PW (Parallel World) 4: Red America v. Blue America

So that's why Bush ripped up the Kyoto Protocol!

"The best predictor of how you're going to vote in this country is not your economic status ... it's church attendance," said Brooks. "People who attended church every week voted for George W. Bush, 60 to 39. People who rarely or seldom attend church favored Gore by a similar percentage."

The last thing I want to do is see this thread turn into a demographic breakdown of the 2000 election, boundaries, procedural questions, etc. This thread starts in an imaginary world where the Reds and the Blues are at war with each other. What happens?

My brother had a very interesting book (though I've been looking for it, I can't find it) called the nine nations of North America or something like that, which divided the US (and Mexico and Canada) along cultural and economic lines fairly accurately reflected by that map.

Also, the church indication is a bit misleading. Remember my mum is a priest.

I would see this war being a bit like the Bosnian war - although the Blues might have greater or equal numbers, their concentration would make it easier for the Reds to break them up into isolated enclaves that can then be gradually eliminated.

The increased gun ownership of the Reds should also give them an edge when push comes to shove.

against that - the Blues would proabably be able to consolidate in the North East, and that area would be the last to fall. Or would be able to erect defences so strong that it is able to secede from Bush ruled America.

I'm also thinking that with energetic leadership it might be possible for the Blues to link up all of the west coast, given that they already have the population centres there. That would leave the Reds weakened should the war turn into a long-term sluggathon.

(Plus don't discount the gun count in supposedly blue states, either. There are guns in the local WalMart in Vermont, too.)

I think that after a few years of war we see the Reds struggling. Their problem is that as soon as Red enclaves developed high tech savvy, there are defections to the Blue side.

The loss of Arizona, for instance, hits the Red economy hard.

I think what we'll see is a NATIONAL WACO SITUATION.

i still think momus on the LIT thread alluded to my telling him that he shouldn't expect americans to be ashamed of themselves, with some kind of retort which i found cryptic. perhaps i'm just slow, but perhaps he could indulge me for a moment and for that moment dispense with the typical display of wordplay and wit and simply explain himself in language designed for maximum clarity. perhaps it'd be pandering, but after the momentary lapse he can go back to encoding his LPs with references that ensure that only the suavest on the international boutique-store scene can appreciate it.

The retort I made was a paradox, Amateurist: if Europeans tend to be more comfortable with ambivalence and Americans with certainties, then an American should not worry: his lack of ambivalence will be judged with ambivalence. But the European may have cause to worry, because his ambivalence will be judged without ambivalence. He may well be 'consigned', his ambivalence, which he sees as a virtue in itself (avoiding 'the rush to judgement'), being seen by the unambivalent as a vice in itself.

In the context of this thread, substitute Blue for European.

I don't see this happening unless the military are converted from red to blue, which is unlikely. Unless you have a blue-funded Manhattan Project style development of an uber-weapon based on technological means. Which I doubt that blues would do unless they seriously believed that the world was at stake, because they tend to be pacifists. I mean, think how long scientists sat on nuclear technology, because they feared it could be used for weapons. Einstein only changed his mind after becoming convinced that the Nazis were developing a nuclear project.

I wonder what that would result in. The Reds would be working on their own uber-weapon. But we've noted that the more educated and highly technically skilled reds become, the greater their chances of flipping to blue.

Like John F 'Cuba' Kennedy, Lyndon 'Vietnam' Johnson, and Bill 'Kosovo' Clinton?

Genetically modified superfood! Aarrrrgggghhhh!!!

The organically grown hippies in Vermont will flip to red if their muselix source is threatened!

i AM american in one sense, i was born there and grew up there, therefore there is essentially nothing i can do about it. i can try if i so desired to be something else, but i'd fail on the fact that i didn't spend my childhood training for it.

because i am american in that sense does not mean that i have to bear the burden of apologizing or making gestures of shame regarding my country's current government, enduring racism, perceived manicheanism, whathaveyou. my friends here seem to understand this and don't force me to confront caricatures at every turn.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!! You josh! WTF?

Seriously, I remember reading that in 1995, and thinking at the time that the US was kinda screwed; I've not changed my mind. I just don't see how you can have massive non-voting corresponding to increasing wealth gaps pace Galbraith's Culture of Contentment, racial divides that are getting worse (ie, used to be mostly affecting policy as a black/white issue, now add in Hispanic). Toss in a war state situation, economic problems, Christian fundies and sooner or later, the thing is going to blow. Well, I can't see how it ultimately won't, unless Cliff Robertson becomes president and moves everyone to NY and LA and bans smoking.

Um, I think you had better take a good look at that map again. Many of the 'blue' areas are in blue-collar areas.

See also. And this.

As someone said upthread, they have all the nukes. I'd hate to tell you what we in the blue states will have to resort to, because it's probably illegal under the Patriot Act.

They're -our- fucking lakes, and we share them with Canada.

