I read this NYTimes ‘Opinionator’ from Thomas Edsall in the wee hours, but it seemed like a lot to drop on people at breakfast:
[All emphases mine.] I encourage you to read the whole thing, because it seemed to me Edsall was perhaps asking the wrong question: It’s not that the ‘new’ Democractic coalition is so fragile, but that the Republicans’ increasingly sophisticated gerrymandering looks to trap us all in a country where a minority rump of Republican ‘traditionalists’ use their control over local government to prevent Democratic presidents from accomplishing what they were elected to do. The solution, under those circumstances, would be for Democrats to spend a lot more time/energy/money on finding and promoting candidates for local offices, even though that strategy takes many years to implement.How Fragile Is the New Democratic Coalition?
… In 1988, the Democratic presidential nominee, Michael Dukakis, carried 26 percent of the nation’s counties, 819 of 3144, on his way to losing the Electoral College 426-111 and the popular vote by seven percentage points. In 2012, President Obama won fewer counties, 690, but he won the popular vote by four points and the Electoral College in a landslide, 332-206.The forces behind this shift illuminate the internal realignments taking place within the two major political parties. But first let’s look at how a candidate could carry 129 fewer counties but come out way ahead on Election Day.
In the simplest terms, Democrats started to win populous suburban counties in big states with lots of Electoral College votes beginning with Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign in 1992, at the same time that they began to lose sparsely populated rural counties, many of which lie in small states with very few Electoral College votes…
“The Big Sort” focuses on one of the key factors behind these geographic trends: people are increasingly choosing to move into neighborhoods and communities of like-minded people who share their political views, creating what Bishop and Cushing call “way-of-life segregation.”
Americans, in their view,
have been sorting themselves over the past three decades into homogeneous communities — not at the regional level, or the red-state/blue-state level, but at the micro level of city and neighborhood.
Other analysts, including Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory, have produced evidence of an additional factor encouraging increased local homogeneity: individual voters are becoming more consistently liberal or conservative in their views on a range of issues from abortion to safety net spending to gun rights.
Over the past three-and-a-half decades these mutually reinforcing trends have resulted in a surge in “landslide” counties, meaning counties in which one of the candidates won by 20 points or more, a trend documented by Bishop and Cushing. At the time of the 1976 presidential election, 26.8 percent of Americans lived in landslide counties; by 2000, that had grown to 45.3 percent. By 2012, the percentage of people living in landslide counties shot up further still to 52 percent. That’s double what it was in 1976.
Such fundamental shifts in voting don’t occur in a vacuum…
Democratic strength is now concentrated in fewer but more heavily populated areas. Polarization has intensified as voters in over half the nation’s counties cast landslide margins for one presidential candidate or the other. These tendencies are intensifying and have spilled over to Congressional elections, leading to legislative paralysis. Self-perpetuating clusters of the like-minded lead voters and their representatives away from the center.
It isn’t just that it’s getting harder to compromise — or that a lack of compromise is what many voters want — but that the topics that divide us are among the most difficult on which to achieve consensus: matters of personal intimacy – not only sex, love and children, but also freedom and individual autonomy. This has not always been the stuff of politics; it is now…
But maybe I’m too optimistic. Billmon, this morning:
Rootless cosmopolitans vs. the flyover people: My take http://t.co/v9F3GA2JnQ (Warning: It's long. And my maps have gone bye bye.)
— billmon (@billmon1) September 4, 2013
… The problem is not so much that there are two Americas, but that each of them — particularly “red” America — believes they constitute the only true America. Thus all the talk on both sides about “taking back the country.” The only way to reach a property settlement in a divorce like that would be to wade though an ocean of blood.
Talk of disunion and civil war may seem like hyperbole. I’m sure it would certainly seem so to the vast majority of Americans who don’t think much about politics or culture and just want to get on with their lives. I’m sure most Spaniards felt the same way in the summer of 1936, just as most Americans did in the winter of 1860.
