Topical thread Feb.3 2010 Pop. density and idealogy
reader sammy submits this question:
Population Density and Ideology
Sammy compared the famous Red/Blue electoral map (by county) with a map of Population Density
and found pretty strong correlation. Areas with high population density vote Democratic, while areas with low population density vote Republican.
What, if anything, explains this correlation?
Sammy’s theory is:
1) People living in high-density areas have a stronger need for government services and control, as everyone’s actions have a greater effect on others, simply du to proximity. This need/desire expresses itself by pulling the (D) lever.
2) Higher population densities result in stronger peer pressure, which enhances a (D) majority.
Before you offer your own theory, you might want to test it against the exit polls here.
(My own thought is in comments)
First let me short circuit the play on words…being dense means (fill in) meme. Ba boom.
Second, the look of the two maps might lead some people to one to one thoughts on correlation, but I find many don’t take the time to actually read charts and maps for the information they actually do offer.
Third, if density is a measure of stronger peer pressure, how does that explain the consistency of voting in less densely populated areas? (Or is the strength of herd behavior on a scale of something) Or purple and pink colored states if that were allowed?
Any way, I lightly edited the poke in the eye part of the question.
Well, I suspect that a map showing the relative concentrations of people with a bachelors degree or above, or of people who read 10 or more books a year would look very similar.
Is there such a map? Or are you saying Dems read more or are better educated? Watch out.
My own theory is that those folks in less densely populated areas find it necessary to be more self reliant. Transportation, water, sewage, police/fire security, even food etc. are individual/family responsibilities and not Govt provided. A higher percentage of the less dense population are property owners. A higher percentage of those in less densely populated areas are employed in production businesses (agriculture, mining, lumbering, etc) making this part of the population producer/supplier oriented.
Those in cities/densely populated areas rely more on government services for their basic needs, water, sewage, transportation, police/fire/security, etc. Few in this population are part of the production sector nor do many raise their own food. Thus city dwellers are more oriented to government reliance, and have a more consumer versus producer mentality.
Government reliant versus self reliance makes up the basic difference between the two voting populations. There’s more, but that is this old man’s observation having grown up in a rural area, lived in urban areas and always eaten my home grown food.
There is more. Can anyone guess why I emphasized food production?
Thanks Dan. Joel’s implication was just recently disproved by the Pew poll.
Joel, who is a scientist, but is obviously one who “goes with his gut” instead of one who bothers to test his hypothesis against data provided. If you look at the exit polling for 2008 you find:
Vote by Education
No High School Obama 63% McCain 35%
High School Graduate Obama 52% McCain 46%
Some College Obama 51% McCain 47%
College Graduate Obama 50% McCain 48%
PostGraduate Obama 58% McCain 40%
http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/results/polls/#USP00p1
By comparsion, the final margin was 52.9% to 45.7%. So the D’s intellectual superiority, as measured by education, does not seem to show up in the data. Obviously there must be some sampling problem 🙂
CoRev,
Except that food production and mining and timber are all areas with heavy government involvement. Ag subsidies to rural red states are absurd.
The big difference between rural and urban attitudes is in the way they tend to look at externalities. The large distances between people in rural areas tends to diminish the importance of negative externalities, although even here things are starting to change. For example, the choking stench of hog confinement farms in the rural midwest is just now becoming a major issue with voters as the size of the farms increases and the distance between rural and urban areas shrinks. And the simple arithmetic of vertically summing demand curves for public goods means that public goods are more important to urban areas than they are to rural areas.
Finally, take a look at some of those porker listings that show discretionary spending by state. Invariably you will see that a lot of those rugged individualist red states aren’t all that rugged and aren’t all that individualistic.
Joel, who is a scientist, but apparently is like those Global Warming scientists who “go with their gut” rather than test hypothesis against data provided.
If you look at the exit polling for 2008 you find:
Vote by Education
No High School Obama 63% McCain 35%
High School Graduate Obama 52% McCain 46%
Some College Obama 51% McCain 47%
College Graduate Obama 50% McCain 48%
PostGraduate Obama 58% McCain 40%
http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/results/polls/#USP00p1
By comparsion, the final margin was 52.9% to 45.7%. So the D’s intellectual superiority, as measured by education, does not seem to show up in the data. Obviously there must be some sampling problem?
Geez CoRev….that is such a straight line. Just tell us.
CoRev,
Forgot to ask. Isn’t the “left coast” responsible for most of the food production in this country? Iowa grows a lot of corn and soybeans, which are ag products, but very little of that is actually directly consumed as food. Most Iowa corn is indigestible for humans and beans are used as a raw input for other outputs. Corn and soybeans are more like cotton than they are a foodstuff.
Mythological underpinings? I think a lot of people love their notions of roots, without the bother of examining the realities. Very human, and usually used for enhancing one’s comfort zone.
I mainly see it the same as CoRev and I too grew up in rural areas. My family has always had horses, and cattle at times, and now we only have 2 horses but all things considered I am much more a ruralite than I am otherwise.
I don’t have time to get into this today but the ag subsidies are essentially urbanites stealing value from the ruralites. So until urbanites are able to prove that their educations are actually of some equal benefit to society, instead of disparaging remarks about the ruralites lack of education, perhaps a little humility and gratitude for the value shift that helps to pay for some of that education is in order.
2slugs, with your discussion re: externalities you are on the track to answering my question re: food.
Lessee, complaining about the smells emanating from a farm until it is closed down adds what economic value to the farm’s products for consumers?
I’m not too sure what you were thinking, but I am sure you are making my point using the food example. Removal of alarge portion of the poulace from the realities of nature has some interesting effects. I wonder what percentage of the extreme environmantalists views are supported by urban and rural populations?
Liked that one, ehh???
