Last week’s election demonstrated, once again, that America’s
most essential and abiding divisions are not between red states
and blue states, conservatives and liberals, or even the
faithful and the secular. They’re cultural, the result of
differences that can be traced all the way back to the rival
colonial projects established on our continent three and four
centuries ago. Our political divisions are rooted in 11
disparate regional cultures, as I explained in a book that was
published last year. These regions — separate nations, really,
including Yankeedom, Tidewater, New Netherland, New France, Deep
South, Greater Appalachia, the Midlands, First Nation, the Far
West, the Left Coast, El Norte — have been hiding in plain sight
throughout our history. You see them outlined on linguists’
dialect maps, cultural anthropologists’ maps of material culture
regions, and maps of religious regions, political geography and
historical patterns of settlement. The fault lines could be seen
throughout this year’s presiden