By John Harwood\Zeteo
Photos: YouTube Screenshots
Viewed up close, Donald Trump’s crude, racist campaign seems out of place in 21st-century America 50 years after the triumphs of the civil rights movement.
But seen through a longer lens, it follows the eternal currents of our politics.
In demeaning, dehumanizing, and threatening non-white minorities, the Republican nominee echoes arguments underlying America’s original sin of slavery. In red states, he rouses the successors of those who built economic and social systems around the unchallenged dominance of white Christians who defied federal authority to impose changes.
The more diverse blue-state constituency of Vice President Kamala Harris, herself of mixed race, has long shown greater commitment to the nation’s egalitarian aspirations. The Civil War, the Great Depression, World War II, and the modernizing influences of globalization all failed to erase the fault line between competing political forces.
“It began with the Founding,” says long-time political analyst Michael Podhorzer, “and it’s the same divide.”
That divide, the former AFL-CIO political director tells me, represents more than mere variance between individual states. It pits “Blue America” against a separate “Red America” – “two countries with dramatically different value systems and standards of living.”
The result is divergent levels of commitment to the will of the majority and the rule of law. Red America’s nominees have lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections, so Trump claims fraud and advocates restricting voting procedures. He challenges the legitimacy of federal prosecutors holding him accountable for election subversion.
Harris champions expanded access to the ballot. The former California attorney general vows to preserve the federal government’s tradition of Justice Department independence.
Red vs. Blue America
Red America traces back to the Confederacy, where enslaved labor made cotton and tobacco staples of the Southern economy. It has grown to encompass the rural Plains and Upper Midwest, with low-wage economies built on the extraction of natural resources and agriculture, as well as the most conservative portions of the Rust Belt.
Blue America is grounded in the Northeastern and free Western states that powered the Union’s Civil War triumph that ended slavery. These more urban states led the development of US industry and finance.
Podhorzer documents the disparate social outcomes the “Two Nations of America” have produced. …
