It wasn't “red states” against “blue states” so much as flaming red rural areas rising up against the big cities.

The countryside knows in its heart that it is right. America's sustaining myths are rural ones: virtue resides in the soil, in the little house on the prairie, the lonely clapboard church, the one-room school, the small self-governing Puritan township. American writers, from Fenimore Cooper and Thoreau to Gary Snyder and Barry Lopez, have expended much eloquence on the theme that true wisdom is to be found in the woods, not in the arid intellectualism… of the city.

Like Britain (and unlike France or Italy) the US, despite producing at least two of the great cities of the world, is prone to see the city… as… a pustular, abnormal swelling on the fair face of the countryside… So it's hardly surpirsing that when the suburbs have to choose a side in the war at election time, they tend to declare themselves for the country and the mystical values that come with being so close to the smell of the woods and the footprints of the mountain lion. Suburbanites love to think that their little acre of tract housing is almost, if not quite, a farm (one of the most hallowed words in American mythology), and if farmers' property rights are threatened by the city, they'll go with the farmers every time.