CHAPTER 3

The Rival Americas

If both individualism and collectivism, taken to extremes, lead to tyranny, how do we build and maintain a free and good society? The answer, of course, is to achieve balance between these two forces. There is a happy equilibrium point out there for any society, where government is accountable to its people and respectful of individual rights and yet strong enough to maintain the free markets and structural equality that nourish liberal democracy.

Every liberal society has a different “sweet spot.” Japan and South Korea emphasize the common good far more than the United Kingdom or Canada, where individualism is broadly celebrated. The United States as a whole is one of the more individualistic places on earth, with a pantheon of rugged individualists—Davy Crockett, Horatio Alger’s characters, John Wayne—at the heart of its national mythos and a welfare system much weaker than that of any of its peer nations. But the American effort to achieve consensus on the appropriate balance between individual and collective freedom is hampered by the simple fact that America is not a unitary society with a single set of broadly accepted cultural norms, like Japan, Sweden, or Hungary. It’s a contentious federation comprising eleven competing regional cultures, most of them centuries old, each with a different take on the balance between individual liberty and the common good. This makes understanding the debates in our country—past as well as present—unusually difficult, especially as few are aware of the true contours of our fractious regional cultures and the conditions in which the dominant ethos of each was forged.

We’re accustomed to thinking of American regionalism along relatively straightforward Mason-Dixon lines: North against South, Yankee blue against Dixie gray or, these days, red. The reality is more complicated than that, and not just because this paradigm excludes the western half of the country. In the East alone there are massive, obvious, and long-standing cultural fissures within states like Maryland, Pennsylvania, Delaware, New York, and Ohio. Nor are cultural fault lines reflected in the boundaries of more westerly states. Northern and downstate Illinois might as well be different planets. The coastal regions of Oregon and Washington have more in common with each other and with the coasts of British Columbia and Northern California than they do with the interiors of their own states. Austin may be the state capital, but Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio are the hubs of the Three Texases, while citizens of the Two Missouris can’t even agree on how to pronounce their state’s name. The conventional, state-based regions that are the basis for much of our political and social discussion—North, South, Midwest, Southwest, West—are inadequate, unhelpful, and ahistorical.

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 a previous book, American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America. It demonstrated 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, but rather a federation of nations, more akin to the European Union than the Republic of France, and this confounds collective efforts to find common ground and campaigns to force one component nation’s values on the others. Once you become familiar with the real map (see pages 60–61), you’ll see its shadow everywhere: in linguists’ dialect maps, cultural anthropologists’ maps of the spread of material culture, cultural geographers’ 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 Civil War.1

Our regional divides stem from the fact that the original clusters of North American colonies were settled by people from distinct regions of the British Isles—and from France, the Netherlands, and Spain—each with their own religious, political, and ethnographic characteristics. For generations, these discrete Euro-American cultures developed in remarkable isolation from one another, consolidating their own cherished principles and fundamental values, and expanding across the eastern half of the continent in nearly exclusive settlement bands. Some championed individualism, others utopian social reform. Some believed themselves guided by divine purpose; others espoused freedom of conscience and inquiry. Some embraced an Anglo-Protestant identity, others ethnic and religious pluralism. Some valued equality and democratic participation, others deference to a traditional aristocratic order modeled on the slave states of classical antiquity. Throughout the colonial period and the early Republic, they saw themselves as competitors—for land, settlers, and capital—and even as enemies, taking opposing sides in the English Civil War, the American Revolution, and the War of 1812. Nearly all of these regional cultures would consider leaving the Union in the eighty-year period after Yorktown, and two went to war to do so in the 1860s. There’s never been an America, but rather several Americas, and today there are eleven.

Founded on the shores of Massachusetts Bay by radical Calvinists as a new Zion, since the outset the nation I call Yankeedom has put great emphasis on perfecting earthly society through social engineering, individual self-denial for the common good, and the aggressive assimilation of outsiders. It has prized education, intellectual achievement, community (rather than individual) empowerment, and broad citizen participation in politics and government, the latter viewed as the public’s shield against the machinations of grasping aristocrats, corporations, and would-be tyrants. From its New England core, it has spread with its settlers across upper New York State; the northern strips of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, and Iowa; parts of the eastern Dakotas; northward into the upper Great Lakes states; and eastward across much of the Canadian Maritimes.

