Published July 13th, 2006 by Future Atlas
Mexico and the US: dyschronicity
Examining a map of the regional split in the Mexican election results, Investor’s Business Daily applies American political analogies: the “red,” sunbelt north of Mexico voting for the conservative PAN party, and the “blue” south going for the leftist PRD.
The analogy is flimsy, however, due to “dyschronicity”: Mexico and the US live in wholly different eras, and no elements of their politics line up neatly beside each other.
The PAN may be conservative, but in the Mexican context that means that they are modernizing, outward-looking, and one sense progressive: they are trying to achieve a functioning modern state in which capitalism can operate. Success would mean making Mexico more like the early 20th century United States: Mexican conservatives can only dream of their country being as capitalist, individualist, and libertarian as “blue America.”
The Mexican south is much farther removed from any American experience, resembling blue America not at all, and red America only by loose analogy, in that both are the traditional, religious, and inward-looking parts of their countries. The dyschronicity with the US is acute: the peasant and indigenous culture that dominate the Mexican south has never existed in the United States, and most Americans’ ancestors have not lived in similar circumstances for 300-500 years. Chiapas resembles Bolivia more than it does Massachusetts.
In short, the Rio Grande is too broad for some analogies to make it across.
[via Social Technologies]