern politics, Eric Voegelin used to point out, is not a division between liberals on one side and totalitarians on the other. No, on one side of that line are all those men and women who fancy that the temporal order is the only order, and that material needs are their only needs, and that they may do as they like with the human patrimony. On the other side of that line are all those people who recognize an enduring moral order in the universe, a constant human nature, and high duties toward the order spiritual and the order temporal."
http://kirkcenter.org/conservatism/ten-conservative-principles/