But the historical truth is that civil wars aren’t made by vast majorities, but by enraged and fearful minorities. Looking at America’s traditionalists and the modernists today, I see plenty of rage and fear, most, though hardly all, of it eminating from the authoritarian right. For now, these primal passions are still being contained within the boundaries of the conventional political process. But that process — essentially a system for brokering the demands of competing interest groups — isn’t designed to handle the stresses of a full-blown culture war.
Compared to most countries, America has been very lucky so far — those kind of passions have only erupted in massive bloodshed once (well, twice if you count the original revolution.) By definition, however, something that has already happened is no longer impossible. It’s easy for newspaper columnists to fantasize about disunited states, but only madmen would actually try to make them so. Unfortunately, the madmen are out there. It’s up to the rest of us to keep them under control.
Doug Milhous J
I like to call them the “wee smalls” a la Cliff Claven (paraphrasing Frank of course).
schrodinger's cat
You need young people to fight wars, not geriatric Fox News watchers.
c u n d gulag
In the Civil War, the North, “The Union,” decisively won after 4 years of horror.
Now, in our current “Cold Civil War,” the Confederacy has spread into states like WI, and, partially, in OH, and PA, and victory for representative democracy is far from assured!.
cokane
His analysis ignores that the US (and the world for that matter) has become more urban since 1988. Talking about what percentage of counties a candidate won is pretty useless electoral analysis. How are you going to throw those stats out without also adding the context of how the population has shifted, not just in sorting, but in terms of concentrating, in certain areas.
It’d be as dumb as thinking that because Romney won more states than Obama, it’s amazing that Obama somehow won more votes.
srv
I dream of waking up one day and Obama has renamed himself Barack Tecumseh Christ and announce he will be running in 2016.
ranchandsyrup
See, also: The Citadel (Idaho)
Linkmeister
People generally don’t ask what their prospective neighbors’ politics are before moving into one neighborhood or another, though.
Fluke bucket
Sometimes it does look like the south will rise again without firing a shot.
PeakVT
We may be sorting, or polarizing, or becoming more consistently ideological, or what have you, but the root problem is still that one party (no prize for guessing which!) has rejected reality. Edsall and others need to say that plainly, not dance about it with talk about sociological and demographic trends.
Yatsuno
@schrodinger’s cat: You discount the olds on their Medicare-provided scooters at your own peril. And there are still enough yootz brainwashed in the Southern churches to be persuaded to fight what could be sold as a Holy War for the soul of Real Merika. There could indeed be a second Civil War, but if the nigra winning a second time isn’t gonna push them over only total political wilderness will. Methinks even that ain’t enough.
(Damn phone keyboard.)
Villago Delenda Est
@PeakVT:
They can’t say that plainly. It’s right there in the Villager Members’ Manual: “Both side do it. Always. No exceptions.”
ranchandsyrup
I’ll put this here to as it is sorta germane: Someone developed ghettotracker.com to purportedly let travelers know which parts of town to avoid. The reaction was swift and negative so he tried to rebrand as “The Good Part of Town” but that didn’t work and he gave up in a huff. http://gawker.com/creator-of-ghettotracker-com-surprised-by-all-the-nega-1249859432
Baud
The country isn’t becoming polarized so much as our side is slowly winning.
Chris
I don’t think he’s wrong, except for this,
Um, no. Blue America doesn’t claim that it’s the “only true America.” Blue America doesn’t insist that Red America live by its values – we’d be happy to let them live by their own ways, quaint and frankly fucked up as they may be, so long as they recognize that other people can live in other ways if they want. We’re not trying to deny them the right to vote the way as they’re doing to us, we’re not trying to deny government services for rural or heavily red states areas (though God knows they’re crying out for karmic irony) the way they do for any liberal demographic that relies heavily on government money. And we don’t even recognize the concept of an “only true America.” While Palin was out there talking about “real America,” Obama was out there talking about “beyond red states and blue states.”
