Tom Tomorrow on "Red Vs. Blue"

This Modern World has a good post about the Red State Vs. Blue State paradigm. Tom, like myself, apparently grew up in Red States and now lives and works in a Blue one (New Haven, if memory serves, and God love him for it). His post--an answer to all the Red State liberals that write him in anger whenever he (in their opinion) denies their existence--is sensible and well-reasoned. Nobody can deny that there are two worldviews clashing in the U.S.



BUT...



There's a lot more than those two. Distilling all the attitudes that Americans have into a binary system--the media calls it Red Vs. Blue, but I'd agree with others that it's closer to Rural Vs. Urban--allows, perhaps even forces, voters into bogus choices like "Do I want the coutnry to be stand proud or do I want a job?" It plays into the idea of a larger cultural war that the Republicans have been pushing since Reagan. (Since, in other words, they jettisoned fiscal responsibility and needed another issue to crusade on.) Red Vs. Blue is a GOP strategy, it's not reality. There are plenty of homophobes in Blue states; and plenty of rural voters who DON'T hate gays; Red Vs. Blue denies the existence of both, to nobody's advantage but the GOP. It's undemocratic, and bogus, too.



WE have the dominant values; the narrow, hateful evangelicals are a minority--always have been, always will be--just like people who are anti-abortion, pro-assault rifle, et cetera, et cetera. It's only through conflating all these issues into a larger cultural war, and forcing a binary choice, can the GOP win. This strategy allows Americans who don't agree with the whole Blue slate pick an single, emotion-based issue and vote solely on that. It's the Red Vs. Blue paradigm that allowed enough people to say, "Well, I need a job and I'm against the war, but I'm anti-abortion, so I'm for Bush." Or, "I need health insurance and think that it's wrong to give rich people tax breaks at my expense, but I'm against gay marriage, so..." It's only within this binary system that the GOP's insistence on party conformity trumps the Dems' respect for diversity. It makes voting solely about who you are, not what the country needs, or what the candidate's gonna do.



Here's what I'm saying: Yes, there are differences between urban and rural culture, and the attitudes of the people who live in those places are expressed in voting patterns. But think about the various maps you've seen since the election: there are voting patterns based on IQ, but the media isn't trumpeting "Dumb Vs. Smart." There are voting patterns based on revenue, but you don't hear people talking about "Freeloaders Vs. Prosperous." Can you imagine Thomas Friedman writing about how the Dems need to "reach out to dumb people who can't hold down a job"?



By accepting the Red Vs. Blue paradigm, the dominant culture--the group that makes the money as well as the art and scientific discoveries and is that portion of America integrating into the rest of the world--grants the other side equal footing, when no measure I've seen suggests that this is appropriate. We have more money. We have more talent. We have more people. We even (and I'm guessing here, for obvious reasons) probably have less crime, fewer divorces, lower teen pregnancy.



There is no measure by which the so-called Red States deserve their outsized influence over our political system; but the GOP has found ways, legal and otherwise, to game the system. There will always be an urban/rural divide, but we in the dominant group--the group that clearly represents the future--should not acquiesce to a paradigm that pretends that we're equal, much less in the minority. 'Cause the fact is, most people want what we want--peace, prosperity, religious tolerance, a decent environment. But as long as we get stuck in the bogus rhetoric of the culture war ("Country music is more patriotic than Hip-Hop!") we're playing on the GOP's home turf. Nobody wants your squirrel rifle, Cletus, and nobody wants to make your daughter get an abortion, and nobody wants to move the Pentagon to France. It's all bogus--but long as we consent to their paradigm, we'll never be able to put forth our reality, which I'm convinced is much closer to the truth about America and Americans.



It doesn't help that so many of us--Tom and me, for example--found Red State culture toxic enough to decamp for the Blue. I despise hick-dom in all its forms, but that's a prejudice of mine; sure, it's based on plenty of unpleasant characters from my youth in Missouri, but chewin' tabaccy does not a bigot make--bigotry does. The more we can make this about values--real values--and not about cultural signifiers and media shorthand, the more I'm convinced that the actual majority opinions will reassume governance.