"Brexit and the rise of the city-state"

"City elites, with ties to big corporations and international finance, have been consistent winners in an age of porous borders. They don’t wake up each morning with a view of an abandoned steel factory or a mothballed manufacturing plant, and so struggle to understand why anyone would vote against an EU fast track lane for their weekend trip to St Tropez, or the ability to freely shuffle professionals from one corner office to another...

As cities grow, they obey certain rules. Urban, social and economic phenomena become more intensive with city size. And most importantly, as West and his colleague Luis Bettencourt have argued, cities are social reactors. The more people who live in one place, the easier it is to facilitate human interactions, the exchange of ideas and creative collaborations.

The trend to density is why cities, rather than countries, are becoming natural attachment points to the global network. It is also why innovation and investment decisions are being increasingly influenced by the interaction between cities and global companies, rather than the plodding regulation between countries and regional alliances."

https://medium.com/field-notes-from-the-future/brexit-and-the-rise-of-the-city-state-d501a0354773?source=linkShare-7f7e96203de2-1467348860

So, the writing gets a little unrealistically dystopic after this, but it is an interesting and useful perspective: city vs. rural driving political divides. It's also something that happens constantly all over history, so I don't think it's likely to produce some horrifying future.