I happened upon a TV show on the Discovery Times Channel called "Red and Blue" which is described: "Two families with opposing political views swap lives for two weeks."   One family represents the conservative side.   They are farmers from Louisiana, fundamentalist Christian, own guns, support Bush and the war, etc.   The other family is from California, despises Bush, is against the Iraq war, etc.   I didn't watch the show because right at the outset I was offended by the choice of representatives.   What or who is behind the popular notion that conservatives are farmers, Christian, gun owners, or any of these other things?   But even more offensive to me than the choice of representatives was something discussed at the very beginning of the show.   Someone stated that there are two Americas, that this country is becoming polarized geographically.   What or who is behind the popular notion that there exists in this country two sets of states with opposing viewpoints?

I have always lived in and around the cities of the northeast.   I am college educated.   I can barely change the oil in a car let alone handle the respobsibility of running a farm.   I have never even handled a gun.   I consider myself to be Christian but I am suspicious of institutionalized religion and rarely attend any church service.   The last two times I was in a church it was a Unitarian Universalist which I think is really a lame sort of gathering but hey, you gotta go to weddings and funerals.   I am no fundamentalist.   I studied comparative world religions as a minor in college along with history, philosophy and a major in business.   I've never owned a pickup truck or even an SUV.   I think about buying a hybrid and will probably do so when I get around to buying another car ten years from now.   The closest I have ever come to liking "country music" is the Allman Brothers.   Generally I like Punk Rock whether it is new or old but I am also hugely into most of the sixties music since that's when and where my tastes were formed.   I supported Bush twice because I believe he was a far better choice than either Gore or Kerry.   Kerry was well beneath even a reasonable representative of the Democrat party but let's not get into that.   I am thinking of "going solar" sometime in the future but not because I think anthropogenic greenhouse gases have anything to do with global temperatures.   I don't.   But I do think using solar power if it were cost effective would be cool.   Screw the big energy companies - let me keep my money.   I am not against big business.   I don't think the oil companies gouged anybody.   I just don't like paying a lot for energy.   I really do not want to look at windmills if I go to the beach but I do worry that if the world were to go with wind power, we have no idea how that might effect climate.

I live in a state that is completely dominated by the Democrat party and liberal ideology.   But even here, there is a very large portion of the population who routinely votes for conservative candidates just as there is a large portion of the population in conservative controlled states which routinely votes for liberal politicians.   I have family in several blue and several red states but these people are both liberal and conservative.   They are educated and not, fundamentalist Christian and not, even atheist, sophisticated urbanites and not, yada, yada, yada.   And if I listed their demographic characteristics, you could not connect the liberals or conservatives to the demo stuff.   I could tell you who was what, where they lived, what they do for a living, what their religious beliefs were, educational levels, etc. etc. and if you tried to connect people with political philosophy, you would be wrong about 70% of the time.

Come to think of it, as I go through the list of people I know in my day to day life and those in my family, there is rarely a solid correlation between your prototypical liberal demographics and a liberal political philosophy.   The same is true on the conservative side.   But not only that, there is such a broad mix of social liberals who vote conservative on so many issues and social conservatives who vote liberal on so many issues that it makes my head spin.   I am lefty wondering why there is this notion in places like the mainstream media and channels like Discovery Times that conservatives are all country bumpkins, etc. and liberals all live in New York City or Los Angeles.

In liberal states, there are some urbane, erudite proponents of liberal philosophy but those states would no longer be Democrat controlled were it not for the under-educated urban poor who routinely vote Democrat because their fundamentalist church preachers tell them to.   The often well educated, urbane middle class people in these liberal states frequently vote Republican.   If you look at the county map of who voted for whom in recent elections you do see a trend of the rural counties voting for Republicans and the urban centers voting for Democrats but even these votes are reasonably close.   Whether you are liberal, conservative, or neither, almost half the people you encounter today will hold opposing political viewpoints.   That is an undeniable fact.   So let's put the new popular mythology of a polarized country to bed.   It just ain't so.