Our red state of affairs

A Feb. 25, 2011 report from Gallup shows that the United States is becoming increasingly more conservative, not less. Here’s the map that shows wide swaths of the nation in dark green (more conservative) and two main pockets of liberal areas, mainly in the West and Northeast:

Map via Gallup

Richard Florida with The Atlantic has taken the time to present some graphs on what the map means as far as trends. While the conclusions are not surprising, they are disheartening for those of us who would actually like to see the country move forward not ever backward.

Be that as it may, here’s a brief roundup.

Conservative states were found to be:

  • More religious than liberal states
  • More blue collar than liberal states
  • Less educated than liberal states
  • Less diverse than liberal states
  • Considerably poorer than liberal states

Florida notes:

While rich voters trend Republican, (Columbia University’s Andrew) Gelman and his colleagues found, rich states trend Democratic.

That’s quite a statement: rich voters with influence in poor, less educated and less diverse states. This reminds me of a profound statement made by British politician [[Tony Benn]] while being interviewed for the movie, “Sicko:”

An educated, healthy and confident nation is harder to govern, and I think there’s an element in the thinking of some people. We don’t want people to be educated, healthy and confident because they would get out of control (chuckle). The top 1 percent of the world’s population owns 80 percent of the world’s wealth. It’s incredible that people put up with it, but they’re poor. They’re demoralized. They’re frightened; and therefore, they think perhaps the safest thing to do is take orders and hope for the best.

Here is Florida’s conclusion about the inflated, and rather ironic, trend of conservatism in America:

Conservatism, at least at the state level, appears to be growing stronger. Ironically, this trend is most pronounced in America’s least well-off, least educated, most blue collar, most economically hard-hit states. Conservatism, more and more, is the ideology of the economically left behind. The current economic crisis only appears to have deepened conservatism’s hold on America’s states. This trend stands in sharp contrast to the Great Depression, when America embraced FDR and the New Deal.

If you’ve read this far, perhaps you know what I’m going to say: In essence, the very people who need some of the reforms that would come with more progressive policies vote, almost in blind lockstep, against liberalism in favor of politicians who, at best, don’t care about their interests, and at worst, actively seek to introduce programs and policies that purposefully keep people uneducated, unhealthy, poor and, in the end, hopeless. Voters in many of these states are too ignorant to catch on to this little game, so the poor stay poor and the wealthy interests happily glide above the fray on cloud nine. Not only is conservatism the ideology of the economically left behind, it is the left behind ideology, and the above more than bears this out.

Following are three of the more telling graphs:

Credit: Richard Florida and Charlotta Mellander/The Atlantic

Credit: Richard Florida and Charlotta Mellander/The Atlantic

Credit: Richard Florida and Charlotta Mellander/The Atlantic

To elucidate some of these points, here is the late comedian George Carlin: