We're finally letting it sink in now that the urban/rural split is the most important demographic division in American politics today. Look at any of the purplish, adjusted maps of election returns -- in each case, the country is colored plum red, with pockets of bruise blue signifying urban areas. To say the ensuing electoral results are caused by a "values" gap is a simplistic mass media's way of discussing the issue. In reality, urban vs. rural translates into Democrats vs. Republicans through a variety of processes. I'm going to try to unpack those over a series of stream of consciousness posts, but first I want to talk about John Gard.

Gard is the Assembly Speaker here in Wisconsin. He is a 41-year-old Republican from tiny Peshtigo, a farm and outdoorsman community in the state's northeast corner. This week's issue of our free weekly, Isthmus (which is unfortunately not available online), has a profile of Gard, which shows him to personally exemplify many of the worst characteristics of modern American politics (this profile is actually an excerpt from a longer piece in Milwaukee Magazine, also not online). Gard's driving force is his loathing of "Madison elites;" he feels personally slighted because not everybody agrees with him that small towns like Peshtigo are the source of our most important wisdom.

One of the things Gard's been pushing hard of late is a repeal of the state's concealed weapons ban. Apparently, the right to carry a loaded gun under your coat is considered an important "value" in Peshtigo, and the big city folks just don't get it. But this is one of many instances in which politicians like Gard put vitriol ahead of common sense; we have a concealed weapon ban in Wisconsin because it helps keep the crime rate down in places like Milwaukee, Beloit, La Crosse, Janesville, Oshkosh, etc. -- places where there are enough balls-out gun nuts to keep such a ban from happening on the local level. Instead of saying, "Yes, this is a reasonable compromise," Gard declares that his constituents are being demeaned.

Similarly, Gard plans to push a gay marriage ban in the upcoming legislative session. Never mind that nobody in Wisconsin has actually put any political weight behind legal gay marriage in this state, and never mind that his legislation would also bar civil unions between gay or straight couples. The fact that Wisconsin is not a theocracy is evidence that Madison elites think they're better than the "real" people of Peshtigo.

This whole idea that liberals think little of the "moral values" crowd and therefore deserve to be wedged out of the political discourse is laughable. Liberals disagree with Christian conservatives. Christian conservatives blame liberals for the terror attacks on New York and Washington, declare that liberals are not "real" Americans and believe that liberals will make their beliefs criminal if given the opportunity. At the end of the day, liberals call Christian conservatives names, and Christian conservatives call liberals names. We deal with it, learn to laugh at ourselves, and move on. They, in control of the whole of the country's power structure, tell us we're going to hell for persecuting them.

So let's quit all this talk about reaching out. We've tried to be nice. We know how to understand without agreeing, and we've done that. They've interpreted anything less than full capitulation as the moral equivalent of slavery, so fuck it. We, as an ideological bloc, don't need their shit.