The great “convergence” of the mid-20th century may have been an anomaly.
The CNN article is about how Republicans are imposing their agenda on the states, and will on the nation if they regain total control of the government. The article at The Atlantic gives the back story on how we got to this point. Unfortunately it’s behind a paywall — but I was able to access it by opening it in a private browser window. It complements the CNN article with some Why behind the What.
Here’s a few excerpts with some commentary.
It may be time to stop talking about “red” and “blue” America. That’s the provocative conclusion of Michael Podhorzer, a longtime political strategist for labor unions and the chair of the Analyst Institute, a collaborative of progressive groups that studies elections. In a private newsletter that he writes for a small group of activists, Podhorzer recently laid out a detailed case for thinking of the two blocs as fundamentally different nations uneasily sharing the same geographic space.
“When we think about the United States, we make the essential error of imagining it as a single nation, a marbled mix of Red and Blue people,” Podhorzer writes. “But in truth, we have never been one nation. We are more like a federated republic of two nations: Blue Nation and Red Nation. This is not a metaphor; it is a geographic and historical reality.”
emphasis added
It’s possible to quibble with this — there’s many ways to slice up America. Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America by David Hackett Fischer argues differing regional cultures imported from England continue to shape politics in America today, with “attitudes toward education, government, gender, and violence, on which differences between American regions are greater than between European nations.”
Be that as it may, the point is America has always been divided at a fundamental level — but that gap was closing for a long time in what Brownstein refers to as the Great Convergence. That is, despite differences, until recently the two sides shared common agreement on a number of things that was larger than the areas of disagreement.
...The increasing divergence—and antagonism—between the red nation and the blue nation is a defining characteristic of 21st-century America. That’s a reversal from the middle decades of the 20th century, when the basic trend was toward greater convergence.
One element of that convergence came through what legal scholars call the “rights revolution.” That was the succession of actions from Congress and the Supreme Court, mostly beginning in the 1960s, that strengthened the floor of nationwide rights and reduced the ability of states to curtail those rights. (Key moments in that revolution included the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts and the Supreme Court decisions striking down state bans on contraception, interracial marriage, abortion, and, much later, prohibitions against same-sex intimate relations and marriage.)
Simultaneously, the regional differences were moderated by waves of national investment, including the New Deal spending on rural electrification, the Tennessee Valley Authority, agricultural price supports, and Social Security during the 1930s, and the Great Society programs that provided federal aid for K–12 schools and higher education, as well as Medicare and Medicaid.
Or, to put it plainly, these are Democratic success stories that remain increasingly opposed by Republicans. Kevin Drum in 2012 observed that red state grievances are rooted in the fact that for conservative whites, these developments are all extremely upsetting and are seen as coming at their expense, whether for reasons of racism, religious bigotry, or just because the world is changing and they don’t like it.
...We tend to mock conservatives for endlessly keeping the culture war alive, but the truth is that it was we liberals who started it. We’re the ones who, among many, many other things, banned school prayer, legalized abortion, fought for gender equality, and are currently pressing to legalize gay marriage. You’ll be unsurprised to learn that I think we were right to do all these things and right to keep fighting for them. But make no mistake: we’re the ones demanding change, and we’re the ones who keep fighting for it. Every time I hear some liberal complaining about the way that conservatives keep turning everything into a new front in the culture war, I feel a twinge of chagrin. Why are we complaining? We’re the ones who really own the culture war, and we should be proud of it. It was a war worth starting and a war worth winning.
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More from Brownstein:
The impact of these investments (as well as massive defense spending across both periods) on states that had historically spent little on public services and economic development helped steadily narrow the gap in per capita income between the states of the old Confederacy and the rest of the country from the 1930s until about 1980. That progress, though, stopped after 1980, and the gap remained roughly unchanged for the next three decades. Since about 2008, Podhorzer calculates, the southern states at the heart of the red nation have again fallen further behind the blue nation in per capita income.
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Point One:
1980 marks the start of the Reagan Revolution. That was the open declaration of Republican War on Government. Charles P. Pierce refers to it as the time when the Republican Party first “ate the monkey brains”. (Read the whole thing.)
Ultimately, as we all wrapped ourselves in good intentions, a prion disease was eating away at the country’s higher functions. One of the ways you can acquire a prion disease is to eat right out of its skull the brains of an infected monkey. We are now seeing the country reeling and jabbering from the effects of the prion disease, but it was during the time of Reagan that the country ate the monkey brains.
Also see Pierce on the GOP government shutdown in 2013: The Reign of Morons is Here. They have not gotten any better since then; quite the contrary.
Kevin Drum wrote a summary in 2018 of what the Republican Party has been doing ever since Reagan, and it is accelerating.
So this is where we are. The Republican Party can’t win using ordinary methods. On the process side, they can win only by inflating the white vote via gerrymandering, cracked-and-packed districts, and ruthless black voter suppression. On the policy side, they can win only with heavy dollops of strident and outright bigotry against Mexicans, Muslims, blacks, Hispanics, Chinese, and anyone else who comes along. Even Canadians will do in a pinch.
Today, the Republican Party exists for one and only one purpose: to pass tax cuts for the rich and regulatory rollbacks for corporations. They accomplish this using one and only method: unapologetically racist and bigoted appeals to win the votes of the heartland riff-raff they otherwise treat as mere money machines for their endless mail-order cons.
