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- [00:00]
A
We as a species, we're a storytelling species. That's how we organize information and share it, and even our own identities, the stories we internally tell ourselves about who we are, teenagers trying on different versions and different stories trying to figure it out. We need those things. And every nation also needs the meta identity that if you belong to the German nation or Japan or Belgium or Canada or United States, that what that means is a story. And if you don't have the story, you don't have a definition to have any kind of coherent public action. So what's your country's purpose? Who belongs and who's eligible to belong? Where did it come from? Where should it be going? Those are incredibly powerful ideas.
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B
Hello, and welcome to the GD Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Druck. Oftentimes, when we talk about what divides the United States or determines someone's politics, we talk about things like education, race, gender, class. But my guest today makes the argument that there's something else fundamental at play that stretches back hundreds of years, well before the founding of America itself, and that's the regional cultures that were developed by. By the people who originally settled America's colonies. It may seem like a stretch to say that after waves of immigration and internal migration, technological and social change, that the Pilgrims and Quakers and aristocrats and pioneers are still with us. But Colin Woodard argues that we can't actually understand our contemporary politics and the fights we're having today without that context. In his previous book, American nations, he laid out what he described as the 11 different quote, unquote nations or culturally distinct regions within America. In his new book, Nations Apart, he looks at the political and social differences across them on everything from voting to health outcomes to gun violence. He also suggests what kinds of common narratives have united us in the past and what might work today based on public opinion research. Colin is the director of the Nationhood Lab at the Pell center for International Relations and Public Policy at Salve Regina University. Colin, welcome to the podcast.
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A
Pleasure to be here, Galen. Thanks for having me.
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B
It's my pleasure. Can we just begin by identifying some of the main, quote, unquote nations that you say make up the United States?
- [02:35]
A
Yeah, I mean, you can't understand the country, its history, our current political environment, our constitutional arrangements, anything, without first realizing that we're not a nation state. We're this federation of sort of these separate stateless nations, regional cultures that tie back to the rival colonial projects that formed on the eastern and southwestern rims of what's now the United States. Projects that had very little in common. Different ethnographic and political and religious characteristics, different plans of the society they wanted to create. For instance, the Puritans coming to New England were, you know, a group of people who thought. Thought they were in a covenanted relationship, like the Old Testament Hebrews with God, right? And that God had sent them to, you know, do certain things in New England wilderness, and that they would be punished or rewarded as a group. So they had an important mission, you know, light on a hill, air in the wilderness, but also an individual among them could screw everything up for everybody. So the important thing was the mission and the success of the group, not the individuals like, you know, liberty and charging forth. Very different than some of the other regions. You go to somewhere like the Chesapeake country, which was settled also by English people, also at roughly the same time. But that leadership group was a totally different set of people after the English Civil War. In particular, they were the second and third and fourth and fifth sons of the English manor families, the Lord Granthams, their Downton Abbeys in that time period. The ones, though, who weren't the firstborn sons, they weren't the ones who were going to inherit the manor at home. And suddenly with the discovery of the new world, they could imagine going and creating a new manor for themselves. So they were going and trying to reproduce the existing, you know, grand country estates where they would be the enlightened gentlemen and they would have duties towards the hands below them. But in the end, they were obviously the people who should be leading this place. Problem was, there weren't any people who could stand into the new world to be peasants or wouldn't tolerate doing that. So they relied on indentured servants. And then, as the 1600s came to an end, started bringing in an actual slave system based on what they'd seen in the West Indies and in the deep south in the back country, you'd have what I call Greater Appalachia, which was founded primarily by Scots, Irish and Lowland Scots coming from the war torn parts of the British Isles, English marches, Lowlands of Scotland, especially Ulster, places that had had generations warfare, where institutions were weak, where you couldn't count on the government, or if the government came, it was usually in the form of, you know, lancers and, you know, archers trying to kill you and your family. You had to protect your kith and kin yourself. Nothing good is going to come of government and kings and princes and any of that. And they were not farming people, they were pastoral people. In other words, their wealth was in livestock, which could be easily killed or stolen. And so anthropologists have recognized that throughout the world, pastoralists often have a sort of culture of honor whereby people have to have a terrifying reputation so no one will mess with their stuff. Don't key that guy's car, he'll mess you up and that. So there was a sort of warrior culture with a strong ethos around individual liberty and personal autonomy and a distrust of institutions, but totally the opposite of the Yankees with their mission and their institutions and going out on the frontier and immediately setting up a collectively governed congregation, a meeting house and a taxpayer finance compulsory public school on the frontier for theological reasons. You take those. And Spanish settled southwest and the West Indies style slave society transplanted from Barbados to the new colonies in the Carolina subtropics and a number of other cultures. And they don't have a lot in common. They didn't in the colonial period. They were rivals and even enemies. And the lasting effect of that is with us today also because they each settled mutually exclusive strips of the country out through the 1830s where they laid down their values. And once you know, that geography of the rival settlement streams at a county level, they don't respect state or even international boundaries, you'll start seeing that spatial pattern over and over again in data mapped today.
