Tag: American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America

Political Realities of America – Part 1

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After what we’ve seen on display during the last four years it seems clear to me that the people in charge of the Democrat party have a stranglehold on almost all the levers of power that exist at the national level in the United States.  And more than that, they control the majority of the power at the state and local level.

It’s probably easier to name the ones they don’t control.  The Republicans control the legislatures and state houses of about half the states and have a hair thin majority in the US Senate.  That’s it.  Our side has almost none of the major media companies, corporations, universities, non-profits, professional societies, unions, banks, financial institutions, publishers or any of the departments of the bureaucracy that we call the Deep State.  Even the Supreme Court that we supposedly have appointed by a six to three margin heaps defeat after defeat on us.  We don’t even control the capital cities of the states that we do hold.  Basically, every city large enough to have a welfare population is controlled by the Democrats.

This is not a new situation.  This has been the status quo for as long as there has been a United States.  The descendants of the New England Puritans have been expanding and consolidating their control over the areas that they’ve colonized since they got here in the seventeenth century.  They control the Northeast, the Great Lakes region, The Pacific Coast and they’ve been expanding off of those areas continuously.  Now they’ve reached down to Virginia in the east and the wretched Californians that ruined their own state are destroying Colorado, Arizona, Nevada and soon enough, the rest of the Mountain West.

They’ve got a very effective model.  It has nothing to do with freedom, equality or anything like that.  It’s strictly a matter of gaining control by power politics.  They’ll paper it over by claiming that they are fighting the evil racists or whatever bogeyman they’ve concocted to bamboozle the simple-minded poor people they pay off for votes.  But if buying votes isn’t enough, they have perfected stealing elections by fabricating votes in urban districts.

All of this has been on open display since Election Day.  Unprecedented vote totals were unleashed in the early hours of November 4th as soon as it became clear that President Trump was going to win in Pennsylvania, Georgia and Wisconsin.  Not even a fig leaf was maintained that a fair election was going on.  The Republican poll watchers were forced out and the trucks backed up to the buildings and poured in the bogus ballots by the hundreds of thousands.

At this point in the process it’s entirely possible that the Supreme Court will be so ashamed of allowing a presidential election be stolen in plain view that they will do something to stop it.  I’d say it’s fifty-fifty.  John Roberts is a worthless, spineless traitor so if we win it will be at best a 5-4 vote.  But even if the President prevails and we get a four-year reprieve it is still necessary to look realistically at the way this country works and plan accordingly.  And if the Supreme Court stabs us in the back again then we have two months to decide how we will deal with the facts on the ground.

I think we have three choices.  Fold, flee or fight.  Surrender to the hive, leave the areas under their control, or fight them.

And I’m guessing it’s not completely clear to anyone which of these choices is best.

So, let’s look first at Option 1, Fold.  Think about it.  You know plenty of people who don’t believe in the leftist madness but who have responsible positions in the corporate and government circles who have to spout the party line and burn incense to Baal.  Their kids go to Yale and Columbia and they write their memos that pledge allegiance to diversity and inclusion and make sure they have a man in a dress working for them in the HR department.  Sure, they have to choke back the cognitive dissonance when they say the things that are expected of them.  But they get paid very well to do it.  They get all the perks that go along with membership in the lower ranks of the managerial elite.  They live in safe neighborhoods; their kids go to the best schools and all the right doors get opened to them in all avenues of life.  They belong to the right clubs and organizations.  They vacation on Martha’s Vineyard or the Hamptons and they get invited to all the best parties and gatherings.

I even know people who say they can keep up this charade while still protecting their kids from the madness that goes along with the propaganda and proselytizing that the sexual deviants that run our public schools practice.  Maybe they can.  Maybe it’s possible to live inside the hive in complete disguise and maintain a normal life.  If it is then my hat’s off to these people.  I don’t seem to be able to do it.  Listening to the proclamations from the Ministries of Peace, Truth and Love are just too much for my little brain to ignore.  But I’m not everyone.  So, there are probably a bunch of people who will take the blue pill and get on with their lives inside the hive.

