Division is a feature of the U.S., not a bug
America does not have, and has never had, a single unifying culture. Yes, we all love pizza, television, Tom Hanks, and ice cubes in our water. But, much as I love pop culture, it’s not identical to the deep cultural values that motivate our thoughts and political decisions. At that level, there are massive regional differences in the country that are like tectonic plates constantly smooshing together. The results are all around us.
Scholars have different ways — different schema — for breaking these regional cultural differences down, but I’m a simple man and I enjoy simple schema. For my money, you don’t have to get more complicated than saying: we started out with Puritan Pilgrims in the North and Slaveholding Oligarchs in the South.
And I’ll freely admit that, while I studied American history in college, I wasn’t really tuned into this basic truth until I read Colin Woodard’s American Nations (primarily because I always considered the colonial ceriod boring and irrelevant — which I can now see was an error).
And I should further point out that I’m really dumbing down the American Nations thesis. Woodard uses 11 “nations”, each with a different origin and a distinct culture and set of values. His analysis is rigorous. He is also fairly rigid in his thinking about how the patterns established in the 17th and 18th…