He’s right to say that this “one true America” bullshit is the reason the country’s becoming ungovernable – we, the people who are not Tea Party Movement Conservatives, cannot sit down with them and have a conversation about what we all want for America, when the reason for all this polarization is they don’t even consider us part of America in the first place and therefore don’t believe we have any right to be having that conversation with them at all. But that’s a one way street that begins and ends on the red side. It’s not even “particularly Red America.” One side does it, the other doesn’t. Period.
Villago Delenda Est
If we undergo multiple crop failure years, as Syria had prior to it’s current civil war, then things will change, and, as in Syria, the actual problem will be subsumed under ideological and religious differences.
Then, the Fit will hit the Shan, with a vengeance.
aimai
I guess I think that “the air of cities makes men free” and always has–people move into urban areas and become more liberal, or realize the utility of city government (even if they believe that some other city, somewhere else, is soddom and gomorrah. The Mormons of Salt Lake City are not anti-big government, that’s for sure. They just have other paths to control the behavior of their voters/citizens than mere government.
Of course there’s some kind of sort going on–people have always moved for opportunity and stayed where they were to be near family but the basic fact of the matter is that rural areas and counties are depopulating because of a loss of economic viability. Those people are dying off or moving and even if the kids of those people are still more conservative than the majority of the cityfolk with whom they live their kids probably won’t be.
raven
Newt against Richardson. . . DOH!
piratedan
@Chris: well said Chris…. hard to have a conversation when someone has blinders and headphones on and doesn’t even think you should be at the table. Any concession on their part is a tragedy and any on yours is obviously a weakness to be exploited. Fucking bunch of zero sum numbnuts.
raven
Corgi’s on their back.
Anonymous37
Jesus, billmon, just start blogging again. We want you to, and we know that you want to, too.
Chris
@Yatsuno:
My take on it for ages has been that Bismark’s system works – as long as there’s a working safety net, the average voter will have too much at stake in society to want to risk revolution/civil war. If wingnuts manage to finally get their wish (no more Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid et all, in any form), then all bets are off. Until then, Second American Civil War = improbable at best.
Zifnab
Spaniards had a monarchy until 1931, and Franco’s goal was to abolish the Republic and reestablish that monarchy with himself as the King. That was bound to ruffle a whole lot of feathers.
Likewise, the winter of 1860 gave us the election of Abraham Lincoln, who heralded the nadir of the abolitionist movement in the United States up until that point. Quite a few southern gentlemen were already juiced up from the Mexican-American War and the Texas Revolution.
But go check where all the young people are headed. I’m sorry, you’re not going to see a revolution launched by 50-something tax revolters. The American youth isn’t backing the GOP, even when it only expresses lackluster support for the Democrats. And you’re going to have one hell of a time putting together an army of scrapy rebel fighters when you are drawing on the Tea Party for recruits.
I’m sorry, but I’m just not seeing the Glorious Second Confederacy rising again.
BGinCHI
The South will writhe again.
MattF
I think all the maps and charts miss the point. The problem is the South. I’m not going to try to summarize the historic and cultural factors that have gotten us to this point. I’ll just note that pretty much every tea-party trope is a version of some Southern political mythology.
What has happened in the last decade, IMO, is that the South has shrunk politically, and the West has joined the East as a Dem stronghold.
geg6
@Chris:
THIS.
And when a writer makes the “both sides do it” claim, I can’t and won’t take a word they write seriously.
Eric U.
I think that when the republican party finally blows a gasket and dies a well-deserved death, it will also take down the Democratic Party. I have trouble imagining anything other than the wishy-washy party coming out in charge. Hope to be proven wrong.
