Source of book: Borrowed from the library
American Nations, like any book that attempts to reduce a complex issue to a system, stretches its point a bit beyond where I think it works. However, it does propose a system that does make sense of a lot of things about American politics.
The way I look at it - just like with ideas about stories - no one system explains everything, and no one paradigm will work at all times. That said, a good system or paradigm will be helpful in understanding things, and can be a part of a better knowledge of dynamics that can be easily missed.
The basic premise of Woodard’s book is that the United States was never a single nation, never a single culture, and never a single political idea. Instead, there were eleven rival cultures that date back to the European colonization of what is now the United States, and these rivals cludged together a union that occasionally works, but often doesn’t. Thus, understanding the regional cultures and political viewpoints does a lot to explain American politics, past and present.
This idea is actually quite solid as far as it goes, and anyone who knows people from different places - particularly white people from these regions - will immediately recognize certain types and ways of thinking that feel foreign. One case in point is that I have generally found white males from the deep south to be the most different from my own Southern California perspective. Either they have deconstructed pretty hard, or they are, to be blunt, racist as fuck and shockingly certain of the congenital inferiority of black people in particular.
But it is more than that: I can see huge gaps in how I think versus my parents (both born overseas, to parents from the Far West nation.)
I could spend a series of posts just on the characteristics of these different nations, but that would be too much for a book review. Better to just read the book.
The author calls them “nations” because to a large degree, each had its own existence and political structure before it became part of the United States. These aren’t just cultures, but ways of thinking about government and what a nation means.
Woodard identifies eleven total nations: Yankeedom, New Netherland, Tidewater, the Deep South, New France, Greater Appalachia, the Midlands, the Far West, El Norte, the First Nations, and the Left Coast.
In practice, there are really only ten, because the First Nations now only exist almost entirely in northern Canada. They mostly come into the book because other nations also cover Canada - Yankeedom, New France, and the Midlands. Canada’s politics therefore get a brief summary, as does the difference between northern Mexico (part of El Norte) and the southern part, which has no American counterpart.
There is a map in the book that shows were these nations exist now, along with an explanation as to the historical reaches of each. The borders have changed a bit along with migration and political alignment.
Another interesting point that the author makes, that I am not sure if I agree with or not (but it is plausible) is that largely immigrants to these nations assimilated into the cultures they joined, rather than influence them. Thus, an Italian who settled in New York City would adopt the New Netherland culture, while one who settled in San Francisco would adopt the Left Coast culture.
Along with this is the obvious issue that this perspective is very, very white. Which the author acknowledges. And also notes that because even today white voters hold the majority of political power, these white cultures matter more when it comes to understanding the intersection of these nations with politics.
I do want to be clear that the author is no right winger, and admits the white-centric viewpoint. I found the book in general to be realistic about the way race plays into all of this - including the regional differences in response to immigrants. (Why, for example, Minnesota has come out in force to protest ICE despite being a fairly white state.)
Again, the author’s perspective is fascinating, and is helpful as a way of thinking about our country.
The “country” of my own birth and formative years is El Norte. As with much of coastal California, it was influenced as much by Spain and later Mexico as by the other US cultures. While the author classifies my current location in Kern County as being part of the Far West (and that is plausible in some ways), I think it really could qualify as El Norte as well, with our high Hispanic population and history.
In the chapter about the origins of El Norte, I noted this particular passage, which is part of the suppressed history of the Americas.
History has tended to portray the native peoples of the Americas as mere extras or scenery in a Western drama dominated by actors of European and African descent. Because this book is primarily concerned with the ethnocultural nations that have come to dominate North America, it will reluctantly adopt that paradigm. But there are a few factors to bear in mind at the outset about the New World’s indigenous cultures. Before contact, many had a standard of living far higher than that of their European counterparts; they tended to be healthier, better fed, and more secure, with better sanitation, health care, and nutrition. Their civilizations were complex: most practiced agriculture, virtually all were plugged into a continent-spanning trade network, and some built sophisticated urban centers.
