(07-20-2013 05:49 PM)BruceMcF Wrote: (07-19-2013 11:46 AM)Dr. Isaly von Yinzer Wrote: With that in mind, I really have come to believe that there are two distinctly different Americas culturally. Based on my experiences, I absolutely do buy into the whole red state vs. blue state divide ...
Yes, urban American and outer-suburban / small town / rural America. Here is a map that goes by county and by percentage of vote, with 70%+ Democratic full blue, 70%+ Republican full red, and counties in between shades of color in between.
This explains why the best single predictor of whether a state is "red" or "blue" is the share of population in the larger urbanized areas ... this is almost the same as a national population density map.
Now, there are, indeed, quite distinctive cultural regions, but they number far more than two ... Joel Garreu's work finds "Nine Nations" of North America, though one of them, Quebec, is located entirely in Canada. More recent coverage from that group suggested that in political terms there are five nations ~ the blue Pacific Coast and Northeast, the red Old Confederacy and Great Lakes / Mountains, and the swing Great Lakes / "Industrial" Midwest.
The "Nine Nations" model is one of the best, although Colin Woodard's 11 regions are even better IMO... but... the truth of the matter is that Americans are more homogeneous than ever before.
All the things that divide us have always been there. However, increased movement between regions, increased communication technologies, and generations of interbreeding have made us more similar than at any point in our history.
There seems to be this great myth that at some point we were all a homogeneous entity. But this is clearly false. Pre-WW2, there were at least 7 distinct racial categories that dominated who you could be friends with: Black, Asian, Hispanic, Irish, Jewish, Southern European (mostly Italian/Greek), and White. You were only white if you were Germanic, French, Scottish, or (sometimes) Slavic. Today, there really is only a White/Black/Asian divide, and maybe Hispanic in the areas of recent Mexican immigration. But in most of the country, Hispanic has blended into either White or Black, and even Asian is starting to blend into White in some areas (at least in the Midwest).
In pre-WW2 Minnesota, it made a huge difference whether your grandparents were Norwegian, Finnish, or Swedish. Such divisions are impossible to even imagine today.
The biggest differences these days are mere political tribalism. But anyone who has ever lived overseas knows that Democrats and Republicans agree on 95% of things that divide political parties in other countries. But the media inserts a prybar into our differences in an attempt to make it seem more polarized, and more confrontational, than it actually is. Confrontations drive ratings, but create a false impression of reality.
Actually, one of the consequences of decreased racial, political, and geographic tribalism these days is the increased importance of college sports rivalries. These days, your college defines "who you are" more than your race or place of birth (in the past, just having a college degree defined *you* more than which school you graduated from).
I'm as big of a fan of regional geographies as you'll ever meet. But anyone who tries to claim that we are more divided that ever before is just lacking a frame of reference.