A new map categorizes American Nations according to the cultural emphasis placed on communitarianism or individualism, which has been shown to have massive extensive effects on policy, politics, and human outcomes
By Colin Woodard
Readers of my fifth book, American Character: A History of the Epic Struggle Between Individual Liberty and the Common Good, will be familiar with my argument that one of the central contentions in American history and politics has been about how best to execute the American Experiment in trying to create a society where all individuals can be sustainably free. Do you emphasize individual liberty – as the Scots-Irish-inflected warrior culture of Greater Appalachia does — or the common good – as did the Puritans, with their belief that they were in a Old Testament style covenant with God and tasked to build a more Godly society on the American frontier?
In other words, is freedom ultimately about maximizing the autonomy of the individual, about personal sovereignty and a lack of restraints – especially (but not exclusively) from government? If we had less government, less taxes, and less regulation, is it not axiomatic that each of us would be more free?
Or is it that freedom is about building and maintaining the infrastructure and institutions of a free society, the schools and parks, roads and bridges, public universities, libraries, and clinics, that act as the leveling mechanism to ensure each person has a fair shot at achieving their potential, of being meaningfully free, regardless of the circumstances of their birth? Is it a shared endeavor, a social project, a cultivation of a Republican citizenry?
The answer, laid out in American Character, is that an optimally functioning liberal democracy maintains a balance between these two essential forces of freedom, to have them in equilibrium. Because if you run to the extremes in either direction, you end up in tyranny: oligarchy in one direction, Orwell in the other. You are maximally and sustainably free when you hit the sweet spot between them, but every country’s sweet spot is different. Japan’s will be more communitarian than Australia’s. But our problem as Americans is compounded by the fact that the regional cultures disagree on the balance point or, in some cases, whether there should be balance at all.
The map at the top of this post shows how the centuries-old dominant cultural values and assumptions of the American Nations regions track on this fundamental philosophical orientation toward liberal democracy. In shades of purple you’ll see the individualistic regions – Deep South, Greater Appalachia, Far West, legacy Tidewater – and, in shades of green, the communitarian ones – Yankeedom, New Netherland, Midlands, Left Coast, El Norte. They are further subdivided into aggressively communitarian and aggressively individualistic cultures — which put a strong emphasis on these distinctions — and the passively communitarian and passively individualistic ones, which lean in one direction or the other, but are less dogmatic about how these principles are executed.
These differences between the regional cultures have had profound ramifications for a wide range of policy issues, human outcomes, and our country’s stability. It was the central orientation of our federal politics — up until 2016 anyway — and it was the main force behind devastating regional differences in gun control and gun deaths, COVID-19 compliance, vaccines, and deaths, and a wide range of health outcomes, as shown in dozens of peer-reviewed academic papers I’ve co-authored with Nico Pronk, CEO of HealthPartners Institute, Ross Arena of the University of Illinois Chicago and a rotating cast of experts in various fields.
As discussed in my most recent book, Nations Apart: How Clashing Regional Cultures Shattered America, the data is clear: the aggressively individualistic cultures have populations who are poorer, less healthy, less healthy, shorter-lived, more indebted, less economically mobile, have less social capital and are more likely to be shot to death than those of the big, aggressively communitarian cultures. (Curiously, the passively individualistic and passively communitarian cultures sometimes perform best of all on one metric or another, and sometimes worst.) This indicates that the whole country would be better served — and more free — if our policies shifted toward providing more public goods, because even our most communitarian region (the Left Coast) has clearly not yet reached the tipping point that other countries — the Soviet Union and its satellites being one extreme but very real example — have exceeded in the past. For a discussion of what this might look like in practice, consider this 2023 essay in the Washington Monthly.