The early Puritans believed they had a covenant with God, that they were a chosen people tasked with creating a more perfect society here on earth, a “city upon the hill,” a beacon for humanity to follow in troubled times. From the beginning, they attempted to accomplish this through collective institutions, with the common good invariably taking precedence over individual freedom when the two came into conflict. The point of the New England experiment was to maintain the freedom of the community, which to the region’s founders meant remaining ever vigilant against the formation of an aristocracy, which in turn demanded restraint on the avarice of individuals.

Early Yankees tended to settle areas not as individuals, but as family units traveling with groups of friends and neighbors, sometimes as a “village on the move,” often led by their Puritan, Congregational, or Presbyterian preacher. On arriving at the frontier—eastern Massachusetts in the early seventeenth century, western New York a half century later, the Western Reserve of Ohio in the late eighteenth century, or Michigan in the early nineteenth—they divided the land nearly equally among themselves, levied taxes, and promptly constructed a public school, meetinghouse, and common pasture. Each town was from the outset a tiny republic onto itself, wherein elected committees decided everything from where the public roads, churches, town greens, and schoolhouses would be located to how to levy, collect, and spend taxes, and to raise and organize the militia. The local church congregation was also completely self-governing, with no external hierarchy to which to report. Whereas in other regions, counties held considerable power and towns had little, if any, in New England and much of Yankeedom counties had few powers at all so as to confound the emergence of unaccountable political forces. To this day, many small towns in New England maintain a town meeting form of government, where the people themselves assemble as legislators and vote on all substantive decisions directly. Government, to the Yankee mind, was conceived not as the enemy but rather as an embodiment of its citizenry.2

Indeed, Yankees would come to have a faith in government and public institutions to a degree that was unimaginable to the people of other regions. Government, New Englanders believed from the outset, could defend the public good from the selfish machinations of moneyed interests. It could enforce community standards through the prohibition or regulation of undesirable activities, from adultery and swearing in the sixteenth century to slavery and drinking in the nineteenth. It could create a better society through public spending on infrastructure and schools. Even the pursuit of profit—a subject with which the Yankee elite was obsessed—was conceived as being not a private endeavor but a civic responsibility, part of the continuing duty of building the New Zion promised by Puritan founder John Winthrop in the sermon he gave upon stepping off the boat in 1630. “Wee must be knitt together in this work as one man,” Winthrop preached. “Wee must be willing to abridge our selves of our superfluities, for the supply of others necessities . . . uphold a familiar Commerce together . . . delight in eache other, make other’s conditions our owne, rejoyce together, mourne together, labour and suffer together, allwayes haveing before our eyes our Commission and Community in the worke, our Community as members of the same body.”3

Here was a society that prized the common good, distrusted the selfish motivations of individuals, and aspired to lead America and the world to the light.

Established by the Dutch at a time when the Netherlands was the most sophisticated society in the Western world, the regional culture I call New Netherland has displayed its salient characteristics throughout its history: a global commercial trading culture—multiethnic, multireligious, and materialistic—with a profound tolerance for diversity and an unflinching commitment to the freedom of inquiry and conscience. Today it comprises Greater New York City, including northern New Jersey, western Long Island, and the lower Hudson Valley. Like seventeenth-century Amsterdam, it emerged as a leading global center of publishing, trade, and finance, a magnet for immigrants, and a refuge for those persecuted by other regional cultures, from Sephardim in the seventeenth century to gays, feminists, and bohemians in the early twentieth. Not particularly democratic or concerned with great moral questions—it tolerated slavery and defended the Deep South until the 1861 attack on federal troops at Fort Sumter—it nonetheless has found itself in alliance with Yankeedom in defense of a shared commitment to public-sector institutions and a rejection of evangelical prescriptions for individual behavior.

