Red vs. Blue; Cavalier vs. Roundhead; PhillyMag vs. Brooks

Joel Kotkin, now affiliated with a public policy institute at Pepperdine University, has long been a perceptive commentator on the geography of American culture, and he makes another interesting contribution today with an article in the “Outlook” section of today’s Washington Post.

In “Red, Blue and … So 17th Century,” he argues that America’s current cultural divide is reminiscent of the English Civil War of the 1640s.

Like England under Charles I, when the Cavaliers — the royalist supporters of the king — and the Roundheads — Puritan upstarts led by Oliver Cromwell — went at it for seven years of war, the United States today is becoming two nations. This is not merely the age-old split between income groups, as Sen. John Edwards kept suggesting in his unsuccessful campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, but something even more fundamental — a struggle between contrasting and utterly incompatible worldviews.

….

The political division has grown wider in recent years. Now a clear geographic and cultural divide is emerging as well. Demographic trends suggest that Republicans and Democrats are less likely to live next door to each other, attend the same churches or subscribe to the same media.

America’s Roundheads cluster in the South, the Plains and various parts of the West, while the Cavaliers inhabit the coasts, particularly the large metropolitan centers of the Northeast and Pacific Northwest. Each side has its own views, confirmed by its favored media. Fox TV, most of talk radio, the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Sean Hannity speak for the Roundheads, supporting President Bush and America’s global mission. The mainstream media, the universities and the cultural establishment, including most of Hollywood, are the voices of the Cavaliers, whose elites, like many of England’s Cavaliers and Charles I’s French wife before them, are most concerned with winning over continental opinion and mimicking the European way of life.

As in 17th-century England, where the Roundheads disdained the Cavaliers’ embrace of what John Milton called “new-vomited Paganisme,” the most obvious divisions between the two groups are contrasting views of moral and religious issues. Our Cavaliers are the secular nation, whose spiritual home is in those places that yearn to join San Francisco at the same-sex-marriage altar. Contemporary Roundheads, like Cromwell’s Shakespeare-hating Puritans, possess a fundamentalist sensibility; they seek to stop gay marriage and abortion, and bemoan other manifestations of our secular culture.

There’s much more (especially a less than completely successful attempt to tie these cultural contrasts to economic demography), but the quoted paragraphs above demonstrate, I think, the power and suggestiveness of Kotkin’s analysis, as well as its weakness in places. For example, I think his brush is a bit too broad when he paints today’s Roundheads as all Shakespeare-hating know nothings and points to gay marriage and abortion as the leading embodiments of secular culture. There are many secular opponents of both abortion and gay marriage, just as one of the leading Shakespeare companies in the country, Blackfriars Theater, is located just over the mountains from where I live, in solid red/Roundhead Staunton, Augusta County, Virginia.

And, speaking of Virginia, there is one factual mistake that no Virginian can ignore. Kotkin argues that in general Roundhead America is economically more dynamic than Cavalier America, but there are several bright spots in Cavalier areas.

If you’re looking for new population and job growth anywhere near the coasts, it’s more likely to be found in Cherry Hill, N.J., Dutchess County, N.Y., Richmond and Petersburg, Va., or Bakersfield, Calif., than within the city limits of Philadelphia, New York, San Francisco or Los Angeles. Still, while these places may be in nominally “blue” states, they often vote Republican….

I don’t know what Kotkin was smoking when he last looked at the political map, but Virginia is most definitely not a “blue” state, nominally or otherwise. Perhaps he was thrown off by the “Cavalier” mascot of the UVa athletic teams.

Nevertheless, despite a blemish or two, the picture painted by Kotkin’s broad strokes rings true (or is that a mixed metaphor?). But the truth that it rings does not, it seems to me, go beyond the masterful portrait painted by David Brooks in his influential Atlantic Monthly article, “One Nation, Slightly Divisible,” that almost poetically delineated the differences between “blue” Montgomery County, Md., and “red” Franklin County, Pa. Some examples: Franklin County has

  • fewer sun-dried tomato concoctions on restaurant menus and a lot more meatloaf platters;
  • no blue New York Times delivery bags dotting driveways on Sunday Mornings;
  • no people complaining that Woody Allen isn’t as funny as he used to be because they never thought he was funny.

Or Again:

In Red America churches are everywhere. In Blue America Thai restaurants are everywhere. In Red America they have QVC, the Pro Bowlers Tour, and hunting. In Blue America we have NPR, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and socially conscious investing.

….

Everything that people in my neighborhood [Bethesda, Montgomery County] do without motors, the people in Red America do with motors. Brooks wrote. When it comes to yard work, they have rider mowers; we have illegal aliens.

Now, thanks to Fenster Moop, I see that an article by Sasha Issenberg in Philadelphia Magazine accuses Brooks of, in effect, making it all up to fit his preconceived thesis. Issenberg does this by unearthing such presumably telling facts as, for example, that “six of the top 10 states in terms of illegal-alien population are Red.” Here’s another taste:

In january, i made my own trip to Franklin County, 175 miles southwest of Philadelphia, with a simple goal: I wanted to see where David Brooks comes up with this stuff. One of the first places I passed was Greencastle Coffee Roasters, which has more than 200 kinds of coffee, and a well-stocked South Asian grocery in the back with a product range hard to find in some large coastal cities: 20-pound bags of jasmine rice, cans of Thai fermented mustard greens, a freezer with lemongrass stalks and kaffir-lime leaves. The owner, Charles Rake, told me that there was, until a few years back, a Thai restaurant in Chambersburg, run by a woman who now does catering. “She’s the best Thai cook I know on Planet Earth,” Rake said. “And I’ve been to Thailand.”