FlipYrWhig
@Eric U.: I think that’s pretty likely. In essence we need more liberals, and until there are more liberals, or until we MAKE more liberals, the center of power will be at least as wishy-washy as it is now. I’ll be surprised if we see a president _more_ liberal than Obama anytime soon.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Eric U.: I
Going by California the most likely result is a 30% dead ender Republican party watching each other for the slightest variation from conservative purity and a dominant, sort of generic Democratic party.
Omnes Omnibus
@FlipYrWhig: If you look at where policy debate has actually taken place of the past ten yeats or so, it is within the Democratic Party. Take healthcare: the republicans were AWOL. Within the Democratic Party there was a fight over a quick path to single payer or a slow road. The slow road won because the quick path people had ally with the slow path people in order for anything at all to happen. Remove the GOP from the stage and you have a real debate between two valid options.
? Martin
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: I think that’s a fair assessment.
In related news, Barbara Coe died – the architect of the GOP self-immolation. Remember kids, never put the crazy people in charge of the boat.
Roger Moore
@cokane:
Especially when you consider the range of county sizes. If my county got fed up and decided to become its own state the way some of those rural counties are threatening to do, we’d be the 10th most populous state and have about 13 electoral votes. I would have to double check, but I think our population is roughly equivalent to the combined population of the bottom 1/3 of counties in the country by population. It’s one of these 80:20 rules: 80% of the counties have 20% of the population and 20% of the counties have 80% of the population.
Roger Moore
@Linkmeister:
They usually don’t have to. People generally know something about the neighborhoods they’re looking at moving to, including what kind of people live there. Moving into a neighborhood with other people who are like you in terms of their race, ethnicity, class, education, etc. will generally wind up with neighbors who are politically similar to you.
piratedan
@Roger Moore: schools are a big tell…. well funded public ones, chances are good it’s a fairly liberal constituency that equates taxes with local investment in kids and services.
? Martin
@Roger Moore: And Texas has nearly 10% of the counties in the US. The smallest of which has a population of 60.
Obama won LA county (9 million) but lost Loving Texas (60), so it’s obviously a coin flip whether he deserves to even be president.
Mike G
@? Martin:
You beat me to it.
After the 2000 election fustercluck a wingnut acquaintance sent me a map of red versus blue counties, saying the larger area of reds proved Bush deserved to win. I guess because square miles of dirt have voting rights in wingnut bubble world.
khead
The most liked reader comment on the NYT story says it the best:
Insane vs. Not Insane
rikyrah
@Chris:
You are on point
Birthmarker
I attribute a lot of Republican success to the effectiveness of their propaganda machine.
jake the snake
@Mike G:
Property rights! Big landowners should have more power than propertyless urbanites.
Walker
@jake the snake:
I actually had a Texan once say to me that we should reinstate property ownership requirements for voting.
Chris
@Walker:
Well, that’s pretty much what they mean when they say “47% of the public doesn’t pay taxes. You shouldn’t vote unless you pay taxes.”
Joel
@Chris: I mostly agree, but there are some issues: greenhouse gas emissions, for example, that require that everyone abide to a new living standard. Changes in energy costs, employment prospects, etc. That puts an imposition on everyone, but one that I feel is completely necessary.
khead
@Walker:
Once? I get that quite a bit.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN)
@cokane:
It depends upon what sort of analysis you’re doing. In this case, it’s a comparison of how many counties were by Democratic in elections 24 years apart. He isn’t saying that looking at the number of counties won in a single election tells us anything, which would be useless. But it is important that things have changed in a way that Obama won even though he took fewer counties than Dukakis did.
Part of it is that Democrats have become very much a urban party and given up most of the rural support they once had. A part of it is that the U.S. population is becoming more heavily concentrated than it used to be. And a part of it is that more counties are being won by large margins than used to be true. (That latter might not seem to work out mathematically, but it does given the first two parts.)
