Two Americas
There are two Americas: one gray and one green. The differences between each one’s residents are a logical outcome of their divergent contexts. If we understand this, we have a chance of building bridges between them. Here’s the back story, and an idea.
The past two elections have sharpened the features of a phenomenon that few of us saw beforehand as clearly, even while we all felt its influence.
To see it, we needed the talents of a new breed of map-makers. Tim Wallace, a Senior Editor for Geography at the New York Times, drew two maps (illustrated above) after 2016’s upset to outline his epiphany. It divided the nation into two landmasses, in separate images: a Republican one, and a Democratic one. The first of these looked a lot like the nation we recognize, because it contained 85% of its land mass, which remained largely contiguous. The second comprised a series of disjoined islands, dotting a perceptual ocean, comprising just 15% of the US land mass, and looking strangely like some new Waterworld.