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B
I mean, when folks think about this, there are aspects of it that make sense. But then you also come up with questions of, you know, the United States has experienced waves of immigration from all over the world, a lot of migration within the United States, massive technological and social change. And on top of that, Europe has experienced similar things. And to the extent that you might say the Scots Irish are fiercely independent and anti government, or that parts of the English population might be more or less inclined towards communitarianism, it seems like at least in Europe, those cultures have changed. The Overton Window, in which the debate between communitarianism and individualism happens in Europe, is much smaller than the Overton Window here in the United States. Yeah, they've just settled on more communitarianism than we have in the United States. So compared with the cultures where all of this difference comes from and all of the change that we've experienced in the, you know, 400 years since, how, why might these cultures endure?
- [07:58]
A
Yeah, those are, I mean, excellent questions everyone should have, they fall into. You've introduced two different tracks. I'll tackle them sort of separately. One is the. We've had mass immigration, mass migration, mass retailing, mass media. Surely that means that the, you know, differences between these colonial cultures you describe Must be disappearing, that we're all becoming more purple, so to speak. But the data, however you look at it, is showing the opposite picture. The differences between these regions falling on these settlement patterns is increasing over time, not decreasing. Okay, so how could that possibly be? Well, in terms of migration, a lot of social scientists have looked at people within the United States who move around. The basic lesson has been that in political terms, they tend to resemble their destination point, not their point of origin. In other words, in aggregate, people who feel frustrated in the place where they grew up, people have all these unexamined assumptions. If only they believed A and B instead of X and Y. And if my company let me move, I would try to move somewhere where people believe X and Y instead. And in aggregate, people are doing that. So that's a countervailing force. The big sort, you might call it. But in terms of immigration, we did a bunch of work on that ourselves. And what we discovered was, for instance, the big dramatic shifts in American identity and self conception and belonging were associated with that 1884-1924 immigration wave. The enormous immigration wave that wasn't predominantly Protestant as before, where you had large numbers of Catholics and orthodox Christians and Jews moving into the country. And it caused all kinds of panic in legacy Protestant America, oh my gosh, you know, the papists will take their orders from the Vatican. They can't be good Republicans. The Greeks are too different. You know, there was all kinds of turbulence. The second Ku Klux Klan rose up. It was a big thing. But in the end, legacy Protestant America had to accept that Orthodox Christians, Jews and Catholics at least would be allowed to be full fledged Americans too. However, if you track where did that immigration wave go and not go, it's extremely stark. We took the census data because census takers asked, hey, are you foreign born or not? So we have individualized data. And in the southern regions, which I call Greater Appalachia, the Tidewater, which is sort of in the Chesapeake zone, and the deep south, or I guess the cotton south people might have called it, Those regions in 1900 were 1% foreign born in Greater Appalachia, 3%. Whereas all the other regions of the country, a Dutch, originally Dutch settled area that's around what's now New York City, that's highly commercialized. The greater New England space I call Yankeedom that extends into the upper Great Lakes states, the Pacific coastal plain between Monterey, California and Juneau, Alaska on the Pacific side of the mountain, sort of chile shaped the Spanish, originally Spanish colonized Southwest. All of those regions you know, were 20, 25, 30% foreign born, 25 or 30 times that. So the experience that Protestant America, accepting that the people from a wider range of backgrounds and religions could also be full fledged Americans, didn't happen in those three regions, increasing the differences in assumptions about American identity and who could belong by the 1920s between these, between these regional cultures, rather than making them more similar. And in 1924, immigration is cut off, right, with ethno racial quotas to protect the, in quotes, Anglo Saxon character of the United States and isn't reopened until after the 1965 Immigration Act. So this has enormous consequences that continued on into the 1990s.
- [11:41]
B
One of the principal differences that you describe between these different cultures is how individualistic versus communitarian they are. And that gets mapped onto all different kinds of political debates that we have in America or have had in America for centuries, frankly. And so I want to go back to my other question about why the Overton Window in which Europe has these debates seems so much smaller, given that we have adopted all of these different European cultures, whether it's New France or New Spain or the English Protestants or the Scots Irish. How come Europe has settled on a more communitarian vision of society while we're still very much having an active debate about where the happy medium should fall?
- [12:26]
A
It's hard to map back to Europe always, because in many cases, these idiosyncratic colonial cultures that.
- [12:34]
B
All right, that's the end of today's preview. Head over to GDPolitics.com to become a paid subscriber and listen to the full episode. I spoke with Colin about the ways in which the original cultural differences he describes inform our current politics and different periods in which maybe one culture won out or they competed heavily. He also talks about the kinds of narratives based on the polling research he's done that work ultimately to unite the country across those differences. Like I said, head over to GDPolitics.com to become a paid subscriber and catch the whole thing. Paid subscribers get out twice the number of episodes, can join in the paid subscriber chat, and most importantly, keep this podcast going when you become a subscriber. You can connect your account to wherever you listen to podcasts, so you'll never miss an episode. There's a link in the show notes explaining how to do that. Again, head over to gdpolitics. Com. See you there.