The early New Netherlanders, to a remarkable degree, struck a balance between individualistic aspirations and the common good. A colony founded, owned, and ruled by a corporation, the Dutch West Indies Company, it was organized to earn profits for its shareholders. When some of its early directors tried to rule as authoritarian bosses, treating its polyglot inhabitants as employees, the citizenry would have none of it. The “establishment of an arbitrary government among us,” they wrote in a 1653 protest, “crushed our spirits and disheartened us in our labors and our callings so that we, being in a wilderness, are unable to promote the good of the country with the same zeal and inclination as before.” Dutch authorities, they insisted, had the duty “to promote the welfare of their subjects,” and therefore had to uphold the civil liberties of “every freeborn man” against the company’s governor. They won the day.4

Unlike the English Puritans in New England, the New Netherlanders didn’t expect much self-government—there were no representative assemblies and, for much of the Dutch period, no municipal government—but they did expect what did exist to provide for the common good. Their successful protests against the authoritarian rule of the West Indies Company argued that without change “this country will never flourish.” As soon as they won the right to establish a municipal government in 1653, they undertook a series of public works projects—the creation of a wall against the English (where Wall Street now lies), the paving of the streets with cobblestones, the building of a proper canal through the middle of the settlement, and a wharf for the oceangoing ships upon which the colony’s prosperity depended. A series of laws were passed that coerced individuals on behalf of the common good: Thatch roofs had to be converted to tiles (to prevent major fires in the densely packed town), and streetfront chicken coops and pigsties had to be removed (for aesthetic and health reasons). As New York grew in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, public works and ordinances became all the more essential to maintaining safety and prosperity in an increasingly crowded city.5

More important, New Netherlanders constrained their government with strong and explicit protections of individual liberties, which they believed to be their birthright. The 1653 protestors asserted their rights as “freeborn” men to assemble and to protest against the company boss’s violations of property rights. When England conquered New Netherland—first in 1664 and permanently in 1674—its people managed to negotiate guarantees for a long list of individual liberties: protections against the arbitrary seizure of property and the quartering of troops in homes, guarantees of trial by jury, and the freedom of religion. In the aftermath of the American Revolution, residents of the New Netherland section of New York spearheaded the passage of a state law granting additional rights, including free elections, freedom of speech for legislators, and the guarantee that any new taxes could be imposed only by the people’s legislative representatives. Not surprisingly, it was New York that insisted on the inclusion of a Bill of Rights to the proposed U.S. Constitution. A multireligious society with a tradition of free presses and a historical experience of foreign occupation and authoritarian-minded corporate governors, New Netherlanders were—and remain—attuned to the importance of protecting civil liberties in maintaining a free society.6

Finally, New Netherland was, perhaps more than any other colonial culture, a socioeconomically mobile society. The elite families who became dominant in the late seventeenth century hadn’t inherited their privileges from forebearers, but had been founded by what was then a particularly Dutch type of personality: the self-made man. The founder of the Van Cortlandt dynasty arrived as a soldier, took up carpentry, and eventually became the city’s mayor. Frederick Philipse was a butcher turned pawnbroker who died the wealthiest man in the city, with a slave plantation in Barbados and a manor home in Yonkers. The first Vanderbilt was an indentured servant and the first Van Burens were tenant farmers, yet those individuals begat the wealthiest family in history and the first self-made man to be elected president, respectively.7

As members of a highly mobile, outwardly oriented trading society, New Netherlanders have long recognized the need to have both an involved government tasked with looking out for the common good and clear protections for the freedom of the individuals living under it. “Shut your eyes, at least not force people’s consciences, but allow everyone to have his own belief, as long as he behaves quietly and legally, gives no offense to his neighbors and does not oppose the government,” Governor Peter Stuyvesant was directed in 1663 by his superiors in Holland. “Your province . . . would be benefited by it.”8

The Midlands, America’s great swing region, was founded by English Quakers, who believed in humans’ inherent goodness and welcomed people of many nations and creeds to their utopian colonies on the shores of Delaware Bay. Pluralistic and organized around the middle class, the Midlands spawned the culture of Middle America and the heartland, where ethnic and ideological purity have never been a priority, government has been seen as an unwelcome intrusion, and political opinion has been moderate, even apathetic. An ethnic mosaic from the start—it had a German rather than British majority at the time of the Revolution—it shares the Yankee belief that society should be organized to benefit ordinary people, but rejects top-down government intervention. From its cultural hearth in southeastern Pennsylvania, southern New Jersey, and northern Delaware and Maryland, Midland culture spread through central Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois; northern Missouri; most of Iowa; southern Ontario; and the eastern halves of South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas, sharing the border cities of Chicago (with Yankeedom) and Greater St. Louis (with Greater Appalachia).

