City vs. Countryside? Nope, It’s More Complicated Than That
The NY Times had a very interesting piece about political fault lines in the US. Contrary to popular opinion, the lines aren’t really between latte’ sipping citified sissies and mouth breathing ignorant hayseeds. It’s deeper than that, going back to our regional cultural roots that go all the way back before the United States was the United States. Good reading.
There is a place for anger, and THIS is it.
Read this guys book a couple years ago and have been touting it ever since; I hope the DNC is building campaigns on the data (not likely).
1Read the article which summarizes the book nicely.
You’re right, Jefe; that’s a good read and probably an important one. The dems need to focus on the dotard’s failures and their plans to follow through.
2Interesting. Some years ago I read Joel Garreau’s “Nine Nations of North America,” in which he came up with a similar map of regional cultures. And David Hackett Fisher’s “Albion’s Seed” discusses cultures in the eastern US based on what part of the British Isles their original settlers came from, e.g. Appalachia was largely settled by Scotch-Irish who were fond of fiddle music and home-brewed whiskey and were not fond of taxes and authority.
3@Rhea
4+1 Nine Nations. Great read.
SCOTS-Irish. Scotch is a drink. I should know that. As punishment, no scotch for me!
5Oh, great! We are having so much rain here that I am pretty much housebound so now I can sit and try to match up the cultural traits of all of these groups. Once I meet my goal, we can base our next presidential candidate on that!
6The Puritans are working on a separate nation http://newenglandindependence.weebly.com/ but a province of Canada sounds good too. 😉
7Colin Woodard’s book American Nations is fascinating and a crucial read for anyone interested in our divides.
8I think these ethnographic divisions are relevant, and it’s important to understand them. But let us not forget that in about 2/3 of the states, the gap between the 2 major parties is less than 20%. Which sounds like a lot, and is in terms of decisive election results. But put another way, if you go to a reliably red state and talk to 10 strangers, it would break down to 5 Republicans, 3 or 4 Democrats, and 1 or two unaffiliated or non-voters. That unaffiliated chunk is remarkably consistent in every state, with about 15-20% in that category.
Also, there’s now a lot more internal migration in the country. So traditional views are being dispersed, diluted, and often changed. Barack Obama didn’t win in 2008 just because he was a good candidate. He won because Howard Dean implemented the 50 state strategy. Instead of writing off entire sections of the population, Democrats secured a lot of votes by asking for them. And the perverse notion that we are the party of elites needs to be actively refuted. Yes, many of our leaders are rich. But they don’t take it as their due. And they don’t legislate to keep everyone else down.
Here’s the Pew Research data. 2014 was the most recent I could find. http://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/compare/party-affiliation/by/state/
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