Chris blogged about Pew's massive data dump a few days ago.  It's a fascinating study with big implications for the parties - the Republicans could be headed for a landslide wipeout in 2008 if the public continues to think what it thinks about the two parties and Bush continues his temper tantrum thirty percent strategy.

That said, there are some fascinating stats that hit on longer term trends.  For instance, there's this.

The public's evaluations of personal financial satisfaction is increasingly split along partisan lines and the gap between Republicans and Democrats is the largest it has been since the Pew values surveys began 20 years ago. Roughly eight-in-ten Republicans (81%) say they are largely satisfied with the way things are going for them financially, compared with much smaller majorities of Democrats and independents (54% each). A decade ago, there were only modest partisan differences in satisfaction with personal finances, and in 1994 Republicans, Democrats and independents expressed nearly identical levels of satisfaction with their finances.

This is very strange, and disturbing.  Paul Rosenberg pointed me to this book, the Rise of Gunbelt America, on the military industrial economy.  Here's the summary.

Since World War II, America's economic landscape has undergone a profound transformation. The effects of this change can be seen in the decline of the traditional industrial heartland and the emergence of new high tech industrial complexes in California, Texas, Boston, and Florida. The Rise of the Gunbelt demonstrates that this economic restructuring is a direct result of the rise of the military industrial complex (MIC) and a wholly new industry based on defense spending and Pentagon contacts. Chronicling the dramatic growth of this vast complex, the authors analyze the roles played by the shift from land and sea warfare to aerial combat in World War II, the Cold War, the birth of aerospace and the consequent radical transformation of the airplane industry, and labor and major defense corporations such as Boeing, Lockheed, and McDonnell Douglas. Exploring the reasons for the shifts in defense spending--including the role of lobbyists and the Department of Defense in awarding contracts--and the effects on regional and national economic development, this comprehensive study reveals the complexities of the MIC.

I've always been suspicious that the culture war was a proxy for economic and political control, and I've also noticed that the rise of the blogosphere roughly correlates to an emerging economic instability for white liberals.  If you accept, as many of us do, that right-wing arguments always mean the opposite of what they say, then taking the 'free market' mantra suggests that there is an incredibly controlled socialist economy in our midst.  And lo and behold, there is, but not for Democrats.

In other words, it's not just that there are two Americas, it's that there are two different economies within America.  The religious and cultural 'difference' between Republicans and Democrats come from entirely different incentive models.  I'm not determinative about this, in that I don't think it's all economic, nor do I think the economic structures came first and the culture emerged around it.

What is clear though is that we need to begin to understand economic policies and tax structures as tools in remapping America.  There is a moment for the next ten years, during which a non-Southern culture controls the political machinery of the Federal government and the South's veto can be overcome with a brutal series of threats to the region's excessive Federal subsidies and reliance on socialist corporate welfare.  If we're smart, we can puncture the institutional architecture that allows the Gunbelt to thrive and build a new America along the networked rule-based freedom-enhancing tolerant lines that exist in the bulwark areas of Blue America.  

I mean, even wingnuts agree that the food in San Francisco is awesome.  

There's more...