Related to this is another passage, on the nation of New France (which survives in the US as part of Louisiana, and in Canada as Quebec.) In this nation, native Americans were able to negotiate a more equal existence, and found common cause with the working-class immigrants, who were as likely to adopt Native ways of living. The wealthier French who had wished to establish a more feudal society lost out, and whined about the working class: “They seem offended by the fact that we wish to treat them like our peasants.”
New Netherland is essentially the greater New York City area - it was hemmed in by other nations and had no way to expand to the west. In many ways, it reflects a lot of my own cultural preferences, in no small part because I was raised in a similarly cosmopolitan city. However, it has its own traits, including (historically) support for slavery for financial reasons, and a capitalistic way of thinking, that I do not share. This bit, though:
Visitors were shocked by the village’s religious, ethnic, and linguistic diversity.
The book lays out many of the different people in and around New Amsterdam 400 years ago, and it sounds…a lot like NYC today. And Los Angeles. And most large cities in our nation.
The different nations are introduced in chronological order - El Norte comes first of course. In between, there are often chapters on history involving the nations already founded. For example, there is a chapter that looks at the various revolts against English rule - the first in 1680. Each was related to the attempt to preserve the unique culture and government of one of the nations. I won’t summarize, but just mention that these forgotten histories were fascinating.
No nation in this book is perfect - each is a blend of good and bad. Except maybe the Deep South, for which it is honestly difficult to find a single redeeming virtue. And that is to be expected for a region founded by Slave Lords from Barbados (that’s a pulp novel title right there) hell bent on instituting slavery everywhere on the planet, and willing to enslave white people if there were insufficient black people to brutalize.
And, to be clear, right now, MAGA is the recreation of that anti-democracy, racist-as-fuck culture, fueled yet again by obscenely rich oligarchs (this time imported from South Africa, not Barbados.) The Southern Baptist/Confederate culture is currently ruling the other nations, who are largely not happy about it.
The society founded in Charleston did not seek to replicate rural English manor life or to create a religious utopia in the American wilderness. Instead, it was a near-carbon copy of the West Indian slave state these Barbadians had left behind, a place notorious even then for its inhumanity. Enormously profitable to those who controlled it, this unadulterated slave society would spread rapidly…From the outset, Deep Southern culture was based on radical disparities in wealth and power, with a tiny elite commanding total obedience and enforcing it with state-sponsored terror. Its expansionist ambitions would put it on a collision course with its Yankee rivals, triggering military, social, and political conflicts that continue to plague the United States to this day.
Exactly.
Like Tidewater’s aristocracy, many of the planters had ancestors who had fought for the king in the English Civil War, and they embraced the trappings and symbolism of the British nobility, if not the social responsibilities that were supposed to attend them.
This too reflects Trump and his ilk: they love the trappings of aristocracy, but have no interest in the responsibilities that traditionally came with that social system. All the bling, none of the noblesse oblige.
There is a great discussion in this chapter about the racial caste lines, and how the rules didn’t apply to rich white men.
Although pressed into service as wet nurses, cooks, and nannies, blacks were regarded as “unclean,” with Deep Southern whites maintaining a strong aversion to sharing dishes, clothes, and social spaces with them. For at least three hundred years, the greatest taboo in the Deep South was to marry across the caste lines or for black men to have white female lovers, for the caste system could not survive if the races began to mix. Even the remotest suspicion of violating the Great Deep Southern Taboo would result in death for a black male.
However, like so many institutions in the Deep South, the caste system had convenient loopholes for the rich white men who created it. Having sex with your enslaved women and girls was perfectly acceptable, so long as you did it only for “fun.”
The book specifically mentions Strom Thurmond and his black child (never acknowledged) - and he died in 2003. As Faulkner put it, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
One final bit from this chapter is amusing. Before the Deep South took over Georgia, it was founded as a philanthropic utopia. With this twist:
Georgia’s benefactors even forbade liquor and lawyers, as they thought both eroded moral character.
Hey now! Apparently they didn’t realize Dick the Butcher was a bad guy?
