No. of Recommendations: 2
Economy and Security.
The top two uniters for red states are
1. An immense cultural distrust of back East if you're in the West, the North if you're in the South, and flatlanders if you're in Appalachia. This is by and large earned by back East because back East and the North were always seen as looking down on them, and New England and the environs of Virginia did look down on them.
2. Lately, it's been abortion, but that seems to now be usurped by - fear of brown hordes invading from the South. So under the more benign title of "security" is - get these brown-skinned evil invaders out of the country. This is a White Christian country and we shall have no dark skinned people before us, unless they are safely in a lower caste.
Useful political foils which make it easier to blame others and resent, neither of which are productive. So the West has the high desert to deal with and theoretically the altitude + toxic masculinity (rugged individualism) yields the high suicide rate. Farmers also have a high suicide rate, and I'm partial to small farmers, who have it tough. The big farmers break their farms up into less than 20,000 acre corporations (within the corporation) so they're eligible for the subsidies.
The Appalachians are billed as early Libertarians. That's a wonder isn't it? They did talk and fight about their rights. The currency was whiskey for a while. And there was a certain amount of indolence. The big circular flat area in the Cumberland gap is a filled in meteor crater. The Appalachias are the US portion of a mountain range caused by the formation of Pangea.
