We’ve been told in innumerable ways that the big-city, liberal parts of the country aren’t the real America. This has been going on, not just for the last few years, but for almost three decades. It didn’t take poor, nutty Michelle Bachmann to do this. It took the corporate media from the Reagan era, which were infatuated with the idea that Reagan, most of whose aggressively right-wing policies actually had little popular support, was the leader of a grass-roots swell to the right that was overwhelming the supposedly shrinking urban holdouts that were all the poor Democrats had left. Back then, even most liberals seemed to buy into this garbage. Worse yet, many of them perpetuated it, spewing forth patronizing comments about how “the sad truth is, people in the real America aren’t so enlightened” and such. Happily, in the last few years, most liberals seem to have woken up from this bad dream of their own creation.
My point is that once you start engaging in that ultimately fascistic kind of reasoning, treating one part of America as somehow realer or truer or more American than another, the shoe can just as easily fit the other foot. The 2008 election shows the more rural, small town, and exurban 30% of the country out of synch with the majority. It shows that majority manifesting itself in a thinly scattered 70%, consisting of the most urbanized parts of the population. This deserves to be highlighted.
Not that it’s as simple as 70-30. The 70% can be split down the middle, rendering America into three roughly equal pieces. Here’s 35% of the electorate, representing the middle-density communities:
Map 4
In these counties with 200-1000 people per square mile, the election was almost a tossup, with Obama barely edging out McCain, 50-48%. But in the very densest counties, with more than 1000 people per square miles, it’s quite a different story:
Map 5
These very thinly spread bits account for another 35% of the population, and here, Obama crushed McCain by almost thirty points, 63-35%. Twenty states have no counties in this grouping. (Fortunately for Obama, although that’s two-fifths of the states, they have only about one-fifth of the electors; McCain won 70 of his 173 electors in these states, Obama only 39 of his winning total of 365.) This ultra-urban 35% is the Democratic hammer, the tool with which they can smash Republicans despite racking up sizeable deficits in the acreage-dominating other 65%.
Indeed, the Republicans are now in a great quandary. They have decisively lost both houses of Congress and the presidency; worse for them, the two groups that grow the population, youth and immigrants, are overwhelmingly against them. Thus, even if there’s a good chance that some of the next few elections will be a bit better for them due to better short-term circumstances (i.e., no W), in the long run they are likely to find themselves falling further and further behind. Perhaps the GOP’s only real hope is a constitutional amendment:
The Arboreal Rights Amendment (ARA)
Section 1
All trees born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.
Section 2
The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of being a tree.
Section 3
