6 L. Poisonous Politics are Dividing America - IS THAT TRUE?

America's strength lies in its diversity, and that America is a "Melting-Pot" where cultures have come together to find the benefit of close cooperation to build a nation of prosperity for all - True?

Diversity means a difference of beliefs and a difference in the common stereo-types of behavior.  Racial traits might be a marker for those differences, but not the cause.  The differences arose because of differing necessities, living in separate geographies and with different neighbors.  How quickly can these differences assimilate or find a new "median" and a new cooperation?

Or are these differences inconsequential as we are led to believe, and it is only one evil man, a Trump or a Putin that throws the whole world out of kilter?

Reviewing the book, “American Nations” by Colin Woodard, 2011.  Get a copy here: https://brax.me/f/American_Nations.pdf/T4AZ65ba5da508e582.02286088

A nation is a group of people who share—or believe they share—a common culture, ethnic origin, language, historical experience, artifacts, and symbols.  The American myth is that alike-people (all of them originally Christians from Europe), migrated to several colonies and found agreement about the most essential aspects of their new nationhood.  Therefore, their original diversity is something to be honored and celebrated.  With that central belief, it should be easy enough to get back to our original unity.

But the original North American colonies were actually settled by people from distinct regions of the British Islands, and from France, the Netherlands, and Spain, each with their own religious, political, and ethnographic characteristics. Throughout the colonial period, they regarded one another as competitors— for land, settlers, and capital—and occasionally as enemies, as was the case during the English Civil War, when Royalist Virginia stood against Puritan Massachusetts, or when New Netherland, (Manhattan), and New France were invaded and occupied by English-speaking soldiers, statesmen, and merchants. Only when London began treating all of its colonies as a single unit— and enacted policies threatening to nearly all of them—did some of these distinct societies briefly come together to win a revolution and create a joint government.

All of these centuries-old cultures are still with us today, and have spread their people, ideas, and influence across mutually exclusive bands of the continent. There isn’t and never has been one America.  (The civil war actually involved a complicated six-nation diplomatic dance over the future of the West.)  Gaining more future states in your ideology, meant a possible control over the American congress.

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For generations these distinct cultural hearths developed in remarkable isolation from one another, consolidating characteristic values, practices, dialects, and ideals. Some championed individualism, others utopian social reform. Some believed themselves guided by divine purpose, others championed freedom of conscience and inquiry. Some forced an Anglo-Saxon Protestant (Calvinist) identity, others ethnic and religious pluralism. Some valued equality and democratic participation, others with a deference to a traditional aristocratic order among an inferior caste of people.

The United States had Founding Fathers, to be sure, but they were the grandfathers, or great grandfathers of the men who met to sign the Declaration of Independence and to draft our first two constitutions. Our true Founders didn’t have an “original intent” that we can refer back to in challenging times; they had many diverse original intents.

The United States is a federation comprised of the whole or part of eleven regional nations, some of which truly do not see eye to eye with one another and never have. These nations respect neither state nor international boundaries, bleeding over the U.S. frontiers with Canada and Mexico as readily as they divide among California, Texas, Illinois, or Pennsylvania.

But on carefully examining events of the past four centuries, one realizes these jurisdictions are illusions that mask the real forces that have always driven the affairs of our sprawling continent: the eleven stateless nations of North America.

1.  Yankeedom, social engineering, relatively extensive citizen involvement in the political process, work-ethic, and the aggressive assimilation of foreigners, middle-class, “secular Puritanism.”

2.  New Netherland, (Dutch New York City), a global commercial trading society: multi-ethnic, multi-religious, speculative, materialistic, mercantile, and free trading, a raucous, not entirely democratic city-state where no one ethnic or religious group has ever truly been in charge.  They came up with the Bill of Rights to maintain their freewheeling style.

3.  The Midlands out of the pacifist Quakers, government has been seen as an unwelcome intrusion, and political opinion has been moderate, even apathetic. An ethnic mosaic, with people of German descent—not “Anglo-Saxons”— they are a key “swing vote”.

4.   Virginia’s tobacco colonies, elites played a central role in the foundation of the United States and were responsible for many of the aristocratic inflections in the Constitution, including the Electoral College and the Senate.

5.    Greater Appalachia, wave upon wave of rough, bellicose settlers from the war-ravaged borderlands, “rednecks,” “hillbillies,” “crackers,” and “white trash,” these clannish Scots-Irish. The Borderlander’s combative culture coming from centuries of brutal British suppression, have provided a large proportion of the nation’s military.

6.   The Deep South, West Indies Barbados–style slave society, a system so cruel and despotic that it shocked even its seventeenth-century English.  After the civil war it became an Apartheid State(s).  It remains the least democratic of the nations.   Epic battle with Yankeedom and its Left Coast and New Netherland allies for the future of the federation.  Deep Southerners developed caste and sharecropper systems to meet their labor needs, as well as a system of poll taxes and literacy tests to keep former slaves and white rabble out of the political process. In Mississippi voter participation fell from 70 percent in 1877 (reconstruction), to less than 10 percent in 1920. States controlled by the Deep South are—South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana.

