Why are red states red and blue states blue?
 

Steven Pinker's blog. An interesting read.

Why Are States So Red and Blue? - NYTimes.com

interesting

I think maybe I detect a smidgen of perhaps a leftist/ intellectual Elite bias in the article.

How so?

I always thought that red vs. blue was mostly of a function of what %age of the state lived in an urban environment.

Urban areas and coastal areas(the Northeast, Southern calif) have large cities that require a good amount of 'shared services' per person (sewer and water lines, trash collection, police and fire presence) just to function in a stable manner.

Rural areas do not require as many of the above services (per person?) to function in a stable manner.

Most of what people want is stability, and if you are a rural person - too many water lines or police officers threatens stability ("who is coming to town that needs a police cruiser parked at every intersection ?"). If you live in the city, too few fire trucks and sewer lines threatens that stability.

I dont disagree with the linked article. I'm sure that it is a combination of many different things.

-John

Time to "tighten up" your Bible Belt.

You're kidding right? Read the concluding paragraph again.

- Peter.

I always thought that "Red" should be the democrat/ liberal/ socialist color. But since they don't want to raise that connection--they picked "blue".

There is a worthy crusade for you to pursue if ever I heard of one...

Go gettem, Tiger !

Nope. Not kidding.

If this history is right, the American political divide may have arisen not so much from different conceptions of human nature as from differences in how best to tame it. The North and coasts are extensions of Europe and continued the government-driven civilizing process that had been gathering momentum since the Middle Ages. The South and West preserved the culture of honor that emerged in the anarchic territories of the growing country, tempered by their own civilizing forces of churches, families and temperance.

I don't see any intellectual elitism here. Presumably you see something that smacks of value judgement towards the south and west. What exactly is that?

Why are red states red and blue states blue?

IMHO people of the same likes and dislikes like to band together. I could never live in Amarillo, but would be comfortable in Austin. Areas where people are incredulous that I don’t hate X and Y people, make me very uncomfortable. I understand fear often motivates people’s irrational thinking but WTH, this is the 21st century.

Sorry. I meant concluding paragraphs, the penultimate one of which reads...

"But then why, once stable government did arrive, did it not lay claim to the monopoly on violence that is the very definition of government? The historian Pieter Spierenburg has suggested that “democracy came too soon to America,” namely, before the government had disarmed its citizens. Since American governance was more or less democratic from the start, the people could choose not to cede to it the safeguarding of their personal safety but to keep it as their prerogative. The unhappy result of this vigilante justice is that American homicide rates are far higher than those of Europe, and those of the South higher than those of the North."

The assumption being that the pussywhipped Europeans are more civilized because their governments retain a monopoly on violence and the US unfortunately became democratic too quickly for the government to succeed in cowering it's populace is a new twist on liberal intellectual elitism I'd never seen before.

- Peter.

Highly probable since the intellectual elite tends toward the left in the first place.

Some guy was piddling with GIS of voter preferences and chose colors from the pallet available in the GIS. He wanted contrasts. He passed along his maps to newsies and wonks. They liked it. It stuck.

Curiously before that happened, the Repos had chosen blue and the Demos had chosen green.

I guess we read it differently. To me it reads like a sound conservative rationale. We got it right from the get go, being essentially democratic from the beginning, we didn't allow the government to monopolize protecting the populace from itself.
I can see how the sentence I bolded might be seen as a liberal viewpoint, "vigilante justice", "unhappy result", and yet statistically the statement is true. The American south has a higher homicide rate than the north.