It's been a few weeks since I finished Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State. As a denizen of a rich, blue state (possibly the bluest, if not the richest) and a former denizen of a poor, red state (possibly the reddest, though certainly not the poorest) I found the book very interesting. I guess that's mostly as a fan of quantitative social and political science.
To recap for non-readers: the fundamental paradox Gelman's team set out to understand was why wealthy individuals voted Republican but wealthy states voted Democrat. The resolution of the paradox was that individual wealth impacted voter preference much more in poor states (where it made one much, much more likely to be a Republican) than in rich states (where it made one only marginally more likely to be a Republican).
I don't feel that Gelman ever really answered the question of what causes this paradox, at least not to my satisfaction. He analyzes a few other societal features (like race, income inequality and religious ideology), but doesn't come up with a convincing explanation to my mind. Does anyone have a speculative theory on why rich states tend to vary only slightly in partisan id with income, but poor states vary more dramatically?
I thought his insight about the red state-blue state phenomenon occurring primarily at the upper end of the income scale was insightful if not surprising. Poor people seem to be (according to Gelman's numbers) fairly ideologically homogeneous, while it's the rich who are bitterly divided. I think it also speaks to the wealth of the political elites (both in office and in the media) that they seem to be so focused on the partisan divide when it really only impacts a small portion of the overall citizenry (albeit an overwhelmingly influential subpopulation). So why is there such power in the red state-blue state meme? Is it because we
want it to be true, in some sense? Because it speaks to a fundamental tension within each of us as citizens and within the structure of the nation as a whole?
A divide that Gelman touches on, but didn't seem to dive into really, is the urban-suburban-rural divide. I read
an article during the 2008 election at Salon.com that I thought was somewhat insightful on this topic. As a rural idealist (in the form of Tolkien) I tend to denigrate the urban value system (or lack thereof). Having lived for some time now near a major city I've yet to be persuaded that urbanity has anything positive to offer from a moral perspective. When I've asked proponents of urban values to justify them, they almost universally point to multi-culturalism and tolerance as values you get in a city that you can't in the country. But to my perspective, those who tout the value of such multi-culturalism have only a thin veneer of tolerance, particularly across socio-economic lines. I think I learned significantly more tolerance of "the other" living in rural Utah than I have in multi-cultural Massachusetts. Reminds me of a story a friend of mine told me about flying out to Harvard for graduate school...
Another thing I found interesting in Gelman's development was breaking out social vs. economic value systems. While I don't know that those are necessarily the "right" axes to separate our political ideology, they certainly are evocative. In the comparison of economic values to income, being richer makes you uniformly more economically conservative, and by almost identical amounts regardless of ones stances on social issues. The social values aren't as uniform, but the strong trend is for more money to make you more socially liberal. So the real mass of people seem to be economically liberal (tax and spend, redistributionist Socialists) and socially conservative (values voting, gay-bashing religious Nutjobs). And that's where I tend to find myself, in direct counterposition to the socially liberal, economically conservative libertarians (of which David Frum is a light-hued version; for more pure examples, go to www.reason.com). And yet, as a Republican it's hard to ignore the youth appeal and renewed vigor of the libertarian movement with its Ron Paulistas and Tea Parties. So I feel conflicted; I'd like my party to look more like me (the compassionate conservativism that got lost post-9/11) but I also want my party to be strong and win elections, which right now seems to imply letting it look less like me.
Anway, I liked the book. I hope a few other people had the patience to check it out, and to wait all these weeks until I managed to get a post off about it.
P.S.- One final point I wanted to make (sorry if this reedit is generating lots of extra emails). When contemplating
why I'm socially conservative but economically liberal I would point to my religion. But many of my co-religionists are much more economically conservative, and some are much more socially liberal, so I don't know that that captures the true reason. Thinking deeper, my "social image" (for lack of a better term) is that poor people have greater moral authority than rich people. And I think that's what leads me primarily to that upper-left quadrant in Gelman's 2-D political belief matrix. So a question I wanted to put to the crowd is whether you feel rich people or poor people have greater moral standing (or neither)?