Well, I see such a theory simply blowing apart the Chicago school of rational exploitation. Good for you rl love. How do how do cactus, linda, holly, 2slugs, rusty, run 75441 fit into the coastal part of that equation.
2slugs, look at the maps a little more closely. We are not talking about state level politics but county. In reality it does break down into urban/rural views.
While writing my response I was remembering the comment in the other thread re: Dems = my brother’s keeper, versus Repubs = taking care of oneself.
DAn, as I already pointed out. RL and I are not talking about coastal, but urban/rural mind sets. Even coastal areas are made up of those two types of locales, and with few exceptions the map will probably support the different voting patterns. It can be traced even to urban counties where the two pockets of voters can be anticipated.
Dan, as I already pointed out. RL and I are not talking about coastal, but urban/rural mind sets. Even coastal areas are made up of those two types of locales, and with few exceptions the map will probably support the different voting patterns. It can be traced even to urban counties where the two pockets of voters can be anticipated.
Keep in mind when you read the density map–most of those red political areas are relatively unpopulated–not many repubs or dems living there. Because Idaho is overwhelmingly republican does not mean many republicans live there.
So, it’s largely inaccurate to say that most republicans live in some “self-reliant, hardy” zone.
The fact is, most republican strongholds are in suburban areas of large cities–particularly in the south, where the city itself is democratic and the suburban/exurban areas overwhelmingly republican. Just take a look at southern california.
Nice job, Sammy.
Co Rev,
Can anyone guess why I emphasized food production?
That is actually pretty compelling. Food is perhaps the most basic human need and urbanites depend on very complex interpersonal arrangements to get it. Or they want Government to get it for them by force if necessary.
I think a certain degree of it is self-selection. I grew up in a more rural area, but I now choose to live in a dense central city (and would never move to the suburbs, let alone the middle of nowhere) due to what I value: a diverse population, cultural events, mass transit, the ability to get along without a car, and so forth. It’s little surprise that somebody with values like mine would choose to live in an city AND vote Democratic.
Similarly, somebody who wants the government out of their life may live in an unincorporated rural area and vote Repubican. They don’t vote Republican because they live in a rural area, both the living arrangement and the voting preference are caused by their values.
Sammy if you plot that poll using two variables instead of one you would come to the conclusion that poor people (no high school diploma) and smart people (Post Graduate) voted for Obama while McCain drew his highest levels of support from people who are below median income and at or below median education.
So you might want to cool the snark about sampling, the data is quite consistent with the more education = Dems.
CoRev,
Look at California. The extreme population density is on the extreme coast, but the agricultural parts of the state also show high population density. But yet those same parts of the state also tend to vote Republican. So I don’t think population density tracks with agricultural production as your thesis claimed. In fact, the model in Japan is for very small farms producing very high value products. That’s because a lot of that kind of farming that produces food people actually eat, as opposed to putting in their gas tanks, is fairly labor intensive. Wine production is a good example.
Under this theory Dallas should be a bastion of liberal democracy and Singapore, Hong Kong and Shanghai even more so. Singapore in particular is an example of how you can combine a culture that emphasizes self-reliance even as social services are delivered via a very centralized and authoritarian state.
The American experience is the end result of a particular set of historical developments and you have to be very tunnel visioned to try to elevate these patterns into some universal law about something like self-reliance.
Geez Co Rev, we got indoor plumbing about 60 years ago, even those country folks with well water.
I have strong ties to both the blue collar and white collar worlds, and the blue collar types are more honest, less self-centered, more dependable and certainly more self-reliant.
There are always exceptions, I am thinking of a math PhD who grew up on a dairy farm, he has the best characteristics on both worlds. He’s a moderate Repub with independent tendencies.
We do get the newspaper and the Internet out here in God’s country/
Looks to me like the areas that depend on Federal handouts — subsidies to road building, single family mortgages, commercial agriculture, hydroelectric, military bases, artificially low charges for pollution from oil or mining, etc — tend to vote Republican, while the areast that are either productive or at least have market based economies and pay more in Federal taxes than they get back in subsidies, tend to vote Democratic.
Maybe depending on handouts for a living makes people less empathetic or less willing to look at the reality of where their income comes from and who they are imposing externalities on.
CoRev,
The smells from dense hog confinement farms isn’t just an unpleasant annoyance, it’s choking and burns your throat. And the midwest has some of the worst water quality in the country because of ag runoff. It’s a said day when the water in Newark is better than the water in your typical midwestern rural town. All of these are externalities. They are economic costs that are not captured in the market price of the item. There is such a thing as too much production, and excess production has been a longstanding problem with American agriculture. We produce too much corn, soybeans and livestock largely because Big Ag owns members of Congress. And that’s bipartisan. Big Ag and ADM not only own Sen. Grassley, they also own his fellow Iowa Democrats Sen. Tom Harkin and Secy of Ag Tom Vilsak (former governor of Iowa).
BTW, I agree with you about large parts of the population being removed from nature, except that being in a rural area is not the same as being close to nature. Digging up prairie to dump fertilizers & pesticides in order to grow corn isn’t all that much different from digging up prairie to grow skyscrapers and chemical plants. I am aware of the difference. My backyard is 11 acres of wooded pasture with 3 horses.
CoRev,
The smells from dense hog confinement farms isn’t just an unpleasant annoyance, it’s choking and burns your throat. And the midwest has some of the worst water quality in the country because of ag runoff. It’s a sad day when the water in Newark is better than the water in your typical midwestern rural town. All of these are externalities. They are economic costs that are not captured in the market price of the item. There is such a thing as too much production, and excess production has been a longstanding problem with American agriculture. We produce too much corn, soybeans and livestock largely because Big Ag owns members of Congress. And that’s bipartisan. Big Ag and ADM not only own Sen. Grassley, they also own his fellow Iowa Democrats Sen. Tom Harkin and Secy of Ag Tom Vilsak (former governor of Iowa).
