A New Olive Branch

If you've been paying any attention to politics, you've no doubt heard about the town halls where the "tea partiers" have staged noisy protests. You hear comments like "Hands off my health care!" and rants about the growth of the Federal Government.

Most of these people seem to come from rural and suburban areas, and the 2008 election cartogram seems to confirm this. No, someone wasn't having a little fun with Photoshop. The larger areas of the map represent population. The most populous urban areas largely went for Obama in the last election, while the rural areas went for McCain.

The ideological differences between the Republicans and the Democrats seem to be geographical differences. I think it's a clash of lifestyles.

Rural areas seem to be isolated and independent. People who live out in the West or the South seem to pride themselves on their self-reliance and privacy. As the cartogram shows, this happens in nearly every rural area. People in the San Joaquin Valley resent do-gooders from L.A. and San Francisco as much as people in the Deep South do. The isolation also gives rise to social conservatism. In small towns, nearly everyone knows each other. Newcomers upset the social balance, because it's difficult to determine if they can fit into the complex social structures of small towns, especially if they're a different color than the locals.

Urban areas are, by necessity, interdependent. For one thing, housing and working spaces are very close together, often even combined. The supposed "government meddling" that conservatives love to decry was a response to the epidemics that were sweeping the cities in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It just wasn't efficient to tackle them on a case-by-case basis using private doctors. Cities have also traditionally been located along large bodies of water, since the only reliable long distance travel was by sea. And the ships docking at New York, Boston, and San Francisco brought new people and new ideas. City dwellers quickly found that neither of them were very threatening at all.

The United States is made up of two fundamentally different nations. The challenge will be to appeal to both the conservative self-reliant traditional nation, while still appealing to the urban interdependent and cosmopolitan urban nation.

Tags: politics, urban, rural, liberal, conservative, town hall Last modified 23:18 Tue, 1 Sept 2009 by ddelony. Accessed 72 times Children What Links Here Share Except where expressly noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.