The Density Divide
8th July 2015
Steve Sailer thinks deep thoughts so that you don’t have to.
The concept of America being divided into sprawling red Republican regions and dense blue Democrat districts first became a cliché In November–December 2000. Over the past decade and a half I’ve probably thought as much about the underlying reasons as anybody, and in this column I’d like to speculate on an even more fundamental cause behind the red-blue divide.
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That the partisan divide is related to density is clear. My contribution in 2004–05 was to point out that the red-blue map is related to affordability of family formation, a topic first explicated by Benjamin Franklin in the 1750s but largely ignored in recent decades.
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But perhaps there are even more fundamental reasons for the density divide. The central red vs. blue identity gap falls between the Core vs. the Fringe of American life: The Obama coalition is a crazy quilt of identity groups who can be held together only by stoking fear and loathing of Core Americans.
In my terminology, the Filling vs the Crust.
July 10th, 2015 at 11:36
“The Obama coalition is a crazy quilt of identity groups who can be held together only by stoking fear and loathing of Core Americans.”
Whereas the (self-identified) “core” can be held together only by stoking fear and loathing of the “fringe”.
Without darkness, there is no light…