BTW, I agree with you about large parts of the population being removed from nature, except that being in a rural area is not the same as being close to nature. Digging up prairie to dump fertilizers & pesticides in order to grow corn isn’t all that much different from digging up prairie to grow skyscrapers and chemical plants. I am aware of the difference. My backyard is 11 acres of wooded pasture with 3 horses.
sammy,
I would love to watch you try and eat an ear of Iowa corn. Most corn and beans are not food; they are agricultural products in the same way that cotton and hemp are agriculture products. Being an agricultural product does not make something a member of the food group.
More: even within the relatively productive urban areas, Republican voting goes up with increased subsidies. Wall Street — the biggest welfare recipients of them all — is full of “free marketeers” who vote for the party that is most likely to use the powers of government to redistribute income upwards. And, despite some attempts by the Dems to compete, the Republicans have a clear lead in that department.
Think of the Republicans as the party of Welfare for Unproductive Local Elites, and the Democrats as Moderation at all Costs, and the voting patterns begin to make some sense.
Plus rural/urban is far too simplistic. Sparsely populated farm states off return surprisingly liberal Senators. Mike Mansfield, the longest serving Senate Majority leader and leading opponent of the Vietnam War was from Montana, Tom Daschle and Byron Dorgon, not exactly rock ribbed conservatives were from South Dakota and North Dakota respectively.
Modern conservatism has its historical and demographic roots in Sun Belt suburbia, in places like Phoenix and Orange County which may be among the least self-reliant places in the country, they don’t even supply their own water for crying out loud, if it were not for New Deal water and power projects bastions of conservatism like the Tennessee River Valley and Orange County/San Diego County would barely exist. This is a ridiculous attempt to try to prove pre-existing narratives with desperate over generalizations.
Superbowl this weekend. NASCAR next weekend.
Hot damn, life is good.
Plus the whole thing is ridiculous on its own terms. Geographically where are the most extensive swaths of blue? Northern Maine, the Upper Peninsula of Michican, the Four Corner States (Utah, Colorado, NM, Arizona), plus another big chunk in South Texas plus some scattered ones in the Northern Plains. All of these areas are relatively sparsely populated and overwhelmingly rural. What do all these blue patches between the East and Left Coasts have in common? They are mostly non-Anglo and poor. That is Northern Maine has a large population of people whose ancestry is predominantly French and Native American, while the patches of blue East of the Mississippi are themselves strongly correlated with Indian Country, while that portion of S Texas is very heavily Chicano.
I suspect you would get some far better correlation if you just plotted the map by areas that have strong English Only movements.
Now it is true you don’t get a whole lot of density in suburban neighborhoods which are typically built out at 4-6 dwelling units per acre, but that doesn’t imply that tea-bagging conservatives are actually living off the ground in comparison to their inner city counterparts. I suspect most conservatives do their hunter-gathering thing at the local Safeway and the Mall.
Sammy,
What about liberal myth and self image that they are just intelligent shinny people with open minds and the facts lead them to become liberal weenies. If you show these pockets of liberal anomolies are correlated geographically then you are saying they are following some sort of herd mentality and just are being weenies to keep up with the Joneses.
Everyone–No one, no one at all can ever be completely self-reliant. The whole concept of human society is based on cooperation and division of labor. Success for anyone requires the active effort and support of many others. It is impossible for you to build every road you need to drive on, or defend yourself from foreign invaders, or fly yourself to a business meeting in Cleveland. But, for Americans, the myth of the self-made man prevails.
We have plenty of extraordinarily successful and creative people, but not one started out in a log cabin in Kentucky in the same way Lincoln did. Or my grandfather did or maybe yours a hundred years ago. We have a complex economy controlled mainly by corporations in a system which is, if anything, hostile to the individual. I cannot understand why we ignore reality when we ascribe qualities of character to political views. Conservatives and liberals live in the same society, have the same type of jobs and want to succeed in the same fields. Yet, one group holds to the notion that they do it all themselves despite living in a world dominated by vast distant corporate enterprises. Even people in business for themselves have to depend on suppliers, transportation systems, and governments to provide a stable society in which to function.
Looking at it this way, why do we need to attribute our personal and economic successes to our self-reliance when there is no evidence that this is the case? Looks like a myth, walks like a myth and quacks like a myth. If conservatives want to protect what they have, fine. If liberals want to do that and improve society, fine. In the meantime, there is no need to starve our society’s educational and public health systems to achieve that end. Countries with less are better to live in in many ways. Better schools, safer streets, cleaner air. All clues we could be doing something wrong which defeats making our myths realities. Makes a lot of our politics meaningless self-destructive conflict. It’s enough already.
Bruce,
the data is quite consistent with the more education = Dems.
No it is not. You have to remember the baseline is D=53%, R= 46% for the general population. The cleanest result to prove my point is (from the same exit poll):
College Graduate Yes – Obama 53%, McCain 46%
College Graduate No – Obama 53%, McCain 44%
In other words, 53% of college grads voted for 0 and 53% on noncollege grads voted for 0. Pretty hard to tease a “Dems are more educated” conclusion out of that.
slugs,
They probably also have a garden in which they grow their own food, or have a direct personal connection with someone who does.
DanG – You mean like Wall Street and New York City?
Or how about Maryland and Virginia, both trace their propserity to proximity to DC.
Wall Street has a market based economy? Now that’s a hoot.
Us versus them does not always work (and LA takes advantages of water from other states I do believe).
