In Washington Monthly, Nationhood Lab director Colin Woodard discusses how core value archetypes are maldistributed across U.S. regional cultures
At Washington Monthly, Nationhood Lab director Colin Woodard shared the results of new research showing the underlying value sets and moral foundations of Americans are distributed differently across U.S. regional cultures.
The online piece described the new research published Nov. 16 that looked at how the civic research group More in Common’s widely used Hidden Tribes are distributed in each of the regions described in Woodard’s 2011 history, American Nations. The data revealed that the most liberal segment of the U.S. electorate is proportionally three times larger in the Left Coast region than it is in the Deep South, while the farthest right segment is substantially larger in the Deep South (at 8%) and Greater Appalachia (7%) than in the “blue” regions of Yankeedom, New Netherland, Left Coast, El Norte and Tidewater, where they comprise about 5% of the population.
The analysis also showed that Tidewater — the Chesapeake low country – is now the second most liberal of the regional cultures as the decomposition of the legacy culture of that region described in American Nations continues. “This is a truly astounding shift in historical terms—from the capital of an ethnonationalist, white supremacist regime to a liberal stronghold—and one that seems to be accelerating with time,” Woodard wrote.
The research was conducted in collaboration with More in Common – U.S. which allowed Nationhood Lab to query MiC’s pollsters at YouGov to obtain the relevant data on the geographic distribution of the 8000 Hidden Tribes respondents. The online piece appeared at Washington Monthly‘s website Thanksgiving morning.
Nationhood Lab, a project at Salve Regina University’s Pell Center, examines regional issues in American life and is developing and testing a revised civic national story for the 21st century United States tied to the ideals in the Declaration.