Red State, Blue State
Back-to-back posts on Tapped that are pretty good.
Nick Confessore suggests there is something to the "bad popular culture" theme or meme after all. Distrusting or disapproving of a lot of TV and movies, objecting to public immorality, seems to be about the only domestic "issue" on which a majority of Americans actually agreed with Bush over Kerry.
As I've said, it is hard to believe there was such a great difference between Bush, father of two New York party girls, and Kerry, father of pretty studious types, on the issue of "does popular culture go too far?" But voters seem to have decided there was a real difference, and John Ellis mentioned this right after the election in his somewhat rude phrase "the pimp and ho culture."
Perhaps Kerry's events with rock stars were generally a mistake, if voters assume that people in entertainment, like theatre people in the old days, are not reliable morally? Confessore thinks Democrats would be foolish to ignore all this.
Even more subtle observations from Grance Franke-Ruta. She says there may actually be more indications of social decline, including divorce and violence, in red states than blue. The insistence of red states on law and order, Christian fundamentalism, and "return" to social norms, then, may not be simply hyprocisy, but self-defence.
A further twist: the violence may be concentrated in the "blue" or Democratic-voting big cities within red states. The Republican-voting suburbanites and rural folk may have moved out of the corrupt city, and may want some kind of crackdown on "them."
In the case of the deep South, Glenn Reynolds linked to a discussion a few months ago about how the qualities that seem most Southern today, including church-going, were decidedly northern, even associated with New England, and decidedly non-Southern, a fairly short time ago. Is it possible that as segregation came under attack, the white South wanted to be able to say: nobody here but us patriotic Christians?
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