How about Option 2, Flee.  Let’s define that a little bit.  It could mean moving from a blue city to the surrounding rural areas of a red state.  Or it could be moving from a blue state to a red state.  Or it could mean leaving the country.  All of these are calculations that a man has to make.  Leaving a city is the easiest choice.  It’s a thing you’d do even if the city wasn’t a political prison.  Lots of folks have always left cities in order to take advantage of the lower costs and property values associated with getting out of the crowded and expensive cities.  But I can personally attest to the unsatisfying result of moving from a blue city to a blue state suburb.  It will lessen your chances of suffering violent crime and give your kids half decent schools but that’s about it.  Now these first two choices end up with someone living in a red state.  That is something.  And if the state is deep red then you will notice a big change.  Living in a place where you’re still allowed to say what you really think and surrounded by mostly normal people is like a dream come true for a deplorable living in a blue state.  And in such a place the schools will be much less destructive of normal ideas about the world.  But even in red states you’re going to deal with the realities of living in America.  Affirmative action and all the other programs that take away the freedom of association and choice that we’re supposed to enjoy is still the law of the land.  So, the move isn’t a cure for the American condition just a less serious case.  And as the leftists tighten the screws through the courts and their corporate allies it will be less and less of an improvement.  Now the only way to completely escape the leftists is to leave the country.  But that brings up a separate predicament.  Where exactly is it better than here?  Moving to Canada or Australia or Europe is at best a mixed situation.  None of those places have even the pretense of a bill of rights.  And all of them are run by elites that have approximately the same program as our masters here.  There may be some places that would be less oppressive like some of the eastern European countries but think of the dislocation you and your family would experience being a stranger in a strange land.  But I know many people who are thinking of exactly this trade-off.

And now we come to Option 3, Fight.  But that’s a long story and I’ll keep that for Part 2.  But I will say that the first two option are pretty awful for someone who believes in the ideals that America is supposed to represent.  You could see why staying and fighting would be the option you would want to take.  We’ll talk about that next.

American Nations – A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America – by Colin Woodard – A Book Review – Part 2

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(The first part of this review is found here)

 

In the second and third parts of the review I’ll go in depth about how the characteristics of the more important “nations” influenced how the political and social divisions in the later history of the United States would align.

Although the Spanish, French and even the English at Jamestown colonized earlier than the New England colonists, the Pilgrims and the Puritans were the biggest influence on early American life.  The Puritans left England, en masse, from mostly East Anglia to found a populous religiously intolerant Calvinist “heaven on Earth’ that they could run their own way.  They despised the aristocratic Norman noblemen and believed that a tightly knit town life run by selectmen who all agreed with the Puritan values would give them the social cohesion and resources needed to flourish and spread their way of life to the surrounding communities and eventually the other nations.

The abiding characteristic that marks the Yankee is his desire to interfere with anyone else who does not live life the way the Puritan thinks it should be lived.  They are inveterate busybodies who cannot abide anyone enjoying life except on their terms.  This was notable in the 1600s and is equally true today.  Even with the demise of their belief in God they have turned their social justice proclivities into a cult that invests much of their time and energy in policing everybody else’s business.

As a practical consequence of their numbers and their organized approach to life they quickly spread in all available directions.  They spread north and east into New Hampshire, Maine and even the Canadian Maritime Provinces.  They went west and south into Connecticut, Long Island and eventually most of New York State.  Later when the western areas of the continent became accessible, they migrated to the Great Lakes region essentially colonizing all of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan and parts of Ohio and even northwestern Pennsylvania.  And much later, in the mid to late 1800s, they even colonized the Pacific Northwest forming the core of Oregon and Washington and even areas of northern California.

One very exceptional branch that emerged late from Yankeedom (as Woodard names the New England founding) was the Mormons.  They were a radical sect founded by a Yankee from New York state named Joseph Smith.  Their extremely unorthodox beliefs and community couldn’t hope to be accepted in the confines of orthodox New England so they eventually fled the United States for Utah.  But it is interesting that their New England heritage of religious communalism is probably the only way that they were able to survive the high desert of the Far West.  Their cooperative lifestyle allowed farming in an area where all other small farmers eventually failed and left.

