We’ve moved toward being not only an economy of ideas and information, but a society of ideas and information. Not only has the intellectual/managerial class managed to position itself well toward the top of the economic food chain, but it is in pretty complete control of the “idea factories” of television, film, music, and print.
Where once socialization was done through more direct contact with one’s community, mass society depends largely on mass culture…and we get mass culture from our exposure to these idea factories, which are controlled by the folks who live in the little blue pockets.
The reality is that the intellectual/managerial class is (relatively…!) homogenous in values, culture, and outlook. There are camps, eddies, and outliers, but culturally, I’d wager that Matthew has more in common with me and with any one of the authors of Samizdata then he does with the machinist who just redid the cylinder head on my race bike.
So we’re on one side of the line, and lots of other folks…folks who live and work far from the idea factories, who don’t anticipate moving to Cambridge or summering at Sea Ranch…are on the other. We have megaphones: jobs at think tanks, or in the media, friends in elected office. They don’t. And yes, we not only challenge their core beliefs, we sometimes burn down their homes and kill them (as a liberal who is also a supporter of law enforcement, I was horrified at both the Weaver debacle and Waco; my respect for Clinton and for Janet Reno never really recovered).
A big part of the divide is the perception … which I share … that the Blue Team not only disagrees with Red Team’s values, but uses its bully pulpit to actively stamp them out. Fair being fair, I have to note that during the 50’s the Red team controlled the media feed and aggressively attacked the values of folks who were the antecedents of the Blue Team today.
From the Atlantic:

Some Americans have an abiding need, it seems, for a cultural and political heart of darkness that can easily be circled on a map. Since the days of Sinclair Lewis and H. L. Mencken, who defined sophistication for would-be cosmopolitan readers negatively, by drawing a satirical perimeter around the Midwest, the coastal smart set has relied on the idea of a landlocked dumb set to emphasize its own alleged refinement. Mencken’s boob-oisie and Lewis’s Babbitts lived out there somewhere, in the weedy prairies far beyond the city gates. These homegrown barbarians fit a profile that is recognizable to this day: pious, suspicious, eminently dupable, and given to joining lodges, clubs, and klaverns. For progressive urbanites, nothing raised morale like the notion of being surrounded by ill-bred dolts. Thus it was that Manhattan invented Main Street.
The new geography of fear persists. The anthrax panic was only a few days old when some in the national press advanced the theory that the culprit was an anti-government hermit holed up in a shack among the pines. The speculative stories about this shared a somewhat wishful tone; linking a novel terror to old villains made the threat familiar, comprehensible. When a New York Times reporter visited a Utah gun show and found a man selling handbooks on homemade bio-weapons (information that is available on the Internet), this was major news. Why? Because it fit a story line dear and comforting to urbanite hearts. When a Times reader sees the words “gun show” in a story, he knows he’s in for another dispatch from the vast moral wasteland that is America beyond the Hudson, and he settles right in.
Never mind the interior’s progressive history as a stronghold of organized labor, women’s rights, and environmentalism—the notion that flyover country is harsh and backward lives on because folks who aren’t from there want it to. In this model not just a few but all Idaho cabin dwellers—perhaps because they’re relatively poor—are reflexively suspected of being racial “separatists,” whereas those who dwell in Caucasian coastal enclaves such as, say, Newport, Rhode Island, and Kennebunkport, Maine, suffer no such taint. There may be a certain romance to the thought. The deskbound have always loved their cowboys, whether those cowboys’ hats are white or black.

And the original Red/Blue article, from USA today:

The culture gap
The cultural differences between Gore’s voters and Bush’s, as illuminated by exit polls, were striking. Bush attracted people who go to church more than once a week, who think it’s more important that the president be a moral leader than a good government manager, who oppose stricter gun laws and who believe that if a school is failing, the government should pay for private school. Honesty is the quality they value most in a leader, followed by leadership and likability.
Gore drew heavy majorities of gay and Jewish voters, those who rarely or never attend church, who support stricter gun laws and who say a school should be fixed if it is failing. Their paramount value is experience, followed by competence to handle complex issues and caring about ”people like me.”
In a sense, Bush exploited the cultural polarization by making the election a referendum on character. But in another way, he tried to bridge many of the differences. He rarely mentioned abortion, gays or guns. Instead, he focused on education, health and ”compassionate conservatism.” His photo ops almost invariably involved black or Hispanic children. And yet nine in 10 blacks still voted for Gore.
Bill Clinton and the question of character shadowed the election, to Bush’s benefit. More than two-thirds of the electorate said Clinton would be remembered not for his leadership but for his scandals. Nearly half — 44% — said the scandal was very or somewhat important in determining their vote, and three-quarters of them voted for Bush.

Go back and read the whole thing.