Red State, Blue State Blues

I need some Stevie Ray Vaughn playing in the background for this one.  Michael Lind, writing in Prospect Magazine (UK), discusses the Red State Sneer on the lips of the more "cosmopolitan" liberal Democrats.  His argument is basically that Democrats, if they wish to be a majority party once again, will have to learn to speak to the red states, their voters and their values.  He fails to advocate those values, however, instead encouraging Democrats to understand them and speak to them, but not encouraging Democrats to embrace them.  His discussion of the demographics that make this important is accurate, though later the arguments unravel.

Many Democrats blame the unenlightened people of red-state America for John Kerry's defeat. But most working-class Americans remain politically centrist and a rising number simply want to live in the fast-growing suburbs of middle America. Liberals should stop sneering at the people they aspire to lead...

Regarding the silliness in the argument that wealthier blue states should stop subsidizing the poorer red states, he counters:

[D[o liberals really want to argue that the federal government should not tax rich people in Connecticut to help poor people in New Mexico?

And then there's Taranto's 'Roe Effect', the tendency for blue states to have fewer babies.  This is due, in his formulation, both to more abortions and more career-oriented women.

According to the authors of The Great Divide: "If our analysis is correct, demographics will slowly bring the current Republican ascendancy to an end, even in retro America." This deserves to go down in history in a collection of famous last words. The truth is that the demographic prospects for blue-state Democrats are grim.

Phillip Longman of the New America Foundation has pointed out that in terms of fertility rates the red states had a 12-point advantage over the blue states in 2004. This partly reflects the higher fertility of Latino immigrants in red states like Texas, but among white Americans fertility differences reflect a gulf between the religious and the secular. In largely Mormon Utah, there are 90 children for every 1,000 women of child-bearing age, compared to only 49 in the socially liberal Vermont of Howard Dean. According to Longman, Bush won a majority in 2000 in states with above-replacement levels of 2.11 children per woman, while the Gore-Kerry states looked like Europe, with a below-replacement fertility rate. Retro America is outbreeding metro America.

And the migratory patterns of those Americans who seek economic opportunity merit a look:

Not only are blue-state Americans not having many babies, but also many of them are migrating to the red states of the south and the interior. From 1988, when Bush Sr was elected president, to 2004, when Bush Jr was re-elected, 27 electoral college votes have shifted to the sunbelt states. In 1960, the last time that a Massachusetts politician won the White House (John F Kennedy, with a Texan on the ticket), Massachusetts had more presidential electoral votes than Florida, and Illinois had more electoral votes than Texas.

Later in the article he strays into economics, and his reasoning begins to fail.  In this section you'll notice a dearth of facts to back the assertions, compared with the demographics discussion.  For example, he states that:

It is true that the Republican conservative agenda is harmful to working Americans, but the Democrats have failed to provide much of an alternative.

Instead of cutting spending, the strategists of the Republican right have opted under Bush to cut taxes. By salami tactics, including a series of tax cuts for the rich and the increasing exemption of savings and capital gains from taxation, the right is moving towards its unannounced goal: the conversion of the US into a utopia for capitalists, in which regressive payroll and consumption taxes (including a possible national sales tax) replace the progressive income tax system.

This is simply false.  The wealthiest 5% have continued to carry the personal income tax burden in the United States, paying an ever increasing percentage of taxes collected, even after the Bush tax cut.  He then goes on to remark that the Clinton-Gore-Kerry Democrats "offer mostly symbolic micro-proposals - a tiny refundable tax credit here, a small increase in funding for a programme there."  I think he's forgetting about the feint jab of the middle-class tax cut, followed by the solid right cross of the biggest tax increase in history, in 1993.  It would hardly have been possible for the Democrats to raise taxes further, especially with a Republican Congress that was the reward for that tax increase.  And perhaps he's forgetting about the attempt (and continued desire) to nationalize 1/7 of the economy.

He then strays into a lengthy discussion of "God, gays and guns," in which he takes a cynical view of Bush in each area.  Suffice it to say that that cynical view is interpretive and speculative, and there is little evidence to support it.  For examples:

Republicans have successfully persuaded many formerly Democratic voters that imposing cumbersome new regulations on hunters in rural areas and suburbs is yet another annoying attempt at social engineering by the coastal elite, rather than an urgently needed reform.

Is gun reform urgently needed?  What evidence supports that position?  He gives none, merely stating it as accepted truth.

At the same time, a majority of Americans oppose redefining marriage to include gay couples - but so do a majority of Europeans, to judge from the fact that only a few European countries have redefined marriage in this way. Republican gay-baiting may have galvanised religious right voters, but only 22 per cent of voters claimed that they voted on the basis of moral values, (although of these, four out of five voted for Bush).

There is simply no support for the assertion that Republicans "gay-baited" in any organized fashion, and who says that for those who voted on moral issues the gay issue was the prime one.  Perhaps it was belief in God, or the morality of freeing 50 million people.  Those are certainly moral issues.  In addition, even Lind admits that a majority of Americans and Europeans do not favor gay marriage.

But it was a political mistake for Bush to say during the 2000 Republican primaries that Jesus was the "philosopher" who had most influenced him. Since then, when addressing the broader public, Bush has been careful to speak of the Almighty rather than Jesus and of God-given human rights rather than sin and salvation.

Although I haven't Googled or Lexis-Nexis'd it, I doubt that Bush, in any public forum, has spoken of governmental policy in terms of "sin and salvation" ever.  His references to religion in public speech have been consistent, and coherent, a luxury which is not available to Democrats who must pay homage to far-left very secular supporters.

He concludes that:

Conservatives, a minority among American voters, have managed to put together a majority coalition because they have learned to speak the populist language of the vast region between the Appalachians and the Rockies.

This is wrong on two counts.  While conservatives are a minority of self-described voters, liberals are an even smaller minority.  And conservatives haven't just spoken the language of the majority.  They have put together that majority because they openly support the principles discussed above, and not just pay them lip service.