I am skipping over a number of chapters without quotes - but I assure you they were fascinating as well.
Next I want to mention the book’s quick look at the explosion of new, uniquely American religions in the first half of the 19th Century. Most of them came out of Yankeedom, which the author does not see as a coincidence. In this context, I want to link to my recent review of The American Religion by Harold Bloom, which definitely ties in with this discussion.
The culture of Greater Appalachia is also fascinating. They have often been one of the “swing” nations in our greater political story, and in ways that are both predictable and yet deeply odd.
Appalachia is sandwiched between the northern nations, with the more tolerant Midland acting as a buffer between the puritanical and utopian Yankeedom, but with nothing between it and the Deep South.
The battle has often come down to whether Appalachia feels more of a threat from the Yankees or from the Deep South. The Yankees have always wanted to impose their values, but the Deep South has tended to eye working class whites in Appalachia as quite exploitable.
It is interesting that the same anti-intellectual, anti-education ideas that we see now have always been there as a reaction to both educated Yankees and wealthy enslavers.
Then as now, demagogues leveraged this desire for “freedom” from interference to rile up racial hatred, and blame liberals for interfering with slavery.
While Yankeedom may have been the birthplace of religions, it was Cane Ridge, in Appalachia that birthed another thread in uniquely American religion, the experiential revivalism that Evangelicals today keep trying to, well, revive.
I give further points to the book for focusing on the way the West was also a battlefield before, during, and after the Civil War. One part of this battle involved immigrants. Here again, we see a fascinating parallel between past and present. Before the Civil War, the free states had eight times as many foreign-born residents as the slave states. As the author pointed out, immigrants saw few opportunities in slave economies, and had already had enough of aristocratic feudalism in their home countries.
We see this today in the way that Red states tend to both have fewer immigrants and be more anti-immigrant.
Another thing we continue to see in our own time is the use of religion in the South to justify evil - calling it godliness.
There is no question that the Deep South seceded and fought the Civil War to defend slavery, and its leaders made no secret of this motive. Slavery, they argued ad nauseam, was the foundation for a virtuous, biblically sanctioned social system superior to that of the free states.
As notorious plantation owner William Preston said at the 1860 Democratic Party convention put it:
“Slavery is our King; Slavery is our Truth; Slavery is our divine right.”
Understanding the Confederacy and understanding MAGA require coming to terms with that reality - this is what underlies both movements. White supremacy as god, king, truth, and divine right.
The book mentions a name with local significance as well. John C. Breckinridge, notorious traitor and enslaver who was instrumental in succession, is the subject of one of two remaining Confederate monuments in my home county. One is a Daughters of the Confederacy plaque that exists somewhere in the archives of our local county museum.
The other is Breckenridge Mountain, whose slopes I have hiked on many times. And no, that isn’t a typo: they misspelled his name. I strongly believe they should rename it, preferably after local conservationist, educator, poet, and advocate for goodness, Ardis Walker.
Moving on to more positive things about American Nations, I found the discussion of the different nations’ approach to immigration to be fascinating. My own El Norte has always been multicultural, as has New France. New Netherland and the Midlands have also been historically welcoming to immigrants.
For both these nations, being “American” had nothing to do with one’s ethnicity, religion, or language, but was rather a spirit or state of mind.
This is how I was raised, before Faux News and the Evangelical Industrial Complex ate my parents. I have always loved the experience of multiple colors, religions, and languages around me - those are the neighbors I literally grew up with.
Moving on to the chapters on modern politics - meaning up until 2011 when the book was published - it is again fascinating to see how alliances have remained remarkably similar despite all of the party realignments. Unfortunately, what has happened is that the worst of the Deep South has eaten one of our major parties, and shifted things sharply to the extreme right.
The most conservative of Northern alliance presidents would all be considered big-government liberals by the standards of early-twenty-first-century Dixie-bloc political leaders. So, too, would the Norther alliance-led Republican Party of the 1950s.
As the author notes, Eisenhower is to the left of the Democratic establishment of today by most standards. And the goals of the oligarchs hasn’t changed in 200 years either.