Diametrically opposed to the culture and the approach of the Puritans of Yankeedom were the landed gentry who colonized Virginia and later the Carolinas.  These men were landed gentry who utilized indentured farmers and later on, black slaves to become wealthy from tobacco, rice and sugar estates that they were given by their aristocratic connections in England.  In Virginia, the Carolinas and later in Georgia, the local government was a closely held enterprise of the wealthy few who did not even permit the common men to vote and certainly not hold office.  And once the system of farming was worked out, these men accumulated great wealth and lived more sumptuously than their patrons back in England ever dreamed of.  The colony of Virginia never expanded much beyond its original borders but the deep south plantations of the Carolinas moved steadily west through the gulf state areas of Alabama, Mississippi, and eventually into Florida.  Later when cotton became the great cash crop, areas of Tennessee, Arkansas and even Texas were also included in this plantation society.  These aristocrats were the spiritual descendants of the landed nobility of England and felt that they were owed obedience by the common people and should answer only to themselves in the way they transacted business and lived their lives.  Woodard compares the rivalry between the Puritans of New England and the Cavaliers of the Deep South as an analogue to the sides of the English Civil War where the puritan roundheads under Cromwell fought to the death against the cavalier gentlemen of King Charles.  And indeed, the documents of the time show that both sides saw it in the same terms.

At all times and even during the American Revolution when these opponents were allies and even countrymen a rivalry and a bitter hatred existed between these two “nations.”

In the next installment I’ll talk about how the other nations and especially the Appalachians figured into this wrestling match for control of North America.

American Nations – A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America – by Colin Woodard – A Book Review – Part 1

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This book has several faults.  One is that the author is an enormous progressive bigot.  He allows his sympathies with the progressive areas of the country to shade almost every aspect of the descriptive and critical content of the book.  Another fault is that he has subsumed the work of earlier authors and glossed over any ideas that don’t fit his world view.  But despite these ugly qualities the book provides a lot of very important information that can be valuable if carefully interpreted.

The thesis of the book is that the foundational cultures that colonized North America along with the remaining older cultures (Native American and Hispanic) account for the regional differences that still determine how people think, live and vote.  And that I think is a remarkable fact and taken along with an understanding of the motivations and psychology of these regional groups provides us with a better understanding of why things are happening the way they are and what best to do to influence the outcome of political and social struggles.

The clearest way to start thinking of what this book can tell us is to look at a map that divides most of North America by how it was colonized.  https://www.twincities.com/2013/11/16/which-of-this-writers-11-american-nations-do-you-live-in/

As a list, the Nations of the title are

  • Yankeedom
  • New Netherland
  • The Midlands
  • Tidewater
  • Deep South
  • New France
  • Greater Appalachia
  • El Norte
  • The Far West
  • The Left Coast
  • First Nation

What you’ll see is that the original Massachusetts colony has spread into an area that encompasses New England, New York, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, parts of the surrounding states like Illinois (Yankeedom).  And to a slightly smaller degree Washington, Oregon and Northern California were its result (The Left Coast).  And the founding of Pennsylvania produced a discernible legacy that extends from the Atlantic in a relatively narrow band through Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, then spreads into a larger area that includes virtually all of Iowa, northern Missouri, and large parts of Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska and both Dakotas.  And in fact, the strip then hooks around to include the majority of non-French eastern Canada.  All of this is denoted as the Midlands.

And in a similar way we can also see the results of the Virginia colonies (Tidewater) and the Deep South spread.  Because of the intervention of outside factors Virginia was prevented from spreading west, whereas the Carolinas went on to extend their way of life all the way down the Gulf coast to eastern Texas.

New Netherland is the Dutch founding in what is now New York City.  It is hemmed in by its neighbors to the North and South but is an extremely densely populated area with enormous commercial and financial clout.

A little less familiar is the origins of the Appalachian region.  This area was settled by lowland Scots, northern Britons and the Scots-Irish who fled poverty, oppression and civil strife in their homelands and spread out mostly from the Pennsylvanian, Virginian and Carolinian colonies to find freedom and autonomy in the mountains and forests of Appalachia and later go on to populate a wide band from western Virginia and the Carolinas to Northern Texas.  The states of West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and most of Illinois, Indiana and half of Oklahoma Missouri and Arkansas are the area called on this map Greater Appalachia.  More or less directly, the Appalachians, by cutting off access to the west, were responsible for the fact that the Virginia colonies never gained as much widespread power as its neighbors.

In a similar way the book goes to describe the founding and spread of the other “nations.”  New France and “El Norte” (the Mexican colonies in the southwest) are the most unfamiliar to most American readers but the information is easily digested and the way that these areas developed is relatively clear.

