Seeing Purple in Brownwood

JOHN YOUNG, Opinion page editor
Thursday, March 03, 2005
For those analysts who think of the nation in terms of red and blue, the Oct. 25 Newsweek featured a very purplish nation.
A national map compiled by a Princeton professor shaded each U.S. county based on proportional votes in the 2000 presidential race. It did not disenfranchise "blue" voters in "red" states and vice versa, meaning that close votes showed in purple.
A few days after the magazine hit newsstands, the 2004 presidential election proceeded to show how little hues had changed in four years.
What is striking about the map is how purple the so-called monolithic South is. The same goes for the Midwestern heartland. Indeed, a band of purple extends from the Great Lakes all the way to the Mississippi Gulf Coast.
It reminds us that a winner-take-all mentality can mislead us just as it misdefines us.
Recently, an exhibit at the Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas helped draw a bead on such matters, as well as how the political process has changed. The exhibit is now where everyone with a computer can see it: the Internet.
"The Living Room Candidate," a virtual exhibit of the American Museum of the Moving Image (livingroomcandidate.movingimage.us) mainly focuses on how campaign commercials have changed over 50-plus years.
They show, on one plane, innocence lost – as appeals go from starchily dignified to embarrassingly vicious. They also show how campaign themes went from governing to branding, as one would with any product. The exhibit shows how more and more ads have used the "oversimplified language of polarization," in the words of curator David Schwartz.
In living color
As a sidelight, the exhibit applies that modern-day color-TV wrinkle, red states vs. blue states, to presidential elections since that black-and-white test-pattern year of 1952 (click on "results" with each year to see its map).
In succession the maps offer a compelling reminder of what changed the South from monolithically Democrat to a safe harbor for the Republican Party. It wasn't gay marriage.
The seeds of change are seen in the changes between 1960, where John Kennedy was widely supported in the South, to 1964, when a band of southern states – South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana – forsook the Democrats for Barry Goldwater.
That year, of course, was the beginning of the end of Jim Crow laws, with passage of the Civil Rights Act. On the 1968 map, with majority revulsion over those trends and more, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Arkansas are neither red nor blue but marked in white, in the column of segregationist George Wallace.
Richard Nixon took this as a cue with his "Southern strategy." It appealed to the fears of whites in an age of race riots, forced busing and an activist federal government enforcing civil rights.
Almanac of American Politics author Michael Barone says that race is the key factor of America's defining political split – that being the more metropolitan and diverse hues of the "blue" and the transparent homogeneity of sweeping plains of "red." Religion – the conservative evangelical dominance in the "red," is a secondary factor, he told Newsweek.
All of which explains why so much of America is purple. Major metro areas and a rapidly increasing, and hard to peg, Hispanic population, are purple even in "red" states. And because of political power owed to generations since the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the color purple is destined to grow.
The nation's most crimson planes are those where diversity is only an abstraction. That also applies to white-flight suburbs around those pulsing urban centers.
Put race aside and see where religion serves as a political trump card, and where such issues as school prayer and faith-based initiatives are pure gold.
The social isolation inherent in such homogeny fits hand-in-glove with fundamentalist Christianity, where a world of difference and cultural churn can be walled off and prayed away. A purple land? Perish the thought and think red and blue.
John Young's column appears Thursday and Sunday. E-mail: jyoung@wacotrib.com.