Like Yankeedom, the Midlands got its start as a utopian project, but one with an entirely different character. With their optimistic take on human nature, William Penn and the early Quaker founders saw little need to coerce individuals to act for the greater good. Indeed, the Quakers themselves were opposed to authority and hierarchy, refusing to address gentlemen and nobles with their honorific titles or to doff their hats to them. As pacifists, they would eventually lose control of the colony’s government for their refusal to undertake the most basic of government functions: the defense of the colony from destruction (in their case, from an Indian attack that threatened Philadelphia itself). Whereas early Yankee towns were nucleated to buttress community unity, cohesion, and discipline, Penn allowed colonists to settle in separate tracts, resulting in a dispersed pattern of farms. Settlers from a particular religious sect or part of the world—Welsh or Mennonites, or German Palatines—were allowed to form their own communities to actively practice and preserve their separate identities. In his original constitution for Pennsylvania, Penn vested most power in a large annual legislative assembly, and very little in the governor, reflecting the egalitarian structure of the Quakers’ meetings. Order was expected to occur naturally as the result of each person observing the golden rule: to do unto others as you would have done to yourself. Government was relatively weak, and taxation rates among the lowest in colonial America.9

The underlying ethos of the Midlander colonies was egalitarian. Family farms—individual and independent—were the primary driver of their rapidly growing economy and the home to most of their population. There were very few large-scale farms. In the 1760s, a time when most plantations in the South Carolina lowlands measured between five hundred and one thousand acres, the average farm size was just 125 acres in southeastern Pennsylvania and in New Jersey, the southern half of which was settled by Midlanders. Inheritance laws encouraged equal partition of estates, discouraging the formation of a Midlander aristocracy.10

Here was a community-minded society distrustful of strong government, a nation where people assumed the best in people and therefore could do without one. If the Midlander ethos were to be stated in a single sentence, it would be, “Government, let our communities alone to get on with building a better place.”

Built by the younger sons of southern English gentry, 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 society that took hold in the Chesapeake country in the aftermath of the English Civil War is best described as hierarchically libertarian, a liberal autocracy not unlike that which was taking shape back in England as the divine right of kings was discredited. Landed gentlemen, many aspiring to nobility, had a near-monopoly control over property, power, religious institutions, and the law. They were the masters of their estates, the “heads” with the intellect and wisdom to control the “hands” of their lessers: wives and children, laborers and servants, paupers and slaves. They enjoyed “liberties”—that is, privileges—that others did not, including the avoidance of taxes and corporal punishment, and the ability to stand for public office. These came, however, with the responsibility to guide society, to provide for one’s inferiors, and, later, to uphold liberal republican principles.11

In England and much of colonial America, it was believed that in a republic, the common good could be entrusted only to extremely wealthy people, on the assumption that since they wanted for nothing, they were naturally possessed of “civic virtue,” the ability to act selflessly for the common good. (That landed aristocrats might also make decisions based on their self-interest never seems to have occurred to anyone.) Indeed, being a gentleman meant, by definition, having a steady source of income—preferably in the form of the reliable revenues of a landed estate—that allowed one to live without working. Ungenteel people—even those rich individuals who had to attend to their businesses to keep their income flowing—were believed incapable of rising above their self-interest and so were denied the privilege of standing for office. Thus Virginia and Maryland set stiff property prerequisites for anyone seeking to take part in the election of legislators: a hundred acres of undeveloped land or twenty-five acres, a home, and a working farm in Virginia’s case. Another of the hallmarks of a gentleman was a liberal education, which was seen as a requirement for being able to understand the public policy issues of the day.12

The role of the wider public was to elect leaders who embodied these virtues. “I go on this great republican principle, that the people will have virtue and intelligence to select men of virtue and wisdom,” James Madison would write. “If there be sufficient virtue and intelligence in the community, it will be exercised in the selection of these men; so that we do not depend on their virtue, or put confidence in our rulers, but in the people who are to choose them.” Madison and other Tidewater revolutionaries had faith in the common person’s ability to vote wisely, and also to have the good sense not to try to stand for office himself. When this faith was shaken in the decades following the Revolution, many of them despaired that much of what they fought for had been lost.13

