If we do away with individual states, we will then be governed ruled by one all-powerful central government over which we have little, or no electoral recourse. Once size fits all. What’s good for Manhattan is good for Amarillo. Last week’s presidential election was a repudiation of that notion. Looking at the above map, there is obviously a wide disparity of thought between the densely populated urban areas and the that huge red area known as “flyover country”. What’s good for Miami is not necessarily what’s good for Omaha. This piece by the Washington Post shows that the mainstream media still doesn’t get it. But it fits their current effort to attack the Electoral College.
While Donald Trump resoundingly won the electoral college — the state-based “point system” we’ve used in presidential elections for more than two centuries — Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by about 780,000 as of a week out of the election. In other words, more Americans wanted Clinton to win, reason enough to revisit the wisdom of using the electoral college to determine elections. But a larger, more important argument is often overlooked in this ongoing debate.
The United States of America: We use the phrase all the time but rarely think of what the words actually mean. In 1776, when this country officially became the United States of America, the words signified a bold idea. Geographic neighbors had formed alliances previously in history to form nations, of course, but these united states shared a vision and philosophy that was literally revolutionary.
The coming together of 13 disparate colonies was itself a historic achievement; never before, perhaps, had a collection of diverse, often contrarian regions merged to create a country whose leaders so vigorously rejected the political and religious doctrines of the times. (The people were not as enthusiastic.) We tend to forget how difficult a process the uniting of the original states was, as the cultural boundaries of the 13 regions persisted after the Founding Fathers joined forces to form a federated republic.
But times have changed, and we need to rethink the notion of the “United States of America.” Our states are no longer culturally diverse regions with their own respective identities; rather, they are artificially constructed geographic entities that certainly would not be formed today. Borderlines between states are especially nonsensical. Pensacola, Fla., is a lot more like Mobile, Ala., than Miami. Upstate New Yorkers are less than happy about being in the same tax pool as Manhattanites.
In fact, despite all the attention to divisions within the country based on geography (or race, gender, class or any other demographic measure, for that matter), Americans share a remarkably similar way of thinking and acting. (The so-called red-vs.-blue-state divide is a crude, media-driven concept that looks great on maps but has little basis in reality.) Regional differences have drastically dissipated over the course of the past 240 years, turning the once radical proposition of the “United States” into an anachronism that now has little or no real value.
More than anything, it was the barrage of mass media and mass marketing through the 20th century that crushed regionality in this country (and much of the world), flattening out attitudinal and behavioral dissimilarities. Suburbanization — as well as the kudzu-like spread of strip malls, chain stores and franchises — transformed much of the country’s physical landscape into something that makes it difficult to know where one is.
HT – Deplorable Xenophobe Perry