On Oct 17, 2006, at 4:44 PM, James Heartfield wrote:
> Doug, what means:
>
> "And population density correlates with voting patterns: the thinner
> the population, the more Republican" ?
>
> What would the causal links be to explain this correlation? Is it
> that low density causes republicanism? That would seem to be a
> spatial determinism as crass as the genetic determinsm that causes
> Europeans to huddle together. (Maybe the cause is the other way
> around: voting republican makes you unpopular and people don't want
> to live near to you.) I believe there is a particular theory that
> white flight consolidates individuation and predisposes people to
> republicanism, but I did not think anyone here would be dozy enough
> to swallow that mechanistic view (which was first retailed by Kevin
> Philips in The Emerging Republican Majority, back when he was a
> Nixon advisor, but has since been given a left-wing twist by
> Danielson etc. etc. ).
>
> Would the explanation not be in the failure of the Democratic Party
> to relate to the aspirations that it originally served? Having
> helped to create the institutions that helped people out of the
> cities, like the FHA, it failed to create institutions that
> corresponded to their ambitions once they had moved to the suburbs.
> Pace Gore, the role of the - what... 'centre-left'? - is to promote
> austerity not aspiration. That they failed to win the majority of
> the country over, when the alternative is so gruesome is telling.
> Blame the Democrats, not the suburbanites.
>
It's an empirical fact that density correlates with voting patterns <http://www.princeton.edu/~rvdb/JAVA/election2004/>. In fact, the Red State/Blue State distinction is at its base a function of the relative prominence of metropolitan vs. non-metropolitan populations within states. From my observation of American life, there's often a rather anti-social attitude behind the impulse to locate yourself far from your neighbors, and an anxiety about diversity and difference. It's not unrelated to the auto industry's marketing research that shows people who prefer SUVs to be aggressive and anti-social in their attitudes: they see the outside world as hostile and threatening, and want to have a thick layer of armor between themselves and it. And I don't know why you think someone has to be "dozy" to accept the Phillips theory on white flight - Phillips is a very smart fellow who knows his social psychology, and the Republican party has had much electoral success in trading on it. There's a lot to blame the Democrats for, but the propensity of low-density areas to vote Republican is a response to the Republican electoral message, which is pious, aggressive, individualistic, and often racially and sexually bigoted. Of course, this doesn't apply to everyone living in rural areas, but it is a measure of central tendency.
Doug