This conception of “republican virtue” helps explain how the enlightened Tidewater gentlemen who played such a decisive role in the American Revolution—George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison—could at the same time be slaveholders. Slaves had helped them achieve their “virtue” so that they could guide society to everyone’s supposed benefit. The “indispensable working class existed as property beyond the realm of politics,” the Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates observed in a celebrated 2014 essay, a situation that left slaveholders “free to trumpet their love of freedom and democratic values.” This conceptual framework also explains why Washington made such displays of disinterest in being elected or reelected president, much less being crowned king. He made himself a living embodiment of classical virtue, resigning his generalship at the end of the Revolution and stepping down at the end of his presidency, both times to return to his manorial duties at Mount Vernon. The key point of all of these gestures was that the objective of government was the pursuit of the public good, not private interest. Theirs was an aristocratic collectivism, a seventeenth-century version of Downton Abbey, where the good of the community was foremost but the elite’s right to lead was supposed to go unquestioned.14

Founded in the early eighteenth century by wave upon wave of rough, bellicose settlers from the war-ravaged borderlands of Northern Ireland, northern England, and the Scottish lowlands, Greater Appalachia has often been lampooned as the home of rednecks and hillbillies. In reality, it is a transplanted culture formed in a state of near-constant warfare and upheaval, characterized by a warrior ethic and a deep commitment to personal sovereignty and individual liberty. From south-central Pennsylvania, it spread down the Appalachian Mountains and out into the southern tiers of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, the Arkansas and Missouri Ozarks, the eastern two-thirds of Oklahoma, and on down to the Hill Country of Texas, clashing with Indians, Yankees, and Mexicans along the way. Intensely suspicious of lowland aristocrats and Yankee social engineers alike, Greater Appalachia has shifted alliances based on whoever appeared to be the greatest threat to its freedom; since Reconstruction and, especially, the upheavals of the 1960s, it has been in alliance with the Deep South in an effort to undo the federal government’s ability to overrule local preferences.

Generations of Americans have been raised with the myth that our country was founded by highly individualistic frontiersmen, men in coonskin caps and, later, cowboy hats who survived and prospered based on their bravery, hard work, and self-sufficiency. Living in log cabins, defending their families from Indians with their own weapons and courage, they neither sought nor relied on government assistance or the comforts of cities. While this account is entirely untrue for much of what is now the United States, it is an accurate description of the Greater Appalachian frontier, which was dangerous, far removed from the centers of government, and populated by people who treasured their individual liberty and were suspicious of ordering institutions of any kind.

The Scots-Irish and other borderland settlers embraced an extreme libertarian definition of freedom: the right to rule oneself with as little intrusion by law enforcement, courts, and other political institutions as possible. They practiced an “eye for an eye” form of justice in which a wronged party was expected to punish his transgressor himself. As a backcountry proverb brought from north Britain put it, “Every man should be a sheriff on his own hearth”; the corollary to this, as historian David Hackett Fischer has pointed out, was that government institutions, including the actual sheriffs, had relatively little to do. Vigilantes and lynch mobs—the latter named for one Charles Lynch, who dispensed frontier justice upon loyalists in Virginia’s Appalachian region in 1789—were socially accepted right into the middle of the twentieth century. Settlements were few and far between for much of the colonial period, the settlers preferring to live on isolated homesteads, and schools, courts, libraries, and other public institutions were correspondingly rare. Leaders—the local elite—relied on their reputations rather than social rank to attract a personal following, usually by having displayed bravery and decisiveness. The inhabitants of this region neither sought nor received much from their governments, and wished to keep it that way.15

Moreover, Greater Appalachians were willing to stand up for their rights, even against powerful opponents. Throughout the colonial era, much of the region was part of one or another colony controlled by the Tidewater or Deep Southern aristocracies. These oligarchs—hierarchical in their thinking, contemptuous of the baser people of the backcountry and highlands—refused to give their Appalachian regions proper representation in the legislatures and passed taxation policies that shifted the burden from wealthy planters to impoverished farmers and herdsmen. In North Carolina during the 1760s, Tidewater counties received ten times the per capita legislative representation as the state’s large and rapidly growing Appalachian sections; the backcountry settlers reacted by forming bands of “Regulators” who seized control of their region for three years, beating lawyers, sacking courthouses, and expelling tax collectors, until they were put down in a pitched battle with Tidewater militia. Similar resistance movements formed across the Appalachian frontier, and during the Revolution past grievances fueled a horrific civil war in both Carolinas and Georgia, with ample atrocities. Life on the frontier was, right up into the nineteenth century, strikingly reminiscent of that of the war-torn British borderlands from which the region’s settlers had come.16