Those are all important trends. And while looking at the number of counties won doesn’t say anything definitive about them it does provide some helpful clues. So, no, it’s not useless.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN)
No. You missed the point of the article. There is a lot less attributable to gerrymandering than a many people think. That’s because the population has worked to gerrymander itself before anyone starts drawing legislative districts. County boundaries do not change every ten years, but they have been becoming much more polarized.
Gus diZerega
I think we need to think about divorce, or at least making it a legitimate option. The recent example of the Czechs and Slovaks separating demonstrates it need not be violent. Perhaps the safest method, and one entirely in keeping with the Declaration of Independence, is to enable each state to vote on whether to stay or leave with each census. If a theshhold is passed, say 35 – 40% – a state wide referendum is held and if they want to go, they go.
It is called government by consent of the governed. The Constitution is NOT a majority rule document. Its ideal is practical consensus. It takes three ‘majorities’ to do anything- House, senate, and President. He can be overridden by two super majorities, each elected in different ways. When adequate consensus does not exist, the system will not work. Divorce seems preferable to civil war or tyranny, and if it is possible it might even cool some jets.
cokane
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN): Be sure to respond to my full post next time instead of snipping one sentence and then attacking it without addressing the obvious other sentences that qualified my statements. Talking about county wins 30 years apart is useless if you do not also address the fact that the population is more concentrated, i.e. more urbanized than it was 30 years ago. It’d be some simple math to compute, just take some arbitrary number such as the 100 most populous counties in 1988, tell us what percent of the population lived in those counties, then do the same for 2012. Failing to add this context does indeed make his analysis useless, because without that context, we can’t tell how significant any of his other arguments really are.
Chris
@Gus diZerega:
Well, it would be harder nowadays if only because there isn’t an equivalent of the Mason-Dixon line and a neat divide between “North” and “South” to separate two self-contained cultures. It wasn’t even quite that simple back then… but it’s more complicated now. (Among other things, the “demographic timer” we keep talking about is active everywhere in the country, not just on the coasts but even in red states like Texas and Georgia).
To make matters worse, you’re assuming that Red America (“the South”) – which is where all our marital problems are coming from – would even consider a divorce in the first place. Their entire way of life depends on the federal government heavily subsidizing them by redistributing money from Blue America, has ever since the 1930s. And enough of them realize it on some level (it’s why when Colorado or Texas drastically cut their fire departments, the very next major fire you hear them pining for DC to come save them) that I don’t see them being willing to give it up at all.
Toss in the fact that part of the “Real America” arrogance means that they think the entire country is their birthright, or should be (which is part of the reason they feel entitled to that continuous flow of money from Washington). I don’t see them being willing to “give up” parts of America to people they see as traitors and foreigners.
ETA: and to be fair, I for one am not all that inclined to let them go either. Not inclined to leave behind all the people in the red states who aren’t part of the Republican majority and currently look to the federal government for protection… and really not inclined to create a hostile, unstable, militaristic nation right on our border, just as I wouldn’t have been in 1861. Letting them secede wouldn’t even be close to having seen the end of them.
billB
Rather than give States the option of voting to leave the Union, we should require that every State affirm by popular vote, that they want to stay in the Union. Say every ten years. I for one, will not miss Ga/Ala/Miss./SC. !
PLUS with ALA gone my Oregon Ducks can rule College Football for decades !!!
CTVoter
@Chris: Pretty much.
CTVoter
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN): A part of it is that the U.S. population is becoming more heavily concentrated than it used to be.
What does this mean? A part of the US population is more concentrated that it used to be?
Which part?
Gus diZerega
@Chris: The problem here is that our constitution works on consensus. Either the blue parts of the country dominate all three branches of government, or it is ungovernable. (I’d prefer the blues dominated of course.) But at the moment I do not know if we have the time to wait till that happens. Of course a helpless national government could lead to reinvigorating the states and as Europe shows, progressive small countries can do very well. But there are a lot of hiccups on that route as well. The bottom line is that free societies depend on the opposition being a loyal opposition and those in power abiding by rules giving those out of power a fair chance to win. The Republicans are neither.