Pretty simple from the perspective of sociology. Increased density emphasizes the systemic nature of society. The libertarian bent of low population areas is based on the perception of the society as an aggregation of individuals, e.g., members of a set having minimal relationship other than as members. A densely populated group is more aware of society as a system comprised of elements (individuals) and subsets (groups, institutions). Here, the relationships are significant. Therefore, residents of densely populated areas more concerned with systemic relationships that affect the general welfare than are rural people. It’s called “civilization.” The origin of the meaning of the tern is from Latin civis, signifying a city dweller in contrast to tribals. It is not by accident that now rural people are often described as tribals, who are primitive in relation to sophisticates (knowledge people).
Rural people feel this, and resent their territory being called” fly-over country.” They respond by calling the people on the coasts, “elites.” But the reality is that city dwellers are more cosmopolitan and rural people more traditional in the sense of convention-bound. Innovation and technology comes from the cities, will the rural areas provide the food. The GOP emphasizes individual liberty and responsibility aka “I’ts every man for himself,” whereas the Dems emphasize community, actually fraternité along with liberty and equality, i.e., “We’re all in this together.”
Of course, this is a generalization and many rural people by background now live in populated areas. But they still proudly retain their heritage. As they say, “You can take the girl out of the trailer, but you can’t take the trailer out of the girl.” (I hope that doesn’t offend anyone.) This is becoming more of a stereotype, however, because agribusiness is taking over the rural areas and to be a successful farmer today in many areas, one has to have a master’s degree from ag school and a humongous computer, as well as prodigious equipment. So eventually it will even out, if we can last that long.
Sammy
I agree mostly with reason number one. But reason number two dosn’t work. there is more “peer pressure” in rural communities where everyone knows everyone and they do indeed help each other out.
i’d vote “rural” every time, but having lived in cities i understand that we need government. This does not mean that everyone who lives in cities understands that they need government. They just find that what “democrats” say makes more sense to them than what “republicans” say. This has nothing to do with education or intelligence. Just the way the parties evolved in their own areas with different apparent needs.
when you get back to the country and start noticing how much everyone there depends on government but dosn’t know it, then you start wondering about intelligence. but i can go to the cities and find good democrats who don’t know much either.
what complicates the picture is that when you get out to the high income suburbs you start running into people who think they did it all themselves and resent paying taxes to help others… even though that is not really where their taxes are going. These are the highly educated Republican idiots. And I can find equally highly educated Democrat idiots. They tend to run to “pc.”
just to be sure Bruce knows where I come from: I am, to my shame, fairly highly educated myself, but looking at most highly educated people, I would say they are highly trained to think that what they learned is “true.” They don’t usually actually think for themselves.
CoRev
see my reply to Sammy. I am “bi” myself… urban and rural. There is much in what you say, but much more. those rural folks are not mostly owners and self reliant themselves. They work fairly closely for those who are, and tend to vote the same way because they all go to the same coffee shops and listen to the same radio.
i think you both have an idea where the divide lies and more or less why. But don’t make a “virtue” out of it. Life is way more compicated than that.
Gonzo,
yes. I have suspected that my rural neighbors don’t move to the city because they have really bad people skills. the only folks they can get along with are folks just like them.
Just occured to me.
In Michigan last year 700,000 deer hunting tags were issued (some people had multiple permits so I would guess about 500,000 hunters).
They took to the field mostly with high powered rifles, but also with slug loaded shotguns, high power handguns (.44 and .50) , compound bows, cross bows and muzzleloader rifles.
Total murders I can find related to hunting – “0.”
Drop 500,000 weapons into an east coast city (or Detroit for that matter) and you would have a blood bath.
So maybe these rugged individualists also have some sense of community and responsibility?
Just saying……….
nice blog. please visit http://www.ebooktub.com/
The American experience is the end result of a particular set of historical developments
Bruce,
I wish you would expand on this. I have been a blue area denizen for most of my life, yet I am a Conservative, so I don’t have a lot of confidence in my theory.
rusty
no doubt. but we need government to keep the white collar criminals from robbing the blue collar decent folk.
rusty
i think your thinking here is a bit confused. ever hear of the stock MARKET? and if Washington DC “depends” on government, well, that’s free enterprise taking advantage of the local situation. i think you’ll find that it was L.A. Republicans who “stole” the water from other states, where Republican chambers of commerce sold it to them.
Cantab,
What about liberal myth and self image that they are just intelligent shinny people with open minds and the facts lead them to become liberal weenies
See Bruce Webb and Joel the Scientist comments at the beginning of this thread. If you are a Liberal and than means you get to tell everyone what to do, you HAVE to be smarter than the unwashed masses.
But this is off topic, and most of the comments are not reflecting this so far.
I go back to the rural Kentucky county I came from. It was republican, but that was largely because it was anti-slavery before the civil war.
At least back in the 1960s when I researched this, over half of the income in the county came from some sort of government transfers, ranging from child support to payment for not growing crops.
I suspect this is much more widespread than most people realize.
Yet they believed they were self sufficient and at least among my family they looked down on those who got welfare type payments but not ag support payments.
But the thing that I often things dominates that county is migration. Its population peaked in the 1890 census and the only time since then the population grew was in the 1930s when people like my grandfather moved back to the farm. But for over a century the brightest and best have left as soon as they grew up. So what does that leave you to inbreed with each other and reproduce the same gene pool over and over again of those who did not have enough on the ball to leave.
Nancy
is right. I forgot to point out clearly enough that the only reason the folk in God’s country can read is because Roosevelt brought them electricity. Trouble is, whatever “side” of this debate I take, I end up sounding like I agree with them. I don’t.
Cantab,
What about liberal myth and self image that they are just intelligent shinny people with open minds and the facts lead them to become liberal weenies
See Bruce Webb and Joel the Scientist comments at the beginning of this thread. If you are a Liberal and than means you get to tell everyone what to do, you HAVE to be smarter than the unwashed masses.
But this is a different topic, and most of the comments are not reflecting this so far.