The region’s religious heritage buttressed its individualism. When the “Second Great Awakening” spread across the American frontiers in the years after the American Revolution, millions of Americans embraced novel religious forms, inventing new Protestant sects and weakening the established churches—Anglican, Puritan Congregational, Presbyterian, or Quaker—that had been brought from Europe. But while Yankee frontiersmen created collectivist religions aiming to fashion more perfect earthly societies—Millerism, Mormonism, Seventh-day Adventism—Greater Appalachia’s people embraced individualistic creeds whereby each person might meet God personally, be spoken to by him or his son, and be guided without the mediation of institutions, a clerical hierarchy, or literary interpretation. In Greater Appalachia—and indeed among the nonelite of the Deep South—the emphasis has been not on improving this world, but on one’s personal salvation in the hereafter.

Unruly, populist, and highly libertarian, Greater Appalachia has historically been a cauldron for individualistic political efforts, be it the Regulator movement or the Tea Party one.

Established by slave lords from Barbados as a West Indies–style slave society, the Deep South 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. Even after its slave and caste systems were dismantled by outside intervention, it has continued to fight for rollbacks of federal power, taxes affecting capital and the wealthy, and environmental, labor, and consumer safety protections.

Described in detail in the previous chapter, the Deep South is a hierarchical libertarian nation. It differs from the Tidewater in that its oligarchy has never had a sense of obligation or responsibility to the rest of society, but rather believes that society exists for and should be structured to suit them. While it shares Appalachia’s emphasis on individualism, it is decidedly not egalitarian. If Appalachian people see the world as a battleground in which only the fittest will survive, the Deep Southern oligarchy believes those battles were fought centuries ago, and that their families won. To the victors—society’s fittest—therefore go the spoils.

The oldest of the Euro-American nations, El Norte dates back to the late sixteenth century, when the Spanish Empire founded Monterrey, Saltillo, and other outposts in what are now the Mexican-American borderlands. Today this resurgent culture spreads from the current frontier for a hundred miles or more in both directions, taking in South and West Texas, Southern California and the Imperial Valley, southern Arizona, most of New Mexico, parts of Colorado, and the six northernmost Mexican states. Most Americans are aware that the region is a place apart, where Hispanic language, culture, and societal norms dominate; few realize that among Mexicans, norteños have a reputation for being more independent, self-sufficient, adaptable, and work-centered than their central and southern countrymen. Long a hotbed of democratic reform and revolutionary sentiment, various parts of the region have tried to secede from Mexico to form independent buffer states between the two federations. Today it has come to resemble Germany during the Cold War: two peoples with a common culture separated from one another by a large wall.

Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Spain, unlike England and the Netherlands, was an unenlightened, unreconstructed despotism, a centralized monarchy wherein neither the mother country nor its staggering array of American colonies had any representative legislative bodies of any sort. Trade and manufacturing were highly regulated, with special licenses required to engage in most activities—if they were permitted at all—and prices fixed by central officials. Most of El Norte, the far-flung frontier of the empire’s already far-flung Mexican viceroyalty, was settled as if it were a lunar base: by militarized missions of farmers, ranchers, servants, and soldiers sent to establish remote installations. Most of the region was ruled by military officers or other outsiders appointed by the distant bureaucracy.17

Even when Mexico became independent in 1821, the parts of El Norte that are now in the United States all lacked full statehood and thus institutions of self-government. Under Mexico’s regressive 1836 constitution, state legislatures were eliminated, state governors were appointed in Mexico City, and only the wealthy were allowed to stand for office. In Alta California, a Mexican cavalry officer reported that “allowances should be made” because not a single person had “the capital indicated by law in order to become governor, senator, or deputy.” Courts remained physically out of reach to the region’s people, as serious cases could only be heard by making a journey of several weeks, and local judicial bodies were handicapped by a lack of literate lawyers or judges. “The government of California,” an American visitor reported in the 1840s, was “very lax and inefficient . . . and infinitely worse than none.” The region’s political heritage, right up to the U.S. annexations, was of centralized and completely ineffective government.18

More than any other part of Mexico, however, the North aspired to a more democratic future. Life on the arid frontier was less stratified than in central Mexico, and individuals had greater opportunities to engage in entrepreneurship, even if they had to do so through illicit trade with their Deep Southern neighbors over the U.S. border. Disgusted with the centralized authoritarianism of central Mexico, parts of the region attempted to secede to form the Republic of the Rio Grande and, later, the Republic of Texas, intended to be buffer states between the U.S. and Mexican federations. The parts of El Norte that remained in Mexico provided the resistance to turn-of-the-twentieth-century dictator Porfirio Díaz, and many radical exiles fled over the U.S. border to foment extreme leftist ideas of revolution among working-class Hispanics who were by then exploited by a racial caste system imposed by the new American state governments, many of which were dominated by immigrants from the Deep South and Appalachia.19

