I've written recently about the need for Democrats to do a better job of communicating with middle America about "values." But if there is any condescension from blue staters toward red staters, there is certainly plenty of it flowing the other way as well. Josh Marshall makes an interesting point: red state hatred of the blue states may be linked to irrational notions of violated honor -- call it
the Zell Miller factor:
Divorce, out-of-wedlock birth, poverty, murder, incidence of preventable disease --- go down the list and you'll see that they are all highest in the reddest states and lowest in the bluest. ...
Broadly speaking, New England and the parts of the country originally settled by New Englanders have low murder rates --- some only a fraction of the national averages. The South on the other hand, and the parts of the country originally settled by Southerners, have higher murder rates. (The highest homicide rates are in the Old Southwest --- Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas.) ...
In the North, where murder rates are higher in urban centers, they tend to track with the commission of felonies.
In other words, people get killed by people who are in the process of committing felonies --- whether those be drug sales, muggings, robberies gone bad, organized crime, or something else. But in the Southern states, where murder rates are higher in small towns and rural areas, this isn't the case. Rather than happening in the process of committing other crimes, these murders tend to be rooted in what are best described as violations of honor, personal slights that escalate into violence or in the simplest sense, rage. ...
Coming out of this election we hear again and again that folks in the Blue states have to give up their attitude of condescension toward those in the Red. The story comes in different flavors and intensities, ranging from admonitions to `reach out' to folks in the Red states to more acidy claims that folks in the Blue states need to get over their alleged hatred of religion and Red state culture.
At some level, something like this is certainly necessary. I can do the math as well as anyone. And what these last two elections have shown (particularly this last one) is that if the country is divided more or less evenly, that `more or less' isn't working in our (i.e., the Blue states) favor. We're in the minority for the moment, even if it's a close run thing. And Democrats can't keep going into elections in which so many states are simply out of play. As I wrote a couple days ago, Democrats need to find a way to put a good half dozen more states into play in every election. ...
But the bad feeling of Red State America toward the Blue is just as often expressed as contempt, moral denunciation or simple rage. To the extent that one hears Blue Staters dissing Red Staters as holy-rolling trailer park denizens, the Red staters routinely portray their fellow countrymen as corrupt, deviant, rootless perverts who express their flipflopper-dom by oscillating between being limp-wristed whiners on the one hand and signing up to work for Osama bin Laden as terrorist fifth-columnists on the other.
More commentary at The Situation Room
