Blue-staters like yours truly regularly scratch our heads and puzzle over what makes those red-staters so obtuse and, well, wrong in their beliefs and political predilections. And don't you know the red-staters do exactly the same about us. How can you account for the Culture Wars? What, indeed, is the matter with Kansas?
Well, the best attempt at an explanation I've seen is in Steven Pinker's latest book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. It's chockfull of great ideas, but today I want to focus on one: just how did America get to the great Red-vs-Blue divide?
Our story, unsurprisingly, begins in Europe, where a violent, lawless culture based on serfs and feudal warlords was slowly replaced by centralized governments with the power to tamp down the chaos (often with harsh and repressive regimes). Murder was redefined as a crime against the state, and the populace learned to control their violent impulses toward "self-service justice" and instead seek redress in courts and other institutions.
At the same time, commerce and trade blossomed, with the known effect of reducing mortal conflict (you're less likely to kill someone if you depend on them for something you need).
Pinker calls these two phenomena the "Civilizing Process": basically, people learned to suppress their innate savage tendencies and acquire a "second nature" based on recognition of the state and its laws. The process is particularly effective in cities, where people live close together, commerce is rampant, and the law is never far away.
The big exception to this process occurs in remote, rugged areas where the state has trouble extending its control. Here, the old "Culture of Honor" prevails, and you must quickly and violently retaliate against any insult, unless you want everyone to walk all over you. There are no police or courts to enforce order and punish malefactors.
The first blue states were of course in New England—urbanized and prosperous, with a strong tradition of English law. The Southern red states were, by contrast, wild, remote, and settled by many Scots Irish herders, who brought the Culture of Honor with them and never felt the full influence of the Civilizing Process. The Far West was, if anything, even more remote and lawless, and self-service justice was about the only kind you could get.
With that setup, I'll let Pinker finish the story (p. 106):
An appreciation of the Civilizing Process in the American West and rural South helps to make sense of the American political landscape today. Many northern and coastal intellectuals are puzzled by the culture of their red state compatriots, with their embrace of guns, capital punishment, small government, evangelical Christianity, "family values," and sexual propriety. Their opposite numbers are just as baffled by the blue staters' timidity toward criminals and foreign enemies, their trust in government, their intellectualized secularism, and their tolerance of licentiousness. This so-called culture war, I suspect, is the product of a history in which white America took two different paths to civilization. The North is an extension of Europe and continued the court- and commerce-driven Civilizing Process that had been gathering momentum since the Middle Ages. The South and West preserved the culture of honor that sprang up in the anarchic parts of the growing country, balanced by their own civilizing forces of churches, families, and temperance.
I'll close with one other thought (p. 99) that bears on America's murder rate overall, which, while falling, is still very high compared with Europe's:
The historian Pieter Spierenburg has provocatively suggested that "democracy came too early" to America. In Europe, first the state disarmed the people and claimed a monopoly on violence, then the people took over the apparatus of the state. In America, the people took over the state before it had forced them to lay down their arms—which, as the Second Amendment famously affirms, they reserve the right to keep and bear. In other words Americans, and especially Americans in the South and West, never fully signed on to a social contract that would vest the government with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. In much of American history, legitimate force was also wielded by posses, vigilantes, lynch mobs, company police, detective agencies, and Pinkertons, and even more often kept as a prerogative of the individual.
So, next time you wonder what it is about the red state fixation on guns, God, and gays, there it is.