Monday, April 26, 2004
Poor, Uneducated, and Easy to Command (Reprise)
This Washington Post article correctly frames the Red State v. Blue State argument, even as it subtly displays its own unwitting condescension towards middle-American voters.
It doesn't bode well for our beloved republic.
More and more Americans in a highly mobile society are choosing to live among like-minded people. University of Maryland political demographer James Gimpel has documented the rise of a "patchwork nation," in which political like attracts like, and ideologically diverse communities are giving way to same-thinking islands. A recent analysis sponsored by the Austin American-Statesman, comparing the photo-finish elections of 1976 and 2000, made this clear. While the nationwide results were extremely close, nearly twice as many voters now live in counties where one candidate or the other won by a landslide. Person by person, family by family, America is engaging in voluntary political segregation.
If present trends continue, the red/blue divide is going to become even more pronounced as time goes on, as the tendency of people to move to live among their own kind accelerates in a kind of self-reinforcing spiral of political Balkanization.
(Just look at this map of political fundraising hotspots within Los Angeles!
If you know LA, then you know that the entire valley is fairly densely and evenly populated. But the huge majority of the donations comes from a few square miles around Santa Monica, Hollywood, and Beverly Hills.)
And so given the fact that we have so many national news organizations with their operational headquarters within a few blocks of each other in Manhattan, the political demographics of our country is becoming more and more important to understanding coverage.
Nevertheless, the article falls prey to a regionalism and subtle intellectual bias of its own.
On Red states philosophy: The idea that faith should inform our public space, and that absolutes, rooted in the Bible, should guide us in our public life.
When Bush extols "entrepreneurs," insists on tax cutting and deregulation, and promotes drilling and logging; when he professes a born-again faith and appeals to traditional norms on issues such as marriage and cloning; when he disdains intellectual subtleties in favor of plain-spoken verities, he is carrying the flag for Red America.
Hey, WaPo...why the scare quotes around the word entrepeneur? You guys got a problem with Warren Buffett or something?
Kerry hoists the Blue flag whenever he embraces environmentalism, labor unionism and regulation; when he emphasizes the complexities of issues and urges an internationalist foreign policy; when he gives precedence to tolerance over tradition and dissent over conformity.
Ok, so red-staters are given to 'absolutes,' while blue-staters emphasize the 'complexities of issues.'
Read another way, blue-staters are enlightened beings inhabiting an ethical and moral plane so high they have to stick their schnozzes in the air to control the epidemic nosebleeds among their heady society, whereas red-staters tend to be knuckle-dragging. mouth-breathing troglodytes incapable of processing information except when meted out to them from the pulpit in prepackaged, just-add-venom homily.
In other words, as the Post has so embarrasingly written before, they're poor, uneducated, and easy to command.
Right.
Splash, out
Jason
(Thanks to Cori Dauber for pointing out the article.)
It doesn't bode well for our beloved republic.
More and more Americans in a highly mobile society are choosing to live among like-minded people. University of Maryland political demographer James Gimpel has documented the rise of a "patchwork nation," in which political like attracts like, and ideologically diverse communities are giving way to same-thinking islands. A recent analysis sponsored by the Austin American-Statesman, comparing the photo-finish elections of 1976 and 2000, made this clear. While the nationwide results were extremely close, nearly twice as many voters now live in counties where one candidate or the other won by a landslide. Person by person, family by family, America is engaging in voluntary political segregation.
If present trends continue, the red/blue divide is going to become even more pronounced as time goes on, as the tendency of people to move to live among their own kind accelerates in a kind of self-reinforcing spiral of political Balkanization.
(Just look at this map of political fundraising hotspots within Los Angeles!
If you know LA, then you know that the entire valley is fairly densely and evenly populated. But the huge majority of the donations comes from a few square miles around Santa Monica, Hollywood, and Beverly Hills.)
And so given the fact that we have so many national news organizations with their operational headquarters within a few blocks of each other in Manhattan, the political demographics of our country is becoming more and more important to understanding coverage.
Nevertheless, the article falls prey to a regionalism and subtle intellectual bias of its own.
On Red states philosophy: The idea that faith should inform our public space, and that absolutes, rooted in the Bible, should guide us in our public life.
When Bush extols "entrepreneurs," insists on tax cutting and deregulation, and promotes drilling and logging; when he professes a born-again faith and appeals to traditional norms on issues such as marriage and cloning; when he disdains intellectual subtleties in favor of plain-spoken verities, he is carrying the flag for Red America.
Hey, WaPo...why the scare quotes around the word entrepeneur? You guys got a problem with Warren Buffett or something?
Kerry hoists the Blue flag whenever he embraces environmentalism, labor unionism and regulation; when he emphasizes the complexities of issues and urges an internationalist foreign policy; when he gives precedence to tolerance over tradition and dissent over conformity.
Ok, so red-staters are given to 'absolutes,' while blue-staters emphasize the 'complexities of issues.'
Read another way, blue-staters are enlightened beings inhabiting an ethical and moral plane so high they have to stick their schnozzes in the air to control the epidemic nosebleeds among their heady society, whereas red-staters tend to be knuckle-dragging. mouth-breathing troglodytes incapable of processing information except when meted out to them from the pulpit in prepackaged, just-add-venom homily.
In other words, as the Post has so embarrasingly written before, they're poor, uneducated, and easy to command.
Right.
Splash, out
Jason
(Thanks to Cori Dauber for pointing out the article.)
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