'John Edwards... [speaks] of "two Americas", one of affluence and security, the other getting by on the minimum wage and with no health insurance. He even talks about the poor, who don't vote and therefore rarely arouse candidates' interest...'

Now there's our Red v Blue America, in reality and in a candidate's campaign. Trouble is, campaigns are not fought on objective realities and the recognition of them. They are fought on myths and impressions, including self-image. This is where it becomes helpful to remember Marx's distinction between a class-in-itself and a class-for-itself. Do the poor realise they are poor? Do they vote with that in mind, or do they prefer to 'think with the rich'?

According to Brooks the Reds rarely sense their own deprivation:

'[Reds] tend to repeat the same phrase: "We've taken some hits." And yet when they are asked about the broader theory, whether there is class conflict between the educated affluents and the stagnant middles, they stare blankly as if suddenly the interview were being conducted in Aramaic. I kept asking, Do you feel that the highly educated people around, say, New York and Washington are getting all the goodies? Do you think there is resentment toward all the latte sippers who shop at Nieman Marcus? Do you see a gulf between high-income people in the big cities and middle-income people here? I got only polite, fumbling answers as people tried to figure out what the hell I was talking about.

'When I rephrased the question in more-general terms, as Do you believe the country is divided between the haves and the have-nots?, everyone responded decisively: yes. But as the conversation continued, it became clear that the people saying yes did not consider themselves to be among the have-nots. Even people with incomes well below the median thought of themselves as haves.'

Now, that eccentric self-image (have-nots who look in the mirror and see haves) would be tragic enough if it just skewed the US election. Unfortunately, because of the US' position in the world, it impacts all over the place. One can only scream at the US rural poor 'Get real! If not for your own sakes, for ours!'

I also watched the 700 Club during a pledge drive, and people were making huge donations - one guy in New York gave $10,000. A lot of the money was coming from Florida and Kansas.

I suspect it's not the amount of money someone has, but the type of work that they do. But maybe some low-income people belong to churches that tell them to vote Republican or burn in hell.

youre a fucking brilliant rhetoritician but not much of a thinker

??? The only state wholly in the United States is Lake Michigan.

Blacks and Hispanics also tend to vote Democrat. At least they did. One of Karl Rove's greatest ruses may have been to get Bush onto this theme of letting illegal hispanics become citizens. It might even be quite a liberal policy if they could also stop US manufacturing jobs from pouring across the border to Mexico. What's the point of being allowed to stay in America if your job just crossed the border going the other way?

This is brilliant.

except that such immigrants typically occupy not the sort of blue collar jobs that are frequently unionized in america but much lower-wage service jobs...jobs most americans are happy to have them fill

Do you want to address any specific point or are you just clearing your throat?

That was pretty much it.

Excuse me. A lot of it about this time of year.

I don't know what the schools themselves are liberal, but everyone (no hyperbole) I know who went to a catholic school ended up a down-the-ballot libral who loves irony.

x-post: Tad, no shit. In Catholic school, they told us that the creation stories were a myth, and they endorsed the theory of evolution.

one should always make a sincere effort to understand those they oppose

Rich man... camel... needle's eye... charity... render unto Caesar... neighbour as oneself... seems like we can work with this message...

momus, the constitutional originalist?

the problem is how to READ either of said sacred texts.

Just one problem. My Chinese is lousy.

Which Constitution is that?

http://www.progressive.org/jan04/miner0104.html

"In an article about education, it's appropriate to start with a pop quiz. Today's question: Republican strategists want to privatize education because:

a) Education is a multibillion dollar market, and the private sector is eager to get its hands on those dollars.
b) Conservatives are devoted to the free market and believe that private is inherently superior to public.
c) Shrinking public education furthers the Republican Party goal of drastically reducing the public sector.
d) Privatization undermines teacher unions, a key base of support for the Democratic Party.
e) Privatization rhetoric can be used to woo African American and Latino voters to the Republican Party.
f) All of the above.

OK, I admit it, the answer's obvious: all of the above. But in the debates over education policy, the Republican political agenda (see d and e) is often invisible.

Occasionally, Republican strategists let the cat out of the bag and admit that vouchers--which divert public dollars to private schools--are about politics, not education.

Grover Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform and one of the most influential Republican strategists in Washington, has long recognized the partisan value of vouchers, sometimes euphemistically referred to as "choice." "School choice reaches right into the heart of the Democratic coalition and takes people out of it," he said in a 1998 interview with Insight, the magazine of the conservative Washington Times.

Norquist and others see great political benefit in going after the teachers' unions. During the last thirty years, as private sector unionism has declined, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and National Education Association (NEA) have grown in strength. Today, the 2.7 million-member NEA is the country's largest union. The AFT has one million members, mostly in education but also in health care and the public sector."

In defense of Frey's "melting pot" idea, my Texas community has almost as many Thai and Vietnamese restaurants as it does churches.