Rural White Liberals - A Key to Understanding the Political Divide

[Torie]

This is one of the most fascinating articles on political geography I have ever read, and seems to be a rather complete tour de horizon of all the theories bouncing around out there. But in the end it is a bit of this, and bit of that, with something for everybody: Yankee cultural values now translated into modern day liberalism, the cost of dirt and fertility rates (fertility rates being a function of cultural values), which feeds into density issues, but beyond fertility rates and the cost of dirt, also in play is the presence or not of the  don't fence me in attitude (a cultural divide that feeds right back to the conflict between Cromwell and the Royalists), and a bit of ethnicity (all those Swedes up there in the liberal rural zone in northern Minnesota), and then of course, the current great self sort.

What's missing from the menu of explanatory variables is the save the planet, go green secular religion that has gained so much traction of late, and which now surrounds me in my new hood among among those who have self sorted in from denser precincts elsewhere (right now the hot issue in the green house pews is stopping in their tracks the installation of any more electrical power lines - is there any "off ramp" from those damn wires that so desecrate our little Garden of Eden?). That is fueling some of this. You want green and not too much pavement, so where do you go to find your fellow religionists? It turns out it isn't Ashland County, Ohio, so where is it? Once a zone gets congenial, the words gets out, and more pour in. It also doesn't allude to the geological theory of the rural white liberalism of the upper Mississippi.

[Torie]

The genetic thing was weird, and yes genes affect disposition, and thus politics at the margins perhaps (I'm hard wired to be rather risk averse), but it was just mentioned in passing, and really never parsed into geography. I thought initially it was getting at race or something, but it was not that banal - or off point.

You sound like maybe you read the book Generations. Did you? That again does not seem particularly related to geography.

[Asian Nazi]

I thought initially it was getting at race or something, but it was not that banal - or off point.

If you read the rest of the guy's blog posts, though, it's full of "scientific" racist drivel.  Basically talking points straight out of Stormfront.  All the more horrifying, since the guy is (or at least claims to be) a black Jamaican. 

I mean read this entry:

https://jaymans.wordpress.com/2015/09/21/clannishness-the-series-zigzag-lightning-in-the-brain/

I'd quote specific lines to demonstrate just how horrific and, well, stupid this post is, but honestly just about every line is facepalm-worthy.

As for the particular post you linked, well, aside from his (objectively wrong) belief that all behavior is 100% determined by genetics, just repeating a lot of what has already been said in many analyses of the political dispositions of white Americans.  Yes, there are many identifiable regional white American subcultures and yes, these subcultures are largely the product of settlement patterns.  This is all fascinating and worthy of discussion.  No need to ruin it with the racist bullsh**t.  I'm going to assume that the OP doesn't endorse the views of the blogger, though one has to wonder how he stumbled across that rather dark cesspit in the first place.

[Torie]

I did a google search about rural liberal whites is how I found it.

[TJ in Oregon]

To be honest I've always thought the "American nations" map has only a tenuous relationship with reality in the Midwest. It doesn't match current demographics well: for instance do the decedents of German immigrants in the Midwest count as "Yankee" or "Midland"? The map seems to arbitrarily classify them by latitude. If the divides are supposed to be historical then SW Wisconsin had a lot more Scotch-Irish southern influence than Toledo. The Midlands in particular seems completely arbitrary to me. I mean, Zanesville has a lot more Appalachan influence than Columbus or Cincinnati yet the categorization is the opposite. Also the northern Ohio divide between "Greater New England" and Midlands looks more like it was drawn to match the 2004 presidential elections results than any real cultural distinction. I never know what that map is supposed to say.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

It's quite a mix of interesting observations with a some complete bs mixed in.  Acknowledging the possibility of heritable differences in things like tolerance for crowding may eb a worthwhile consideration, though by itself can't explain an entire political culture, and going full genetic determinist is a dead end.  The differences in genes that might increase the propensity of a temperament are almost surely going to be a matter of a modest statistical difference rather than a clear break when it comes to the level of comparing ethnicities. If you look at something like Fischer's Albion's Seed, you see that political difference have strong roots in culture, and are just one expression of these cultures. There is a complexity and coherence there that cannot be reduced merely to an assortment of genetic markers.  The variation in cultural practice and historical and geographic experience is more where I would look to when it comes to differences in political temperament.  

As for the environmentalism of your birkenstock belt, or the pacific northwest, these are areas with
a strong connection to land that has beauty of the majestic and/or bucolic variety, and low participation in orthodox forms of religiosity but still retaining some of that moralistic Puritan ethos which may express itself in a more ecologically based spirituality or commitment. It also makes sense that a more radical Environmentalism would be dominant here as opposed to somewhere like WV or WY that has a strong tradition of reliance on resource extraction.

[freepcrusher]

wow, Torie posted something from an hbd blogger.