The Far West is the mountainous and high plains areas between the mid-west and the Left Coast that were populated in the wake of the railroads.  This area is defined by its relation to the federal government and its improvement programs.

First Nation describes the area in the north of Canada and Alaska and Greenland that are inhabited by the Inuit and other aboriginal peoples of the region.

In the next installment of this review I’ll discuss how the characteristics and ways of life of these different foundations set them in motion and how they collided with the outside world and each other over the course of several hundred years.

 

(The second part of this review is found here.)

10MAR2019 – OCF Update

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I’m finishing up the book “American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America,” and without exaggeration it has been an eye opening book.  Dividing the country by the origin of the founding stock in each geographical area explains many things that weren’t previously understandable.  Now granted, the writer is firmly in the lefty camp but information is still information.  I should start writing something early next week.

I’m starting to post a bunch of butterfly shots I took a week ago at a conservatory.  That should break up the winter monotony of white snow.

I haven’t been very inspired by the political news lately.  Everything seems to be about the 2020 election.  Seems a little early for everything to grind to a halt.  I’m sure something will break soon.  Mueller for instance.  But I did find myself thinking about who the actual Dem candidate would be.  For all the talk about women of color, I think the candidate will be either Creepy Uncle Joe or Bernie Sanders.  But without a doubt the VP will be Kamala Harris.  She’s the female Obama and needs the grooming for her own run in the future.

Either way it should be an hilarious campaign.  The debates should be the stuff of legend, a veritable blooper reel of comic goodness.

It’s been insanely busy at work so things have had to slow down on the site.

 

post script:  First tests using the Orion 10010 Atlas Pro AZ/EQ-G Computerized GoTo Telescope Mount with my Sony A7 III and the 90mm f\2.8 macro lens were very promising.  With only the minimum of calibrating the polar axis 30 second shots were completely usable.  But I can tell the post processing stuff will be an enormous learning curve.  This will be a very long story.  I’ll revisit this in late spring.

 

Reflections on the Political Landscape

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A while back I put Colin Woodward’s book, “American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America,” in my wish list based on the Z-Man’s description of its importance.  I’m about twenty percent into it and I’ve got an idea of where it is going.  I also can tell that Woodward is a thorough going lefty but that there is a lot of useful information in the book.  The beginning of the book describes the origins of the various “nations” that he contends still underly the current political and cultural reality of the United States and its surroundings in North America.

As I said, there is a lot of slant to his description of the character of the various populations and you can tell where his sympathies lie and who he is virtue signaling to but there is also valuable information that actually helps to explain some general behaviors that can be observed at work today.

For example, Woodward waxes poetic about the New England characteristic of local autonomy and small-town democracy.  This is presented as a contrast to the feudal rule of aristocratic Virginia where great landowners lorded it over the common men and monopolized the government and the courts.  Supposedly this is still the reality today.  But anyone living in New England knows that any community that imposed any policies out of synch with the smothering regulation existing at the state level would be assaulted with the full force of the state’s judicial and administrative might and quickly the offenders would find themselves in prison and their families dispossessed and harassed out of the state.

One of the features of New England was its early adoption of universal education and the establishment of higher education as the basis of elite status.  This is also touted as a democratic virtue as opposed to the wealth-based basis of education in Virginia.  Looking at the present day it’s instructive to see that the educational situation is much changed.  The educational state of the poor even in New England has degraded to the point where claiming universal education is very debatable.  And the status of higher education has likewise changed to the point where elite status is more of a legacy condition than any kind of meritocratic status.  In other words, the state and poorer colleges have been degraded to where their degrees are approaching a worthless status whereas the high-status Ivy League schools are the domain of elite families and the affirmative action minorities that they include for the sake of appearances.

What seem to be happening is that the supposed egalitarian impulses of the New England nation and their descendants in the other Left dominated areas of the country have abandoned the pretense of equality and now embrace the model of an elect elite directing the lives of the rest of society as some sort of latter-day serfdom.  This conforms more closely to the Marxist model than any puritan world view.  And this of course makes sense.  As the New Englanders shed their Christianity, they reached out for what replaced it in their environment, the fashionable socialism of nineteenth century intellectuals.

I’ll have a full review at some point and other discussions of the ideas and the applications of these ideas to the present condition we find ourselves in.  Z-Man was right. There is useful information in this book overlaid with leftist smugness.