Since the 1960s, El Norte’s Spanish-speaking majority has reasserted itself, helping topple the region’s caste system and reclaiming its political rights. Its inherited legacy, as Chicano scholar Juan Gómez-Quiñones once put it, is of being “leery of government” while also maintaining “the fairly continuous expectation that government should provide for the general welfare, combined with the practical awareness that it provides for a select number.” In El Norte, where family and church ties are strong, and the collectivist impulses of the Catholic Church remain influential, government is seen as an agent of the common good, even if there is little expectation that it will be able to perform its role without prejudice in favor of the region’s elites. El Norte is theoretically a swing region, so long as its nonwhite, Spanish-speaking culture is accepted by the competing political actors.20

Two other regional cultures were established much later—in the mid- and late nineteenth century—and were founded not by European colonizers, but by people from the older, aforementioned regional cultures. Their histories are much shorter, and until the twentieth century, settler populations were sparse, resulting in a lighter cultural footprint. That footprint does, however, exist and exerts a powerful influence on the political ideals of half of what is now the United States.

The first of these areas to be settled was the Left Coast, a Chile-shaped nation wedged between the Pacific Ocean and the Cascade and Coast mountain ranges and stretching from Monterey to Juneau. This region was originally colonized by two distinct groups: merchants, missionaries, and woodsmen from New England (who arrived by sea and dominated the towns) and farmers, prospectors, and fur traders from Greater Appalachia (who generally arrived by wagon and controlled the countryside). Yankees expended considerable effort to make it “a New England on the Pacific” but were only partially successful: The Left Coast remains a hybrid of Yankee idealism, faith in good government, and social reform and the Appalachian commitment to individual self-expression and exploration. The staunchest ally of Yankeedom, it battles constantly against Far Western sections in the interior of its home states.21

The Left Coast culture defines the common good differently from Yankeedom, as the project of creating a nurturing support system for individual actualization, rather than one to create an ordered community that will keep individual avarice in check. It is, however, very much a communitarian culture, especially in regard to that ultimate common good, the environment. Prior to the first Earth Day in 1970, the entire American environmental movement was based in the more collectivist nations—Yankeedom, New Netherland, the Midlands, and, most of all, the Left Coast. The Sierra Club, the nation’s first grassroots group, was founded in San Francisco in 1892; Greenpeace, which spearheaded environmental activism in the 1960s and 1970s, was established in Vancouver, the Sea Shepherds in coastal Washington State, and the Friends of the Earth in the Bay Area. In 1975 the science-fiction writer Ernest Callenbach imagined this part of the world breaking off to form its own state called Ecotopia, where people lived in a steady-state equilibrium with their environment—an idea still nurtured by idealistic separatists today.22

The Far West, the other second-generation nation, is the one part of the continent where environmental and geographic factors trumped ethnographic ones. High, dry, and remote, the Far West stopped the expansions of the eastern nations in their tracks and, with minor exceptions, was colonized only via the deployment of vast industrial resources: railroads, heavy mining equipment, ore smelters, dams, and irrigation systems. As a result, settlement was largely directed and controlled by large corporations headquartered in distant New York, Boston, Chicago, or San Francisco, or by the federal government itself, which controlled much of the land. Because the region was exploited as an internal colony for the benefit of the seaboard nations, its 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. The Far West encompasses nearly all of the North American interior west of the 100th meridian, from the northern boundary of El Norte to the southern frontier of First Nation, including much of California, Washington, Oregon, British Columbia, Alaska, Colorado, and Canada’s Prairie provinces and all of Idaho, Montana, Utah, and Nevada.

