It is time for me to revisit something that I wrote over thirteen years ago, in 2008. I wrote about "Northern Effect", the tendency of Barack Obama to outperform in some areas of the United States that were traditionally thought to be conservative, especially across the Great Plains States and Rocky Mountain States. When I wrote it, it was May of 2008, and the 2008 Democratic Presidential Primaries weren't even finished. Some of the things I wrote about were premature, but indeed, in the general election, Obama did end up doing very well across some conservative areas, such as the Dakotas. Some of that was due to the unusual aspects of that time, but in general, Obama managed to do better than expected, and for a while to have some personal popularity, in traditionally conservative areas.
In 2010, I was living in Montana, and having a lot of time on my hands, I started analyzing demographic data from the census. I manually input the college and high school graduation rates of 3000 counties into a spreadsheet, among many other things. And I started to form a narrative. "Conservative" or "Red" America, what was often grouped together as the flyover states" came in two distinct areas: the Great Plains and Rocky Mountain states on one, and the Deep South and Upland South on the other. Although having similar political leanings, they were demographically distinct in many ways. When it came to education, health, literacy, and community participation, the areas diverged widely. Also, although harder to qualify, the Rocky Mountains and Great Plains tended to be more secular. So in my mind, I built up a narrative: Westerners and Northerners were independent people who were tolerant of differences, responsible for themselves, and wanted to support their communities on their own terms. They had a distrust of bureaucracy, and since they lived in an egalitarian society where neighbors helped neighbors, their distrust of government was based on the inevitable depersonalization that comes from welfare. On the other hand, I saw people from the South as willfully ignorant, slouched under a cloud of cigarette smoke, and wanting to recreate the racial hierarchies of slavery and Jim Crow. Group adherence, in society and religion, was their primary motivator, unlike the rugged individualists of the West.
I could embellish this further. And I could back it up with statistics. If we look at a lot of things, like obesity, high school graduation level, and religious affiliation, there is a difference.
But I don't believe this anymore. Two things popped my confidence. One was the support for Donald Trump, a man who was the opposite of a homespun, egalitarian self-made man. He was a reality television star from New York City who exhibited no values of neighborliness. And while there may have been some qualms about him from some quarters, such as the LDS Church's principled refusal of his bullying nature, it was too little, too late. The second was Covid-19. While there is a long argument that could be had about how much government should mandate personal behaviors, that is beside the point, because there are large quarters of these seemingly thoughtful and sober people who have reacted with something like glee to the idea of getting and passing a deadly disease in their community. Not the libertarian ideal that rules do more harm than good, but just a refusal to admit reality. If the idea was that voluntary compliance and community, not government action, were what was needed, that would be one thing. But instead there is just a total lack of acknowledgement that actions have consequences.
So rather than being a society based upon principle, even if those principles are different than the ones I have, are that are somewhat naive, when I think about all the smiling, friendly faces that I knew in those small towns in the West, I just think of another rabble, easily shaped and swayed by demagogues and propaganda. Maybe this wasn't always the case, but now it is, and I don't know what to say about that. The "Northern Effect", the idea that seemingly conservative or traditional parts of the US, actually were able to strive for something better, is something I no longer believe in.