Showdown or Surrender
14th December 2020
There is no longer a Southern gentry with values and lifestyles and dialect that are distinct from those of the old Northeastern patrician elite. The former regional oligarchies have fused into a single homogeneous national overclass, mostly hereditary but partly meritocratic. Its geographically mobile, careerist members attend the same selective private and public universities, speak the same homogenized non-regional elite dialect, read the same newspapers and ‘zines, watch the same TV shows and movies, follow the same fashions and have the same diets.
There are no red and blue states. The most accurate maps of voting are county maps, not state maps. And the county maps show that the major partisan division, in every region of the U.S., is between urban cores and everywhere else. Outside of densely populated metro areas, California is red. Most metro areas in Texas are blue. Because cities and counties are mere creations of state governments, the moment that politicians representing a slight majority of statewide voters capture power in state government they can use that power to overrule local governments everywhere in the state. This means that, once a majority of voters in a few large metropolitan areas capture a state legislature and governor’s office, there may be no way for their exurban and small-town rivals to fight back.