7.   New France, a nation-state-in-waiting in the form of the Province of Québec, Down-to-earth, egalitarian, and consensus-driven, the New French have recently been demonstrated by pollsters to be far and away the most liberal people on the continent. The nation most likely to secure an independent state.

8.   El Norte is the Spanish contingent, more independent, self-sufficient, adaptable, and work-centered than Mexicans, a hotbed of democratic reform and revolutionary sentiment.

9.   The Left Coast, from Monterey, California, to Juneau, Alaska, retained a strong strain of New England intellectualism and idealism, cofounder (along with New Netherland) of the gay rights movement, the sovereign state of Cascadia by adding in British Columbia and southern Alaska as well.

10.   The Far West, No-good for a farming lifestyle, so directed by large corporations, ranching, railroads, mining, oil, headquartered in distant New York, Boston, Chicago, or San Francisco, or by the federal government itself, with military installations. An internal colony, exploited and despoiled for the benefit of the seaboard nations.

11.   First Nation, vast region with a hostile climate, put the remnants of native North America back on the map culturally, politically, and environmentally.  But over the generations they assimilated into the culture around them, not the other way around. They may have embraced or rejected the dominant culture, but they didn’t replace it. And it wasn’t an “American” or “Canadian” culture they confronted and negotiated with or against; it was one of the 10 respective “national” cultures identified above. 

Since 1877 (end of civil war reconstruction), the driving force of American politics hasn’t primarily been a class struggle or tension between agrarian and commercial interests, or even between competing partisan ideologies, although each has played a role. Ultimately the determinative political struggle has been a clash between shifting coalitions of ethno-regional nations, one invariably headed by the Deep South, the other by Yankeedom.

The majority of Yankees, New Netherlanders, and Left Coasters simply aren’t going to accept living in an evangelical Christian theocracy with weak or nonexistent social, labor, or environmental protections, weak public school systems, and checks on corporate power in politics, the Baptist equivalent of Sharia law.

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The question to ask is what causes a population to hang on to their ancestor’s belief structures for 100’s of years?  Yes, that becomes their identity, but apparently it does serve some purpose.  The Barbados elite mentality stretches before 1600.  What we call the Appalachian feud between the Hatfield’s and the McCoy’s really starts 700 – 800 years ago with British suppression of the Scotch / Irish.  The belief in vengeance is 1,000’s of years old.

I don’t propose to answer this question.  But it does shed light on the prospect that the USA will UNLIKELY become a unified nation.  If a foreign nation mistreats part of its populace, is that my concern?  If I am a member of the United Nations, I have assumed the “duty to protect”.  I interpret that to mean to stop wanton killing, but not to give everyone the right to vote, or an abortion.  The truth is that the States in the USA have enforced laws in many different ways and to many different degrees.  I feel sure that will continue.

I am not an elitist nor a chauvinist, so I look down on Apartheid.  Still in 1955 the three nations of the Dixie bloc were authoritarian states whose citizens— white and black—were required to uphold a rigid, all-pervasive apartheid system.  Whites were forbidden to address blacks of any age with titles other than “boy,” “Auntie,” or “Uncle”. Blacks and whites were prohibited from dining, dating, worshipping, playing baseball, or attending school together. The caste system required that blacks and whites use separate drinking fountains, rest rooms, waiting rooms, and building entrances; that factories maintain separate production lines, with blacks unable to be promoted into “white” positions regardless of experience, merit, or seniority; and that theaters, lunch counters, restaurants, railroad companies, and public bus systems maintain separate seating by race.

Vigilante groups tortured and executed blacks who violated these rules, often with the public approval of elected officials, newspaper editors, preachers, and the region’s leading families. White violators faced legal penalties and, worse, the social ostracism that resulted from having one’s family branded “nigger lovers.” Dixie’s white religious leaders, with few exceptions, either bestowed divine-endorsement on this system or kept silent.

For instance, Crystal City, a town in South Texas, even in 1960 was a town of 95% Hispanic population, but the White Anglo minority owned virtually all the land and businesses, and ran the town council, and the school board, teaching the kids about their inferior status and even ensuring that Hispanic teens remained a minority on the cheerleading squad. 

The German Nazis had praised the Deep South’s caste system, which they used as a model for their own race laws.  Nazi publications approved of lynching as a natural response to the threat of racial mixing.

“It is a hundred times better for Southern whites", one pro-Nazi intellectual wrote, “if exaggerated racial hatred leads to a hundred lynchings per year, then if each year 50,000 mulatto children are born.”   (Reference: John Peter, Horst Grill, and Robert L. Jenkins, “The Nazis and the American South in the 1930s: A Mirror Image?” Journal of Southern History, Vol. 58, No. 4, November 1932, pp. 667–694;)

Perhaps I pick on the Deep South most, but even the Puritans were a “busybody population” trying to force the rest to adopt only their ideals.

What I am saying is that; poison politics doesn’t divide the nation, but the already divided nation creates poison politics.  So, one villain will be replaced by another villain on both sides of the divide.  I see no solution nor end to it.

The book is easy to read because it is so interesting.

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