My Amazon Review of Colin Woodard's "American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America"

 

Uneasy Alliances

 

I wish I read Colin Woodard’s book ten years ago when it came out. He hypothesizes that the United States instead of being one united nation, it is more akin to an uneasy alliance rival regional cultures. His eleven cultures formed early in the days of the republic ignore both state and national boundaries. The book is in the tradition of Kevin Phillip’s “The Emerging Republican Majority,” Joel Garreau’s “The Nine Nations of North America” and the more scholarly “Albions Seed” by David Hackett Fischer. I too used a similar approach in an article on the economic geography of the United States.

 

From the beginning the early settlements in the United States were divided on the Revolutionary War with Yankeedom leading the charge while New Netherland (New York City and environs) and the Deep South being more reluctant. He notes that the politics of today mirror those early divisions. Specifically, the Blue State alliance includes Yankeedom, New Netherland, the Left Coast and El Norte (Joel Garreau’s Mexamerica) while the Red State alliance includes the Deep South, the Far West, and Greater Appalachia. The swing states of Pennsylvania, Ohio and Iowa are in what Woodard calls the Midlands.

 

On a minor point I would differ with Woodard when he called SDS’s 1962 Port Huron Statement the “founding document” of the youth movement. Although there were many political aspects to the youth movement at its core it was all about sex, drugs and rock and roll. This is a far cry from the original Yankee (Puritan) and Midlander (Quaker) values. To be a bit snarky what the late Tom Hayden the author of the Port Huron Statement had in common with Puritan values were rigidity in beliefs.

 

My major point of difference is that Woodard is too locked into the view that the Deep South continues to be run by a neo-colonial oligarchy. That was true prior to World War II and it far less so today. The rising cities of Atlanta, Nashville, and Raleigh-Durham and the Appalachia city of Austin have more in common with Yankeedom and the Left Coast than the old agribusiness oligarchy. In fact, those cities vote Blue. Further just as Yankeedom has an innate fear of a southern theocracy, the Deep South and Appalachia fear Yankeedom’s religious-like faith in secularism. Further the hitherto reliable blue voters of El Norte are drifting away from Yankeedom as cultural values predominate over economic ones.

Close to the end of the book Woodard offers up the horrifying possibility that a pandemic might induce the suspension of civil rights, the dissolution of Congress and the incarceration of Supreme Court justices leading to a break-up of the United States. In 2011, when the book was published, that had the sound of complete fantasy; not so much today. Despite my quibbles this is a terrific book for those readers interested in the origins of our country and its politics.

For the complete Amazon URL see: Uneasy Alliances (amazon.com)