Red America and Blue America
Ronald Brownstein says there is a “great divergence” occurring in the United States. His claim piggy backs on Michael Podhorzer’s analysis suggesting that red America and blue America are “fundamentally different nations uneasily sharing the same geographic space.” Brownstein has simply provided a novel phrase to describe a complex country’s politics reduced to and visualized by two primary colors. Ronald Brownstein gives credence to a grand ideological divide between republican red America and democratic blue America when the country south of Canada requires a big picture social cohesive to unite the States of America.
It was late-summer in 2010 and the global economy was still trying to collect its thoughts after the 2008 Financial Crisis. For the majority of us, our common sense view of money was too fractured to continue imagining a financial future promised by the Baby Boomers. I was visiting the prairie province of Saskatchewan listening to an ol’ boy farmer sow his ideology.
American farmers used to come up here with a couple hundred grand in cash to buy bees, this ol’ boy had said. They’d have big trucks and empty trailers to haul the pollinators back to their fields, this ol’ boy continued. You could have made a lot of money on the side of the road with an old shotgun, this ol’ boy suggested. He sounded like a retired union man reminiscing about his overtime shifts at the factory. But this ol’ boy was more like a weathered highwayman looking to end his sabbatical.
What we need, said this ol’ boy in a tone of genial finality, was another world war. That’ll settle everyone down, he concluded with a nod. But what I didn’t understand then was this ol’ boy was suggesting we need a common enemy to pit ourselves against, something to bring everyone together, something to be a social cohesive. The Financial Crisis was a massive misfire driving us to diverge from one another. And we were going to need more than bees’ wax to repair the fault lines of social separation — financial or otherwise.
I think a lot about what that ol’ boy had said more than a decade ago. And I find myself recollecting his words when I encounter American style politics spilling over the border into Canada like sour maple syrup poured over a mismatched stack of pancakes.
It is problematically reductionist to think of the country south of Canada as two ideological halves, two nations living and breathing together and calling themselves the USA. It is like saying the Financial Crisis caused two groups to form: individuals who profited or individuals who lost out. Situations impacting nations, whether financial or ideological, are too nuanced to wrap up in a novel phrase. We should know better than to reduce our thinking to an absolutist yes or no, this or that, red or blue.
So I think back to what that ol’ boy had said — another world war to settle everyone down. A belligerent theater of death is not a guarantee to unite the States of America, and it is not a moral or ethical military modus operandi I am advocating for. America needs a big picture social cohesive that erases the perceived separations of red and blue ideological thinking.
I don’t know what big picture social cohesive will settling everyone down. It is not abortion, climate change, or gun rights. However, continuing to remind and divide a nation into red and blue ideological units is not helping to brush violet paint on a big, fresh American canvas.
