How Conservatives See America
Here’s a great point from Ali Frick. Sarah Palin thinks New Hampshire is a “microcosm” for America and in the past she’s said Alaska is a “microcosm of America.” In fact, these are highly unrepresentative states — richer than average and full of white people:
| United States | New Hampshire | Alaska | |
| Median Income (’04) | $44,334 | $53,377 | $52,141 |
| Poverty Rate (’04) | 12.7% | 6.6% | 10% |
| Non-Hispanic Whites (’06) | 66.4% | 93.8% | 66.4% |
| Blacks (’06) | 12.8% | 1.1% | 3.7% |
| Hispanic/Latino Origin (’06) | 14.8% | 2.3% | 5.6% |
I would also add that Alaska and New Hampshire are exceptional in that neither of them contains a substantial city. But the broader metropolitan areas around large cities contain the bulk of our population and economic activity (the NYC and LA Metropolitan Statistical Areas together contain ten percent of the country’s population). The states that are basically outside the orbit of major metro areas are often nice places — I’ll testify to the merits of New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine and I’m sure Alaska’s neat, too — but they’re quite a bit outside the mainstream of contemporary American life. These are places that are facing their share of challenged, but they’re not the challenges that the places where most Americans live are dealing with.
39 Responses to “How Conservatives See America”
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October 15th, 2008 at 3:24 pm
Apparently, Palin thinks [...]
BZZZT!! Assumes facts not in evidence:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMyNk8J1c8g
October 15th, 2008 at 3:26 pm
So, can I claim New York and California as the states that best represent a microcosm of America? And myself as the most quintessential of Americans?
October 15th, 2008 at 3:29 pm
More gotcha media Matt. She thinks “America” is rich and white. To some, the United States and the real America are not necessarily the same thing.
October 15th, 2008 at 3:29 pm
Palin thinks the entire United States is wealthy and white
Well, all her friends are.
October 15th, 2008 at 3:35 pm
The table actually shows that Alaska has the same percentage of non-hispanic whites as the United States. I would never have guessed that.
October 15th, 2008 at 3:41 pm
Palin’s relationship to words and meaning is not the same as yours. She uses the word “microcosm” to just be filler. To mean “part of” or something.
In other words she does not know what the word means
October 15th, 2008 at 3:45 pm
Is % white in Alaska a typo? Looks like someone accidentally retyped the national number there. Unless natives make up the difference…
October 15th, 2008 at 3:48 pm
The table actually shows that Alaska has the same percentage of non-hispanic whites as the United States. I would never have guessed that.
Probably due to the high percentage of Native Americans in AK.
I would also add that Alaska and New Hampshire are exceptional in that neither of them contains a substantial city
The southern tip of NH is part of the Boston metro area though and Anchorage is #65 in terms of population according to Wikipedia. I don’t think your point is really valid.
October 15th, 2008 at 3:48 pm
Although the people of NH and MA may try to deny it, a lot of New Hampshire’s population lives in the Boston MSA.
October 15th, 2008 at 3:48 pm
Alaska has the same percentage of non-hispanic whites as the United States. I would never have guessed that.
Unlike the rest of the US, Alaska has seen very little immigration. A lot of the state is still Inuit.
http://www.census.gov/prod/2002pubs/c2kbr01-15.pdf
October 15th, 2008 at 3:57 pm
Mr. Yglesias,
New Hampshire is definitely much whiter than most other states, and Alaska’s demographic mixture is also unusual, with few Black people and many Native Alaskans. However, calling them ‘wealthy’ states is more than a bit misleading. New Hampshire and, even more, Alaska, have a high cost of living which balances out the fact that they have a higher than average income. Moreover, most of the money in New Hampshire is concentrated in the Boston exurbs in the far south, and most of the rest of the state is very working-class. Alaska is, I would think, much the same way.
October 15th, 2008 at 3:57 pm
This whole microcosm thing always drives me crazy. Five minutes of googling shows that a little over half (54%) of the US population lives in the top fifty metropolitan areas, none of which are in Alaska and only one of which go in New Hampshire at all (if you count the Boston area).
October 15th, 2008 at 4:02 pm
Palin doesn’t deny that much of America is non-rich and non-white. She merely deplores it.
October 15th, 2008 at 4:06 pm
I think another important aspect to this is that Alaska is wealthy not just in income, but in industry. Unlike states in say, the rust belt, Alaska has an oil industry to provide jobs and stability to its citizens.
October 15th, 2008 at 4:08 pm
Anchorage is a real city, and a large percentage of the population lives there.
And the cost of living is much higher in Alaska, so higher income may not really translate to being economically better off.
October 15th, 2008 at 4:29 pm
America’s real microcosm is, of course, Illinois:
66% White
15% Black
15% Hispanic
4% Asian
Go Obama!
October 15th, 2008 at 4:37 pm
Seconding Bob Oso: Sarah Palin’s “America,” as a geographical category, is defined less by population or citizenship than by allegiance to an ideal. It’s like the old fuzzy geographical entity “Christendom.” It describes a physical region, but only the residents and subcultures that are actively Christian can claim to typify it. For Palin, the fact that her “microcosm” is actually demographically unrepresentative of the United States as a whole does not mean she is making a mistake. It means she is making a point.
