The demographic divide is geographical

As a follow to that great thread about college and culture, let me direct your attention to a provocative piece from the NYT Magazine yesterday, in which political scientists Bill Galston and Pietro Nevola argue that the whole "Red America/Blue America" idea is rooted in geographical reality. Excerpt:

The buzz these days is that American politics may be entering a “postpartisan” era, as a new generation finds the old ideological quarrels among baby boomers to be increasingly irrelevant. In reality, matters are not so simple. Far from being postpartisan, today’s young adults are significantly more likely to identify as Democrats than were their predecessors. Along with colleagues at the Brookings and Hoover institutions, we recently completed a comprehensive study of the nation’s polarization. Our research concludes not only that the ideological differences between the political parties are growing but also that they have become embedded in American society itself.

More:

What accounts for the decline of ideologically mixed localities? Bill Bishop, a journalist, and Robert Cushing, a sociologist, who have studied this issue, stress that the age of “white flight” to the suburbs is over. Instead, during the past two decades, many whites have moved to one group of cities and many blacks to another. Meanwhile, young people have deserted rural and older manufacturing areas for cities like Austin and Portland. Places with higher densities of college graduates attract even more, so that the gap between such communities and less-educated areas widens further. Zones of high education, in turn, produce more innovation and enjoy higher incomes, generating communities dominated by upper-middle-class tastes. Lower-educated regions, by contrast, tend to be more family-oriented and more faithful to traditional authority.

Not surprisingly, this demographic sorting correlates with a widening difference in political preferences. What’s more, according to Bishop and Cushing, once a tipping point is reached, majorities tend to become supermajorities.

Latino immigration skews this dynamic. Dallas County, where I live, is now blue, thanks in large part to the influx of Latinos, who vote Democratic but who do not fit the culturally-blue profile. Within my lifetime, Texas will likely tip from red to blue because of the size of the Latino population.

Anyway, what Galston and Nivola point to is the political division of Americans according to cognitive ability. What this could imply is that the Republican Party will of necessity become what Ross and Reihan, in their forthcoming book, call the Party of Sam's Club. From their much-discussed 2005 essay:

This is the Republican party of today--an increasingly working-class party, dependent for its power on supermajorities of the white working class vote, and a party whose constituents are surprisingly comfortable with bad-but-popular liberal ideas like raising the minimum wage, expanding clumsy environmental regulations, or hiking taxes on the wealthy to fund a health care entitlement. To borrow a phrase from Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty, Republicans are now "the party of Sam's Club, not just the country club."

Therein lies a great political danger for Republicans, because on domestic policy, the party isn't just out of touch with the country as a whole, it's out of touch with its own base. ... The current Republican majority isn't likely to be defeated, or disappear, in the next few election cycles --though serious setbacks are always possible. [Remember, this was written in 2005 -- RD] But the party feels increasingly tired and corrupted by power, obsessed with fighting yesterday's battles and unwilling to adapt to the changing political landscape--a landscape that has changed, in many cases, precisely because of the party's past successes. Because of the GOP, most Americans no longer feel overtaxed; because of the GOP, rising crime rates no longer threaten the fabric of daily life; because of the GOP, the free market no longer buckles under the weight of government regulation. But in these very successes lie the seeds of potential defeat.

Many of the issues that the Republican party rode to power remain salient today, of course. The GOP doesn't need to rethink its support for a strong national defense, for instance, or its commitment to social conservatism. But having risen to power at a time when most Americans were worried about losing their economic freedom, the party needs to adapt to a new reality--namely, that today, Americans are increasingly worried about their economic security--and reorient its agenda to address those concerns.

So, the Republican Party is either going to have to go the way of its social-conservative base, and become fully the party of working-class and middle-income Americans (for the present, mostly white). Or the Democrats are going to have to stiff its social liberals and become more fully a party that can legitimately accomodate social and religious conservatives. Which do you think is more likely? I say whatever the fate of Gov. Huckabee in tomorrow's Republican Party, the Huckification of the GOP is, I think, inevitable. Good.

But the question of the health of a meritocratic democracy in which political parties are divided between the cognitive haves and have-nots remains.