Many Americas

Reason, March, 2001 by Cathy Young

Don't confuse the electoral vote map with the territory.

Whether you think the Electoral College is a silly archaism that frustrates the people's will or a time-tested institution that helps preserve our republic, one thing is certain: That red-and-blue electoral map not only illustrates but dramatically inflates political, cultural, and geographic differences in the United States.

Last November, the oft-reproduced image of a vast sea of Republican red framed by strips of Democratic blue gave rise to much tall about "the two Americas." Partisans at both ends of the political spectrum have long described what they consider the "other" America in cliches that border on nasty caricature. In 2000, the nastiness seems to have escalated--perhaps because, with the election a virtual tie and the results in dispute, there were stronger-than-usual motives to suggest that the other side's votes were less worthy.

The most egregious instance of such vilification was a now-infamous November 13 column posted on MSNBC.com by Democratic strategist Paul Begala. Responding to commentator Mike Barnicle's observation that the red-and-blue map represented a cultural divide of "family values versus a sense of entitlement," Begala proposed a darker way of looking at this split: "You see the state where James Byrd was lynch-dragged behind a pickup truck until his body came apart--it's red. You see the state where Matthew Shepard was crucified on a split-rail fence for the crime of being gay--it's red." He rattled off other awful deeds that occurred in the "red" states, from the Oklahoma City bombing to the teachings of Bob Jones University.

Later, Begala indignantly claimed that his argument was deliberately distorted and that he was trying to show how preposterous generalizations about regional character could be. But that explanation doesn't hold up; at most, Begala's original article allowed that the "red" states couldn't be reduced entirely to a hotbed of hate. The former Clinton advisor was articulating a view of flyover country that is hardly uncommon among the liberal intelligentsia. After Al Gore finally conceded the election in December, Boston Globe columnist David Nyhan sneered that the angry white males" who had backed George W. Bush could finally claim victory and "go back to their day jobs--oiling their Smith & Wessons, hectoring pregnant girls scurrying into abortion clinics, jeering at welfare mothers."

Conservative pundits have gleefully lambasted this liberal bigotry. And they have every right to be indignant: It's outrageous to peddle vicious stereotypes about millions of Americans simply because they voted for a candidate you oppose. Conservatives would never stoop to such a thing...right?

Actually, three days before Begala's screed appeared on the MSNBC site, a headline on OpinionJournal.com, the Web spinoff of the Wall Street Journal editorial page, referred to the pro-Gore parts of the country as "the Porn Belt." The article, by former Delaware Gov. Pete du Pont, ominously noted that Gore carried the areas in which sex videos make up the highest share of the home video market (the West and the mid-Atlantic states--including, of course, Delaware) and depicted the election primarily as a referendum on traditional morality.

Not to be outdone, National Review ran a piece by Mark Steyn titled, "Who Are These People? Gore's America--And Ours." Gore's America, as depicted by Steyn, consists mainly of "Al Sharpton's entourage, gay scoutmasters, partial-birth-abortion fetishists," liberal Hollywood airheads, and foreigners. A "not- insignificant chunk," Steyn speculated, were either non-citizens who had voted illegally or "people who are U.S. citizens but probably shouldn't be," having been rushed through the naturalization process without criminal background checks. Steyn concluded by deriding the bicoastal metropolitan areas as "debauched dystopias that the rest of us can visit for wild weekends every now and again before returning to our homes in solid, enduring, conservative...America."

There, in stark polarity, you have the two camps' view of each other. Liberals are inclined to see conservatives as bigoted, hate-filled rubes; conservatives are inclined to see liberals as immoral, degenerate, and not really American.

This mutual demonization has an impact on policy ideas. The liberals want to transfer more power to Washington and away from those benighted regions. The conservatives' city-bashing translates easily, today as a century ago, into immigrant-bashing. After the election, former National Review editor-in-chief John O'Sullivan warned that continued immigration seriously imperiled Republican fortunes in future elections. He was echoed by Richard Brookhiser, who sneered at "daffy" pro-immigration Republicans in his New York Observer column.

It's hard to tell which brand of smugness is more obnoxious in its claims to superior virtue. The real question, though, is not which America is morally better but whether there are "two Americas"--a dubious cliche that went virtually unchallenged in post-election commentary.