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I find this map endlessly fascinating. Nominally, this
is a plot of counties that voted "more Republican" in
2008 than in 2004 |
In the earliest decades of this nation -- before this nation was
even a nation -- four waves of settlers arrived from Britain. The first
three waves landed in New England, the Southern Colonies and the Middle
Colonies, respectively, and each defined the culture of its own region.
The fourth wave came in mostly through the Middle Colonies, but it
didn't stay there. Instead, it migrated inland, into the Appalachian
mountain range. It spread south, then west, through the Tennessee River
Valley. It crossed the Mississippi River into Missouri, Arkansas,
Oklahoma and Texas. And because of its greater willingness to migrate,
it's reached into almost every corner of this country.
The fact that this culture has, to a greater or lesser degree, influenced almost every part of America, doesn't mean that it
is
America. It's only one color in the mosaic. Yet it claims a monopoly on
"American values," and incredibly, the media let it get away with that.
Here's why the media are wrong.
We have two dominant political parties. Each of those parties is
built upon two of the four primary waves of migration from Britain that
defined America in its earliest years. Historian David Hackett Fischer,
in his book
Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America, identifies these waves as:
- Puritans, who settled in New England;
- Cavaliers, who settled in Virginia;
- Quakers, who settled in the Delaware River Valley; and
- Borderers, who settled in the "backcountry," as Appalachia and the Highland South were termed back then.
These four waves weren't the only immigrants to bring their cultures
to America -- there were also Dutch colonists and Jews in the Hudson
River Valley, French colonists in Louisiana and Maine, Catholics in
Maryland and Huguenots in South Carolina -- but they came to dominate
American culture and politics, for two reasons. First, they held not
just local power but regional power. Second, they migrated westward.
Through the 18th and early 19th centuries, politics revolved on a
Puritan–Cavalier axis. The Civil War was fought, essentially, between
Puritan abolitionists and Cavalier slaveholders. But in the late 19th
century, the descendants of Quakers and Borderers settled the West,
while the descendants of Puritans and Cavaliers mostly stayed east of
the Mississippi River. Consequently, the balance of power began to
shift, and the four cultures found themselves on more equal footing.
Today, if anything, the Quaker and Borderer strains in our culture and
politics are stronger nationwide than the Puritan and Cavalier strains.
Since the political realignment of the 1960s, we have essentially had a
Northern Party (the Quaker–Puritan Democrats) and a Southern Party (the
Borderer–Cavalier Republicans), with the Great Plains and the Mountain
West leaning toward the Republicans until just recently.
Knowing all this, we can begin to analyze what's going on in politics
right now. Let's begin with an interesting artifact from the 2008
presidential election:
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