[lbo-talk] Sean Wilentz: Blue Cities vs. Red Surrounds

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Thu Nov 11 20:59:13 PST 2004


[I wonder if there would be a way to map this in a way that would be striking and clear. Perhaps by county?]

Los Angeles Times

November 7, 2004

COMMENTARY

Hicks Nixed Slicks' Pick

By Sean Wilentz

Sean Wilentz is a professor of history at PrincetonUniversity.

"It's the secular coasts versus the religious heartland," CNN's Tucker

Carlson says of this year's election results. That sums up the

conventional wisdom that right-wing Republicans would prefer that you

believe and that too many of the rest of us do believe. The effete

liberal coasts against the Real America. Situational morality against

real morality. Relativism against Standards. Metrosexuals against the

God-fearing.

Wrong.

The real electoral division isn't between the coasts and the

heartland. It's between cities all over the United States and the rest

of the country.

In every state in the Union, red states included, Sen. John F. Kerry

performed disproportionately well in urban areas. Kerry actually

carried, sometimes convincingly, cities in some of the deepest-red red

states that are about as far from coastal secularism as you can

imagine.

Missouri, for example, broke 54% to 46% for Bush -- except the city of

St. Louis, which voted overwhelmingly for Kerry.

Nobody ever really took seriously Kerry's chances of carrying Texas.

But in El Paso, he won 56% of the vote. What is so "secular," so

bicoastal, so effete about El Paso?

Alabama is supposed to be the buckle of the pro-GOP Bible Belt. But

don't say that too loudly in Montgomery County, eponymous home to the

state capital, which came in with a Kerry majority, as did Dallas

County, home to the city of Selma, which voted for Kerry by a 60% to

40% margin.

From Richmond, Va., to Jackson, Miss., from Salt Lake City, Utah, to

Columbia, S.C., the Democratic ticket either won outright or ran well

ahead of statewide totals.

Now let us reverse the terms. New York is a huge blue state. On

Tuesday, though, it was a sea of red, except for some tiny blue dots

around New York City, Albany, bits of Long Island and a few other

places. California, the quintessence of Carlson's secular coast, was

also pretty solidly red, except for L.A., San Francisco and San Diego.

The California pattern may seem, at first glance, to suit the

stereotype. Everybody knows about "San Francisco Democrats" and the

fleshpots of L.A. But Memphis, Tenn.? Selma, Ala.?

The reasons for the city-country divide are obvious. Cities are home,

disproportionately, to wage earners, civil service employees, racial

minorities and immigrants -- and those people are overwhelmingly

Democrats. The cities are where those who are still hoping to cash in

on the American dream pray and work -- except for those domestic

servants who commute to the suburbs to clean the houses of those who

have already cashed in on the American dream.

The cities are also, of course, the homes to all of those artsy

intellectuals, entertainment industry elitists and limousine liberals

whom the GOP and its backers like to demonize. But these liberal elite

enclaves are tiny even within the cities where they are located. The

minority and immigrant vote in Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Harlem

dwarfs the numbers on Manhattan's Upper West Side and Greenwich

Village. The same holds true, to say the least, of the secular liberal

elite's grip on Montgomery, Ala.

The urban-rural split has been a perennial feature our political

history. In 1896, the last time the national election map closely

resembled that of today -- with the Northeast and the West Coast

seeming to go one way, and most of the rest of the country another --

the Democrats were the party of the countryside and the Republicans

the party of the city. Unlike today, the clash was explicit, pitting

the agrarian values of populist Democrat William Jennings Bryan

against the pro-business industrialism of Republican, William

McKinley.

"Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will

spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms and the grass

will grow in the streets of every city in the country," Bryan

proclaimed in the famous speech that gained him the nomination.

In 2004, there is a harder and even more inflammatory aspect to the

split, usually mentioned only in code: divisions of race. Although

most black Americans live in the South, and in non-metropolitan

regions, the fact remains that our cities, in every area of the

country, are as a rule more heavily African American than they were in

Bryan's and McKinley's time. Not surprisingly, because blacks vote

overwhelmingly Democratic, many of the bluest cities in the red states

are those with the largest black voting presence. Richmond (58.1%),

Memphis (61.4%) and Jackson (71.1%) rank among the top 10 cities with

large and concentrated black populations.

By perpetuating the easy impression of a nation divided into coastal

liberals and heartland conservatives, reporters and commentators are

misleading themselves and their audiences about the actual political

state of the Union. Without realizing it, they are also advancing the

picture of the nation advanced by the GOP culture warriors, feeding

the despair and paranoia of coastal liberals and writing off millions

of Americans in every part of the country.

Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times



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