Can the Blue-Red divide in American politics be explained by people's demographic density and number of children? Fascinating Article!
"The Baby Gap: Explaining Red and Blue" by Steve Sailer in The American Conservative, December 20, 2004:
"As you've seen on all those red-blue maps, most of America's land is red, even though Kerry won 48 percent of the vote. Even excluding vast Alaska, Bush's counties are only one-fourth as densely populated on average as Kerry's counties.
Lower density helps explain why red regions both attract the baby-oriented and encourage larger families among those already there.
A dozen years ago, the U. of Chicago sociologist Edward O. Laumann and others wrote a tome with the soporific post-modern title The Social Organization of Sexuality. I wrote to them and suggested a follow-up called The Sexual Organization of Society, because, in my experience with Chicago, where people lived coincided with their sexual status."
[...]
Likewise, a San Francisco couple earning a $100,000 between them can afford just as much in Cedar City, Utah if the husband can find a $44,000 a year job -- and then the wife can stay home to raise their children.
Moreover, the culture of Cedar City is more conducive to child rearing than San Francisco. Having insulated themselves through distance rather than money, they can now send their kids to public schools.
[...]With more children, the couple will have less money per child to buy insulation from America's corrosive media culture, so they are likely to look to the government for help. Typically, red region parents don't ask for much, often just for quasi-symbolic endorsements of family values, the non-economic gestures that drive Thomas Frank crazy. But, there's nothing irrational about trying to protect and guide your children. As the socially conservative black comedian Chris Rock advises fathers, "Your main job is to keep your daughter off The Pole" (keep her from becoming a stripper).
That red region parents want their politicians to endorse morality does not necessarily mean that red staters always behave more morally than blue staters. While there are well-behaved red states such as Utah and Colorado, hell-raising white Texans are 3.4 times more likely than white New Yorkers to be behind bars. Similarly, whites in conservative Mississippi and South Carolina are 1/6th as likely as blacks in those states to be imprisoned, compared to the national average of 1/9th. In contrast, in ultra-liberal Washington D.C., whites are only 1/56th as likely to be in the slammer as blacks.
The late socialist historian Jim Chapin pointed out that it was perfectly rational for parents with more children than money to ask their political and cultural leaders to help them insulate their kids from bad examples, even, or perhaps especially, if the parents themselves are not perfect role models.
Focusing on children, insulation, population density, and real estate reasonsing reveals that blue region white Democrats' positions on vouchers, gun control, and environmentalism are motivated partly by fear of urban minorities.
[...]
In 2001, the Wall Street Journal's favorite mayor Brett Schundler ran for governor of New Jersey on a platform of vouchers to help inner city children attend better schools in the suburbs. The now notorious Democrat Jim McGreevey beat him badly because white suburban moderates shunned this Republican who put the welfare of urban minority children ahead of their own. These homeowners were scraping together big mortgage payments precisely to get their kids into exclusive suburban school districts insulated from what they saw as the ghetto hellions that Schundler hoped to unleash on their children. They had much of their net worths tied up in their homes, and their property values depended on the local public schools' high test scores, which they feared wouldn't survive an onslaught of slum children. So, they voted Democratic to keep minorities in their place.
The endless gun control brouhaha, which on the surface appears to be a bitter battle between liberal and conservative whites, also features a cryptic racial angle. What blue region white liberals actually want is for the government to disarm the dangerous urban minorities that threaten their children's safety. Red region white conservatives, insulated by distance from the Crips and the Bloods, don't care that white liberals' kids are in peril. Besides, in sparsely populated Republican areas, where police response times are slow and the chance of drilling an innocent bystander are slim, guns make more sense for self-defense than in the cities and suburbs.
"The Baby Gap: Explaining Red and Blue" by Steve Sailer in The American Conservative, December 20, 2004:
"As you've seen on all those red-blue maps, most of America's land is red, even though Kerry won 48 percent of the vote. Even excluding vast Alaska, Bush's counties are only one-fourth as densely populated on average as Kerry's counties.
Lower density helps explain why red regions both attract the baby-oriented and encourage larger families among those already there.
A dozen years ago, the U. of Chicago sociologist Edward O. Laumann and others wrote a tome with the soporific post-modern title The Social Organization of Sexuality. I wrote to them and suggested a follow-up called The Sexual Organization of Society, because, in my experience with Chicago, where people lived coincided with their sexual status."
[...]
Likewise, a San Francisco couple earning a $100,000 between them can afford just as much in Cedar City, Utah if the husband can find a $44,000 a year job -- and then the wife can stay home to raise their children.
Moreover, the culture of Cedar City is more conducive to child rearing than San Francisco. Having insulated themselves through distance rather than money, they can now send their kids to public schools.
[...]With more children, the couple will have less money per child to buy insulation from America's corrosive media culture, so they are likely to look to the government for help. Typically, red region parents don't ask for much, often just for quasi-symbolic endorsements of family values, the non-economic gestures that drive Thomas Frank crazy. But, there's nothing irrational about trying to protect and guide your children. As the socially conservative black comedian Chris Rock advises fathers, "Your main job is to keep your daughter off The Pole" (keep her from becoming a stripper).
That red region parents want their politicians to endorse morality does not necessarily mean that red staters always behave more morally than blue staters. While there are well-behaved red states such as Utah and Colorado, hell-raising white Texans are 3.4 times more likely than white New Yorkers to be behind bars. Similarly, whites in conservative Mississippi and South Carolina are 1/6th as likely as blacks in those states to be imprisoned, compared to the national average of 1/9th. In contrast, in ultra-liberal Washington D.C., whites are only 1/56th as likely to be in the slammer as blacks.
The late socialist historian Jim Chapin pointed out that it was perfectly rational for parents with more children than money to ask their political and cultural leaders to help them insulate their kids from bad examples, even, or perhaps especially, if the parents themselves are not perfect role models.
Focusing on children, insulation, population density, and real estate reasonsing reveals that blue region white Democrats' positions on vouchers, gun control, and environmentalism are motivated partly by fear of urban minorities.
[...]
In 2001, the Wall Street Journal's favorite mayor Brett Schundler ran for governor of New Jersey on a platform of vouchers to help inner city children attend better schools in the suburbs. The now notorious Democrat Jim McGreevey beat him badly because white suburban moderates shunned this Republican who put the welfare of urban minority children ahead of their own. These homeowners were scraping together big mortgage payments precisely to get their kids into exclusive suburban school districts insulated from what they saw as the ghetto hellions that Schundler hoped to unleash on their children. They had much of their net worths tied up in their homes, and their property values depended on the local public schools' high test scores, which they feared wouldn't survive an onslaught of slum children. So, they voted Democratic to keep minorities in their place.
The endless gun control brouhaha, which on the surface appears to be a bitter battle between liberal and conservative whites, also features a cryptic racial angle. What blue region white liberals actually want is for the government to disarm the dangerous urban minorities that threaten their children's safety. Red region white conservatives, insulated by distance from the Crips and the Bloods, don't care that white liberals' kids are in peril. Besides, in sparsely populated Republican areas, where police response times are slow and the chance of drilling an innocent bystander are slim, guns make more sense for self-defense than in the cities and suburbs.
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