71–80 of 107 posts
Chicago is in Yankeedom? I don't understand that entire western half of Yankeedom, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin and Minnesota. SLO, Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, Orange County and San Diego are El Norte?
Upstate NY is not Yankeedom. It is Greater Appalachia. Also, many of the Midwest states are less Yankeedom and more Heartland. Also, Dallas is Greater Appalachia and not Deep South yet Houston is Deep South and not New France? Also, LA is El Norte and not the Left Coast? Was this map based on 200 year old data?
American state boundaries clearly do not reflect these national regions. Federal states have boundaries that either serve to unite separate territories or to administer a united territory. It has probably a source of strength in the US, that states are either much too small or contain multiple different areas in them, since it fosters a broader, national US identity rather than an identity as a New Netherlander or a…
What do you mean by “weakness as a federal state”? In terms of division of power between states and federal, the Canadian federal government has much more power than the US federal government. After I learned more about it, I was quite surprised at the level of autonomy that US states have.
Upstate NY is not Yankeedom. It is Greater Appalachia. Also, many of the Midwest states are less Yankeedom and more Heartland. Also, Dallas is Greater Appalachia and not Deep South yet Houston is Deep South and not New France? Also, LA is El Norte and not the Left Coast? Was this map based on 200 year old data?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nine_Nations_of_North_Amer...
American state boundaries clearly do not reflect these national regions. Federal states have boundaries that either serve to unite separate territories or to administer a united territory. It has probably a source of strength in the US, that states are either much too small or contain multiple different areas in them, since it fosters a broader, national US identity rather than an identity as a New Netherlander or a…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thinking about who has the vote back when the USA became independent, I think of those lords as being close in character and power to dark age European kings, and I mentally map their slaves to feudal serfs.[0] My cynical reading is that describes an attitude of “if you let someone else tell you what to do that makes you a peasant, so when we do it it’s fine because we do it to peasants, but when other people do some…
A better analogy would be to the lower, mostly independent rungs of a feudal society like the English yeoman. Antebellum, the general attitude in the South was that even the poorest person was entitled to live his life as he saw fit on his land, and should be regarded as equal to a rich plantation owner with employees and slaves. There was generally no bureaucracy that could force a poor person to lose his land, make…
I think this describes neither medieval Europe nor the antebellum US South. Certainly in Europe, a king needed no 'bureaucracy' to take anything he wanted from anyone at any time. Lords could largely do the same with impunity, since they had the power to do so and were largely immune from prosecution due to the heavily politicized courts prior to the rise of heavy industry in 1700, after which non-lord authorities like commercial barons arose, and demanded better legal representation.
IMHO, the US south never really lost that same feudal sensibility, that titled folk deserve greater power / immunity than commoners and the demi-people below that. Before modern telecommunications which enabled enforcement of federal law, that mindset allowed ad hoc laws like Jim Crow to displace formal legal codes in the courts and enabled the segregationist inequality that persisted until the 1960's. I believe that even today that value system lives on in hearts and minds, even if the courts are shaped by it much less.
There's definitely a big cultural distinction between the Boston/DC corridor part of the east coast states and everything else in those states. DC has more in common with Boston than DC has in common with other parts (e.g. Indiana) of the "midlands" panhandle the map has it occupying. The fact that there's a line smack through the DC metro itself is kind of a wtf. There should probably be "left coast" dots for the counties that Denver, CO and Austin, TX are in. Maine North of Portland has more in common with Quebec and western Pennsylvania than it does with anything in Southern New England. If those are my gripes based on my personal experience then I would wager the areas with which I have no experience are similarly inaccurate.
Edit: Just confirmed with people from Michigan, Indiana and west Virginia. They all had some pretty raised eyebrows at this map.
Edit2: Asked some Mainers, one called the map "bold".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Switzerland seems to be doing OK as a counterexample. Its cantons have a high level of self-government and a history as independent states and cultures. Yet Switzerland is a prosperous country with a strong national identity and minimal talk of secession by the cantons.
Switzerland individually is a bad example because it is pretty much the size of an individual US state, so it's cantons would just be counties in that example. A better comparison would be Switzerland's power-balance with the EU, especially in comparison to the extremes in population like Germany or Malta
It's interesting to see how canned phrases to represent certain concepts can become nonsensical when put together : > The Deep South was established by English slave lords from Barbados and was styled as a West Indies-style slave society, Woodard notes. It has a very rigid social structure and fights against government regulation that threatens individual liberty. Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Texas, Georgia, and So…
Yet it’s a very striking fact that the language that to our ears sounds most “libertarian” in the Founding generation tended most often to issue from those most committed to slavery. By contrast, the Founding Fathers who sound most “statist” — Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams — tended also to be most hostile to slavery.
This disjunction is more than some odd little paradox of history. It is a resounding klaxon warning of the enormous gap between the 18th century mindset and our own. Samuel Johnson jeered at the American colonists: “How is that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” Johnson’s accusation of hypocrisy is obviously well-founded, but there is something more going on here than hypocrisy. It was precisely the intimate awareness of the horror of unfreedom — and possibly guilt for the denial of freedom to others — that inspired the passionate concern for liberty among so many slaveholders. When Patrick Henry said that he would rather be dead than share the fate of the 75 slaves he owned, he was not engaging in metaphor. But he was also not expressing 21st century libertarianism.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Switzerland seems to be doing OK as a counterexample. Its cantons have a high level of self-government and a history as independent states and cultures. Yet Switzerland is a prosperous country with a strong national identity and minimal talk of secession by the cantons.
Being a much smaller country, in terms of land and population, I would assume variations within must be lighter too.