I have recommended this book (and the follow-up, "American Character") to so many people that Colin Woodard should give me a cut of his royalties. I'm a big fan of the "how we got here" kind of books as regards the U.S. political situation, and though none of the books I've read explains everything, this contains an important element that most others don't-the invisible but very real differences in basic cultural worldview in different regions of the U.S. that often form the scaffolding that our political differences are built upon. If I had to boil it down to only two of the eleven, I would say that the struggle between "Yankee" culture and "Borderlander" (or "Scotch-Irish*") culture is the most salient (though because both of my grandfathers were of Puritan Yankee extraction and both of my grandmothers were of Border Scots extraction, perhaps I have too much of a tendency to project my own internal conflicts onto current events-but I don't think so).
People are often incredulous when I try to explain that the Puritans weren't just a bunch of prudes-they were actually the progenitors of the progressive movement, and their concept that we needed to "reform the world in preparation for Christ's return" persists today in the liberal "mainline" versions of Protestantism. Seattle, where I live and where all my grandparents settled in the 1890s, was founded largely by settlers from Yankeedom, many following a route from the area of the Plymouth Colony, westward into New York, and around the Great Lakes, and eventually landing in Seattle, where our original motto was "New York, Alki" ("Alki" being the Chinook trading jargon word meaning, "someday"). As a result of this, we have always been a "Progressive" city, adopting both women's suffrage and Prohibition before the rest of the country, as well as having a pretty remarkable "general strike" in 1919. But Progressivism is not without its problems, as Seattle residents sometimes find when they mistake "liberalism" for "libertarianism". I always tell people, "The GREAT thing about liberals is that we want what's best for you. The BAD thing about liberals is that think we KNOW what's best for you". An example of this is our tax on sugary drinks. Because poorer people tend to drink too many of them, often resulting in diabetes and such, we discourage consumption with a substantial tax- never mind that this might be the only source of joy for a lower income worker. Though I greatly prefer it to the alternative, our city's reputation as a "nanny state" is well-deserved.
Though David Hackett Fischer's "Albion's Seed" is better known, a book that goes into far more detail and nuance than either Fischer's or Woodard's is Kevin Phillip's "The Cousin's Wars". Though Phillips WAS involved in Nixon's "Southern Strategy", to his credit, he did recant. Phillips begins with the "English Civil Wars" (aka "The Wars of the Three Kingdoms"), though he doesn't go into the religious differences too deeply-and they are necessary to REALLY understand what was at stake. I'm more inclined to believe that a culture chooses a religion that fits it more than being formed by a given religion, but whatever the mix of synergy, the seeds of the conflicts between communitarianism and libertarianism, and centralized, "top down" authority and patriarchal, "family up" authority were sown before the first settlers from Britain got here.
*Without going off on too much of a tangent, I think that the whole concept of "Sola Scriptura", which was embraced so thoroughly by Presbyterians, Baptists, and other "dissenters", and the idea that one's "compact" was directly with God (rather than with God as mediated through Church and Monarch) was, for good or ill, an important contributor (or collaborator) with the "independent spirit" associated with Borderlanders and their descendants-the frontiersmen, cowboys, and "rogue cops" that have become our American "icons". It definitely worked better when we lived in an age when we could move on when we could hear our neighbor's axe.
I have recommended this book (and the follow-up, "American Character") to so many people that Colin Woodard should give me a cut of his royalties. I'm a big fan of the "how we got here" kind of books as regards the U.S. political situation, and though none of the books I've read explains everything, this contains an important element that most others don't-the invisible but very real differences in basic cultural worldview in different regions of the U.S. that often form the scaffolding that our political differences are built upon. If I had to boil it down to only two of the eleven, I would say that the struggle between "Yankee" culture and "Borderlander" (or "Scotch-Irish*") culture is the most salient (though because both of my grandfathers were of Puritan Yankee extraction and both of my grandmothers were of Border Scots extraction, perhaps I have too much of a tendency to project my own internal conflicts onto current events-but I don't think so).
People are often incredulous when I try to explain that the Puritans weren't just a bunch of prudes-they were actually the progenitors of the progressive movement, and their concept that we needed to "reform the world in preparation for Christ's return" persists today in the liberal "mainline" versions of Protestantism. Seattle, where I live and where all my grandparents settled in the 1890s, was founded largely by settlers from Yankeedom, many following a route from the area of the Plymouth Colony, westward into New York, and around the Great Lakes, and eventually landing in Seattle, where our original motto was "New York, Alki" ("Alki" being the Chinook trading jargon word meaning, "someday"). As a result of this, we have always been a "Progressive" city, adopting both women's suffrage and Prohibition before the rest of the country, as well as having a pretty remarkable "general strike" in 1919. But Progressivism is not without its problems, as Seattle residents sometimes find when they mistake "liberalism" for "libertarianism". I always tell people, "The GREAT thing about liberals is that we want what's best for you. The BAD thing about liberals is that think we KNOW what's best for you". An example of this is our tax on sugary drinks. Because poorer people tend to drink too many of them, often resulting in diabetes and such, we discourage consumption with a substantial tax- never mind that this might be the only source of joy for a lower income worker. Though I greatly prefer it to the alternative, our city's reputation as a "nanny state" is well-deserved.
Though David Hackett Fischer's "Albion's Seed" is better known, a book that goes into far more detail and nuance than either Fischer's or Woodard's is Kevin Phillip's "The Cousin's Wars". Though Phillips WAS involved in Nixon's "Southern Strategy", to his credit, he did recant. Phillips begins with the "English Civil Wars" (aka "The Wars of the Three Kingdoms"), though he doesn't go into the religious differences too deeply-and they are necessary to REALLY understand what was at stake. I'm more inclined to believe that a culture chooses a religion that fits it more than being formed by a given religion, but whatever the mix of synergy, the seeds of the conflicts between communitarianism and libertarianism, and centralized, "top down" authority and patriarchal, "family up" authority were sown before the first settlers from Britain got here.
*Without going off on too much of a tangent, I think that the whole concept of "Sola Scriptura", which was embraced so thoroughly by Presbyterians, Baptists, and other "dissenters", and the idea that one's "compact" was directly with God (rather than with God as mediated through Church and Monarch) was, for good or ill, an important contributor (or collaborator) with the "independent spirit" associated with Borderlanders and their descendants-the frontiersmen, cowboys, and "rogue cops" that have become our American "icons". It definitely worked better when we lived in an age when we could move on when we could hear our neighbor's axe.