>That is unsettling - and it's a point you and others have made before, which
>I kind of thought was half tongue in cheek, because I truly can't see that
>happening up here and regard the more liberal and urbanized Northern and
>upper coastal states as largely sharing the same political culture as us.
>That view was reinforced for me after the last election when those
>Jesusland/United States of Canada maps started circulating on the Net. Is
>the perception of two parallel political universes - red states, blue states
>(more accurately, IMO, red hinterlands, blue cities) - greatly exaggerated
>or is there substance to it? Wouldn't you expect to see a polarization:
>Republican ranks moving right and Democrat ranks moving left if things
>actually did start falling apart, reflecting the current equally divided
>political alignment in the country?
You never know what could happen. Since the country is about equally divided between Dem & Rep (ignoring, for the moment, those who've excused themselves), if they moved to the extremes, the average might stay the same but volatility increase markedly. It's easy to imagine parts of the American right - the people that Lew Rockwell talked about in his red state fascism essay - going wildly racist and nationalist. But a lot of the pop isn't like that and could resist. But how many, and how much? The mood in this country after 9/11 was hideous, which isn't a happy portent for what could happen in a crisis.
Doug