Cross posted at
OneUtah.
If you begin by removing the state lines we're accustomed to seeing on US maps and replace them with cultural lines, rather than 50 states, you see blobby amoeba like lines of culture - Yankeedom, the Midlands, Greater Appalachia, El Norte, The Far West, The Deep South, New Frace, New Netherlands, Tidewater, and the Left Coast. Each of these regions has a characteristic social, economic and political culture. Colin Woodard's articleat Washington Monthly delves into the characteristics of the different regions and teases out some ideas about how differences will play out in politics over the next few years.
The Far West, vast swaths of open lands encompassing most of the intermountain states, inland California, eastern Oregon and Washington, is a colonial region:
. . . the one part of the continent where environmental factors trumped ethnographic ones. High, dry, and remote, the Far West stopped the eastern nations in their tracks and, with minor exceptions, was only colonized via the deployment of vast industrial resources: railroads, heavy mining equipment, ore smelters, dams, and irrigation systems . . . Exploited as an internal colony for the benefit of the seaboard nations, Far Western political leaders have focused public resentment on the federal government (on whose infrastructure spending they depend) while avoiding challenges to the region’s corporate masters, who retain near Gilded Age influence. It encompasses nearly all of the interior west of the 100th meridian, from the northern boundary of El Norte to the middle reaches of Canada, including much of California, Washington, Oregon, British Columbia, Alaska, Colorado and Canada’s Prairie Provinces, and all of Idaho, Montana, Utah, and Nevada.
Woodard's description of the Far West as an internal colony makes sense when you examine the workings of Utah's legislature - like the colonial governing bodies of old, they do their master's bidding, yet are reactionary conservatives as a means of containing discontent and dissent (there's more to be written here, no doubt!).
Woodard's piece pivots on the rise and fall of Teabagger influence in the Yankee regions of the US - where they won elections with narrow margins and have almost instantly run afoul of the culture within which they were working. In the Far West, the teabaggers have had relatively modest success partly because they have represented the politics and culture of the Deep South and Tidewater:
Tidewater was meant to reproduce the semifeudal manorial society of the countryside they’d left behind, where economic, political, and social affairs were run by and for landed aristocrats. These self-identified “Cavaliers” largely succeeded in their aims, turning the lowlands of Virginia, Maryland, southern Delaware, and northeastern North Carolina into a country gentleman’s paradise, with indentured servants and, later, slaves taking the role of the peasantry. Tidewater has always been fundamentally conservative, with a high value placed on respect for authority and tradition, and very little on equality or public participation in politics. The most powerful nation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, today it is a nation in decline, having been boxed out of westward expansion by its boisterous Appalachian neighbors and, more recently, eaten away by the expanding Midlands
[The Deep South] Established by English slave lords from Barbados as a West Indies-style slave society, this region has been a bastion of white supremacy, aristocratic privilege, and a version of classical Republicanism modeled on the slave states of the ancient world, where democracy was the privilege of the few and enslavement the natural lot of the many. It spread apartheid and authoritarianism across the southern lowlands, ultimately encompassing most of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, and Louisiana, plus western Tennessee and southeastern Arkansas, Texas, and North Carolina. Its slave and caste systems smashed by outside intervention, it continues to fight for rollbacks of federal power, taxes on capital and the wealthy, and environmental, labor, and consumer safety protections.
Woodard's model proposes that Yankeedom, the Left Coast, New Netherland and El Norte (generally) stand in opposition to Tidewater and the Deep South, with the Midlands, the Far West, and Greater Appalachia as swing regions (New France, centered on New Orleans is too small to wield much influence but is another swing region). Tidewater has deep shared cultural assumptions with the Deep South, but is declining.
Woodard's suggests that the teabaggers reached maximum influence in 2010:
The real, historically based regional map of our continent respects neither state nor international boundaries, but it has profoundly influenced our history since the days of Jamestown and Plymouth, and continues to dictate the terms of political debate today. I spent years exploring the founding, expansion, and influence of these regional entities— stateless nations, really—while writing my new book, American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America. It demonstrates that our country has never been united, either in purpose, principles, or political behavior. We’ve never been a nation-state in the European sense; we’re a federation of nations, more akin to the European Union than the Republic of France, and this confounds both collective efforts to find common ground and radical campaigns to force one component nation’s values on the others. Once you recognize the real map, you’ll see its shadow everywhere: in linguists’ dialect maps, cultural anthropologist’s maps of the spread of material culture, cultural geographer’s maps of religious regions, and the famous blue county/red county maps of nearly every hotly contested presidential election of the past two centuries. Understanding America’s true component “nations” is essential to comprehending the Tea Party movement, just as it clarifies the events of the American Revolution or the U.S. Civil War.