I stopped at Blockbuster, where the dvd of Annie Hall was checked out. I went to the counter to see how Scott, the clerk, thought it compared to Allen’s other work. “It’s funny,” said Scott. “What’s the funny one? Yeah, Annie Hall, that’s the one where he dates everyone — it’s funny.

Again, there’s more. Since I believe Brooks on Red vs. Blue successfully captured something of the essence of our current cultural conflict, I really should be bothered by these inconvenient facts. I like facts. I believe facts are important. As I mentioned as recently as the bottom of this long post, I have no use for the true believers who continued to defend Rigoberta Menchu’s allegedly non-fiction book after it was revealed that much of it was fiction. They, too, said that some of the “facts” were fake but that the essence of the book was true. That’s also what some people say of hate crime hoaxes, that the lies they tell reveal deeper and more important truths.

And yet, I remain reluctant to throw out the Red vs. Blue insight because Greencastle has a good coffee roaster and Thai cook, just as I’m unwilling to dismiss Kotkin’s Roundheads vs. Cavaliers because some of his examples don’t hold up. Indeed, the Democrats could capture Congress and behead Bush (emulating the Cromwellian Roundheads) and we would still no doubt have to deal with arguments saying the cultural divide is exaggerated.

UPDATE [3/29]

For an interesting personal take on the reds vs. the blues, see this March 2001 essay by Clayton Cramer in Shotgun News.

Say What? (6)

  1. Laura March 28, 2004 at 6:40 pm | | Reply

    I wouldn’t have a problem with a cultural divide if people didn’t seem to think that if they think X they have to think Y and Z also. Without a cultural divide, either we’d all have to be exactly the same in all our thoughts and convictions and preferences, which would be terrible, or we would have to live like we were, which would be almost as bad. If folks want to put a car up on blocks in their front yards, well, there are whole neighborhoods like that. It’s nice that there’s somewhere they can feel at home.

    The part about Republicans and Democrats not going to church together is not true, alas. I am only half joking about the “alas” part. Our senior pastor, who ordinarily is pretty cool, feared that the Republican takeover in 1994 would mean widespread starving in the streets due to the instantaneous wiping out of welfare programs. His son is a divinity student at Princeton and has preached for us a few times; sharp kid, but he bemoans the attacks on affirmative action as evidence of widespread racism. Well, this kind of thing keeps me on my toes during church.

    I’ll end with this: Our city was graced by the yearly science fiction convention this weekend, and my daughter attended in the same costume she wore for it last year: she’s “some random elf” from Middle Earth. We had to park way back behind the hotel because these conventions are always jam-packed. As we walked through the lot, she told me, “I feel like a dork.” (being in costume). I said, “Well, you’re going to a dork convention, so don’t worry about it.” She laughed and agreed. Then a car passing through the lot slowed down, and one of the two men in it (fat, white, buzz haircuts and goatees) said to us, “I take it this is where MidSouthCon is?” “Yes”, we said. It takes one to know one, apparently. We went on into the hotel to find the hundreds of Imperial Storm Troopers, wizards, space beings, and so forth, and my kid said, “I feel at home.” It takes all kinds to make a world.

  2. craig henry March 29, 2004 at 12:24 pm | | Reply

    Brooks was on to something about Red/Blue, but he was so much a blue-stater he caricatured Franklin County. Those are the things that Issenberg nails him for. We aren’t all mullet-headed toolheads licking gravy off our plate at the Waffle House.

    But Issenberg overstates his case.

    We do have a few Thai restaurants and coffee roasters out here, but nothing like a blue suburb. My brother lives in Greencastle and i live next door in Cumberland county. It’s a little over 35 miles on I-81. Guess what, you can’t get a latte anywhere along that route. We have nice restaurants, but Cracker Barrel is packed on Friday and Saturday nights. People go to churches and gunshows. We do hunt. Maybe Philly watches some NASCAR, but we go to the races. And we don’t watch the thugs from the NBA like blue america seems to.

    So yes, i agree that the culture line exists. But i think Brooks drew a distorted picture.

  3. andy March 29, 2004 at 2:20 pm | | Reply

    Note also the the late Bob Jones Jr. was supposedly an excellent Shakespearean actor. BJU continues every year to present a Shakespeare comedy and tragedy around their big campus visitor days (Thanksgiving and graduation)

  4. Robert Wenson March 30, 2004 at 6:36 am | | Reply

    A minor quibble:

    Mr. Kotkin did not describe today’s “Roundheads” as Shakespeare-hating; if you re-read the quoted passage, you will see that he refers to “Cromwell’s Shakespeare-hating Puritans.”

  5. John Rosenberg March 30, 2004 at 7:49 am | | Reply

    A minor contra-quibble:

    Robert, I think you are technically correct. My comment was something of a stretch. Still, if you describe someone today as a Roundhead with “a fundamentalist sensibility” that is “like Cromwell’s Shakespeare-hating Puritans,” I think it is not a stretch too far. If it is, then it is also too much of a stretch to call current antagonists Roundheads and cavaliers in the first place. Kotkin was being evocative, successfully I think, not literal.

  6. Damon Morris May 10, 2004 at 8:32 pm | | Reply

    Craig henry hit the divide on the nose.

    My real question is, why debate specifics, which side has which territory and which side does what, but Instead discuess WHAT on EARTH can we do to prevent this ideological split, from widening and ending in serious political strife, and (I think) possibly civil war down the road. After all, that’s what it took in 1640 to resolve this type of conflict.

    Maybe I’m just too pessimistic. But I think americans, all types of them are fiercely stubborn in defending their set of ideals. Hell, that is part of the revolutionary spirit that started this country on the road to greatness. But now, we find this too is a double-edged sword?

Say What?