Our Patchwork Nation

When I was 21 and in Peru I met a Swiss man who went on at length about the virtues of his country’s direct democracy form of government. “It would solve a lot of the problems you have in the United States if people had more of a say,” he told me, and for the next few months I tramped around South America believing that he was right.

It was only later that I realized the fallacy of comparing the US to tiny Switzerland, which has barely more people than Virginia. The social cohesion of the US, our rapid highways, and our pervasive commercial culture all serve to paper over the vastness of the country. They turn the mind away from the impossibility of even beginning to imagine the 300 million Americans who live together under one constitutional roof.

In Our Patchwork Nation, journalist Dante Chinni and political scientist James Gimpel endeavor to make the diversity of American life more legible. Their project, which has been featured as an ongoing series in this newspaper for the last two years, takes the 3,141 counties that make up the US and sorts them into 12 categories that are themselves defined by a potpourri of statistical indicators like median income, racial composition, and church attendance. Many of the designations are intuitively familiar, like the “Monied ’Burbs” (Westchester County, N.Y.), “Tractor Country,” (a good chunk of Nebraska) and “Industrial Metropolis” (Philadelphia). Others, like “Service Worker Centers” (think isolated, commodity-less places like rural Maine) and “Boom Towns” (the exurbs) likely took a little more statistical sifting to uncover.

Chinni and Gimpel’s starting point is the well-worn red state/blue state dichotomy, which they view in about the same way that it’s been said we should view the genetic basis of race: That is, the diversity within the red or blue states themselves is great enough to render broad comparisons between the two tenuous and uninformative.

To press this point they combine large-scale number crunching with anecdotal reporting from counties representing each of the community types. In some cases this approach yields genuine insights and delivers a voyeuristic thrill, like when Chinni visits a deserted golf development in the emptying Boom Town of Eagle, Colo. In others, however, the reporting reads more like travel guide schlock (“High-rises populated by the wealthy run into bungalows full of white blue-collar workers...”) and the statistical conclusions appear to arise largely from an overreading of flimsy data. For example, the authors conclude that “not all ... [urban liberals] like books as much as we believe they do” from the relatively low ratio of bookstores to people in cities. This reading ignores the obvious point that a single Barnes & Noble in Times Square can serve a lot more people than one in sparsely populated Montana.

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