Book review: American Character: A History of the Epic Struggle Between Individual Liberty and the Common Good, by Colin Woodard
This is required reading for anyone who wants to understand US history, as well as current day cultural and political conflicts. In this book, Colin Woodard provides anthropological ground truth recognizable by most anyone who’s grown up in America, and who will discover it’s been hiding in plain sight. Calling these groupings “nations” might seem extreme to some, until the full history and background is laid out—at which point the behavior of politicians and other public figures becomes easier to explain.
Woodard identifies and describes the 11 nations within the US, a summary of which may be as follows:
1 Yankeedom, of Puritan communitarian culture
2 New Netherland, of Dutch commercial culture around New York City
3 The Midlands, a live and let live culture, and a thin region stretching from just outside New Netherland, through central Maryland and into the Midwest and expanding north and south just past the Mississippi River
4 Greater Appalachia, a vast area of coherent culture from southwestern Pennsylvania through central Texas and into New Mexico
5 Tidewater, initially a slave holding region stretching from Delaware through the eastern parts of Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina
6 Deep South, the area where settlers from Barbados brought their slave based economy to the Carolina region, which expanded through to Texas and north Florida
7 New France, the area either side of New Orleans whose culture originated from France
8 El Norte, the culture of northern Mexico, which spans the southern part of the US from Texas to California, with a narrower expansion to the north into southern Colorado
9 The Left Coast, a coastal region from southern California to Juneau, Alaska, which was initially influenced by Yankeedom culture
10 The Far West, a vast part of the open country between the Left Coast, El Norte, and The Midlands, which stretches to Fairbanks, Alaska
11 First Nation, in Woodard’s map this covers the Native American cultures in the arctic and subarctic regions of Alaska and Canada, and stretching to about the northern latitude of Maine east of The Far West region
Among all the detail that Woodard provides, the impact and experience of immigrants from other parts of the world (such as Asia and the Middle East), and Native Americans are addressed only tangentially if at all—and one people integral to the history and culture of the US, African Americans, are covered only in the context of the relationship some of the other 11 nations have with them. As African Americans and immigrants who’ve become Americans have interacted with the 11 nations identified by Woodard in several different ways, there is room for one or more additional books to be written to complete the current American story—here’s inviting Woodard or anyone else who is competent and qualified to take on that task.
As the nations described by Woodard seem to carry irreconcilable differences, the author offers a strategy for addressing these differences and saving the US from the threat of a descent into autocracy. The strategy involves appealing to the economic concerns of Greater Appalachia to erode the larger than life grip of authoritarian Dixie on the federal and state governments. Enhancing the live and let live culture of The Midlands is also a possibility. It is reasonable to imagine the communitarian supportiveness of Yankeedom combining with the individualism of Greater Appalachia and The Midlands to provide a prosperous society in which all are truly free. Waking the country from the trance of laissez-faire economics and shoring up the New Deal safety net is within the range of possibility. There are ways to counter the billionaire funded propaganda outlets that support populist demagogues. Current efforts to appeal to voters to change their support away from authoritarians are underway already—projects such as More in Common, Vote Common Good, and OpenSecrets (a research group tracking money in US politics) are examples of these efforts—it’s time to increase their traction, so that all nations in the US may prosper peacefully.