Gus diZerega
@billB: I could go for that. It’s a peaceful way to incorporate Jefferson’s desire to keep consent active with each generation.
dww44
@Birthmarker: And that was the major point of the currently 2nd most liked comment at the Edsall NY Times piece. BTW,I’m mostly undecided about how I feel about him. IMO, he’s right of center in most of his opinion pieces.
dww44
@Gus diZerega: Well, I’m very much a blue person in one of those states you want to be divorced from and I say No way. I’m an American, by God, and I aim to stay that way.
Look, it’s like with this Syria debate, I’ve got a very conservative cousin, who lives in Atlanta, actually talking to me with empathy, because she’s opposed to military action. and she’s discovered that the issue is “not political”. I keep wondering where she was in 2003, along with all the others around me, when I was the only one opposed to the Iraq War. All it will take for the currently disenchanted red staters to come back into the fold is for the country, God Forbid, to elect a Republican President.
With a Democratic Black man as President, the secessionist and nullification urges are very strong. Big spread in my paper today with a picture of Sen. Isakson and how conservative GOP voters in the state are pressuring him to defund Obamacare. There is absolutely nothing sane about their stand on Obamacare. It is truly the sane vs. the Insane.
I’ m not sure I’ve a vision for the near term future, except to work with the nascent beginnings of a new somewhat unified and focused State Democratic Party and I’ve never been a “party” person before. In this respect I’m an optimist like Anne Laurie
jheartney
One other problem with secession scenarios is the national debt. If you just allow states to leave the union, they get to welsh on their share of the debt (much of which is the legacy of red state presidents).
If states want to leave the union, they’ll need to buy out their portion of the debt, either by lump sum payment or by issuing their own debt instruments. Wonder how popular that’ll be in Wingnutland.
Chuck Butcher
I don’t think the GOP can hold together as a viable political instrument much longer – a relative term to be sure – with the unholy mix that exists. The wealth wing cannot co-exist with people who are determined to break the system that keeps wealth concentrated. It isn’t so much that wealth is afraid of insanity, but it won’t tolerate being cut out.
That will mean the end of the Democratic Party as we know it if another entity doesn’t step up to absorb the GOP defectors. It also means that some entity has to appeal to the younger demographic and the Democratic Party as a whole is failing in that rather badly. Three Parties will be pretty difficult for this country to work around but there are now three pretty much aligned groups along with another of uninterested confused middles. This is going to get very weird.
Pain meds are also weird.
Swellsman
This “self-sorting” has been going on for a while now — I’ve been reading about it for years, it seems — and is only like to accelerate, as it seems likely to feed off of itself in a positive loop. I think it is driven not so much by people’s desire to find other like-minded people, but by their desire not to be surrounded by a bunch of others who believe quite odious things. That is, the self-sorting results not from a search for some happy place, but from a fleeing of something unpleasant.
I am, of course, speaking of my own self. I was born and raised in North Carolina, but moved away to Miami immediately after finishing school. (Miami – as Billmon indicates – is not “the South.”) A few years ago, I moved back home. I knew it was a much more conservative place than what I had gotten used to, but I figured it was something like a 60/40 split — I certainly didn’t remember it being monolithic before I left.
Anyway, I already have begun making plans to leave this place. It is not only because of NC’s radical turn toward Authoritarian Conservatism post the 2010 and 2012 elections — that might be dismissed as simply a temporary political phenomenon — but because (with a few exceptions) the majority of the individuals I meet here seem to be nothing but rock-ribbed, Fox-viewing Republicans. I really think that — despite the state’s extremely narrow vote for Obama in 2008 — this place has been overrun by conservatives looking to exclude anyone who doesn’t fit.
Well, I don’t fit, and I can take a hint. This place doesn’t seem to want me or anybody like me, so I’ll be leaving. But I won’t be going toward something, I’ll simply be moving away from something distasteful.
