JMM: Poking around the Red/Blue divide

[JHB]

From Talking Points Memo

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_11_07.php#003958
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The regional patterns get even more interesting when you drill down deeper into them. Commonsense would probably tell most of us that big cities have higher murder rates than suburbs and small towns. And that’s true. But not everywhere. In the North and in much of Blue State America, for instance, big cities have higher rates of homicide. But in the South the pattern is turned on its head. The murder rate is highest in the small towns and rural areas.

Digging deeper still we find another difference --- though here the evidence becomes a bit murkier and less definitive. In the North, where murder rates are higher in urban centers, they tend to track with the commission of felonies.

In other words, people get killed by people who are in the process of committing felonies --- whether those be drug sales, muggings, robberies gone bad, organized crime, or something else. But in the Southern states, where murder rates are higher in small towns and rural areas, this isn’t the case. Rather than happening in the process of committing other crimes, these murders tend to be rooted in what are best described as violations of honor, personal slights that escalate into violence or in the simplest sense, rage.
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You can define it in a variety of ways. I’d say it’s based in modernity and tolerance. But once you see it in that light, is it simply a matter of the Blue States having an attitude of condescension toward the Red ones? The country has become sufficiently divided that there is a good deal of mistrust and animosity on both sides. And I think it is fair to say that that ill-will on the part of the Blue state America does sometimes express itself as condescension. But the bad feeling of Red State America toward the Blue is just as often expressed as contempt, moral denunciation or simple rage. To the extent that one hears Blue Staters dissing Red Staters as holy-rolling trailer park denizens, the Red staters routinely portray their fellow countrymen as corrupt, deviant, rootless perverts who express their flipflopper-dom by oscillating between being limp-wristed whiners on the one hand and signing up to work for Osama bin Laden as terrorist fifth-columnists on the other.

[Philostopher]

1. I have nothing to back this up ...

but it may have to do with poverty, and where the poor live in each location. Generally, violent crimes follow the poor -- and crimes tend to occur in communities where people feel disinvested in the power structure and incapable of lifting themselves out. Maybe poverty is more centralized in cities in the north.

Just a thought.

[Wright Patman]

2. If they ever really cut

federal spending, which is a doubtful scenario as Chimp is the biggest spender of all time, the South will be hit far harder than the Northeast, Upper Midwest and West Coast.