Friday, November 19, 2010; 11:56 AM
The Surprising Truth About the "Real" America
By Dante Chinni and James Gimpel
Gotham. 322 pp. $26
We Americans take pride in our varied nation, but also seem to take inordinate pleasure in carving it up. Every election, we watch as the cable suits slice and dice the country on their digital maps. And every few years bring another book promising to chart the country's divisions [JB emphasis]by splitting it into categories more telling than the 50 states. Former Washington Post writer Joel Garreau offered his "Nine Nations of North America" in 1981; two decades later came Richard Florida with "The Rise of the Creative Class," followed by Bill Bishop's "The Big Sort," which sought to explain why so many of us are clustering in enclaves of the like-minded.
The latest aspiring Linnaeuses are Dante Chinni, a journalist, and James Gimpel, a University of Maryland government professor, who use socio-economic data to break the country's 3,141 counties into 12 categories. Unlike Garreau's categories, which consisted of broad regional blocs, Chinni and Gimpel's kin communities are scattered across the map: boom towns, evangelical epicenters, military bastions, service worker centers, campus and careers, immigration nation, minority central, tractor community, Mormon outposts, emptying nests, industrial metropolises and monied burbs. The result falls short of "revolutionary," as the publisher's blurb has it, but is nonetheless a useful entry in the genre. The country is a more complicated place than the view from Washington, New York or Hollywood holds, and there's value in every effort to remind readers of that.
The authors are motivated by their frustration with the oversimplified red state/blue state construct: "We hate that map. In so many ways, it represents a lie." This is something of a straw man: The red/blue concept took root because, for several cycles, the electoral-college map broke down in strikingly consistent ways, before the sharp pendulum swings of 2008 and 2010. And even glib pundits acknowledge differences between, say, Chicago and downstate Illinois or Northern and Southern Virginia. But Chinni and Gimpel's typology still highlights nuances too often overlooked. For instance, they are insightful in differentiating between two types of conservative rural areas: the Great Plains, where traditional Protestantism predominates and small-government sentiment does not preclude local civic investment; and the Bible Belt running from Appalachia across the upper South to Texas, where evangelical Christianity elevates church and family above all else.
Some of the authors' categorizations are curious. Their "emptying nests" lump together Florida retirement towns and graying Upper Midwest communities. Their "service workers centers" are defined as tourism-dependent places with little historic economic base of their own - say, coastal communities in Oregon or Maryland's Eastern Shore - but they also count among them a huge swath of mining and manufacturing towns in the Rust Belt and Appalachia that have little in common with vacation getaways. The authors make some odd choices to represent their types: Their model "monied burb" is the sui generis atomic-research hub of Los Alamos, N.M. And using counties as their organizing unit gives the endeavor a rural bias: "Mormon outposts," with only 1.7 million residents, get their own category, while disparate big cities are crowded into the "industrial metropolis" group - everywhere from Buffalo to Los Angeles to Jacksonville.
But such quibbles can be offered against any list. More problematic is Chinni and Gimpel's attempt to read meaning into their map. Their reporting, like their prose, comes across as a bit slapdash - they rely heavily on local Chamber of Commerce types and make some factual mistakes, such as placing the AIG bailout before the September 2008 financial collapse and describing Tim Geithner as a "Wall Street man" (he's a career civil servant). Their political analysis of the map based on the 2008 election is somewhat dated in light of the 2010 results, a forgivable flaw in this volatile era. But even in the context of 2008, some of the analysis is off the mark. In describing wealthy suburbs as a pure swing-vote area, the authors understate their steady shift to the Democratic column over the past two decades, which even this month's election did not fully reverse. They discount the notion of a red-blue religious divide by citing high rates of religious participation in big cities, without addressing the fact that much of this can be attributed to churchgoing racial minorities. They gloss over the racial factor in John McCain's strong showing in "evangelical epicenters" (where McCain, even in defeat, outperformed George W. Bush's 2004 tally). And they refer to Orange County, Calif., as a conservative bastion without noting the shift underway there: The increasingly diverse county voted 48 percent for Obama.
The authors' analysis is closer to the mark on regional economics, with acute predictions about how the 2009 stimulus package and the recession generally are affecting their various areas. They venture closest to lasting insight when they suggest that economic policies should be tailored more to the different community types - say, by targeting mortgage-assistance and unemployment relief more narrowly at the hardest-hit areas. This runs counter to the argument put forward by Richard Florida and others that policies should focus on people, not places, even if it means leaving certain parts of the country further behind. But Chinni and Gimpel stop short of engaging fully on this point. That debate may have to wait for the next geographer seeking to make sense of this fractured national landscape of ours.
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