Even as I was explaining the clash of cultures in India, my attention was drawn to a new book that attempted to explain the present vitroilic standoffs in US public life. According to Colin Woodard, Americans have never agreed on anything, and that’s not about to change.
Americans’ fundamental differences go way back, Woodard explains; the original North American colonies were settled by people from completely distinct regions of Britain, France, Spain, the Netherlands. They were middle-class Calvinists with a missionary zeal to improve the world through education and good government; Scots and Irish rednecks who hated authority in any form; aristocratic slave lords with no use for democracy; English Quakers; Spanish missionaries; northern French peasants. They had no time for each other and they founded very different regional cultures – the “American nations” of Woodard’s title, which don't map exactly onto either the colonies or the early states – that are very much with us today and whose distinctive cultural DNA goes a long way toward explaining why we're still at each others' throats.
Yankeedom was founded on the shores of Massachusetts Bay by radical Calvinists seeking to remake earthly society in accord with God's plan, but over time it spread to Midwestern frontier and even, by ship, to the Pacific coast. Yankees have always had a faith in government to improve the world and a drive to improve the world, with the community perfecting itself through individual self-denial – which, when you think about it, is a very un-American idea! Yankeedom has been at the center of many of America’s great moral crusades, from the fight to abolish slavery to Prohibition to the environmental movement. The religious zeal has gone down for various reasons over the years, but not the secular puritan zeal behind it and the drive to somehow improve the world through public institutions.
The Deep South was founded a few generations after Yankeedom around Charleston and the lowlands of South Carolina by English slave lords from the island of Barbados. It was actually referred to as "Carolina in the West Indies," as if it was a Caribbean slave island that just happened to be on the mainland. It was a slave state backed by a racial caste system. The system was extremely authoritarian and marked by staggering differences in wealth and privilege and rights. Its founders considered the slave state to be virtuous; they abhorred democracy and saw themselves as aristocrats and society as being created to serve their interests. They thought that regular people's participation in politics should be limited or nonexistent.
The clash of cultures that we see today is the result of this basic DNA.
Most Yankees, New Netherlanders and Left Coasters simply won’t accept an evangelical Christian theocracy with weak or nonexistent social, labor or environmental protections, public school systems, and checks on corporate power in politics.
Most Deep Southerners will resist paying higher taxes to underwrite a public health-insurance system; a universal network of generously funded, unionized and avowedly secular public schools; tuition-free public universities; government-subsidized transportation, high-speed rail and renewable energy projects; or strict regulations on financial services, food safety, environmental pollution and campaign finance.
Hence the vitroil and lack of compromise.
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