Of course, then I’ll just be yet another inhabitant of a piece of Blue America, and — very likely — there will be some rock-ribbed, Fox-viewing Republican already living there who will find me one progressive person too many; and then he or she can move here and take my place.
It would be nice to imagine this self-sorting might somehow correct itself, but as pockets of the country become increasingly homogenous – and increasingly unpleasant places for those who “don’t fit” — it is hard to see how that happens.
Matt
@Gus diZerega:
“Divorce” would be an utter disaster for the places that want it most – nearly all of them are net *consumers* of tax revenue, their dog-whistle symphonies about “welfare queens” notwithstanding.
Further, the modern GOP platform means that they’d be essentially lobbying for “I want a divorce, but I’m going to continue to leave my dirty dishes in the sink and throw my trash over the fence into your yard”: a county or whatever might “divorce”, but that doesn’t mean they get their own air, water, etc. to pollute without affecting their neighbors.
The Pale Scot
The the problem, in a nutshell, are prods. If the Scots-Irish moved to China, in a couple of generations they’d be insisting that they were the only real chinese.
A comment from a Discovery magazine article the-scots-irish-as-indigenous-people
cvstoner
@c u n d gulag:
Indeed. And there is no geographical region to fight against, anymore. A civil war today would quite literally be brother against brother.
cvstoner
@Matt:
They want a divorce and perpetual alimony.
cvstoner
@Swellsman:
Interesting, although I wonder if the more compressed environment of urban living has something to do with this, too. After all, it is easier to tolerate hateful neighbors if they living an acre away instead of on the opposite side of an apartment wall.
stinger
@cvstoner: Ah, but in the city you have hundreds and hundreds of other close neighbors, among whom you can surely find some like-minded others to hang out with. Whereas, in farm country, you have only a few dozen neighbors in a given square mile or two; you might be quite lucky to find someone nearby who shares your outlook on matters political. But you’ll run into the same few dozen neighbors day after day in the grocery store, post office, feed mill, coffee shop, church, etc. They are the people you rub elbows with, if not actively socialize with.
Matt McIrvin
@Chris:
Actually, no, that’s wrong.
In a substantial and crucially important chunk of what is now Red America, the quaint folkways were built on various sorts of oppression of African-Americans. What is now Blue America objected to that. There was a war that nearly disintegrated the United States, but the oppression didn’t go away, and there was another blowup about it a hundred years later.
And that is what all this is really about. That is “states’ rights,” that is “big government off our backs,” that is “welfare queens,” that is “most terrifying words: ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help,'” the whole lot. It’s even the horror of Obamacare: consider the people who mostly occupy the coverage gap in the poorest states that have refused Medicaid expansion.
Oh, it’s metastasized to all kinds of other things, some of them quite important: gay rights and abortion and school prayer and whatnot. And black people are plenty oppressed already in Blue America, often by Democrats. But when you look at the roots of the culture war, where the religious right and movement conservatism came from, and why Republicans dominated presidential politics in the 1980s, and the origins of the modern Red/Blue split, this is what it’s really about: to what extent are white people allowed to oppress black people (and now brown people!) in states where they insist the oppression is an essential part of the local culture?
I am concerned at the increasing willingness of blue-state liberals to just write it all off. We’re basically deciding that the Civil War and the civil-rights movement were big mistakes: we should have just let those reliable 19th-century-Republican/modern-Democratic voters in the South go to hell, maybe set up some refugee camps on the border. And it’s at a time when the conservative whites in power there are starting to feel a demographic squeeze!
Matt McIrvin
@The Pale Scot: The whole “Scots-Irish as irredeemable redneck monsters” thing makes my spidey-sense tingle, just because, you know, I kind of have incontrovertible proof from my personal existence that they interbreed with other kinds of people.
