Blue / Red

At 05:28 AM 11/8/2008, you wrote:
some revealing cartographic versions of the election's red-blue distribution.

Hey, study that enough, and you might be able to redraw some district boundaries in a way that favors one party or the other !

Some time ago I realized it boiled down to a large difference in the problems encountered by rural or small-town people vs. the people who live in large cities. Different problems encountered every day, different ways of dealing with those problems, and different ways of thinking about the world, based on these encounters.

Gun control -- probably just as many idiots with guns in the country as in the city, but when they fire them off in the country, they're most likely to only injure themselves, their friends, or their family members, whereas in the city, they're going to injure strangers.

Abortion -- rural areas are the baby factories and breadbaskets. In the city, it's ENOUGH PEOPLE ALREADY ! ...and of course, we want to fund abortions for people who can't afford them, because those people will have more problems raising their kids if they can't get abortions. But if you own a farm, you can have 6 wives and 40 kids, and it won't bother your neighbors (or they can shoot at them when they cross the property line!) You can bury the miscarriages in the back yard, but people in the city don't want to see them in the apartment garbage can !

Property rights -- when the next neighbor is 1/2 mile away, who cares? When only wealthy landlords can afford to own rental buildings, of course everybody wants some standards for those buildings and some rights for the tenants, and control over whether someone builds a dynamite factory in the building next door.

Endangered species -- no one in an office cubicle has to worry about their cubicle encroaching on endangered species habitat; those species were driven out years ago ! On the farm, it's, "oh crap, now I'm not going to be able to plow that strip of land, which is going to lose $XX a season."

So the challenge is trying to regionalize the laws -- the current big legal dichotomy is federal / state, but it seems like the dichotomy should instead be federal / county. "States" seem much more artificial than rural / urban boundaries. Maybe there should be a movement towards rural / suburban / urban associations that better define the issues in each area, and work out compromises that are more agreeable, rather than a blanket of laws that don't fit either situation very well.