Matt Yglesias makes short shrift of David Brooks' faux populism: Take a look at his "One Nation, Slightly Divisible", the article that spawned a million Red America vs. Blue America clichés. The general thrust is that Blue America is rich, sophisticated, and liberal while Red America is working class, moral, and conservative. This theory is a bit hard to square with the actual data indicating that if you slice America up into six income brackets Gore won the three at the bottom and Bush won the three at the top, even while Gore voters tended to live in high cost of living areas. The reason is that Brooks chose Montgomery Country, Maryland -- specifically, Bethesda -- as his exemplar of Blue America. We're given no reason, however, to think Bethesda is actually typical of the region he's trying to profile. If he'd picked, say, Silver Springs or the Bronx or my particular slice of Blue America (Columbia Heights in the District of Columbia) he'd have found a very different story -- lots of working class African-Americans and Latinos, many churches, and no Pottery Barns. Brooks lives in the area, so it surely hasn't escaped his attention that the bluest state of them all -- Washington, DC -- is, outside of a few neighborhoods, nothing like Bethesda... Papering over these inconvenient facts isn't just sloppy journalism; it serves to obscure the persistence of class division in American life -- a theme that's quite explicit in the article. Painting conservatism as the ideology of ordinary working people pitted against hoity-toity liberal elitists while the Republican Party puts forward budget after budget geared toward the needs of the super-rich looks to me like a deliberate effort to obscure what's really going on.