Re: People like what they’re used to, was Let’s Build
On Oct 17, 2006, at 4:44 PM, James Heartfield wrote:
Doug, what means:
“And population density correlates with voting patterns: the thinner the population, the more Republican” ?
What would the causal links be to explain this correlation? Is it
that low density causes republicanism? That would seem to be a
spatial determinism as crass as the genetic determinsm that causes
Europeans to huddle together. (Maybe the cause is the other way
around: voting republican makes you unpopular and people don’t want
to live near to you.) I believe there is a particular theory that
white flight consolidates individuation and predisposes people to
republicanism, but I did not think anyone here would be dozy enough
to swallow that mechanistic view (which was first retailed by Kevin
Philips in The Emerging Republican Majority, back when he was a
Nixon advisor, but has since been given a left-wing twist by
Danielson etc. etc. ).Would the explanation not be in the failure of the Democratic Party
to relate to the aspirations that it originally served? Having
helped to create the institutions that helped people out of the
cities, like the FHA, it failed to create institutions that
corresponded to their ambitions once they had moved to the suburbs.
Pace Gore, the role of the - what… ‘centre-left’? - is to promote
austerity not aspiration. That they failed to win the majority of
the country over, when the alternative is so gruesome is telling.
Blame the Democrats, not the suburbanites.
It’s an empirical fact that density correlates with voting patterns
http://www.princeton.edu/~rvdb/JAVA/election2004/. In fact, the Red
State/Blue State distinction is at its base a function of the
relative prominence of metropolitan vs. non-metropolitan populations
within states. From my observation of American life, there’s often a
rather anti-social attitude behind the impulse to locate yourself far
from your neighbors, and an anxiety about diversity and difference.
It’s not unrelated to the auto industry’s marketing research that
shows people who prefer SUVs to be aggressive and anti-social in
their attitudes: they see the outside world as hostile and
threatening, and want to have a thick layer of armor between
themselves and it. And I don’t know why you think someone has to be
“dozy” to accept the Phillips theory on white flight - Phillips is a
very smart fellow who knows his social psychology, and the Republican
party has had much electoral success in trading on it. There’s a lot
to blame the Democrats for, but the propensity of low-density areas
to vote Republican is a response to the Republican electoral message,
which is pious, aggressive, individualistic, and often racially and
sexually bigoted. Of course, this doesn’t apply to everyone living in
rural areas, but it is a measure of central tendency.
Doug