Upside of peer pressure

We humans are social animals. We get fat together, we quit smoking together, we influence each other's choices. This really shouldn't be a surprise. It's why advertising works. It's why grassroots campaigning works better and why water cooler conversation works even better.

Massachusetts isn't more liberal than Texas just because its citizens are better educated. There's a self-sustaining consensus in each place about what's right. In Massachusetts, there's a long tradition of progress toward liberty. In Texas, as in much of the South, there's still a mildly feudal acceptance that the rich people have proven by their wealth that they should run things.

Karl Rove thought he could bring Texas's Southern white anti-government evangelical consensus to America as a whole in the form of a permanent Republican majority. He looked on a transformational conflict with radical Islam as an opportunity to do for his coalition of wealthies, bullies, and fundies what WWII had done for urbanites, farmers, union workers, and eventually minorities.

Too bad for him that his low-judgement neocon buddies and his dipshit boss fucked it up so badly.