The goal of the Deep Southern oligarchy has been consistent for over four centuries: to control and maintain a one-party state with a colonial-style economy based on large-scale agriculture and the extraction of primary resources by a compliant, poorly educated, low-wage workforce with as few labor, workplace safety, health care, and environmental regulations as possible.
Yep, that is literally the GOP platform these days. Factory farming and fossil fuels, no regulations that might interfere with profit.
And how do these oligarchs get the masses to follow them against their own interests? Same way as always…
When these systems were challenged by African Americans and the federal government, they rallied poor whites in their nation, in Tidewater, and in Appalachia to their cause through fearmongering: The races would mix. Daughters would be defiled. Yankees would take away their guns and Bibles and convert their children to secular humanism, environmentalism, communism, and homosexuality. Their political hirelings discussed criminalizing abortion, protecting the flag from flag burners, stopping illegal immigration, and scaling back government spending when on the campaign trail; once in office, they focused on cutting taxes for the wealthy, funneling massive subsidies to the oligarchs’ agribusinesses and oil companies, eliminating labor and environmental regulations, creating “guest worker” programs to secure cheap farm labor from the developing world, and poaching manufacturing jobs from higher-wage unionized industries in Yankeedom, New Netherland, or the Midlands.
Yep. Exactly.
Two factors worked in the oligarchs’ favor, however: racism and religion.
Again, EXACTLY. Those two things have become essentially inseparable in Evangelicalism, and other conservative-leaning religious groups.
And it isn’t the religion of the Yankees either.
Borderlanders and poor whites in Tidewater and the Deep South shared a common religious tradition: a form of Private Protestantism that rejected social reform, found biblical justification for slavery, and denounced secularism, feminism, environmentalism, and many key discoveries of modern science as contrary to God’s will.
This is why my mom believes I am going to hell. Not because of theological disagreements, but because of this politicized religion that opposes female equality, pluralism, and science. It is a religion of whiteness, of privilege, and of deep denial of reality.
One of the most fascinating things in this chapter, though, was the way that the author ties regionalism to some unexpected voting patterns. The Deep South voted for Carter over Ford in one of the very rare political defections of the last century. This is even more unusual than Appalachia going for Clinton over Dole. After all, Carter was, in his political views, the polar opposite of the usual Deep South obsessions. The local liberal won out over the conservative Yankee.
The epilogue is all about how the unlikely union of such disparate nations has survived as long as it has. It really does feel like a miracle, and one whose power has faded in our time as it did in the 1860s. Will we hold together? I am not confident in that, not least for a reason that the author notes:
But one thing is certain: if Americans seriously want the United States to continue to exist in something like its current form, they had best respect the fundamental tenets of our unlikely union. It cannot survive if we end the separation of church and state or institute the Baptist equivalent of Sharia law. We won’t hold together if presidents appoint political ideologues to the Justice Department or the Supreme Court of the United States, or if party loyalists try to win elections by trying to stop people from voting rather than winning them over with their ideas. The union can’t function if national coalitions continue to use the House and Senate rules to prevent important issues from being debated in the open because members know their positions wouldn’t withstand public scrutiny.
Oh, snap! That’s literally MAGA and Trump and today’s GOP being literally described. They want to impost Baptist Sharia on the rest of us. They have already stuffed SCOTUS and the Justice Department with party hacks. They are trying to end voting rights. They are using Trump’s orders to accomplish deeply unpopular policies, from illegal wars to the destruction of the Federal Government.
And those of us from the nations that are not the Deep South are pretty furious about all this. We are tired of subsidizing the lazy whites in Red states. We are tired of religion protecting pedophiles. We do not want the tech bros to own everything.
Will the nation hold together, or will we cut the Red states loose to become a third world country? We shall see.
It’s an interesting book, for sure, and one that I recommend to those who like history, politics, philosophy, and thoughtful ways of looking at the above.
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For a quick look at the nations, Business Insider revisited the idea during the Covid pandemic.
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