The gangs of The Left

From NRO:

Exit polls have shown that the contest between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama has produced deep divisions among Democratic constituencies. It looks something like tribal warfare. Whites have voted, if you average the results from the states, 53 percent to 39 percent for Clinton; blacks, 80 percent to 17 percent for Obama; Latinos, 58 percent to 39 percent for Clinton; Asians, in California (the one primary state where they’re numerous enough to gauge), 71 percent to 25 percent for Clinton.

The differences in voting by the young, overwhelmingly for Obama, and the elderly, overwhelmingly for Clinton, are as large as any I can remember in either a primary or general election. Upscale voters are heavily for Obama; downscale voters are heavily for Clinton.

As the contest has continued, increasing percentages of Clinton and Obama voters say they wouldn’t vote for the other candidate against John McCain.

But the exit polls don’t show another tribal division, one that emerges when you examine the election returns by county and congressional district. In state after state — from New Hampshire and Michigan to Texas and Ohio — Obama runs unusually strongly in counties with large universities. Academics — and I include here those who choose to live in university towns as well as those actually in or teaching school — seem to find Obama particularly appealing.

Also, Obama runs unusually well in many state capitals — Concord, Lansing, Tallahassee, Atlanta, Nashville, Santa Fe, Dover, Jefferson City, Sacramento, Trenton, Madison, Columbus, Austin — which of course have unusual concentrations of public employees (and in some cases big universities, as well).

Clinton’s highest percentages come in counties with large numbers of Latinos and what I call Jacksonians. You can see the latter in counties in what is loosely called Appalachia — southwest Virginia, southern Ohio, the north end of Georgia, non-metropolitan Tennessee, northern Alabama, northeast Mississippi, all of Arkansas, southern Missouri, eastern Oklahoma, east and central Texas.

These are lands that were settled by the colonial-era immigrants from northern England, Scotland, and Northern Ireland and their descendants, who thronged down the Appalachian chain and then, like their heroes Andrew Jackson and Sam Houston, kept going southwest.

Clinton’s strong performance among Jacksonians may reflect her positive appeal (it certainly does in Arkansas), but it also seems to reflect a distaste for Obama. Buchanan County, Va., which borders the yet-to-vote states of West Virginia and Kentucky, voted 90 percent for Clinton and 9 percent for Obama.

What’s behind these sharp divisions? You could sum it up by saying that Jacksonians are fighters and academics (and public employees) are not. Jacksonians fought fierce battles against Indians as they moved southwest; they have always made up a disproportionate share of the American military (and were on both sides in the Civil War).

As historian David Hackett Fischer writes in Albion’s Seed, they believe in natural liberty — I’ll leave you alone if you’ll leave me alone, but if you attack my family or my country, I’ll kill you. Academics are, to say the least, lightly represented in the American military, and in economic terms they tend to compete with the military for public dollars. They seek honor for the work of peace as fiercely as Jacksonians seek honor for the feats of war.

I heard Sean Hannity interviewing Michael Barone about this article Friday afternoon. When Barone got to the part about the Jacksonians having the "attack me or my family or my country and I'll kill you" attitude Hannity was incredulous. He asked Barone if you could really say that about an entire people.

The answer is yes. What Barone calls the Jacksonians are actually the Anglo-Celts. We speak English, but our culture is Celtic. Although we are religious our ancestors did not come to this nation primarily for religious freedom. We came for land and freedom and to be away from the annoying presence of authority.

We do take a live and let live attitude and follow the belief that what a man does on his own land is his own business. But if you threaten us or ours we will kill you.

Those Anglo-Celts inclined to vote Democrat will tend to prefer Hillary however the majority of Anglo-Celts will unfortunately choose to back McCain.

Oh, the reason that Obama is leading by such a wide margin here in North Carolina? The most heavily populated part of NC is the central part of the state which contains the University of North Carolina and Duke University. It also has the state capital of Raleigh and the Research Triangle which is peopled largely by transplanted Yankees.

In other words there is a large colony of New Jersey in the middle of NC and that tends to skew our numbers.