Last month I wrote in this space about the “Two Nations” contained within America’s borders—not the rich and poor nations of John Edwards’s anachronistic fancy, but the clever and the stupid, the complicated and the simple, the sophisticated and the boorish nations symbolized for many in the now ubiquitous red and blue map of the election results. Of course, no one supposes that there are not clever, complicated, and sophisticated people voting for Kerry in the red states and stupid, simple, and boorish people voting for Bush in the blue states, but bright Kerry supporters versus dim Bush supporters was the accepted model wherever you looked in the media, many of whose sour post-election commentaries were based on the assumption that the blue states had for some reason been blessed with majorities of bright people while the red states were correspondingly cursed with majorities of thickoes. More than one liberal commentator echoed Carole Simpson, the former anchor of ABC’s World News Tonight, in noticing that the thirty-one red states included the thirteen that made up the old Confederacy at the time of the Civil War and put the difference between red and blue down to the legacy of slavery. Or slave-owning.

But wait a minute. Isn’t there something wrong with the whole idea of statewide majorities of smart people? Doubtless there are majorities of bright people at places like the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Washington or Harvard University or at 229 West 43rd Street in Manhattan