Heart of Redness

Have you ever noticed that the Blue media only decide to portray the Red states as humans, rather than facile stereotypes, after the election?

David Von Drehle of the WaPo convoyed through Nebraska, Oklahoma and Texas, easily steering clear of any Blue counties, and reports back to his DC readers that yes, there really was more to the election than "God, Guns 'n Gays" - and that people in Red states seem vaguely humanoid.

Von Drehle - a onetime Colorado native, as he points out in the article - isn't unaware of the cultural divide that his paper helps create:

We met Bruce Owen outside Abilene, Kan. He invited us into his home, introduced us to his wife, Donna -- and then seemed to wish he hadn't. He told us he rarely saw people like himself portrayed in "the media," except as objects of derision.

He had a point there.

All I could answer was that we were tired of hearing pundits tell us about "Red America" and wanted a firsthand look. For months, the passions had been running awfully high. A lot of Democrats seemed settled on the belief that Bush supporters were stupid and selfish and sanctimonious, when they weren't downright religious fanatics and bigots.

He also notes that his own current home, in the District of Columbia, voted for Kerry by a 10:1 ratio. Von Drehle never connected the two ideas - who, indeed, are the fanatics and bigots?

The article is an interesting read, nonetheless. My big question: What's the motivation?

I actually found it, I think. But on the way, there were questions. So many of them...

Von Drehle feels - correctly, I'd imagine - the need to translate to his audience that there are some very different motivations in action here:

One of the first things worth noting about the Red Sea is that people live there because they like it. (Several people proudly pointed out to me that there are no houses on the market in Waco.) This basic fact strikes wonder in some city dwellers, who live in cities because they love cities. They love the bustle, the myriad options, the surprises and the jolts and the competition. It can require a leap of imagination to perceive that there are people who seek precisely the opposite, and not just on weekends and vacations.

And many people not only never make that leap of imagination - but they assume that the difference in outlook is a sign of some sort of diminished capacity. Von Drehle's piece might dispel that assumption for some, and it might not; the question is, where was this little social olive branch before the election?

And about those motivations:

I suppose there are no great surprises there -- these views represent many of the strands that have been collected over the past generation into the political camp we call "conservative." But the focus on this common label may obscure the individual nature of these voting decisions. I met regular churchgoers and people who attend church seldom if ever. I met young libertarians and elderly prims. I met a wealthy man and a man unemployed and deeply in debt. I met people who admire Bush and people who have little regard for him.

I imagine this might disappoint those people who seek a large and unified explanation of something as important as a presidential election. How much more satisfying it is -- especially for those who make a living from explaining elections in catchy sound bites -- to conjure up overarching themes, towering trends, looming like alps over an election. Nothing sells like a big trend story, whether the trend is "right-wing backlash" or "values revival."

A fair point. I should be happy the mainstream media bothers to try to put a human face on the Red/Blue divide at all.

The piece points out some other media-related issues as well; Red state peoples' stances on discrete political issues frequently have motivations that people in Georgetown just can't grasp.

Example: Remember the Bush Administration's plan to return EPA limits on arsenic in drinking water to pre-Clinton-Administration levels? Levels which were already infinitesimally low? Republicans - red-staters, natch - supported Bush. During the first year of Bush's administration, before 9/11 when stories like that still made the news, that support was portrayed in the eastern press as callousness about the environment.

So where was this kind of reporting back then?

"I'm the village water officer," Stuhr explained. "For more than 100 years, we've lived with arsenic in our water. It is a naturally occurring element. It isn't contamination -- it's natural."

During the Clinton administration, the Environmental Protection Agency lowered the amount of arsenic allowed in water, from 50 parts-per-billion to 10. "Now all over Nebraska, villages are having to build new water treatment plants to remove a naturally occurring element," Stuhr said, which costs "millions of dollars."

Does Washington pay? I asked.

"They'll loan us the money," Stuhr answered. "And whose money is it to begin with? And once we get the arsenic out, why, then we have a hazardous waste problem, because there is nowhere to dispose of it."

Bush would like to restore the previous standard. You might recall that many Democrats howled that Bush was willing to poison people, but in these parts, Bush's proposal was greeted as simple common sense.

Merv Ocken: "The problem comes in when you try to pass one law that will apply to everyone all across the country. In New York or Washington, certain laws might make sense. But you get out here, where there's sometimes just two people living in an entire section, and it's different."

Why was the WaPo above showing the actual impact of that proposal four years ago?

Along the way of his journey, Von Drehle did a little juggling of numbers, and found some little truths:

There are 30 states -- including all the Red Sea states -- in which married couples form a majority of all households. Bush won 22 of the 30, by an average of 21 percentage points. The eight that went for Kerry were very narrow victories, an average of five points. Utah, with the highest percentage of married folks, gave Bush his largest ratio of victory: 71 to 26.

In nine states, there are equal numbers of households headed by married and unmarried people. Sure enough, Bush and Kerry split them evenly, four for Bush and five for Kerry -- and by middling margins, too: an average 16 points where Bush won, 11 points where Kerry won.

Of the 11 states, plus the District of Columbia, where married couples form a minority of all households, Kerry won seven, by a jaw-dropping average of 24 percentage points. Bush won five, by the relatively skimpy average margin of nine points. The District, with the lowest percentage of married folks, gave Kerry his biggest win: 90 to 9.

