A Nation Divided

Each era is defined by the great rivalries to which it bears witness. Intractable, riveting clashes where neutrality is not an option, and the side you take reflects not just your preference, but the contents of your soul.  In 21st century America, the fate-of-the-world-deciding-conflict-du-jour is even color-coded for convenience.  It is, of course, that trusty bichromatic bastard Red vs. Blue.
Every year, South Carolina based militiamen become more wary of their Bible-burning neighbors to the north. The jokes that New England dwelling college students make about Republicans grow snarkier.  A tragic and totally one-sided civil war redux seems inevitable: the gun-loving southerners will sidestep the weakly-thrown iPhones that the college students are using for weapons, mow them down with a few M-16 blasts, say a prayer for their lost atheist souls, and America will be no more.  Without a savior, this doomsday scenario could take place as soon as President Paul’s third term.  So praise be to Dante Chinni, James Gimpel, and their new book, Our Patchwork Nation. The book is a work of political geography that aims to free us from the shallow and divisive tyranny of the red-state/blue-state map.  Rather than cram Americans into two boxes, Chinni and Gimpel have endeavored to cram us into 12.
By examining statistics such as income levels, immigration-emigration patterns, and age distribution, the authors have sorted all of America’s 3,143 counties into one of 12 categories:  “Industrial Metropolis,” “Evangelical Epicenters,” “Monied Burbs,” “Minority Central,” and so on.  These are tooled to reflect something like an ideal cross-section of the population and replace the binary of red or blue with teal, orange, and magenta.  The result is, as promised, a “Patchwork Nation,” where an electoral map of California is a dozen colors rather than just party-approved blue.  The pitch seems airtight and borderline utopian: anything that is not Red vs. Blue is surely a step in the right direction, no?  But this new division of the country is open to a litany of criticisms, and begs the more serious question of whether categorizing a country of 307 million by any color scheme is inherently a fool’s errand. Thus, Our Patchwork Nation enters choppy ideological waters.
The book is structured to give a statistical and anecdotal snapshot of each of the 12 community types before reflecting on the state of broad topics such as “politics” in light of the Patchwork Nation framework.  The snapshot chapters, the result of much travel and investigation, are all interesting and well told in their own right.  For example, analysis of deep-seated racism in Baton Rouge is a perfect opportunity for Chinni and Gimpel to show off their respective skill sets.  On the quantitative front, Gimpel’s statistical work is extensive and often enlightening, particularly when examining the distinct economic motivations behind community types like “Tractor Country” and “Boom Towns” distinct.  Qualitatively, Chinni’s prose is deft and efficient, perfect for bite-sized storytelling.  To capture the racial tension in Baton Rouge, he describes two adjacent bars that are effectively segregated, writing that “the M Bar isn’t the Wine Loft, and the main difference isn’t that martinis are the house specialty.  Here, everyone is black.”
Our Patchwork Nation is by no means an unpleasant read.  Its findings are approachable and probably educational to anyone at all interested in demography.  But the efforts of Chinni and Gimpel to concisely define all 12 communities lean on familiar archetypes of the very kind that the book aims to discredit such as latte-sipping college students or small-town Christians who hate to read anything but the Bible.  Chinni and Gimpel seem hesitant to enter truly ambiguous ground, for fear of muddying their 12-type breakdown.  Upon even brief examination, there are hundreds of nitpicks to be raised with their rationale.  Should “Mormon Outposts” really be considered one of the 12 community types that make up the country?  Why does Boulder County, home to the University of Colorado, fall into the “Colleges and Careers” category while Larimer County, a largely analogous town home to Colorado State, fall into “Monied Burbs?”  And does California really have the only “Emptying Nest” community west of the Rockies?  On these issues and many others, Our Patchwork Nation comes off as arbitrary, confused, and overly ambitious. Under the Chinni and Gimpel’s map, Cambridge falls into the “Monied Burbs” category.  While it is undeniably a place of great affluence, Cambridge is also defined by its universities. Why not place it in “Colleges and Careers?”  And what of the large contingent of homeless people that populate its streets?  In the case of Cambridge and many other places, the Patchwork Nation framework is reductive in the worst way.  To try and lock Cambridge or any other town into one tidy category is to take something hugely complex and make it brutishly simple, not unlike doing dental work with a jackhammer.
The book’s goal, to ride in on a rainbow-maned horse and save us from the narrow-minded generalizations that are ripping our country apart, is a noble one.  But the foundation on which their anecdotes and evidence rest ultimately proves unworthy of their research.  To learn more about what defines America is an unequivocal good, and Chinni and Gimpel give our national diversity in politics, economics, and culture its due.  Still, their dogged insistence on shoehorning it all into a color-coded map only lends greater entrenchment to the notion that vast populations can and should be color-coded.  Chinni and Gimpel fall all over themselves to point out that “no place fits entirely into one type,” but this only draws attention to the fact that their strong investigative work is being forced to serve a troubled premise.  Constant apologies suggest flaws that are more than skin deep.
In both the book’s introduction and conclusion, the authors write that “the principal aim of this project was to get beyond the oversimplified red-state/blue-state model.”  Regardless, the Patchwork map is still profoundly oversimplified.  And as much as it seems like an improvement, there is still something fundamentally unsettling about painting thousands of people one color or the other.  The red-state/blue-state map is, by all accounts, a destructive and divisive monster.  As the authors say themselves, “We hate that map.  In so many ways, it represents a lie.”  But rather than try to one-up that map, we should be attempting to do away with the ethos that led to its creation.  The irony is palpable. In their efforts to fight stereotypes, Chinni and Gimpel have created a nuanced, thoughtful, and well-researched set of stereotypes in their misdirected masterpiece.  To its credit, Our Patchwork Nation provides the best color-coded political map on the market.  That, however, is the very definition of faint praise.