The Harvard…linguist? philosopher? celebriprof?…writes in the Times on the question of why states are either so decisively red or decisively blue.

….the American political divide may have arisen not so much from different conceptions of human nature as from differences in how best to tame it. The North and coasts are extensions of Europe and continued the government-driven civilizing process that had been gathering momentum since the Middle Ages. The South and West preserved the culture of honor that emerged in the anarchic territories of the growing country, tempered by their own civilizing forces of churches, families and temperance.

There’s a lot that comes before this, but that’s basically Pinker’s conclusion.

I’m not convinced. My theory about the political composition of states has to do with a dialectic between economic progress and education levels. As the blog Daily Kos points out, there’s almost a 1:1 correlation between a low education ranking and red state status….