Sammy
not at all. a college degree today is worth about what a sixth grade education was in my mother’s day. a second grade education in my grandmothers. you will note that us post graduate types vote teh same way as the ignernt poor. that’s because we both understand reality in ways the “educated” are no longer capable of.
coRev
an industrial hog farm has nothing to do with “the realities of nature.”
And what does dems – my brothers keeper vs republican + taking care of myself say about the religious values of dems and republicans?
this is the point where i start tearing my hair. both sides want to claim to be the party of virtue. but it is always virtue that means “Me. MY money.”
Yes the Dems are looking out for the poor. But that is because most of them ARE poor, and the educated ones who aren’t understand that poverty does nothing for their bottem line. What you have with Republicans is a party of selfish ignorance telling themselves they are just practicing down home virtues. Down home bullshit.
even us self reliant idahoans rely entirely on the product of the industrialized urban civilization. we just like to pretend we grew our guns ourselves. we are talking here about people who are too damn dumb to know that they depend upon the people they hate. without the government and the cities your average rural resident wouldn’t know how to build an outhouse.
I in fact grew up on the Irvine Ranch in So Cal. We could see Disneyland from the hill behind our house and L.A. in the distance, but, we lived at the end of a dirt road that was several miles long. So the ‘urban/rural mind sets’ is apt for me.
sammy
i was trying so hard to be on your side for a change. but this is BS. your average rural person buys his groceries in a grocery store. it is delivered on a truck that was built in a city, running on gasoline made possible by the Government’s army and navy. And most of the “force” you are talking about is taxes collected in urban areas used to subsidize those rural areas and try to bring them up to a level of civilization they could not maintain, or even imagine, for themselves.
2slugs, you eat Iowa corn daily. Your meat products, many of your sweeteners, and even corn meals. But, you keep on believing that corn and soy beans are not used as food.
Are you actually making my case for the greater than arms length understanding of food production some urbanites have? I think the answer is obvious.
BTW, how much snow do you have? This has been one of the most ugly storms and snows in my life time. Super heavy and slippery, and at this point coming down at a rate greater than an inch/Hr.
Rusty, wells and septic systems? Wow? 😀 That was my point.
And when it is necessary I go where the bears go. 😀
Rusty, now news and intertubes? Next you’re going to tell us you no longer use the Sears catalog for… umh…. erh you know. 😀
Rusty, you going to confuse them with this analogy.
Today’s your day to impress! Going through your list, news papers, wells, spetic systems, the intertubes and now gun carrying. sounds just like my neighbors and family as far as that goes. 😀
and leave the toilet paper to blow across the prairie for your neighbor to have to deal with.
love
actually, Orange county is Republican Country, and it ain’t rural for the most part. what you have is the “republican myth”. it floats better in “country” than in “city” but it’s still a myth.
Sammy
there are some books. one of them by a man named Keilor, no relation to Garrison, that describe the development of party affiliation. you’d be surprised what a tangled web it is. but you might begin to understand that the politicians don’t generally believe the lies they tell you, republican or democrat,
i think the country began to go to hell when the republicans began to elect people who believed their own lies. it’s more a matter of luck of evolution than any innate difference in intelligence, but the republican line these days is down home ignorant. and dangerous. you are not going to run an industrial empire with the government philosophy of Wyatt Earp.
Nancy
is wong. First start with the definition of what a self made man (or woman) is supposed to be:
Self-made men are the men who owe little or nothing to birth, relationship, friendly surroundings; to wealth inherited or to early approved means of education; who are what they are, without the aid of any of the favoring conditions by which other men usually rise in the world and achieve great results
A king who inherits his title and privilege is not a self made man. Members of the Kennedy, Bush, or the Clintons after Bill are not self made men or women either. I think it would be nice to have wealth handed to you but if that’s not your fate you have the possibility of being a self make man. This is what makes this country great.
Sammy the baseline makes no difference, it is simply the product of the calculation. If more educated people identify themselves as Democrats of course it comes out in the totals.
You have a group with 13-16 years of education that are only slightly D over R. Then you have a group of people with 17-25 years of education who are D by 8 points. Considering that a lot of that group are professionals with MBAs and JDs that may by nature lean Republican and whose degrees are essentially vocational that suggests that even a higher percentage of people with PhDs are Democrats. These people who you would think are self-identified Democrats by conviction rather than by need are joined in quite high numbers by those who never finished high school and so are presumedly more inclined to vote D because they are more reliant on direct governmental assistance. Once you correct for the existence of what we can only concede is a welfare class the correlation between education and identification as a Democrat is pretty blindingly clear.
Rust
i don’t know about last year, but wasn’t it in Michigan where they sent some poor Hmong to jail because a family of hunters tried playing “dance nigger” with him?
For those who don’t remember, the Hmong shot back, and having been roused he tracked them all down and killed them. Murder of course. But I tend to see it from his perspective.
Sammy
what frosts me is that you don’t realize that you are in the very act of doing exactly what it is you are complaining that Bruce is doing.
I think a bit too much is being “concluded” from the minimal data provided by Sammy, above. The one thing that is clear, and maybe the only thing, is that voters across the educational spectrum voted more for Obama. The fact that the two ends of the spectrum voted even more so for Obama is an interesting piece of information.
By what measure of worth? I don’t know how old your mother or grandmother might be, my own grandmothers both being born in 1898. But the notion that either had the basic literacy and numeric skills of a college graduate today by the second grade is just ludicrous.
Now I at one point had a copy of my Great Grandfather’s eighth grade American history book. And it would have compared favorably to that of a standard introductory college textbook from when I was an undergrad in the 1970s. So I will concede that an eighth grade education then might well be the equivalent of a college degree from a mediocre college today. But Ulysses Grant Arbuckle would have been in eighth grade around 1878. And while you might trust someone with an eighth grade education to teach primary school, such a graduate obviously would not have been able to teach high school. By the 20th century qualifications for that were already a two year degree at what were called a Normal School or perhaps a Teacher’s College.