October 15th, 2008 at 4:50 pm
Patrick Wilkinson,
Given that Alaska is the least religious of any U.S. state (along with Oregon), if Sarah Palin would like to define Alaska as a new Christendom, then she is a bloody fool.
October 15th, 2008 at 4:51 pm
Just a note: the native population in Alaska isn’t all Inuit. In fact, a lot of the Inuit in Alaska tend to still call themselves Eskimo. There are various other groups strongly represented in Alaska: Aleuts, Tlingits, Yupik, Haida, etc.
Also: Anchorage is a real city, but it’s a small one. It has a downtown with maybe 5 buildings taller than six stories, but it’s the center of commerce for most of the state. Its city population of ~279,000 is higher than anything in New England outside of Boston, however. As a metro area (Anchorage + Mat-Su Borough, which includes Wasilla), it’s a less-impressive ~362,000, slightly smaller than Manchester-Nashua, NH.
October 15th, 2008 at 5:01 pm
I think you are giving her way too much thinking credit here.
October 15th, 2008 at 5:12 pm
Actually, that is code for you know what. Of course, I am not going to take the tack that she doesn’t know what microcosm means.
In fact, wasn’t there a meme during the 2000 election about something like this. I have to dig it up. The wrong side never admits to holding a particular “undesirable” position such as seeing America for the melting pot or salad bowl or whatever it is, when the code but “ostensibly good” position, such as running against “the multicultural left-wing liberalism” will work. My feeling is that, they have been doing this for so long and so cynically – and taken it to some ludicrous extremes even by the standards of the wrong-wing media that, the Rip Van Winkles are beginning to stir.
I am still afraid of the Bradley effect, all the feel-good polls notwithstanding.
Sorry about those run-on sentences.
– r
October 15th, 2008 at 5:26 pm
I’d nominate Florida as the true microosm, because everyone else moves there. The state has northerners, southerners, midwesterners, racists, populists, liberals, filthy rich folk, dirt poor folk, white trash, immigrants, Blacks, Native Americans, Hispanics galore, a major gay mecca, religious rightwingers, Big Agriculture, tottering banks, corrupt politics, mediocre schools, crowded freeways, shiny new downtowns, endangered wildlife, and occasional natural disasters.
October 15th, 2008 at 5:53 pm
Don’t know about Alaska, but NH doesn’t quite fit that description. There are several respectable-size cities, there’s plenty of brains-based industry, there’s at least one first-rate university, etc. In many ways, it’s not too far off your ‘average’ America.
October 15th, 2008 at 6:03 pm
Anchorage is Alaska’s grand exception. In fact, in other parts of the state it’s commonly said that Alaska begins where “Los Anchorage” ends.
Anchorage may be only a moderate-sized metro area by Lower 48 standards, but that area contains more than half the state’s population – 359,000 people.
The second-largest city, Fairbanks, has a metro population of 82,000, bolstered by the flagship state university there. The third-largest city (and state capital), Juneau, is right at 30,000. Those are the only cities with more than 10,000 people.
In other words, once you leave Anchorage, the population gets very thin, very fast.
October 15th, 2008 at 8:40 pm
If there were a competition for most atypical state, wouldn’t Alaska be the frontrunner?
October 16th, 2008 at 2:12 am
NS: You’re talking about UNH, right?
To the general point, isn’t it pretty obvious that the McCain-Palin ticket isn’t pulling much of the Black or Hispanic votes? Why should they fake it and campaign in demographically and politically GOP-unfriendly states like…Virginia? Hmm. Which states that don’t begin with A (Alaska, Arizona, Alabama) are they expected to win again? At this point Republicans are struggling to hold New Hampshire, which you would have called me a liar for suggesting as a remote possibility 10 years ago. New residents get credit/blame for this phenomenon, but I know plenty of old, white, male, life-long Republicans up here who feel that it’s not their party any more. One plus of Obama’s candidacy is that these people can vote for him regardless of race when they couldn’t vote for Hillary regardless of party. I’m not sure if states other than NH have many voters like this though.
October 16th, 2008 at 6:41 am
R: At this point Republicans are struggling to hold New Hampshire
At this point they would seem to have lost it: Obama is dexcidedly ahead in the polls and it looks like Sununu is losing his Senate seat too, though that’s still close.
October 16th, 2008 at 11:08 am
I’ve long been pissed off by this part of the culture war.
Fuck middle America. America is NYC, LA, Chicago, Miami, Dallas, and Houston. Everything else is just a cultural and economic drag on our cities.
If New Hampshire is so great, why doesn’t anybody want to live there?
If Nebraska’s so strong, why does it need enormous subsidies from the states that ACTUALLY produce value?
I’m not saying that we oughtta kick these guys outta the union. I’m just saying that I’m sick of them acting like they’re doing us some big favor by selling us corn–corn that we could get cheaper (and better) from elsewhere in the world.
America is a nation of cities. If you want to live in a rural nation, move to Kazakhstan.
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