While finishing up my HCI seminar paper for Dr. J, I stumbled upon a movie called, Red State. Depressed from the last national race in 2004 and finding no solace in liberal groaning on the Internet, Michael Shea packed up a team of movie types and headed out of California to find out what people in conservative “Red States” were thinking when they re-elected George Bush. From the movie website:
A team of documentary filmmakers set out from the Blue-est of Blue States, California, on a cross-country journey to record what actual people, not pundits, politicians or reporters, have to say about their country and themselves. Traveling through Red States they interviewed hundreds of Americans from all walks of life in an attempt to discover what makes a Red State person Red.
You can preview the movie online, but you need to try to set up your own local screening if you want to see the whole thing. Or, order the DVD for $16.
I have three big comments about this movie. The first has to do with the research that had me land on this site, and the other two are about the movie as a concept.
Is the color fixed?
I started voting in the midterm election of Reagan’s second administration. I am both horrified and proud to say I have never voted for the winning President (Dukakis, Perot, Skipped it, Nader, Barbara Lee), but that’s another post. The point is that I remember the colors being the other way around. In trying to see if campaign sites reflected a composite color that reflected this Red-Blue dichotomy, I got confirmation from several places that I wasn’t crazy. Republicans, in my mind, have always been blue and Democrats red. The reason it all got stuck in the current Republican Red mode is due to three factors, imo:
- The major television networks (and then papers like the NY Times all happened on the same color scheme at the same time. That is something that hadn’t happened since we transitioned from Black-and-white.
- The past two elections where people paid most attention to such things — 2000 and 2004 Presidential elections — were both extremely close and controversial, reflecting a pretty even distribution of voter ideology.
- The media picked up the terms “Red State” and “Blue State” and won’t let go.
Having a movie, which is often less temporal than network news coverage, use the term means we can’t really ignore it any more. Until there is a major shift in our concept of partisan politics or third-party reforms, I think Red State is just a sign that we’re never going back.
It’s a Poor Metaphor
First, there is the issue of the now-familiar Red-Blue U.S. map being based on electoral votes, which themselves are influenced by two-party politics. If the electorate was awarded by congressional representation (districts each get one electoral vote, states two), all states would look purple. Indiana’s Alumni Magazine had a timely article this month on the subject, pointing to a county-by-county map that reflecting voting majorities. A much different look than what the mainstream media likes to portray. Then there is the problem of there only being the two sides of the political spectrum. The metaphor is visible light, ranging from the lower energy red to the higher energy blues. That paints politics as linear rather than deep.
What is Blue anyway?
The only political label I’ll self-apply these days is progressive. I haven’t seen much in the Democratic Party, at least nationally, that reflects those values. Barbara Lee needed to muster all her courage to vote, by herself, against a blank check military reaction back in 2001. In the Democratic Party I idealized, there would have been many more such voices slowing the pace. I’m glad that party control was wrested from the Republicans, but is there really going to be that much difference in Washington now? Getting Nancy Pelosi in charge is the best byproduct of yesterday, for many reasons. But the themes of this election and the renewed calls for impeachment hearings remind me a lot of the party I hated in the 1990s: the Republicans. This has the appearance more of In-Power/Out-of-Power rather than ideology. That part is still depressing. Also sad: The one candidate I was most invested in (sign on lawn) didn’t get a local school board seat.
I’m a big fan of Louis Theroux, so I’m open to this kind of wide-eyed innocent interviewer schtick. I’m just not convinced, sight unseen, that Mike Shea or anyone else is going to be able to pull it off as well. I’m sure there was probably great catharsis in doing this film, but do we really need more reinforcement of this partisan war? A more interesting film might have been about What Would Bring You Back To Vote.
2 replies on “Red State (The Movie)”
I agree that we need to get away from the partisan, only-two-choices-to-every-issue way of thinking. But things have been too desperate lately for me to feel like we have the luxury of opening things up just yet.
Until just a few years ago I was just as disgusted with the reduction of politics in this country into just two points of view. I voted for Nader in 1996 and 2000 (not because I thought he’d make a good president – I didn’t – but because I lived in a state where the Republican’s victory was practically assured from the outset, and because I wanted a third party to get enough votes to be included in future national debates and to qualify for federal matching funds).
However, over the past five or six years the high stakes of national politics and the exasperating dominance of the Republican Party forced me to grudgingly accept the Democratic Party as the best platform for progressive voices at the moment.
Face it, politics in this country is basically broken (on the national level at least), and the emergence of a third party right now would require nothing short of a dramatic revolution in political thought at the grassroots level and without aid from the major media. And, recent election results notwithstanding, the country just doesn’t have the stomach (or political education) for that right now.
So, yeah, I’m firmly in the “lesser of two evils” camp with the Dems right now, as are most people apparently. And the Dems are well aware of this (notice the conspicuous lack of a national platform and identity…) The Democratic Party, at the moment, basically defines itself in terms of its differences from the Republican Party. It’s a shame, but almost a necessary short-term reaction under the circumstances.
I’m afraid that, for now at least, the best real hope of change has to come from the Dems. These guys have lots of problems as a national entity – no guts, a vague national platform, and a history of in-fighting and “pet issues” among its constituents. Having said that, things like district reapportionment, the lobbyist plague, and gaping loopholes in election finance laws (not to mention a highly complicit mass-media) have us pretty much stuck with this system for the time-being.
The good news is that the Dems seem to be more responsive to the grassroots this time around. The bloggers, orgs like MoveOn, etc. really do seem to get the ear of the party when they make enough noise. Are the Dems a permanent solution? No. But right now they’re the finger in the dam keeping us from slipping into complete totalitarianism. Until the dam gets fixed, I don’t think we really have the luxury of breaking down red-blue just yet (on the national level at least).
There was a noticeable absence of Green candidates in the local elections in Bloomington, and I’m interested to understand why. I remember some flack that party took in recent elections because their presence (in some cases, with a much more attractive candidate) took away the kind of support you describe above. Republicans win. My reaction to the criticism of the Greens at the time was: Run a better candidate.
The deck is stacked in favor of the status quo, so yes, it is vital to implement widespread reforms (runoff balloting, fusion ballots, district distribution of electoral votes, relaxed ballot access and write-in rules, etc) to create a better selection. There are definitely ways to give American politics more dimensions, and they will have to be done before third party candidates will have any meaning.
HOWEVER, I’m also sick of voting against people, especially when the guy (always a guy, right?) getting my vote isn’t inspiring. My bar has lowered since Clinton. It was a difficult decision not to vote for Gore, but I couldn’t stand the guy. Today, he looks like FDR by comparison. Running Kerry was the final straw. If you are going to be the Party About Nothing then at least put someone up on the podium who can spin that into a positive. 2004 should have been a slam dunk for Democrats, and imo, the Kerry effect is the reason why that didn’t happen.
I’m a bit more optimistic about the future than I seem here. At least with a Democratic Congress, I can see myself in the mix somewhere. Maybe progressive culture will grow as a result of the change. But the national sound bytes coming out of Democrats were as maddening as the ones coming from Newt a decade ago.