College freshmen even back in my day were often shockingly ignorant but even they could have beaten out a sixth grader and even more a second grader. I had a friend who was a mathematical genius who kept a copy of Run, Dog, Run on a stand on his dresser claiming that was as far as his reading ability went, but that was a joke.
Unless you are from a family of vampires and your grandmother was born in 1668 I doubt her level of education was as good coming out of two years of primary school as a typical college graduate today. Sure this is a blog and a certain level of hyperbole comes with the territory but come on man.
I’m not complaining, just pointing out facts.
I lived in a line of four six suburban lots out in the middle of corn country in 1971-73. Two houses down was an actual working farm whose primary product, like just about everyone else was seed corn but who kept a sizable number of pigs. And when the wind was right you were pretty aware of it. But it wasn’t anything like a modern industrial hog farm.
Much later after I moved to Washington State in the 1990s I worked in the Planning Department. And by State Law every building permit and every real estate transaction in a designated rural area had to be accompanied by a Right to Farm Notice telling the city people that they might occasionally get stuck behind a tractor on a country road or maybe smell a cow and that neither could legally be considered a nuisance. This didn’t mean you could be exposed to literally toxic fumes from a hog farm manure lagoon. Snohomish County is not hog country, instead it was historically dairy country, but the closest use we would have ever had to a industrial hog farm would have been a rendering plant, which under our Zoning Code would have been restricted to areas zone HI for Heavy Industry. The idea of locating such a massively intrusive and even health dangerous operation in a rural area being inconceivable.
As to 2slugs point. Another 100 feet down the road and across from the hog/corn farm was a patch of woods that had inexplicably left alone more or less in the way Indiana was when my ancestors moved there in the 1820s and 1830s. At that point in time Indiana like the rest of what was just previously known as the Northwest Territory was almost entirely a hardwood forest. Over the next forty to sixty years industrious Cattertons, Grahams, and Arbuckles (Scotch-Irish on my maternal grandfathers side) and Lutz’s and Beisels (German immigrants on my grandmother’s side) merrily transformed those woods into the open cornfields that typify central Indiana today. Outside of State Parks and certain river banks there is very little that is ‘natural’ in rural Indiana. You got green stuff growing all around you but that does not make monoculture ag in any sense close to nature
I may not have admitted this in the past, but I’ll come clean here nad now. I grew up in a rural part of NY known popularly as Brooklyn, but is legally Kings County. Folks who lived there in the 1950s understood the value of hard work and education. Self reliance was a part of every clan’s moto. We all periodically converged upon large stretches of grssy savannahs to either forage for decorative flora or, on the other hand, participate in large group observances of physical competitions against men of giant stature who would periodically appear in an effort to corral our own best dodgers. It was an example of exhilarating tribal activity.
The people of Brooklyn, at that time, had a very conservative view of the social aspects of every day life, but allowed for a need for social interactivity in regards to economic activities. The family that ran the general store nearest to our home wouold often allow his customers, who were at the same time his friends and neighbors, to take needed provisions on the basis of no more than a promise to pay. Those customers did in turn provide services to the merchants in the area. Economically each provided for themselves, but each considered the needs of his neighbors. Socially each was expected to respect the values of those who had come before them and to observe the value of independence and self reliance.
If you’re wondering what all that has to do with the topic of Sammy’s post I submit that it has as much meaning as can be taken away from the very gross measures offered regarding educational attainment and presidential election voting. In Wyoming where cows may out number voters and we can be certain that Republican voters out number Democratic voters,
we know little about which Wyomans voted for O and which voted for Mc.
CoRev,
Yes, believe it or not I do know that corn arnd soybeans are used as inputs to other foods. But when farmers fantasize about feeding the world they don’t have in mind the reality, which is shipping corn off to ADM to produce unhealthy sweetners, or to feed massive chicken, hog and cattle operations. Or to feed your gas tank. The actual business of food production is every bit as much urban as it is rural. Very little of the “value added” in a box of corn flakes is due to the farmer. Almost all of it is due to processing, packaging, transportation, inventory management and sales.
Oh please. In general people in rural areas are just as dependent on food from elsewhere. Most rural areas I have visited, flown across or driven through are over-whelmingly mono-culture ag. You have areas that are mile after mile of tree crops: oranges in Florida, apples in Eastern Washington, apricots and pears in what is now known as Silicon Valley, walnuts between my uncles town of Walnut Creek and my grandfathers house in Tracy, or corn in Central Indiana, wheat in the Palouse area of northeastern Washington State, cotton in East Texas, peanuts in Georgia. While there are areas in California where a very wide variety of vegetables and fruits are grown, say like Imperial County (which is by the way blue on that map while not being exactly urban), mostly farmers in any given region tend to specialize. And while a lot of farmers maintain kitchen gardens I doubt this is really in any greater intensity than you wold have found in suburban areas in the first half of the last century. When my own city was platted out in 1892 the standard lot for what was envisioned to be the NYC of the West Coast (Rockefeller was a big investor, things didn’t quite work out as they planned) was twenty five feet wide and 120 feet deep, it was expected that everyone would grow some of their own food even in what was designed to be a thoroughly urban environment. You guys are trying to draw systematic distinctions which simply never matched with reality. Even in the 19th century truly rural areas were commodity centers, market gardens being located close enough to the cities that eggs and vegetables could be delivered in an era before mechanical refrigeration. Which is why New Jersey was the Garden State, it supplied such goods to NYC and Philadelphia.
