By JULIE CARLE
BG Independent News
New York Times bestselling author Colin Woodard believes the United States is not a single, unified nation but a collection of many distinct regional cultures that have their own characteristics and values.
Speaking at Bowling Green State University, Woodard addressed how the regional cultures in the U.S. have shaped American politics, society, public health outcomes and other aspects of American life.
He has spent a lifetime studying and analyzing the cultural and historical differences between various regions of the United States. The topic is also the focus of his 2017 book, “American Character: A History of the Epic Struggle Between Individual Liberty and the Common Good.”
The regional differences resulted from different European colonial powers settling in various parts of North America. Interestingly, those cultural values have persisted over generations. He categorized cultures broadly into “communitarian,” emphasizing the common good, and “individualistic,” prioritizing individual liberty.
“Finding the right balance between individual liberty and the common good has been a constant challenge in American history,” Woodard said. “Finding the right balance is crucial for the country’s future.”
American history, the American identity and the current cultural or political ideologies can’t be understood “without knowing that there’s never been one America, but rather several Americas, each with their own characteristics,” he explained.
Additionally, each region developed isolation from one another, “consolidating their own principles and fundamental values,” he said.
The regional cultures championed such ideas as individualism, utopian social reform, freedom of conscience, religious pluralism, equality and democratic participation, and even traditional aristocratic order modeled on the slave states in classical antiquity, he said.
Woodard talked about the culture that “was founded on the shores of Massachusetts Bay in the 1630s by a bunch of radicals who thought they were creating a new society. The emphasis was on perfecting earth, society, food, social engineering, individual self-denial, the common good and the aggressive assimilation of outsiders.
“It’s a culture that prized education, intellectual achievement and community rather than individual empowerment, or a broad citizen participation in politics and government,” he said. Those ideals would protect them from tyrants or a strong country government.
When it came to settling in Ohio, a strip of land near Lake Erie/Cleveland, referred to as the Western Reserve, was claimed by Connecticut. The federal government said that area would be part of the state of Ohio for sovereignty purposes, but Connecticut was allowed to settle there.
Other parts of Ohio were settled by the Virginia military and other settlement groups. In Michigan, an area that was highly forested, the land was settled by the people who pioneered the techniques of industrial lumbering in northern Maine, Woodard said.
As people settled across the U.S., they brought “their institutions, assumptions and planning on the landscape,” he said.
What transpired was a humanitarian group that thought they were on a mission from God and everyone had to work with a plan, and another highly individualistic group who didn’t trust institutions because of their own historical experience.
“As you can imagine, having such contradictory takes on the meaning of freedom can complicate life in a shared federation,” where there is division over the relationship between individual liberty and common good, he said.
The far west is passively individualistic. Its libertarian frontier ethos, tempered by the fact that in the extreme conditions and isolation of that region when it was settled in the mid and late 19th century, people really had to rely on one another to survive or on massive infrastructure deployed externally, railroads or snow, roof dams, irrigation systems, trans water basin and water transfers from corporations or the federal government just to survive.
One outcome is the consolidation of regional alliances from the 1820s onward: a communitarian versus an individualistic on the federal landscape.
The presence of these regional cultures blocks and shapes much of American life. For starters, the regional cultures profoundly affect political behavior. “The lines on this can be seen in the county-level results of most contested presidential elections in our history,” he said as he showed maps that supported the concept of regional differences in presidential elections.
“You see the Western Reserve vote and the Ohio Yankee one color. You can see the left coast disagreeing with the far Western interiors in their own states,” he said.
The regional effects go beyond elections and can also be seen in how people responded to a public health crisis. The individual liberty sections’ response to the COVID-19 pandemic was to resist mask-wearing and vaccines, he said. The vaccination rates were double in the areas prone to common good ideology.
“You see these regional divides though, not just in COVID-19, but in the prevalence of all sorts of diseases,” including diabetes, obesity and even life expectancy, Woodard added.
The same holds true regarding gun violence. Whether looking at per capita rate for gun deaths, “the strongly communitarian regions outperform the individualistic ones,” he said. “The divides are real. They are persistent, and they matter today.”
Throughout history, the pursuit of individual liberty has resulted in such incidents as the Salem Witch Trials and the conditions that inspired Nathaniel Hawthorne to write The Scarlet Letter. “It can take you astray to a universe where the oligarchy enslaves and employs death squads to protect that liberty,” he said.
When federal government tried to move toward social democracy, such as President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal or Lyndon Johnson’s The Great Society, there was always pushback.
“That’s not to say social democracy doesn’t work,” he said, pointing to Denmark, Switzerland and Iceland that “are almost social democracies,” where it works for them.
“Because of our mix of regional cultures, that’s not a path we can ever achieve with one country,” he said.
“The political battle now is no longer over the best way to achieve the American experiment to secure those promises in the Declaration of Independence, but whether or not we’ll continue to have a democracy at all,” Woodard said.
For someone who has spent a lifetime studying and witnessing authoritarian movements around the world, Woodard said, “This is the real deal.”
“If we return to the Declaration’s definition of America, the one about fidelity to the ideals of equality and freedom, and where Americans are defined by their commitment to protect one another’s inherent and equal rights, we will need to rebuild and do so on solid foundations.”
The government is supposed to protect freedom from external enemies and to ensure that economic competition at home is fairly played.
“The consensus point for us, the American way, is ultimately the pursuit of happiness via a free and fair competition between individuals and their ideas and institutions,” he said. “Americans want that competition to be free and fair, that people can’t cheat either by a monopolistic or parasitic behavior and that the government is strong enough to regulate and make sure that that behavior doesn’t happen.”