One could dream up all sorts of theories about this. Married people have, on average, a more stable financial situation. They have, on average, more avenues of support in times of trouble. You might say that marriage involves the surrender of certain personal liberties in favor of creating lasting institutions. You might say marriage favors stability over experimentation. All of these might point, on average, to a more conservative disposition.

All I know for sure are the numbers. Only voters can explain the whys and wherefores.

So we kept driving.

To his credit, Von Drehle might have popped a smug bubble or two, pointing out the Plains' rather tumultuous political past, and the sometimes crazy contradictions that past left behind:

Before the trip, I heard a lot about a book that claimed to explain how people like Joyce Smith and Bruce Owen and Paul Kern and those ECU students have been tricked by the moneyed class into voting against their own best interests. I found a copy of What's the Matter With Kansas? at a bookstore in Ada and began reading it as we resumed our southward journey.

The author, Thomas Frank, grew up in a wealthy suburb of Kansas City and received a PhD in cultural criticism from the University of Chicago. His book is a lament for the lost prairie Populism of years gone by -- not the Ku Klux Klan aspect, which he never mentions, but the capitalist-scourging aspect of William Jennings Bryan and the Farmer's Alliance.

In Frank's view, if Red Sea residents knew what was good for them, they would vote for capitalist-scourging Populists today. But they don't know what's good for them, Frank explains, because of "a species of derangement." The deranged people of the Midwest are no longer able to make "certain mental connections about the world," because those once-"reliable leftists" have been deluded into caring about moral issues.

I marveled at Frank's discovery of a strong leftist tradition in Kansas, a state that has voted for the Republicans in 30 of the 36 presidential elections since 1860, including twice against Franklin D. Roosevelt. And I thought maybe Bryan, a fundamentalist Christian who denounced Darwin's theories of evolution at the famous Scopes trial, might have a lot in common with some of the so-called values voters of 2004. But Frank kept me reading until it was too dark to read anymore.

Von Drehle erred in choosing Frank for his source on the subject - Frank is an idiot. But there's a history, there; the Prairie Populists and Grangers of the 1890's led to the Non-Partisan League and other Depression-era populist/radical groups that tried to radicalize the farm states in the thirties, which led to a legacy as diverse as our huge farm programs, or states as conservative as North Dakota operating instititions as socialistic as the State Bank and the State Mill and Elevator, or regions as Red as the northern plains sending legislators as Blue as George McGovern, Tom Daschle, Kent Conrad and Byron Dorgan to Washington.

Still, I'll give him a "B" for effort.

Von Drehle concludes, via noting that Kerry spent very little time and money in the Red states, virtually none on the Plains:

After a campaign in which the Democrat made very little effort to seek their votes, the Red Sea folks decided to cast their ballots in large numbers for George W. Bush. Something he said or did struck a chord with some note of their own political music. Maybe it was the feeling that bureaucrats just don't get it. Or the idea that elitists hold the heartland in contempt. Maybe it was the worry that traditions are under attack. Maybe it was the view that coastal culture is an enemy, not a friend, in the effort to raise children. For some, it was the feeling of authenticity and apparent horse sense. The attitude toward land and resources that comes from living amid an abundance of both. The significance of personal faith.

In short, I found ordinary people with various motivations, sundry stories, personal beliefs, custom-made decisions.

...

One afternoon, about 3 o'clock, we turned off Kansas highway 15, down a mud track in an expanse of nowhere. We stopped and got out of the car. The sun was low in the south; its rays arrived languidly and aslant through the gray, tufted stubble of a cornfield. When the engine stopped ticking, a lark began to sing nearby, and as my ears grew attuned to the silence I noticed steers bawling in the middle distance and a human voice, audible but indistinct, riding the wind toward us from a long way off. A pair of pheasants sauntered past without looking our way.

At the edge of a lion-tan pasture stood an old gate topped with a weathered W. But I guess we weren't in the mood for heavy-handed symbolism. Sometimes a W is just a W. Instead, I studied a small circle of grass covered with the feathers of a hawk-killed bird, and listened to the pianissimo hum of truck tires over a highway a mile distant.

Turning slowly where I stood, I took in the whole 360-degree horizon, which bisected the curve of sky like the base of a snow globe. And for a moment it felt like we were in a world apart, so distinct and separate did this lonely sheet of earth appear. But I knew that if we set off and kept going, we'd meet up eventually with Blue America. In a tangible sense, even after this bitter election, something connected this land to that one, something more durable than fear and loathing, though it was beyond my view. An industry has been set up to convince us otherwise, but I'm here to tell you that a person can get from there to here, and here to there. Maybe next time, the Democrats might give it a try.

In that light, I looked again, and the world seemed to float off in every direction toward new beginnings and fresh possibilities.

Von Drehle hints at an interesting question: Which is more likely to make the translation?

If John Kerry had tried to sell his message, and the message of Blue America, deep in the heart of the Plains, would it have resonated? Would it resonate more than a concerted, integrated Republican effort to sell conservative values in, say, the inner city? This past election saw, if not a sea change, at least some flaking in the traditional blue coalition; Hispanics and Jews crossed over to the GOP in record numbers.

Which message is more likely to cross over?

Posted by Mitch at January 17, 2005 08:08 AM | TrackBack