Andrew Sullivan has an interesting, thoughtful piece in the Sunday Times that addresses what I was on about the other day: the critical uselessness of geography as an analytical tool to comprehend the split in American politics, and the ways in which the red/blue dichotomy undermines itself. Musing on why the "red staters" preach hardest about moral values that they themselves do not observe, he cites lots of statistics on things like divorce rates, abortions, and teen pregnancies, all of which are highest in the regions that decry them the loudest. His conclusion is thought-provoking:
The spasms of moralism that have punctuated American history from the first Puritans all the way through Prohibition and now the backlash against gay marriage are not therefore a war of one part of the country against another. They're really a war within the souls of all Americans. Within many a red state voter, there's a blue state lifestyle. And within many a blue state liberal, there's a surprisingly resilient streak of moralism. And it is this internal conflict that makes America still such a vibrant and compelling place. The conflict exists perhaps most powerfully within the red states themselves - as they grapple with the "sin" of their own practices and the high standards of their own aspirations.
In other words, if you base your perceptions on the red/blue division as a strictly geographical one, then looking at the conflict between red states' rhetoric and their reality produces a paradox. But it's not the reality which is contradictory, it's the seeing.
For years, biologists thought of the duck-billed platypus as an impossible creature; its warm blood and egg-laying habits were mutually exclusive, they thought, so the platypus was to be regarded as an oddball, a violation of the rules. It wasn't the platypus that was in the wrong: it was the classification scheme. Restructuring the phylogenetic relationships was necessary to fit the platypus into a logical order.
So it's not just regional affinity that can explain the schism in America today. If a blue stater thinks some red thoughts, and a red stater thinks blue thoughts, then the very distinction is meaningless: how can I be in two states at the same time?