Abstract:
I found an article talking about how states are increasingly becoming too partisan to be competitive in Presidenital elections. This got me thinking about the state of the country as a whole-- are we (and by 'we' I mean the country as a whole, and not Democrats specifically) becoming so determined to be right and so unable to concede that the other side can be anything other than dead wrong. Have we gone so far in developing separe worldviews that rational comrpomise and discourse between the two sides has become impossible, and does this mean that the country as a unified whole is living on borrowed time? Or is this just a temporary trend that will reverse itself? I'd love to hear what other people have to say about this.
So I came across this article online
[http://www.fairvote.org/?page=1555]
The basic upshot of the article is that the number of swing states--the number of states that'll be really close in a close election--has dramatically shrunk over the last twenty years. Whereas in 1960--the ultra-close Kennedy Nixon election--about half the states, including most of the larger states, were seriously competitive, and only a couple of small states were too partisan to not be worth campaigning in. Increasingly over the last several elections, though, less of the country has become politically competitive--only about a third of the electoral votes last year--and far more of the country is rigidly uncompetitive--about a third of the electoral votes, as opposed to less than a tenth during the 1960 election.
(A digression for campaign junkies: the article also has a list of probable '08 swing states. Missouri, Colorado and (somewhat surprisingly) Virginia are on the list. Washington, Oregon and Maine are off.)
I see little things wandering around through life that seem to back up this notion that more and more people are being dragged out to the political fringes. I'm sure Rush Limbaugh would rather eat his own mother than admit that a liberal was right about something (actually, to judge by his girth, this has already occurred). I can remember paging through the `Politically Incorrect' (read: Republican) guide to US History at a Barnes and Noble recently and spotting the following arguments 1) the civil rights laws of the 1960s were unnecessary because segregation would have just gone away on its own, and 2) the 14th Amendment (which ensures that the government can't discriminate against you) was a horrible, evil piece of legislation. I see less and less tendency, especially on the right (but also on the left now and again) to compromise, to willingly admit that the other side may every now and again be right about something.
In a sense I feel that we've gone from being two sides of a national debate to two different sports teams locked in a zero sum game, where neither side can ever admit that they're wrong because that would mean giving the other side free points. And I have a hard time imagining how a country like that can hold together or it's people remain sane for very long.
For example what will happen in the red states when, as is practically inevitable, the US pulls out of Iraq, unable to further endure the strain on the army, and the country collapses? What happens when we lose the Iraq war? How will Republicans react? What bizarre stories will they tell themselves to avoid admitting that we were right and Bush was wrong? Will whatever frail connection they retain to the real world be snapped forever? Will they concoct an elaborate scheme about liberals somehow stabbing the nation in the back, like they did with Vietnam? And if they somehow try to convince themselves (as I think is very likely) that we're responsible for everything that's gone wrong with Iraq, how long will it be before a large number of red states decide that they don't want to be part of the same country as crazy gay marrying liberals in San Francisco, or San Franciscans decide that they don't want to be stuck in the same country with lunatic fantasists in Wyoming.
So I've got to ask--and I suspect that the people on this site may have some interesting thoughts on this topic--is the country coming apart at the seams? Or is this just some phase that the country goes through periodically? Or both? (Hell the country already came apart at the seams once--if Abe Lincoln hadn't been willing to reconquer the South...) If so, how do we get back to a point where we're not red staters or blue staters but Americans?