How deep the divide?
Scholars and pundits don't agree on the meaning of red and blue--or whether the nation is deeply split
Yet Fiorina sees the lost liberal hegemony of the Democrats and the emergence of an evenly divided electorate as less the product of a winning Republican strategy than the result of the transformation of the political process, including party reform and the rise of ideologically driven purists in both parties and, again, the sorting into parties of more rigidly aligned partisans. His analysis of the data on, for instance, voters' attitudes toward abortion (particularly when broken down into situations when the respondents think it should be permitted) and gay marriage shows fewer strong differences than commonalities among the vast majority of Republicans, Democrats, and independents. In other words, most voters are out of sync with the absolutist positions of the highly polarized party elites. The conclusion would seem to be that culture warring alone will not lead to a solid Republican majority coalition.
The Democratic Party's efforts to rebuild a majority coalition also run up against problems raised in the two-nations debate. Both Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton tended to rein in progressive federal programs and trim bureaucracy, sensing Americans' growing distrust of "big government." But if Clinton's "reinvention" of government seemed popular enough to secure his re-election, many traditional liberal critics argue that "new Democrats" have steadily chipped away at those policies and programs that once made the party attractive to the majority of working- and middle-class Americans. "The difference between Clinton and other DLC [Democratic Leadership Council] Democrats and Republicans is very small compared to differences between the DLC Democrats and the Democrats they replaced, such as Hubert Humphrey," says Thomas Frank, author of What's the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. By becoming Republican Party Lite in social and economic policies, Frank adds, the Democrats have basically allowed the Republicans to seize the populist mantle simply by appearing more folksy and standing for the traditional cultural values that most red Americans are drawn to.
Frank's solution to the great divide--return to the populist-progressive policies of the FDR Democrats--is one that Sperling takes up with a vengeance. But Sperling isn't worried about the voters in Kansas or any of the other retro states. They are, in his view, on the down slope of history, demographically and economically. Metro America, by which he means all the blue states in the last presidential election plus a few other ought-to-be blues (Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, and Virginia), are the future. The economic engine of the nation, they put more into the federal till than do the retro states, whose residents get more back from the government they complain about than metro-state folks do. "America receives huge subsidies, and it exports huge amounts of agricultural products," he says, "but industrial metro America doesn't receive a dime of support." Democrats, he argues, should not only advocate increased support for industries in metro states (including reasonably protectionist "fair-trade" policies); they should also be bold about standing for the progressive values, including gay marriage and abortion, that most metro Americans support.
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