Even though you can still manage to sell
books about it, the red/blue cultural divide is a tired animal to flog these days. Liberals don't get the conservatives' loyalties, and conservatives don't get the liberals' priorities. There is, to tread old ground, a canyon between rural and urban values.
At a glance, rural values don't seem to pair with affluence, but I want to suggest that wealth is poorly measured. I was in the Salt Lake valley in Utah last year, and it's an amazing place: flats as far as the eye can see, giving way to abrupt mountains to circle the whole plateau; it's a valley all filled up and flat with ancient sediment, and, of course, a great big lake (the remains of a much bigger one). There are places in that valley where you can look 360 degrees around you and see no almost no signs of other humans. There are numerous industrial chemical facilities out there, including a military proving ground, all of which the locals bear in an easy stride. Why? because they are not really all that close, and, consequently, are easy to forget. Only the mountains do much looming, and out there, your immediate environment is purely your own. That, folks, is luxury, American style.
Although Salt Lake City votes urban blue, the rest of the state is stridently Republican. Driving from the city around the surrounding basin, I was struck by the splendid emptiness of it all, but it's changing. Growing. Instant little McMansion colonies are sprouting up in the sticks, like pockets of infection in otherwise healthy tissue. My guide told me how the commuting trend there has reversed in the recent past: people used to work in the plants in the boonies and live in the city; now they work in the city and drive in from the burbs. I shudder to think that the outskirts of Salt Lake are not inviolate at all, that they just happen to be 20 years behind the suburbs of D.C. What a(nother) waste.
Growing up in suburban Connecticut, the trend was further in history but mercifully slower. As a kid, there was still plenty of reminder of last century's farms, as well as last century's mills. No shortage of nostalgia for them either, as each beloved local landmark got inevitably plowed under or retrofitted to make tract lots and two-car garages, filling up with sprawl the old divide between the crumbling mountains of industry and agriculture.
Understanding this trend isn't rocket science, whatever David Brooks may think.* There are just too many people here (and everywhere), and lacking the incentive to concentrate, they follow the natural human urge to maximize the distance between themselves and their neighbors. You're closer in spirit to your neighbors if you don't have to see them as much. Maybe you can't get that comfortable maximum of many acres, but you do what you can.
I don't know where planned growth falls on the liberal/conservative axis (though I suspect it follows "environmentalism"), but it's clearly a modern necessity. Some counter to the (in hindsight) incredibly misguided federal highway program is long past due. The luxury of their sparse populations and easily-governed communities is an advantage that red counties guard jealously and mislabel as "values." (Small government is really easy if you aggressively keep your population small.) In this light, it's perhaps not surprising that "values" types associate with old-wealth conservatives, who are protectively conserving their own financial expanses and misconstruing it as ideology.
Though I can hardly blame them, and wouldn't assert that the red philosophy is cynically held (nor even entirely without merit), it's ultimately a selfish one, an outlook that's furthermore unsustainable if we don't stop reproducing like bunnies all over the globe. The Salt Lake region is flat because of millenia of prehistoric lake sediment filling up the bottom of the valley, inexorably and inevitably. Fighting growth is like trying to unsettle the silt, like trying to push rain back into the air. People will keep trickling on in and filling up those valleys for as long as people enjoy reproduction.
There's still something wrong with Kansas, I'm afraid.
Keifus
* Note: I endorse neither of these books, nor even have any particular desire to read them.