I mean, yeah, that side of my family has some interesting political attitudes. But here I am.
…Oh, geez, it’s Razib again. Though he seems to be expressing some skepticism at the narrative.
Gus diZerega
@dww44: Good luck. But if states were married people marriage counselors would now be advising divorce. Having been born in Virginia and raised in Kansas, with relatives in both states, I am not simply demonizing whole areas of the country, much as I disagree with their dominant cultures. But our national system presupposes a higher level of agreement between regions than now exists, and until that reappears, or a divorce happens, the national government will not work, except perhaps as a servant of oligarchs who benefit when the peasants fight among themselves.
Gus diZerega
@Matt: If divorce were a disaster- and I agree with you it would be – I can think of nothing more able to discredit the authoritarian nihilists who dominate those regions. It would encourage decent people there to start thinking clearly and clean up their act.
Meanwhile, as it is we can’t do a lot of things to clean up our own act on issues like the environment because we are yoked to these regions. They actively sabotage anything attempted. We spend a lot of energy just fighting them. Assuming, as I do, that we are far better able to create good societies, that example would serve as a lure to the others to change.
Gus diZerega
@Matt McIrvin: With 20-20 hindsight the case for the Civil War from a northern perspective is not a slam dunk. Had the South left, they would have had to deal with the results of a inferior economy incapable of modernizing rapidly, a border at the Ohio River or even closer beyond which slaves would be free, with no fugitive slave law, their main customer, Great Britain, turning every more strongly against slavery,and the entire world abandoning slavery within a few decades after the war. Brazil was last- in 1888, not that long after the war. Jefferson Davis and the other traitors would then be seen as reactionary spoilers who did their region no good, and would hardly be honored today they way they are.
Plus we would still be able to take pride in our nation being government by consent of the governed.
I am not sure what you mean about giving up on civil rights- it is the impact of the neoconfederate South that is eroding those gains.
dww44
@Gus diZerega: Wasn’t it ever thus?
Taking a break from the political shows last evening and Syria-all-the-time-everywhere coverage, I switched over to the rebroadcast of Ken Burns series on the National Parks and their creation on PBS. While Burns has a wonderful ability to make a story about the people involved in that building and making one connect with them, my other takeaway is that the fight to move forward has always been with us. What we are experiencing now is NOT so different from what we’ve experienced in the past. It’s a long, slow, and extremely hard slog to actually “progress”. We really should be required to revisit our history more frequently than we do. and Ken Burns’ series thus far do that remarkably well.
I really do fundamentally disagree with your take on our Red State issues. But, respectfully, of course.
Gus diZerega
@dww44: The respect is reciprocated. I hope you are right, I fear you are not.
Chris
Goodness. I didn’t expect the thread to pick up the following day. Apparently, I am not aware of all Internet traditions.
@Matt McIrvin:
Fair enough.
That… kind of falls under what I was trying to say with “they can live their own way of life as long as they recognize other people don’t have to.” Forcing black people to play their game without regards to their rights as humans would be failing to recognize that. None of us are telling them they’re not allowed to self-segregate in all-white “Citadels” and play Real America for their entire lives, is what I’m saying. We’re just telling them they’re not allowed to force all the rest of us to live there.
In the same way, we’re not telling them whether or not to have abortions – just that they can’t make that decision for other people. We’re not telling them they have to have gay marriages, or even to perform said marriages in their fucked-up churches – just that they’re not allowed to prevent others from having them if they so choose. Etc, etc, etc.
You make a good point though that their entire way of life depended in large part on being able to coerce other people. So in that sense, I suppose we are interfering with their way of life. Ah, well.
Chris
@Matt McIrvin:
I agree. Sweeping culture-based explanations for behavior tend to rub me the wrong way, no matter who they’re aimed at.
cokane
@CTVoter: more people are living in urban and suburban counties. Urbanization has been an obvious long term trend for the last 500+ years. Why did this have to be explained?