Red vs Blue America

 

Every two years, Mad Dog does his penitence, wandering through the streets of Hampton, New Hampshire, like those penitents of the Middle Ages who walked among the plague stricken towns of Europe, self flagellating, in an attempt to atone for their sins. In the case of Mad Dog, this consists of knocking on the doors of his offended neighbors, and watching them scamper from the fronts of their houses to the inaccessible back rooms, where the Patriot's game is playing on their TV screens.

What makes the exercise magnetic for Mad Dog is his partner, who we will call "Olivia" and who is the epitome of a local citizen who sacrifices for her country. 

There is no better, and likely will never be, a better door knocker/canvasser in New Hampshire. About ten percent of those doors are actually opened by the citizens who are willing to engage.  Olivia quickly introduces herself and Mad Dog as neighbors who live in Hampton.

The faces of these wary home owners transform almost instantaneously from the picture of annoyance to something approaching delight.  There are two reasons for this: Firstly, there is the face of Olivia.  Picture what most people look like when presented with a yellow Labrador puppy, or an adorable child. Oliva's blue eyes are so captivating that when Joe Biden was campaigning through New Hampshire some ten years ago, before his cognitive abilities slipped, he stopped his movement down the handshaking line, did a double take and told Olivia, "Those are some gorgeous eyes!" 

In all the years Mad Dog has accompanied Olivia to thresholds, he has never seen a homeowner whose countenance did not simply melt under the radiance of her smile.

Then there is her prodigious use of memory and connectivity: Olivia knows everyone in town, or if she does not know them personally, she knows that your cousin's brother went to Winnacunnet High School with her daughter's best friend's cousin. 

Talk about six degrees of separation! For Olivia, in Hampton, it doesn't matter if the connection is twelve degrees: She'll make that connection.

Now, the homeowner is ready to invite us in for tea or a beer or nachos and all is warm and welcoming until Olivia feels compelled to get down to business, because, after all, we are working off a computer list provided by the state Democratic Party and she has to present the slate of Democrats running for US Senate and the House and for the state representatives and for sheriff. Mr. or Ms. Homeowner's face changes from delight to tentative tolerance but it's still smiling, until...Olivia has to progress on, as the Party demands, to the next function beyond shoring up good feelings for Democrats to a polling function when she has to ask, "So, can we count on your supporting Senator Hassan?"

Renny Cushing

At that point, a dark shade is pulled own across half the faces and sometimes a diatribe ensues to the effect that Senator Hassan has voted for a law which allows "abortion" at such a late stage that the baby may be met with a scalpel as it is coming down the birth canal. 

Sometimes, the citizen will agree she will support the Democratic Senator, and then Olivia is obligated by Party fiat to ask the citizen to sign a blue post card saying the citizen agrees to show up and vote on election day, although this request often provokes a look which clearly says, "And here I thought we we friends. What are you trying to sell here?"

For those who have expostulated about the late term abortion bill Senator Hassan voted for, Mad Dog will sometimes interject: "Excuse me. I must have missed that. What bill, exactly was that and when did she vote for it?" But that only results in overt hostility and slammed doors. Mad Dog tried to reach the offices of Senator Hassan and Congressman Pappas without success as a succession of interns answered with flustered dodges that they are not authorized to speak for the Senator or the Congressman even though they answer the phones in their offices. 

Dudley Dudley

Thus we find the Party has undermined the magic Olivia is capable of working, or we find that we don't have all the answers when it comes to what our candidates actually stand for. 

But, the effort of canvassing did allow Mad Dog to experience actual field research from which he has formed these hypotheses:

1/ Most citizens are not as cleanly divided over abortion as he thought. In fact, they draw a line between abortion and infanticide; they are fine with abortion up to a certain stage in pregnancy, but late abortions look like infanticide to them. For some, of course, life begins at conception and a two cell zygote, but for most, they are much more nuanced and the Party has completely missed this with their "women must control their own bodies." For most folks we met, this is an aggravating simplification which neglects the obvious objection that at some point in pregnancy there are now two bodies involved and both may have rights.

2/ Abortion is not a vote determining  concern to voters who are for it; for those opposed it is the only determinant.

3/ Anger over Dobbs flared and then cooled, like the passions of the million woman march. Once the march was over, passions cooled.

4/ Most voters do not have "issues" which drive their votes. When we asked voters what their big issues were we got mostly blank looks. Issues? Can't think of any. When we suggested, well, abortion, democracy, inflation, the war in Ukraine we'd get, "Yeah, well, all of that. I just don't like those MAGAT's!"

So it goes back to the problem of trying to run on a platform of policies against an opposition which is all about charisma and emotion. David Brooks calls this "performative" politics, in which Marjorie Taylor Green or Lauren Bobert pose with guns, at shooting ranges and rant from the galleries of Congress trying to drown out President Biden at the State of the Union. 

During the last Presidential primaries, we asked Amy Klobuchar how she planned to run against a candidate of charisma (Donald Trump) with a campaign of policies and she was clearly flustered by the question, which at that point in her campaign she had never been asked. She finally said, "Well, I think I have charisma." 

The fact is, the United States of America has changed. 

Lincoln, speaking in 1865, at his magnificent Second Inaugural Address noted, "One eighth of the whole population were colored slaves not distributed generally over the union but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war."

Apart from the importance of this observation, which answers definitively the canard now promulgated by Southern apologists that the Civil War was not about slavery, the demographic importance Lincoln alluded to is relevant today.

While the former Confederate states are still deeply, although not completely "Red" in the sense of being MAGA Republican, the distribution of white supremacy is not confined to the southern part of the nation. The nation is truly "purple" in the "blue" states. 

So, we do not have the option of simply dividing and going our separate ways.

Blue vs Red Counties in the USA 

We have to live with one another, and, the fact remains, our great strength and our advantage over Europe is that we have remained one country. It is easy to move from Uvalde, Texas to Hampton, New Hampshire.  People live in Maine and winter in Florida. The National Football League and Major League Baseball makes household names out of players who are as well known in California and Green Bay, Wisconsin, as they are in Washington, DC and Boston.

Obama was correct to say there is no Blue America and Red America there is only the United States of America. Or at least there is no way to easily split us up now that the MAGA folks in Pennsylvania cannot be dissected away from the blue cities of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. 

A Civil War today would be more like the fight between the Reds and the Whites of the Russian Revolution: There is no way to Balkanize the United States of America. 

For better or for worse, we are stuck with each other and there is no avenue for divorce.