> There's no amount of division that can neatly contain a group's interests. Gerrymandered maps are an extreme example. 60m vs 300m is no more meaningful a distinction than 500k (Atlanta) vs 6m (Atlanta MSA).
While technically true, surely there's degrees of 'containing group interests'?
I've been part of various groups with different sizes. Family > friends > Christian denomination (Evangelical) > Class (highly educated but very 'middle-class'), Country (The Netherlands), etc. To me it seems obvious that as the group gets larger, as well as more 'abstract', the group interest becomes vaguer and broader and less cohesive.
While I don't agree that comparisons on a state-level are the right kind of abstraction (perhaps more rural versus urban?), I do think that there's a huge difference in 'contained group interests' on the level of something like 'The Netherlands' versus 'The European Union' (the 'umemployed leeches' are at least my unemployed leeches, and not brown-skinned, etc.). And while I think the USA cannot be directly compared to the EU, I do think the USA is more similar to the EU than to one particular country within it. Or at least enough so that it makes that comparison very shaky.
I often find it difficult to remember this, because from the perspective of a Netflix-guzzling European the USA is a monoculture. But if the differences within the relatively small and relatively (globally speaking) homogeneous eurozone are any indication, the USA might be much less monocultural than it appears.