One simple answer is that Democratic machines grabbed control of many urban areas in the North and MidWest and never let go. In turn they cultivated ethnic immigrants as a counterbalance to the largely anglo business establishment and in fact in a lot of places it just broke down as a power struggle between W.A.S.P. business owners vs Catholic Laborers, with the ethnic, class, and religious divisions all cutting down the same line.
During the years of massive relatively unrestricted immigration various national/ethnic groups went were others of that same group had gone before. And often that mirrored conditions in the Old Country. Italians have lived in cities and nucleated villages for a couple of thousand years and ended up in cities and fishing towns here. Poles and Germans ended up in the lower Mid-West, Norwegians and Swedes in the upper Mid-West and the Northern Plains. The Irish tended to land in cities, in large part because to live on the land in Ireland in the seventeenth and eighteenth century meant a live of grinding poverty, exploitation by the English landlords, and suppression of your language and culture, in America they banded together and were natural recruits for the Democratic Party.
Singapore is also historically an immigrant city as is Hong Kong, but both were historically colonial outposts run by and for the English in a more direct way than cities like New York and Boston were by their own WASP elites, there wasn’t political space for opposition parties because there was not any democratic space to start with.
If there is a real basis for American Exceptionalism it is possibly because it had a traditional of self-government at all levels from bottom to top from very early times and all the later waves of immigrants entered into what was at least nominally a small d democratic structure.
This all would take a lot more thought but a lot of the divide you see might not be so much as rural vs urban per se but the cross cut between ethnicity and land use. It may be really significant that the midwest was originally developed on the basis of the Land Grant system where immigrants were simply given 80 or 160 acres in a checkerboard pattern. You have to be both self-reliant and locally cooperative if you arrive in Northern Indiana with a wagon an axe and a plow and are faced with eighty acres of woods where your farm is going to be. Whereas an immigrant to New York immediately entered a world that was more structured economically and socially, renting a room and getting a job on the docks being just as difficult in many ways as building a cabin and clearing some acres, on the other hand you didn’t have to bake your own bread or brew your own beer.
My first thought was that the urban/rural axis correlated with the liberal/conservative axis. But then I remembered that in the early history of the U. S. it was the opposite. The conservatives were in the cities and the liberals were in the country and backwoods. Consider the fight between Jackson and the big bankers. Wall Street is still both urban and conservative.
Frankly, my dear, I don’t know what to say.
Well the history of Water Wars in California is more complicated than that.
Nicholson’s movie Chinatown is based on one of the earlier water grabs. The City Fathers of Los Angeles wanting to grow it from a small town into a city managed to acquire all the water rights to the Owens River and simply de-watered all the farmers and essentially turned the Owens Valley into a desert. But that is within California.
As to stealing water from other states, well that oversimplifies the situation. All of that water originally flowed to California anyway or alongside it as the Colorado River forms the border between California and Arizona. What the Federal Government did was to build some dams, notably Hoover Dam to control and contain the natural flow of the river and then allocate it for irrigation and consumption. But all of that water would have flowed to California ultimately and at the time the people upstream didn’t really need it. Which of course changed with the growth of Las Vegas and Phoenix and other formerly small cities in Nev and Ariz. In a way it was California’s water needs that made the Sun Belt growth even possible. And for what it is worth the entire water supply of Reno comes from California, it is not all a one-way street.
Cantab I don’t believe anyone has ever believed that every bit of breakdown between Liberalism and Conservatism is the product of a clash between the Enlightenment and European Reaction. The modern political and economic policies that form American Liberalism and Movement Conservatism certainly derive from those roots but the fundamental divisions can be traced back to the struggle between Athens and Persia on the one hand and Athens and Sparta on the other.
If you really have an open mind on this I would suggest reading Karl Popper’s ‘The Open Society and its Enemies’ (which among other things will show you how ridiculous Goldberg’s thesis of ‘Liberal Fascism’ really is, his and now Beck’s conflation of Communism, Fascism and Liberalism missing some of the deepest fundamental divisions between them. That all draw in different ways on what can loosely be called Socialism doesn’t make them identical).
But it is certainly true that Liberalism is open to progress and change in a way that Conservatism is not, the root ‘conserve’ did not drop into the name without reason, resistance to certain kinds of change being bottled into Conservatism.
Ah hah. The axis is less than satisfactory, but sammy agrees it is less. Wall St. is predatory but certainly not self-reliant. We switch environments and meanings of self-reliance and cooperation at our convenience to ascribe virtue and vice without intellectual rigor, but for comfort.
What is the difference between an ag subsidy, a banking subsidy, and a housing subsidy in relation to self-reliance….no one wants to take their lumps for choices made?
Min,
Frankly, my dear, I don’t know what to say.
That’s a good answer too. The correlation is rather puzzling. A lot of good answers re. “self reliance” and Bruce’s theory is also not too bad. Here in Oregon, the divide is very dramatic, as two counties in urban Portland runs 70-30 lib while the entire rest of the state runs 30-70. Because of the population disparities, the two urban counties dominate electoral results, which causes signigicant tensions.
That was Wisconsin – an evil place. 😎
The Upper Peninsula of Michigan has very few people, they talk funny, and they spend most of their time chopping firewood – not exactly a political hotbed.
Rdan,
It seems that ag subsidies are misunderstood by association. Ag subsidies though are not charitable, they are instead part of a trade-off intended to hold down the value of labor. They have caused the value of farmland to rise as the ‘actual’ value of staple goods have fallen. These subsidies are therefore a replacement of something lost, not a donation.
Hey! 2slugs really DID get a pony!
Now where’s mine?
I forgot to mention Dr. Gonzo’s theory of self selection – that probably has some validity.
Rusty, you’ve been on a roll today! Thanks. 😉
Another explanation that crosses my mind: urban areas are way overrepresented in 1) government workers 2) private workers that are dependent on government largesse and 3) government aid recipients all of whom have a very direct stake in high levels of government spending. There are so many of 1-3, that it can easily account for a county turning “blue.”