The Far West’s much-celebrated libertarian streak—embodied in the image of the cowboy individualist, alone against nature and the corruption of distant urban interests—is tempered by the region’s dependence on enormous public works projects and government-supported industries. Massive irrigation, dam, and water transfer projects enabled cities and water-intensive farms to exist in an arid region. Federally subsidized railroads and, later, highways and airports linked it to distant markets. World War II and Cold War military spending—from the nuclear weapons labs of Los Alamos, New Mexico, and Hanford, Washington, to the nuclear missile silos of western Nebraska, and dozens of military bases in between—became vital to its economy.23

The Far West is also a region whose exploiters have been private as well as public. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Anaconda Copper literally ran Montana, buying off judges and public officials and dictating rules and regulations that enriched its owners and executives. Logging interests clear-cut the region’s federally owned forests for next to nothing, while oil and gas companies prospected on federally administered Indian reservations, often without the required royalties ever being paid out to the tribes.

Having thus been exploited, Far Westerners have been highly attuned to issues of economic fairness. As a result this individualistic frontier culture was also a hotbed of economic populism, labor unionism, and other “common good” concerns right up until World War II. It elected progressive senators like Burton Wheeler of Montana or Idaho’s William Borah and enthusiastically endorsed FDR and the New Deal. Today the region’s people are mobilized against another perceived tormenter, the federal government, led by politicians who promise to get the government out of the way of prosperity and self-reliance by reducing regulations and oversight.

It is, in short, a schizophrenic political culture shaped by colonial exploitation, one that values civil liberties and seeks a fair shake for individuals, but also a level playing field and an open public purse for spending that buttresses the economy. Egalitarian and individualistic—but not strenuously so—it is in many ways the analog of the Midlands, only with libertarian rather than communitarian leanings.

Two other nations—the Inuit-dominated First Nation in the far north and Quebec-centered New France—are located primarily in Canada and are peripheral to this discussion. Their U.S. enclaves in northern and western Alaska and southern Louisiana, respectively, have scant electoral power and little influence on the ongoing national struggle over individual and collective interpretations of freedom. Each is on the verge of establishing a nation-state of its own—Greenland for First Nation, Quebec for New France—and each would be strongly collectivist. Since reasserting their identity in the not-so-quiet Quiet Revolution of the 1960s, the Québécois have built a European-style welfare state, and leveraged Canada to do the same; the province has powerful unions and an economy dominated by huge state-owned companies like energy giant Hydro-Québec. Greenland’s Inuit people don’t even have private property: All land is collectively owned, and individuals lease the land upon which their homes or businesses are built. Once sufficient oil and mineral resources are discovered to pay for the country’s Danish-provided cradle-to-grave welfare state, Greenlanders intend to rule their own lands for the first time in more than three hundred years.24

The presence of these separate regional cultures—these rival “nations”—has greatly complicated Americans’ effort to come to any consensus on where the proper balance should lie between individual freedom and the public good. Most of the other free societies that emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries each comprised a single dominant culture—the Netherlands or Denmark, for instance—or just two or three, as in Belgium, Switzerland, or the United Kingdom. Reaching a common understanding of how to weigh individual and collective concerns was relatively easy in these less heterogeneous places, to say nothing of later entrants like Japan or South Korea, where social conformity and harmony are themselves cherished values. In America, the differences between our separate cultures on these issues are enormous, which is why we ended up with such a complicated federal constitutional arrangement to begin with.

The tensions that have arisen as a result of these clashing notions of freedom—from the radically egalitarian individualism of Greater Appalachia to the fundamentally communitarian outlook of Yankeedom or the hierarchical libertarianism of the Deep South—have brought our nation’s people to war with one another, and not just in the U.S. Civil War. When the English king and Parliament went to war over the future of republicanism in the 1640s, the Tidewater gentry and Yankee Puritans took opposing sides. When the American Revolution broke out, Midlanders and the Deep Southern oligarchs wanted nothing to do with it, while New Netherlanders rallied behind the empire for fear their individual rights would be trampled on by the unbridled Yankee communitarians who would likely control New York’s government if royal authority was overthrown. Yankees themselves would seek to leave the Union during the War of 1812, which came to symbolize their loss of control over federal affairs to the libertarian-minded Tidewater elite. Such tensions continue today, in the battle lines between the regions seen on electoral maps or the geographical plotting of the voting records of members of Congress.25

These regional differences divided the founding fathers and created fear and uncertainty in the early years of the Republic, in turn prompting the drafting of a constitution that sought to balance the freedoms of the government, the elite, and the people. Even the genius of men like Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton, however, could not contain these divisions for the next two centuries and beyond. Indeed, even a terrible war and an extended military occupation would prove unable to resolve them.