Point Two:
One of the things Brownstein notes is that red states are doing worse. Complaints about having no good jobs, government paying people not to work, taxes being blamed for a lousy economy, government spending kicking up inflation obscure the truth.
They are doing worse because Republican policies and Republican rule are based on a lie that claims it’s all about smaller government and more freedom, while it’s really about using government to transfer wealth upwards and the freedom is freedom to be ripped off by the wealthy.
Republicans are masters of distraction, with lies about immigrants, people of color, “tax and spend liberals”, elites, scientists, teachers, public education, the ‘war’ on religion, etc. All to change the subject away from how the end of anti-trust enforcement, the lie of trickle down economics, things like out-sourcing, down-sizing, off-shoring, the destruction of unions — how all of these things have left them poorer and angry at the wrong people for the wrong reasons.
The rise of inequality to record levels in America is behind much of the anger and misery in red states. The Spirit Level by Wilkinson and Pickett documents with extensive statistics and other data a simple observation with huge implications.
The greater the economic distance between those at the top and those at the bottom of a developed society, the worse the quality of life is by every measure for everyone from top to bottom.
Many seemingly separate problems for society can be most effectively tackled by starting with reducing inequality as a focus. Bring that down and everything improves: school outcomes, crime, drugs, teen pregnancy, health outcomes, mental health... It is difficult to read the book, look at the examples, and not become angry and frustrated that there seems to be so little awareness of this in our politics and our media.
It's not hard to understand and there is a huge body of evidence to back it up — but discussing inequality and doing something about it is verboten in America. (See Joe Manchin.) Government spending programs for necessary infrastructure and other needs can’t be done, because it would cause inflation. (See Joe Manchin.) Trying to give people a living wage just can’t be done. (See Joe Manchin.) Tackling inflation by imposing wind fall profit taxes on companies that are seeing record revenue while continuing to raise prices because they can — can’t be done. (See Joe Manchin.)
Joe Manchin is cited because he is the most visible roadblock for Democrats in the Senate, but it needs to be kept in mind he would not have such power if the Senate Republicans weren’t all marching in lock step on these issues. The result is this, as Brownstein notes:
But the big story remains that blue states are benefiting more as the nation transitions into a high-productivity, 21st-century information economy, and red states (apart from their major metropolitan centers participating in that economy) are suffering as the powerhouse industries of the 20th century—agriculture, manufacturing, and fossil-fuel extraction—decline.
The gross domestic product per person and the median household income are now both more than 25 percent greater in the blue section than in the red, according to Podhorzer’s calculations. The share of kids in poverty is more than 20 percent lower in the blue section than red, and the share of working households with incomes below the poverty line is nearly 40 percent lower. Health outcomes are diverging too. Gun deaths are almost twice as high per capita in the red places as in the blue, as is the maternal mortality rate. The COVID vaccination rate is about 20 percent higher in the blue section, and the per capita COVID death rate is about 20 percent higher in the red. Life expectancy is nearly three years greater in the blue (80.1 years) than the red (77.4) states. (On most of these measures, the purple states, fittingly, fall somewhere in between.)
There’s a reason red state voters don’t like the America they are living in. God help the Republican Party if they ever figure out what that real reason is — but the fleeced don’t like to admit they’ve been conned and right wing media and the GOP hand them a constant stream of scapegoats and distractions.
If Republicans regain control of the national government, the above quote is what the future of America looks like, with a heavy helping of civil disorder and increasing Climate disruption while the rich continue to get richer. Brownstein warns:
It seems unlikely that the Trump-era Republicans installing the policy priorities of their preponderantly white and Christian coalition across the red states will be satisfied just setting the rules in the places now under their control. Podhorzer, like Mason and Grumbach, believes that the MAGA movement’s long-term goal is to tilt the electoral rules in enough states to make winning Congress or the White House almost impossible for Democrats. Then, with support from the GOP-appointed majority on the Supreme Court, Republicans could impose red-state values and programs nationwide, even if most Americans oppose them. The “MAGA movement is not stopping at the borders of the states it already controls,” Podhorzer writes. “It seeks to conquer as much territory as possible by any means possible.”
The Trump model, in other words, is more the South in 1850 than the South in 1950, more John Calhoun than Richard Russell. (Some red-state Republicans are even distantly echoing Calhoun in promising to nullify—that is, defy—federal laws with which they disagree.) That doesn’t mean that Americans are condemned to fight one another again as they did after the 1850s. But it does mean that the 2020s may bring the greatest threats to the country’s basic stability since those dark and tumultuous years.
Fasten your seatbelts and get ready to dig in. Anyone who still tries to tell you there’s no difference between the two parties is either an idiot or is trying to sell you something.
The mechanisms behind the great convergence can be applied again. You’d think the statistics just in the quote about the differences between red and blue states would give Democrats plenty of talking points. Maybe Biden isn't up to Fireside Chats, but some effort along those lines would not hurt — although telling the truth about Republicans is considered partisan and uncivil. Democrats need to tell the whiners “Deal with it.”
We can more than justify big government spending programs by declaring a Climate Emergency and setting up national programs that would positively impact every state — including red ones — to both reduce emissions and increase adaptation.
For example Solutionary Rail provides a framework for one such effort. The Moonshot Modeshift plan alone would make a big difference, is easy to understand — and the current meltdown in the rail industry provides a big opportunity to do it. There’s no shortage of needs that must be addressed.
The world is made by the people who show up for the job. Time to show up. We don’t lack for places to get to work.