Red
states and blue states? Flyover country and the coasts? How simplistic.
Colin Woodard, a reporter at the Portland Press Herald and author of
several books, says North America can be broken neatly into 11 separate
nation-states, where dominant cultures explain our voting behaviors and
attitudes toward everything from social issues to the role of
government.
“The borders of my eleven American nations are
reflected in many different types of maps — including maps showing the
distribution of linguistic dialects, the spread of cultural artifacts,
the prevalence of different religious denominations, and the
county-by-county breakdown of voting in virtually every hotly contested
presidential race in our history,” Woodard writes in the Fall 2013 issue
of Tufts University’s alumni magazine. “Our continent’s famed mobility
has been reinforcing, not dissolving, regional differences, as people
increasingly sort themselves into like-minded communities.”
Woodard lays out his map in the new book
“American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of
North America.” Here’s how he breaks down the continent:
Yankeedom: Founded by Puritans, residents in
Northeastern states and the industrial Midwest tend to be more
comfortable with government regulation. They value education and the
common good more than other regions.
New Netherland: The Netherlands was the most
sophisticated society in the Western world when New York was founded,
Woodard writes, so it’s no wonder that the region has been a hub of
global commerce. It’s also the region most accepting of historically
persecuted populations.
The Midlands: Stretching from Quaker territory
west through Iowa and into more populated areas of the Midwest, the
Midlands are “pluralistic and organized around the middle class.”
Government intrusion is unwelcome, and ethnic and ideological purity
isn’t a priority.
Tidewater: The coastal regions in the English
colonies of Virginia, North Carolina, Maryland and Delaware tend to
respect authority and value tradition. Once the most powerful American
nation, it began to decline during Westward expansion.
Greater Appalachia: Extending from West Virginia
through the Great Smoky Mountains and into Northwest Texas, the
descendants of Irish, English and Scottish settlers value individual
liberty. Residents are “intensely suspicious of lowland aristocrats and
Yankee social engineers.”
Deep South: Dixie still traces its roots to the caste system established by masters who tried to duplicate
West Indies-style slave society, Woodard writes. The Old South values
states’ rights and local control and fights the expansion of federal
powers.
El Norte: Southwest Texas and the border region
is the oldest, and most linguistically different, nation in the
Americas. Hard work and self-sufficiency are prized values.
The Left Coast: A hybrid, Woodard says, of
Appalachian independence and Yankee utopianism loosely defined by the
Pacific Ocean on one side and coastal mountain ranges like the Cascades
and the Sierra Nevadas on the other. The independence and innovation
required of early explorers continues to manifest in places like Silicon
Valley and the tech companies around Seattle.
The Far West: The Great Plains and the Mountain
West were built by industry, made necessary by harsh, sometimes
inhospitable climates. Far Westerners are intensely libertarian and
deeply distrustful of big institutions, whether they are railroads and
monopolies or the federal government.
New France: Former French colonies in and around
New Orleans and Quebec tend toward consensus and egalitarian, “among
the most liberal on the continent, with unusually tolerant attitudes
toward gays and people of all races and a ready acceptance of government
involvement in the economy,” Woodard writes.
First Nation: The few First Nation peoples left —
Native Americans who never gave up their land to white settlers — are
mainly in the harshly Arctic north of Canada and Alaska. They have
sovereignty over their lands, but their population is only around
300,000.
The clashes between the 11 nations play out in
every way, from politics to social values. Woodard notes that states
with the highest rates of violent
deaths are in the Deep South, Tidewater and Greater Appalachia, regions
that value independence and self-sufficiency. States with lower rates of violent deaths are in Yankeedom, New Netherland and the Midlands, where government intervention is viewed with less skepticism.
States in the Deep South are much more likely to
have stand-your-ground laws than states in the northern “nations.” And
more than 95 percent of executions in the United States since 1976
happened in the Deep South, Greater Appalachia, Tidewater and the Far
West. States in Yankeedom and New Netherland have executed a collective
total of just one person.
That doesn’t bode well for gun control
advocates, Woodard concludes: “With such sharp regional differences, the
idea that the United States would ever reach consensus on any issue
having to do with violence seems far-fetched. The cultural gulf between
Appalachia and Yankeedom, Deep South and New Netherland is simply too
large. But it’s conceivable that some new alliance could form to tip the
balance.
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