NATIONS APART

A study that explores our polarized politics as a reflection of polarized geographies.

The idea that the United States is a congeries of very different countries isn’t new. Woodard’s welcome twist on the thesis is that the country’s “awkward federation of distinct regional cultures” has led to very different ideas of political organization, an insight he and his research associates back with hard numbers and reams of data. The current turn toward authoritarianism, for instance, is rooted in the Deep South, founded and settled by aristocrats served by enslaved people and underlings, resulting today in “the least democratically minded of the regions, with a history of authoritarian, one‑party rule, and the suppression of dissent.” What Woodard calls New France, embracing southern Louisiana, “has become the most conservative and authoritarian of all the continent’s culture regions, transforming Louisiana from a swing state to a bastion of Trumpism and ethnonationalist sentiment.” Against this are the community-minded, liberal states of the Northeast and the Pacific coast, whose egalitarian traditions extend outward to Hawaii and America’s island empire. Those traditions have interesting sequelae: In terms of gun violence, Hawaii and Greater Polynesia are “the safest culture region of the country,” while the homicide rate of the Deep South is quadruple the rate of New York. Indeed, Woodard adds, “New Netherland is far and away the safest of the large regions, and often safer even than Hawaii, despite being the most densely populated part of our continent.” Oddly, while the Far West is thought of as being Trump country, it is “inhospitable turf for right-wing authoritarians,” as is much of the country. Still, Woodard warns, we need a refreshed civic story of American democracy, “vital not only because democracy really is better than fascism, but also because the consolidation of an ethnonationalist authoritarian regime would almost certainly trigger the physical collapse of this federation.”

A lucid exercise in political geography with tremendous—and disturbing—explanatory power.