Another explanation that crosses my mind: urban areas are way overrepresented in 1) government workers 2) private workers that are dependent on government largesse and 3) government aid recipients – all of whom have a very direct stake in high levels of government spending. There are so many voters in 1-3, that it can easily account for a county turning “blue.”
@Bruce Webb
Actually, the city of Dallas while perhaps not a stereotypical liberal bastion, is overwhelmingly democratic and for years has had a lesbian police chief. It’s not Austin, but it’s far, far from the wingnut stereotype most make it out to be–just your typical mostly liberal big city.
Nancy is…sorta right. The “assume a can opener” approach to success in our society can actually be a good working assumption for a person’s lifetime, or even a few generation’s worth. The society / environment in which their specialized life skills are successful, is a fairly robust fabric. A few parasites can make out like bandits without really endangering the host. A wood tick doesn’t have to know about the complex nature of the caribou herd, their migrations, birth and predation patterns, preferred food or even their competing parasites — they can “assume a caribou herd” and get along just fine.
In this example, I must hasten to point out that neither rural nor urban are my parasites. They both work together, they both benefit and support each other. But it’s not necessary that most rural and urban folk, or the parasites that live on both of them, fully understand this interrelationship. But government and policy makers, and involved citizens, damn well ought to.
@ Bruce Webb
Excellent points, particularly since I made the same ones earlier–great minds think alike. . ., lol
Anyway, I should add Harkin in Iowa and McGovern from SD.
And you are right of course that the republican heartland is not the “heartland” (hate that term), but the suburbs of large sunbelt cities, even while those cities themselves–Los Angeles, Houston, Dallas, Atlanta, etc., are fairly liberal democratic.
Geaux Saints!
And the very blue lower Mississippi valley is predominately african american, rural, and blue.
Ah, little Sammy,
If you bothered to read the post, you would see that it contains maps.
My point is that the distribution, on a map, of college graduates and book readers track regions of urban density. Your pathetic attempts to change my comments into something I wasn’t trying to say in order to appear to score some kind of point only further demonstrates your intellectual feebleness.
Smarter trolls, please.
Seriously Rusty that was the point.
One test of a scientific assertion is how it stands up to falsification. If you look at that map there are very large geographic stretches of this country that are rural, sparsely inhabited, and Dem voting. It is up to Sammy to explain why Upper Michigan, Northern Maine, South Texas, and large swatches of the Four Corner states don’t match his theory, why they should not falsify his rural/urban density claims. He makes no effort to do so.
In this case correlation is not only not causation, it is not even correlation. I have an explanation as to why some of the sparsest populated parts of this country vote D. But it is not my role to explain why Sammy’s empirical claim fails in this instance, that is the job of Sammy and his supporters. A job and test that I would judge “epic fail”.
Actually, Sammy, my dull-witted friend, it was *you* who pointed out what I do, not me.
But that simple fact seems beyond your feeble intellect.
Smarter trolls, please.
Sammy you might want to check that number against military spending. Although almost all major Naval Bases are located next to oceans (well duh) you might want to plot the locations of major airforce and army bases against those self reliant rural areas.
A whole bunch of employment dollars flow to Minot Air Base, SAC command in Omaha, NORAD in Colorado, Fort Benning in Georgia and Fort Hood I. Texas. A good part of rural America survives and occasional thrives because you need huge stretches of forest or swamp or desert to support our military machine. Eliminate some of those big rural bases and some of those states would dry up and blow away.
The U.S. Air Force’s Strategic Air Command (SAC) was deactivated on June 1, 1992.
Where is the updated map of independent voters? You know, one third of the nation’s voters.
Joel,
If you bothered to read the post, you would see that it contains maps.
Yes I know. It is my post, you idiot.
arguing around metaphors rural vs urban ahs been going on since jefferson and it is still a wrong-headed way to promote discourse
wikipedia on jefferson yeoman -” The yeoman farmer best exemplifies civic virtue and independence from corrupting city influences; government policy should be for his benefit. Financiers, bankers and industrialists make cities the cesspools of corruption, and should be avoided.[2]s” (was a yeoman farmer was intrinsically better, superior to printers like ben franklin, or financiers like stephen girard, or any of the women, blacks, and whjite male non-property holders that were not considered fit to have civil rights?)
how is “rural” more self-reliant than “urban”? (does this mean “rural has more goodness, rigthness than ubran?)
what does it mean when “middle” america is called the “heartland of america” (does this mean kansas and other “heartland states” are more american and have more goodness than new york and other not quite as american states)
wiki for middle america
” Middle America
Middle America suggests a small town or suburb where people are predominantly middle class. The economy of Middle America is traditionally considered agricultural, though most Middle Americans now live in suburban locales, and a person may hold Middle American values while not living geographically in the Midwestern United States, and vice versa. [3] [4] The phrase Middle American values refers to more traditional or conservative politics like family values. There are many people who object to the notion that one group or subgroup of Americans defines its values or defines proper family values”
coberly,
I suppose I should have included that I lived in Irvine in the 1960s. I suppose though that I provided you with some presumption fodder that you so clearly need to allow you be as smug as you seemingly are. I have also lived in rural areas in the following states: Washington, Oregon, Nevada, New Mexico, Idaho, Texas, Hawaii (Parker Ranch), Kansas, and Oklahoma. I have also lived in the San Joaquin and Salinas Valleys and I hope now I have added ample support to CoRev’s point.
“Yes I know. It is my post, you idiot.”
Yes, I know.
That why I asked for smarter trolls, you idiot.
I don’t know one conservative who is not itching to tell me what to do, and if I don’t the country goes to hell.