“I’m sick to death of seeing things from
Tight-lipped condescending mama’s little chauvinists
All I want is the truth – just gimmie some truth”
--John Lennon
Among the most puzzling by-products of Tuesday night’s rejection of the Republican project is the near-universal assumption that conservatives will now engage in introspection regarding the severity of their movement. Nothing in the history of the modern Right suggests that this will happen. A much more plausible guess is that these folks will double down yet again on the most alienating aspects of their platform as they burn hot and slow with the traumatic memory of defeat at the hands of an appalling tapestry of limousine liberals, single-issue queers, urban sluts, Euro-loving social science majors, shiftless blacks, and, spectacularly, Latinos. The Right’s great metabolism for myth – which aided in both producing the outcome of this election and rendering it so shocking to FoxNews Nation – also explains why no soul-searching is forthcoming. For tales of "blue moats of minorities and comfy singles," read on.
The Republicans’ ideological bunker may have been badly shelled on Tuesday night, but as the Dittoheads emerge from the rubble, they are already gathering the myths that will form the new building blocks: Romney ran out of money (notwithstanding the fact that his campaign was desperate to find places to spend it in the home stretch); Chris Christie delivered the election to Obama (ignoring the overwhelming evidence of the now-vindicated poll aggregators, showing that Obama’s lead had been solidifying well before Sandy’s arrival); Romney was undone by dishonest negative advertising (requiring an impressive degree of myopia regarding the mendacious marketing flowing in the other direction); Democrats are low-information voters (but not, apparently, low-information secessionists, etc.); Election results are skewed by liberal ballot shenanigans (the list of serious people who have debunked this one approaches the length of a small-town phonebook), and so on. It’s exhausting.
Which brings us to a woeful little piece in the Wall Street Journal by Daniel Henninger (“Obama’s Divided Nation” Wall Street Journal Nov. 8, 2012, A19). In rapid succession, Henninger offers a series of inane, tired tropes: (1) through redistributive politics, Obama unilaterally divided a country that had been (wait for it) unified in 2008; (2) Paul Ryan and his poor, earnest House Republican colleagues were bullied and ultimately stood up by the President after they offered a sensible, good-faith compromise on deficit reduction (utter nonsense); (3) signing the Affordable Care Act, a series of moderate insurance regulatory reforms approved by the House and a filibuster-proof Senate majority “was madness for our political system” (despite the fact that it represented a significant compromise from the party’s core “ask” and was one of only a few major initiatives pursued by a President who had been elected with 375 electoral votes); and (4) the DoJ’s opposition to self-evidently racist anti-suffrage legislation – and NOT such legislation itself – was racially divisive. Having imbibed this Kool-Aid sampler, Henninger then shifts into a slightly higher (and clunkier) gear, accusing President Obama of “us[ing] his office to blow up the country itself.” Alas, devotion to myth can render language a dumb, blunt instrument, even in the hands of a highly decorated writer.
None of this, however, distinguishes Henninger’s piece from the painful, awkward work-product of the conservative intelligentsia in the days after the election. The real clue that Henninger will be offering something uniquely stupid is the visual aid he uses to instruct the reader about “Obama’s Divided Nation”: the standard electoral map. This image has very limited utility for almost any thoughtful argument about the current state of American politics. Yes, each state ended up filling in either Red or Blue. Yes, there are Blue accretions around the East Coast Megalopolis, the Great Lakes and the West Coast. Yes, the Old Confederacy is overwhelmingly Red and one can walk from Savannah, Georgia to Glacier National Park without setting foot in a Blue State. But so what? The 1976 electoral map is almost a negative image of 2012’s, but conservatives view (and revile) Democrats today in much the same vein as they remember Jimmy Carter. Furthermore, would Henninger view the 2000 and 2004 electoral maps -- which are more evenly divided and contain geographic clusters nearly identical to 2012’s -- as evidence of George W. Bush’s “divisiveness”? Of course not.
Given the ultimate destination of Henninger’s essay, a more appropriate graphic would have been the electoral map showing the county-by-county votes. Henninger laments that “[w]ith every election, the southern and central states drift further from the coastal sophisticates obsessed with social issues, and from the heavily unionized industrial states around the Great Lakes.” Setting aside the lazy “sophisticates” epitaph and the nonsensical claim that such voters remotely approach the single-minded, froth-speckled obsession with social issues of the Religious Right, this claim is simply not true. Virginians and North Carolinians are full-throated Southerners, and yet they are (albeit unevenly) pulling their states toward Purple. Georgia and Tennessee and Montana may follow within a generation, just as Blue Wisconsin and Pennsylvania have shown themselves quite willing to elect statewide conservative candidates.
Henninger knows this, so he concludes his piece by explaining away the complication with a final barrage of myth based on one of the biggest whoppers of them all – the irreconcilable conflict between The Country and The City: “…[o]pen up those Obama states and you’ll discover divisions: Their big-vote city centers sit like blue moats of minorities and comfy singles who are surrounded by red counties of married couples trying to cope.” The basic observation here is correct: urban counties break blue and rural counties break red. But Henninger is wrong to suggest that this phenomenon applies exclusively to “Obama states” (see, e.g., Indianapolis, New Orleans, etc.) and he offers no clue as to why Obama should be blamed for it (rather than, for example, a constellation of variables with long historical tails). Henninger also tellingly views this “division” as a one-way street; that ocean of solid red counties somehow represents the status quo and the baseline, while urban agglomerations represent The Other. Never mind that cities have reflected the greatest aspirations and achievements of civilized man for ten thousand years. For Henninger, they are new and disruptive. Henninger here is simply re-casting the fantasy of the pastoral "Real America" peddled by Sarah Palin as she spent every available moment and every available RNC dollar basking and shopping in Manhattan between Red State red meat applause lines. Divisive? You betcha.
Much more importantly, it turns out that the great country-city chasm upon which Henninger relies is undermined by an even better map – one that reflects the relative margins on a county-by-county basis:
Purple America, 2012
Fatally for Henninger’s worldview, this more detailed map shows that there is in fact a whole lot of purple out there, from interior suburbs to the remote reaches of the continent. Henninger’s myth of stark, diametric opposition between city-dwelling “minorities and comfy singles” and “red counties of married couples trying to cope” is also contradicted by common experience. There are, of course, plenty of suburban, exurban and rural minorities out there, plenty of un-comfy singles and married couples trying to cope in the (gasp) city. Those “comfy” college-educated city kids Henninger probably imagines Netflixing their lives away while easily absorbing huge Whole Foods bills? They emerged from college into a BushCrash-painted employment desert, the bleakness and harshness of which surpasses the imagination of most working-age people alive. They will endure a hundred trials by fire before they make their first 401(k) contributions. Henninger’s sainted rural married couples aren’t the only ones trying to cope. They aren’t the only ones scratching and clawing and contributing – not by a very, very long shot.
But don’t tell the myth makers; rumor has it that Rubio is already making a move in Iowa for 2016.
Wed Nov 14, 2012 at 3:30 PM PT: Although this diary attracted almost zero attention, I did want to update it with a yet more detailed and more meaningful electoral map that I came across today:
Another Look at Purple America, 2012