Blue City Warrior Visits Red America: In Search of Us: A Proposal

Follow along as I leave my blue bubble to travel to red cities

I am what political scientists call a “chronic voter”. I am also a radical urbanist. Put those two things together and you’ll find a committed, politically-involved city dweller, who can be counted on to vote for the Democrat wherever they show up on my ballot. I like living in a place that is represented by Democrats at every level of government, because they generally reflect my values in their policies. 

My values stem from growing up a free-lunch kid in a lush Minneapolis neighborhood in the 1970’s. Politically, this was the era of the “Minnesota Miracle”, and the liberal approaches to governing, as embodied by our U.S. Senators and Vice Presidents Hubert H. Humphrey and Walter Mondale. Our public schools were intentionally racially integrated, and we lived near parks and lakes where you could play without having to pay a fee. We had access to buses that could get us downtown and to first jobs, and we had safe streets where we could walk or bike to friends’ houses. We had what we needed, and had a sense that we were in it together.

I also like living in a city and in a neighborhood where I am in proximity to other people, people that are different from me, that allow me to experience diversity, and expose me to other perspectives. My city and neighborhood is also rich with public amenities, like bike trails, public transit, and recreational opportunities, all within walking distance to a grocery store and coffee shops. Realtors have given my neighborhood a high walk score.

I’ve often thought that one of the reasons urban areas tend to vote blue is due to this exposure to diversity – people who look, believe, and act differently than they do – and how it tends to make people more empathetic and tolerant of otherness. Tolerance of otherness ties to the values expressed in the platform of the modern Democratic Party. I also have an assumption that Democrats, more than Republicans, are willing to invest in the public spaces and amenities that make great places to live. (At least since the civil rights movement that challenged segregated public spaces. The civil rights movement’s successes in desegregating public spaces led to the backlash that Heather McGhee in The Sum of Us coined “draining the public pool,” which has further led to decades of disinvestment in public spaces throughout the country. But that’s an article for another time.)

But surely there are red communities that are full of people who like to be in proximity to others, even others that don’t look, believe, and act like them. And there must be red city dwellers that like to have access to public amenities and third spaces where they can interact with other humans, whether intentionally or not. People who like being represented by politicians – in this case Republicans – that reflect their values at all levels of government. Right?

So if there are places and people out there in Red America that like to spend their time like I do in Blue America, maybe we have more in common than I thought? The division in our country has been a long time trend. Bill Bishop wrote about this in his 2008 book, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart, and it has only been exacerbated with the elections of Barack Obama and Donald Trump. This sorting and division has made it so easy to demonize each other because we are increasingly rarely in proximity to each other. But maybe, if we were in space together, we might find that we have some things in common. And that’s a place to start the work of decreasing the divide.

That’s my thinking behind this endeavor: Over the course of 2024, I propose to take my bluest of blue body and beliefs to visit red red communities – communities that have a lot of things that I love – to explore what makes them tick. I want to see if I can find where our values align – and diverge – in search of an “us” in this fractured country that we all love.

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