The essential conflicts in American culture aren't red state versus blue state but rather cultural regions with different beliefs and cultural values.
Nearly every internally divisive development in U.S. history in the past two centuries has pitted Yankeedom against the Deep South. Since neither of these regional “superpowers” has had a sufficient share of the population to dominate federal politics in this time period, they have sought to build and maintain alliances with other regional cultures. Some of these alliances have been remarkably durable, like those between Yankeedom and the Left Coast or between the Deep South and Tidewater, each of which has survived since before the Civil War. Others are younger and weaker, such as the axis between Greater Appalachia and the Deep South—cultures that took up arms against one another in both the American Revolution and the Civil War—or between the Deep South and the Far West, where resentment of corporate control may one day eclipse anger at the federal government.
Utah represents a unique and uneasy blend of the two. Mormons got their start in Yankeedom and Mormonism embodies many of its values; but they are also strongly drawn toward Deep South resentment of government.
The Tea Party movement is active across the country, but it has had only limited success in the three nations of the northern alliance. Of the sixty members of the House Tea Party caucus, only three hail from Yankeedom, and not one comes from the Left Coast or New Netherland. The three Yankees have had a tough go of it; in the seven races they have collectively won, only twice did one of them achieve a margin of victory of greater than 5 percent (Michele Bachmann in 2006 and 2010). One, Illinois freshman Joe Walsh, won his seat by just 291 votes and has since been gerrymandered into lame-duck status by local Democrats. Add to that the previously mentioned setbacks in Wisconsin, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine, and the movement’s prospects in Yankeedom appear bleak. From the Puritan migration of the 1630s to the debt ceiling debate, as noted above, Yankees have championed individual self-denial for the common good, investment in strong public institutions, and governmental projects to improve society; the Tea Party is unlikely to ever take deep root in such inhospitable soil.
By contrast, the Tea Party has encountered little resistance to its agenda in the four nations of the Dixie bloc, as it is a carbon copy of the Deep Southern program of the last two centuries: reduce taxes for the wealthy and services for everyone else, crush the labor unions, public education, and the regulatory system, and suppress voter turnout. The four nations account for fifty-one of the sixty members of the House Tea Party caucus—or 85 percent of them—with the Deep South alone accounting for twenty-two. Of the sixtysix House Republicans who refused to support the final compromise on the debt ceiling—roughly half of whom were not members of the Tea Party caucus—fifty-three hailed from the same cultural regions. Debt ceiling lunacy was a regional phenomenon. The Dixie-led bloc has produced many of the Tea Party’s most influential politicians, including Senators Jim DeMint (Deep South), Mike Lee (Far West), and Rand Paul (Appalachia), former Governor Sarah Palin (Far West), secessionist-minded Governor Rick Perry (Greater Appalachia), and FreedomWorks boss (and former house majority leader) Dick Armey (Deep South). Tea Party activists can be found most anywhere in the country, but only within this four-nation bloc have they had significant and sustained political success.
Woodard's argument echoes the argument put for by David Hackett Fischer in his book Albion's Seed. The deeply ingrained British folkways of the early settlers have been woven into the cultural fabric of the US and those who came later adapated to those folkways, adopting the values they met. The northern tier of the US has historically attracted immigrants, not the Deep South for a reason - the values of Yankeedom and the Midlands welcomed them, while the semi-feudal values of the Deep South created little room for immigrants. The teabaggers have been a vehicle for white resentment in huge chunks of the nation for long lasting cultural reasons. For the same reasons, though, the change is only temporary.
In short, the Tea Party and the Deep South may do the country serious harm, but they will not take it over. They may hobble the workings of Congress, inject flat-earth thinking into Senate debates, or even capture the presidency next year. But their policy program will never win the hearts and minds of a clear majority of Americans, and it carries the seeds of its own destruction. The political pendulum will indeed swing back. How far it goes—and how long it stays there—will depend on how many of America’s cultural regions the Deep South’s opponents can attract to their cause.