"Polarized" may well be the most overused adjective in American politics today. Employed to lament our deep national divisions, it's usually followed by nostalgic pining for a gauzy past when Americans set aside their differences for the common good.
The thoughtful response the next time someone drops the "p" word into a conversation would be: "It has ever been thus." According to "American Nations," a provocative 2011 book that reinterprets U.S. history in ways both reassuring and unsettling, it's the norm, not the exception, for our country to fall far short when it comes to putting the united in United States.
Deep divisions were present among the colonies and regions that came together to fight the British and forge a new nation over 200 years ago. Deep divisions remain, as anyone knows from studying election-night maps that sort America into "red" states and "blue" states. But "American Nations" author Colin Woodard makes the compelling, if not entirely new, argument that the fault lines are more complex -- and more interesting -- than the conventional wisdom about north-south and urban-rural divides.
Woodard, a Maine author and journalist, builds on previous work about North American folkways to argue that we have multiple regional cultures in North America -- areas whose distinct identities, values and institutions make them virtual nations within our union. And he says these internal nations have been engaged for more than two centuries in a kind of Cold War struggle (with a notable outbreak of actual war in the 1860s), vying for dominance of the federal government.
It takes a leap of imagination to accept the idea that these regional "nations" were primarily shaped by early, mostly Western European settlers and that despite immigration and modern technology, subsequent generations have acclimated to the cultures that were originally deposited. How these national identities interact with race and gender are also unanswered questions. Yet readers will likely find that they intuitively recognize that these nations exist on some level.
Woodard backs up his argument with voting data that show the nations' cohesiveness, even across state lines. But the dominant characteristics he describes for each nation are familiar to anyone who's traveled even a little around the United States. Once you read the book, you can't stop seeing these national identities and rivalries rearing up in everything from politics (Nebraskan Chuck Hagel's confirmation struggles with Southern and Western senators from his own political party) to pop culture. "Here Comes Honey Boo Boo" is a TV window onto a Southern society that, to the average Minnesotan, may be more "foreign" than are half a dozen European countries.
Having distinct nations within our borders doesn't make America unique -- think Turkey with its Kurds, Spain with its Basques, or Great Britain with its Scots and Welsh. Where America differs is that we rarely acknowledge our separate cultures. Our American nations deserve a more prominent role in our collective consciousness so we can quit mourning a mythic unity and better understand the forces that have long divided us and will continue to divide us over everything from the federal budget to foreign affairs to health care.
"We have all these arguments about what are American ideals or the American identity," Woodard said in a recent interview. "Everybody tries to go back to the founding fathers for the answers, but that's far too late in the story. The real answers -- and they're multiple, competing answers -- go back to the foundation of regional cultures 50, a hundred, or 150 years before 1776."
