You often hear that the NeoCons are former Troskyites, but who knew the culture cons were Neo-Maoists?
Conservatives cope with this inconvenient fact by redefining blue states as a few urban enclaves and making a fetish of the political map, with its misleadingly large, depopulated red states. To take a typical example, a 2004 postelection Wall Street Journal column by Daniel Henninger announced triumphantly, "[I]f you adjust the map's colors for votes by county ... even the blue states turn mostly red. Pennsylvania is blue, but, between blue Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, every county in the state is red. California, except for the coastline, is almost entirely red." This is a persuasive point if you believe in the principle of one acre, one vote.
Tom Wolfe recently took this analysis a step further, declaring that the blue-state elites are not part of the United States of America. "They literally do not set foot in the United States. We live in New York in one of the two parenthesis states. They're usually called blue states--they're not blue states, the states on the coast. They're parenthesis states--the entire country lives in between." I wonder if Wolfe and his fellow travelers realize how much their mau-mauing of blue staters is, well, Maoist. Mao, like the contemporary American right, saw his country as divided between the great virtuous, patriotic interior and the decadent, traitorous coastal cities. Intellectuals--or, in the Maoist parlance, the "stinking ninth category," a phrase so pungent and catchy I can't believe Bill O'Reilly hasn't picked it up yet--were forcibly relocated from the cosmopolitan cities to the countryside to "learn from the poor and lower middle peasants."
