The Death of a Red State

In the city of Greeley, a small group of Democrats gathers on a Friday night to hold a fundraiser for Musgrave's opponent, Betsy Markey. It's a mostly middle-aged group, a lot of Sixties survivors, some Hispanics and a Native American, even a pair of married Peace Corps vets and their daughter.

Like Barack Obama, the up-ticket candidate whose coattails she hopes to ride, Markey is a prototypical modern Democrat — young, attractive and not overtly ideological. Markey is a reminder that the days of the Democratic congressman being whichever Irishman or Italian the relevant unions decided to back are long over.

Those days ended in most American towns when the factories that made steel, cars or, in Greeley's case, beet sugar (the town's huge Great Western Sugar factory closed in 2002) moved abroad or shut down. As organized blue-collar workers have disappeared, there has been a struggle to figure out just what constitutes the base of the Democratic Party.

It's not an easy question to answer, which is one of the reasons the Democrats have been such an embarrassment for so many years. In the days of FDR and JFK, the party was a bunch of rich people whose bread-and-butter platform was a sort of noblesse-oblige advocacy for the voter-rich underclass. The party that sent Al Gore and John Kerry to the electoral gallows was made up of the same rich people — only now all they did for poor people was talk.

The Republicans, meanwhile, weren't doing anything for the rank and file either, but at least their candidates were speaking the right language. They understood that in the absence of results, the average voter would settle for seeing someone in the White House who doesn't make him feel bad about himself. The Republicans cannily targeted voters — and there were plenty of them — who don't want to be talked down to by some Washington suit acting all smart and shit. And so for a long time the GOP won the battle of cultural preferences, sending to high offices all across the country a succession of blunt underachievers who didn't aspire to anything that the ordinary American couldn't achieve.

But even as Republicans were winning that battle, there was another shift taking place. Gay people started walking around in even the most remote parts of the country. Women became bosses, mayors, senators. Some of almost everybody's best friends really were black. Next thing you know, even the most backward dickhead is quoting Dave Chappelle's Rick James skit. So what the Democrats lost in their base, they gained in the form of a generalized tolerance that seeped unconsciously into the brains of a whole generation. They became more of a demographic than a political party united by common interests.

At the fundraiser in Greeley, the assembled Democrats look like a college discussion group — it's a crowd where you'd worry more about a game of Trivial Pursuit breaking out than a revolution. But in truth it's people like this, in places like this, who are on the front lines of one of the great cultural showdowns in our history. It's a showdown that has been brought into stark relief by Obama, a contest between those who embrace the multicultural future and that segment of white America that is still holding its breath, waiting for the Earth to start spinning backward and erase all the unpleasant changes.

In Greeley, as in most of America, those two groups are defined by their racial attitudes — fault lines that these days are most visible in the battle over immigration. Immigrants comprise the bulk of the workforce at the local meat-processing plant owned by Swift and Co. The plant, which contributes to the town's heavy cape of death-shit smell, was raided in December 2006 by agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, who arrested 265 workers and drove a deep wedge into the local political scene.