When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school

It's a wonder I can think at all

Thank you, Paul Simon, Kodachrome.

There was a lot of crap.

• The Indians (as they were then known) had it coming

• A woman’s place is in the home

• All men are created equal

• One nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all

• No man is above the law

• Checks and balances

The years following my graduation 60 years ago have disabused me of the notion that these were factual statements. But they at least gave me a framework to think about how political life was supposed to work. Until recently when that went by the board, and I don’t think college added much to that, at least until Con Law.

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I suspect that the general run of high school since then isn’t even up to even that standard.

And in 2024, the percentage of the county adult (older than 25) population with no college degree explains about 25% of the variance among the results of all the counties.

But that’s not all that’s going on.

There’s also what we can call “rurality.” On average, Biden won in counties with about five times the populations in which Trump won. But that only brings the statistic up to explaining about 30% of the variance.

And, yup, you guessed it. Add the white percentage of the population and about half of the variance is explained.

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The tension along the rural-urban divide is nothing new, of course. By 1810

The profits of the export and import business fell chiefly to Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, where the shipping belonged; and these cities could not fail to attract labor as well as capital beyond the degree that a conservative republican of the Revolutionary time would have thought safe.

Adams, Henry. History of the United States During the Administrations of James Madison

The economic rivalry is matched by the moral contest.

Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue.

Jefferson, Thomas. Notes on the state of Virginia (Function)