Adam Cadre, who I don't read as often as I should (because his site doesn't have an RSS feed), writes that yes, blue states really are better.
I'm not sure I totally agree with it (I think Adam's too flip about people choosing where to live based on their politics), but any opinion piece that uses the phrase the incredible erratic adventures of Stiffy McCain can't be all bad.
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9 years ago
2 comments:
Oof. Adam says all the things I don't want to think because it'll make me too depressed. I want to have hope. I'm creeped out by the idea that, basically, people like us should get to make all the decisions for the country because we went to an Ivy League school. I've bought into the elitism/populism dichotomy that far.
But "if you're not going to try to make the country look more like Cambridge and less like Crawford — why should I vote for you?"... yes. It's more complicated than that, obviously, but ultimately... I don't want the whole country to be gravel pits and Walmarts and McDonalds fed by CAFOs, and it makes me sad that politicians or corporations or somebody has convinced the majority of Americans that that *is* what their towns and their country should look like.
The main issue I have with Adam's post is that it portrays regions as more culturally monolithic than they actually are. And I think that was one of the points of Obama's 2004 Democratic National Convention speech: we talk about red states and blue states, but what this tends to mean is states that are 60% Republican vs. states that are 60% Democrat, not that all the preachers are in red states and all the artists are in blue states.
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