Although true to a large extent, I think the malady is more specific than this.
In his "Cross of Gold" speech (at the National Democrat Convention in 1896), William Jennings Bryan said:
... the great cities rest upon our broad and fertile prairies. Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.
In most rural areas of the coasts (excluding the big cities) you find the outnumbered and beleaguered conservatives. It is the paternalistic, elitist, libertine philosphies of the large cities which grow Liberals like toxic mold in a petri dish.
Peggy Noonan lives in New York. she would encounter the same Liberal bigotry in Chicago.
Gritty, I agree with you. I think the rural/urban divide is the more significant.