A tip from Paul Krugman last week, America's Superiority Complex, had me thinking about Wexler again as I read a post by Richard Florida, America's Great Passport Divide. Generally speaking, the states with the smallest percentage of passport holders-- i.e., states with people who don't travel outside the country-- are also the states that elect Republicans that most regularly. Mississippi is the worst, closely followed by West Virginia, Kentucky, Alabama and Arkansas.
"It’s a fun map," writes Florida. "With the exception of Sarah Palin’s home state, it reinforces the “differences” we expect to find between the states where more worldly, well-travelled people live versus those where the folks Palin likes to call “real Americans” preponderate. Mostly to entertain myself, I decided to look at how this passport metric correlates with a variety of other political, cultural, economic, and demographic measures. What surprised me is how closely it lines up with the other great cleavages in America today." And, as he says, the statistical correlations are striking across a range of indices.
People in richer states tend to hold passports and people in poorer states tend to not. Same for educated people versus ignorant people. The kinds of folks who elect Haley Barbour, Mitch McConnell, Jim DeMint, Jeff Sessions, David Vitter don't hold college degrees-- or passports. They watch Glenn Beck instead and listen to Hate Talk Radio.
States with higher percentages of passport holders are also more diverse. There is a considerable correlation between passports and the share of immigrants or foreign-born population (.63) and also gays and lesbians (.54). The more passport holders a state has, the more diverse its population tends to be. And yes, these correlations hold when we control for income.
What about politics? How does passport holding line up against America’s Red state-Blue state divide? Pretty darn well, actually. There is a considerable positive correlation between passports and Obama voters (.59) and a significant negative one (-.61) for McCain voters. It appears that more liberally-oriented states are more globally oriented as well, or at least their citizens like to travel abroad. Again, the correlations hold when we control for income, though they are a bit weaker than the others.
I've always thought that America is dual tribal culture that goes back a long way. (All the way, actually.) And during this last couple of decades the differences have been particularly pronounced. But I do recall taking some comfort during the Bush years in recognizing that as much as liberalism seemed on the run here in the US, we were actually a huge faction in the West in general. Indeed, many times during that period (and today) I felt solidarity with the large number of allies in Europe and Canada and realized that our "tribe" is much bigger than it seems. (Of course xenophobes and chauvinists are a world wide phenomenon as well, but the American version only sees them through the prism of friend or foe.)
I used to believe that while Americans are certainly parochial we also had such a high rate of immigration that it mitigated it a bit and made us more flexible. And in some ways it has. We at least developed a mechanism for assimilation that a lot of countries haven't. But I've realized in my later years that it only goes so far. We might eventually absorb "the other" but only once they agree to accept American exceptionalism. Those who travel, however, quickly learn that while cultures differ, at the end of the day humans are humans and most problems are the fault of fundamental flaws in the species, not the race or the culture or the borders.It boradens the thinking a little.
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