Thomas Frank has an excellent article in the NYT today that reviews several books about the divided American electorate, most notably The Great Divide: Retro vs. Metro America, by John Sperling et al. Sperling and his co-authors take the ubiquitous red/blue narrative and run with it, but they cleave the country along urban/rural lines instead of strictly regional ones. This analytical move will be familiar to readers of the Urban Archipelago manifesto, which is breathtaking in its contempt for what it calls "raving neo-Christian idiots".
For the Great Divide, the rhetoric is less fiery, but not by much:
The essential cleavage in American life, the authors argue, is not between left and right or business class and working class; instead, it is a regional matter, a cultural divide between the states, polarized and unbridgeable. One America, to judge from the book's illustrations, works with lovable robots and lives in ''vibrant'' cities with ballet troupes, super-creative Frank Gehry buildings and quiet, tasteful religious ritual; the other relies on contemptible extraction industries (oil, gas and coal) and inhabits a world of white supremacy and monster truck shows and religious ceremonies in which beefy men in cheap clothes scream incomprehensibly at one another.
This reminds me of the widely circulated red/blue maps with their multifarious visualization schemas: straight-up Electoral College results, cartogram skewed by population, county-level binary color maps, county-level proportionally shaded, and permutations of all of these. It's a nice exercise that seems to liberate your thinking from the rigidity of the standard Electoral College map, which seems to suggest that 75% of the country voted for Bush, but essentially each map is a convenient substitute for research and thought. Seeing the red and blue splotches (or purple, red, and blue) we get hypnotized by the neat spots of color, and lead ourselves to believe that the determining factors on who voted for whom must be regional. So we go looking for other regionally correlated variables that match up with the election results maps, and we find patterns of extractive vs. information industries, or evangelical vs. Catholic faiths, or low birthrate vs. high birthrate.
But all of these mapped demographic figures provide a convenient way of not talking about the real issues of social class. Back to Thomas Frank:
Economic determinism ordinarily rubs Americans the wrong way, but for some reason this particularly blunt variety enjoys extravagant popularity with the map-and-poll set in Washington. Economics are fate, in the most sweeping sense, with people of all classes bearing the political imprint of whatever industry is statistically dominant in their region. The actual process by which this imprinting operation takes place, however, is never explained or even really examined. The even more glaring question of why poorly educated, low-wage labor in Retroland would vote for a system that only benefits its masters is scarcely raised. In ''The Great Divide'' we never find out precisely how it is that coal mining clouds the minds of the people who live in coal states; the map is supposed to be sufficient evidence of the effect. Coal mining is here and here and here, and these places voted Republican. Ergo, extraction industries make people ''Retro.''What we see here is a classic case of an obvious and convenient binary opposition serving a political agenda: to divide two groups of people, stoke their mutual dislike and disrespect, and cover up the more insidious divisions within society.
On the one hand, the opposition between red and blue obscures all that the two sides have in common with each other. It's certainly possible to find urban hipsters who voted for Bush, or oilmen who voted for Kerry. By slicing the populace in half this way, the interconnections between the two groups are obscured, and each is constructed as Other: irreducibly strange, alien, and hostile. But in this very move, you deny yourself the capability to recognize yourself in the Other, and vice-versa. Even the staunchest blue stater will have some conservative views. To imagine yourself as a strict "blue" political actor slices out half of reality, making you something less than whole. And it makes it vastly more difficult to relate to "red" voters as what they truly are: fellow human beings, with their own problems, interests, and convictions.
On the other hand, in the political sphere, the red/blue divide is a handy scapegoat, taking all the blame for the schism in American life. This schism is overwhelmingly due to a conflict between the needs of free-market capitalists and the needs of everyone else. By framing the struggle as one between the coasts and flyover country, or cities and exurbs, or Republicans and Democrats, the entire red/blue paradigm obscures the way in which both parties, as agents of capital, are responsible for transferring wealth up the income pyramid. True, the Democrats are less egregious and less single-minded in this regard, but they are still essentially owned by corporate interests. If we're not allowed to talk about class conflict, then all we can see is red and blue.
Posted by Chris at November 27, 2004 11:23 AM