There are good people and racists everywhere. But Massachusetts today is more likely
to elect politicians like Elizabeth Warren and Deval Patrick.
Texas elevates people like George W. and Ted Cruz.
It isn't just the South -- it's all the Red states. But the division between Blue and Red is real.
If it wasn't for the "solid South" the Republican party would be doomed.
https://prospect.org/article/red-state-blue-state-polarization-and-american-situation
Under other circumstances, however, polarization can be a stimulus to change. When politics become polarized between two alternatives, voters have clearer choices. They have more reason to pay attention and turn out. Each side may then mobilize, take power, and get its way in different jurisdictions or private institutions. That is what is happening now in state and local governments and civil society. Two ideologically based societies have developed within the United States, and the differences between them are growing. The question will ultimately be which America, red or blue, dominates the nation’s future.
The United States began as two societies—one based on racial slavery, the other on free labor—and despite all that has since happened in the nation’s history, today’s political divisions are descended from that original split. The current political map, to be sure, does not divide exactly along North-South lines. Some rural areas in the North are socially and politically more like the South, while some urban areas in the South are more like the North. The West has its own divisions. But the regional and racial continuities are unmistakable. The South continues to be the principal base of support for a party favoring harsher policies toward labor and the poor and drawing its support almost entirely from whites. The South’s culture and religion pervade the version of conservatism that dominates the Republican Party.
For most of the 20th century, it wasn’t at all clear that these old divisions would continue to define the lines of conflict in the United States. Until the 1980s, the prevailing currents of change favored the creation of a single national society. The Progressive era, the New Deal, and the civil rights movement and Great Society of the 1960s all brought nationalizing reforms; the Supreme Court extended constitutional requirements for equal rights and civil liberties to the states. As national markets, national corporations, and national media grew, they contributed to a narrowing of regional economic and cultural differences. Especially during World War II and the Cold War, it was easy to believe—as many leading historians and social scientists did—that all Americans shared a consensus on values. While Europeans fought ideological battles, Americans supposedly worked out their differences within a common framework.
SNIP
= new reply since forum marked as read
MA also put Scott Brown in office.
