"Red" Country, "Blue" Cities

A “blue state”—or just blue cities? (2020 results, via CNN.)

I have a new piece up at Discourse puzzling out “The Dilemma of the Rural Democrat.”

I start with a passing reference to the film now out in theaters about a current-day American Civil War. I haven’t seen it myself yet, but I’m intrigued by this review. The first thing that caught my attention is that the production company behind it, A24, is best known for high-concept horror films, and that’s basically what this is: our national horror film, showing what awaits us if we don’t turn back.

The other thing that intrigues me is that apparently the filmmakers deliberately avoided having either the issues behind the civil war or its geographic alliances correspond directly with the partisan issues of the real world. (The winning side, for example, is an alliance of Texas and California.) That’s the point of this as a horror film. It is meant to focus our attention purely on the terrifying prospect of Americans killing each other, so that people from any ideological background will come away convinced this is something we definitely shouldn’t do.

Good luck to them on that. I like the idea, and I’m curious to see how well they pulled it off.

What’s relevant for my article is that our real-life divisions are geographical, and let’s just say that a Texas-California alliance is not about to happen.

Even within states, I point out, the divisions are rural versus urban.

This map of Virginia is particularly striking, because even small cities such as Staunton, Winchester, and Danville are counted as separate electoral districts from their surrounding counties, so they stand out as blue dots in a sea of red. The kind of lopsided left-leaning ideological composition you find on a college campus or in a newsroom is mirrored by the lopsided right-leaning margins you find in rural counties.

For Democrats, their party’s failure to compete outside urban areas is the main reason why a presidential election that probably shouldn’t be close is a toss-up. 

So you might not get a general Texas-California alliance, but Austin would be aligned politically with a lot of California, while the Central Valley would be more aligned with Texas. The cities still tend to win, of course, because that’s where the people are.

The point of all of this is to figure out how the Democrats lost the countryside. Part of this is that they have sent the message that they just don’t care—the way Republicans and conservatives have spent decades conveying that they don’t care about the cities, which are dens of sin and iniquity, anyway. Part of the answer is policy, including obsession like “green energy” and the culture war that are priorities for city dweller and turns off for the country.

Yet I have mixed feelings about the advice to Democrats to drop the culture war, because I don’t want them entirely abandoning the field to the conservative culture war.

Yet one could argue that in these areas, policies to encourage diversity and tolerance are even more desperately needed. These are the places where a young woman in need of an abortion, or a young gay man struggling with his identity, or someone who wants to live outside the usual norms, is likely to feel far more alone and in far greater need of help.

So it’s not a matter of dropping the culture wars but about pursuing more modest goals. This is the classic paradox of the political activist: On the one hand, your most active supporters want you to push for their maximalist agenda. On the other hand, doing so threatens even the most minimal goals of that agenda and causes you to pass up wins on the easy issues. To put it in practical terms, Democrats need to focus less on pushing for Drag Queen Story Hour in the public library and more on keeping Moms for Liberty off the school board.

After some discussion about the collapse of local news—which explains why I keep getting flyers from local politicians running against Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, none of whom have ever been on a Virginia ballot—I end by returning to that issue.

Consider the recent vote on military aid to help Ukraine defend itself against authoritarian Russia. It was held up by a small ultra-Trumpist fringe of the Republican Party, yet when put to a vote, it passed by a lopsided margin of 311-112.

The party that can focus on this kind of issue, holding its radical fringe at arm’s length and defining itself by a broadly popular agenda between the 40-yard lines, will reap the rewards. But this implies the need for a wider political realignment. The policies that are broadly popular in America are generally liberal policies, in the widest sense of that term. They are policies that reject the illiberal tendencies on both the right and the left—no Moms for Liberty or admiration for Vladimir Putin, but also no hectoring left-wing “cancel culture” or support for Hamas.

The party that can regain its sanity first will win.

Read the whole thing.

The Dilemma of the Rural Democrats

Over at Symposium, I had a discussion about this kind of maximal-minimal dilemma with Ruy Teixeira. One idea I didn’t want to talk about there, because I think it’s too speculative at this point, is that in some ways, the best outcome for November from my perspective is that Biden wins, but without the support of the Democrats’ “progressive” wing. I say this is speculative because I’m not sure he can win without their support, particularly as things look now—though it’s a bit too early for the polls to be strongly predictive. But that outcome would give people like me the chance to tell the Democratic Party that maybe it should try to win by scooping up all those Nikki Haley voters from the primaries and telling the so-called “progressives” to get lost.

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The Very Worst Voters

If I’m agitating for a “liberal” realignment of American politics, it’s partly because I live in terror that the realignment will come anyway—but it will be illiberal.

For example, Teixeira is with

The Liberal Patriot

, which is more or less trying to revive the old-fashioned “conservative Democrat.” But sometimes I fear they will try to go about that in the very worst way. So just in the past few days,