[disneygibson]

You can think of it as a hollowing out of the middle. As people have become more individualistic, they’ve lost interest in the “middle range” of power: neighborhood, town, city, state. This power structure has collapsed almost entirely, flushing all of it to the top, centralized federal level. This is also why an urbanite in Brooklyn is more similar to one in San Francisco than to those a hundred miles north in upstate New York. Local identities have been replaced entirely by national and increasingly international ones.

[mbg721]

I wouldn't chalk that up to individualism as much as to the idea that the Internet has caused people increasingly to identify with groups that don't correspond to physical proximity.

[disneygibson]

There is much more homogenization today which goes far beyond your point.