Has the Red State-Blue State Narrative Changed Over the Years?

The simple-minded, obfuscating, indeed obscurantist discourse treating American politics as a contest between the irreconcilable national cultures of "Red" and "Blue" states has just gone on and on, but rereading Thomas Frank's old "American Psyche" essay I find myself reminded that the narrative has not been perfectly constant.

One aspect of it that has changed is the way that talk of the division once played into the hype about a "New," information age economy that was still very strong about the turn of the century. Those more favorably disposed toward the "Blue" states of the Northeast, Great Lakes and West coast saw them as at the forefront of that new economy, with their cultures playing an important part in that. Their disproportionate share of the more prestigious institutions of higher learning, the more open and cosmopolitan and accepting culture of their cities and their workplaces, were supposed to be key to attracting the superlative "knowledge" workers and technological and entrepreneurial talent that made such an economy possible--all as they criticized the Red states as looking backward nostalgically to an idealized industrial age past and taking comfort in bigotry rather than accommodating themselves to the rules of the hard but rewarding new game.

The narrative was, of course, nonsense. While there certainly are high-technology industries the broader vision of a profoundly transformative information economy, however interesting it may have been as a theory, was in the form that most came to know it and discuss it ultimately cover for neoliberals deflecting attention from deindustrialization and other problems the country had so that they could press ahead with their policies, as we are reminded when we consider just how much we still live in that insanely unsustainable fossil fuel-guzzling world dominated by "the brute force of things" that figures like George Gilder talked as if we had transcended thirty years ago, and ignore the rules of that still very physical, industrial age world at our cost.

It is a sign of just how much less salable the nonsense became that we now hear so much less of it than we did before.

However, if that has changed much else in the narrative abides with the commentariat--and not to our benefit.