Colin Woodard (47 page)

 

But if the Northern alliance and Dixie bloc have stood in near-constant monolithic opposition to each other, what accounts for the shift in power over the years? The answer: the behavior of the three “swing” nations.

Neither of the continent's superpower blocs has ever truly dominated the U.S. government without first winning the backing of at least two of the swing nations: the Midlands, El Norte, and the Far West. From 1877 to 1933 the Northern alliance controlled the federation with the support of the Far West and the Midlands. The era of Dixie ascendancy and dominance—1980 to 2008—was founded upon an alliance with the Far West and the Midlands, and on the presidential bids of conservative Anglos from El Norte: Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan. Even in periods when neither bloc was truly dominant, governing majorities were created through intranational alliances: between Dixie, New Netherland, and the Midlands in the New Deal Era; between the northern nations and Appalachian progressives in the 1960s; and between El Norte, Tidewater, and the Northern alliance in the election of Barack Obama.

What, then, are the three swing nations' priorities?

The Midlands is the most philosophically autonomous of the nations, for centuries leery of both meddlesome, messianic Yankees and authoritarian Dixie zealots. Midlanders share the Yankees' identification with middle-class society, the Borderlanders' distrust of government intrusion, the New Netherlanders' commitment to cultural pluralism, and the Deep South's aversion to strident activism. It's truly a middle-of-the-road American society and, as such, has rarely sided unambiguously with one coalition, candidate, or movement. When it has—for FDR in the 1930s, Reagan in the 1980s, or Obama in 2008—it has been at a time of profound national stress and in reaction to perceived excess. It's no accident that the Midlands straddle—but do not control—many of the key “battleground states” at the turn of the millennium: Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, and Missouri. Its modern presidents, Truman and Eisenhower, were both “compromise candidates” who were able to defuse intrabloc rivalries to win the White House for one party or the other.

By contrast, the Far West's agenda has been clear: to escape the colonial domination of the Northern alliance while maintaining the stream of federal subsidies upon which its way of life was built. In the late nineteenth century, Far Western congressional representatives voted in lockstep with the Northern alliance because they were bought and paid for by Yankee- , New York–, or San Francisco–based railroad, mining, ranching, and timber interests. But during the New Deal, World War II, and the Cold War, federal government spending transformed the region via the creation of airports, highways, dams, irrigation and water transfer projects, research laboratories, military bases, academies, research institutes, and a profusion of defense industry plants. The nation developed homegrown industrial and agricultural interests, senators with local power bases, and an agenda set in Las Vegas, Phoenix, and Denver rather than New York, Cleveland, and Chicago.
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As a result, since 1968 it has aligned itself with the Dixie bloc out of a shared interest in gelding federal regulatory power for the benefit of large corporate interests. From its emergence in the 1880s until 1968, the Far West's presidential vote reflected that of the Northern alliance in nearly every election. From 1968 to 2004 it almost always voted for the candidate favored by the Dixie bloc, except when Dixie has spurned a conservative in favor of a liberal Southerner. In the same period, its congressional representatives sided with their Deep Southern counterparts to pass tax cuts, oppose health care and financial reform, and roll back environmental regulations. Its affinity with Dixie is limited, however, as its people have a strong libertarian streak that balks at restrictions on dissent and civil liberties. In the 2008 election, fault lines began to appear in the Dixie–Far West partnership, with Colorado and Nevada voting for the northern candidate (Obama) over a Far Western native son who chose to run on a Dixie platform (John McCain); Republican support had ebbed in nearly every county in the region, leaving McCain with a thin margin of victory even in “ultraconservative” Montana.

In the future, however, the balance of power will be largely shaped by the affinities of the rapidly growing, increasingly assertive Hispanics of El Norte. Until the second half of the twentieth century, the other nations generally ignored El Norte, a national culture that controlled no state governments and was assumed to be on the road to extinction, its various elements absorbed into the Far West, Greater Appalachia, and the Deep South.
Norteños
—isolated in enclaves in the Far West and marginalized by the racial caste system in the border states under Dixie control—were expected to go quietly the way of the American Indians.

But
norteños
began reasserting control over the political and cultural life of New Mexico, south Texas, and southern Arizona, and making deep inroads in Southern California. They've elected their own to city halls from San Antonio to Los Angeles, the governorship of New Mexico, the U.S. Congress, and the U.S. Senate seats for New Mexico and Colorado. As discussed in chapter 23, their numbers have increased rapidly both in raw totals and percentage of the federation's population, triggering talk of a
reconquista
of land lost after the Mexican-American War. Already the largest U.S. minority, Hispanics of all origins are expected to account for a quarter of the federation's population by 2025. In 2010,
norteños
already constituted a majority in Los Angeles, San Antonio, and El Paso and a plurality in the state of New Mexico. Some observers believe that, if Mexico were to break up, several of its northern states might seek annexation or political affiliation with the United States, further increasing El Norte's influence and prestige within the federation. The bloc that wins the allegiance of El Norte stands to control American affairs.
¹⁰

For 150 years the Dixie bloc has done itself few favors in neglecting to win
norteño
hearts and minds. The Deep South's caste system and Appalachia's commitment to white supremacy led to the oppression and alienation of
Tejanos
and New Mexico Hispanos. Anglo colonists in Arizona and southern California—a majority of whom hailed from Dixie and have voted for Dixie candidates—didn't go out of their way to integrate Spanish-speaking people into politics and society while they were in power. As a result, El Norte's activists and political leaders have aligned themselves with northerners while its electorate has voted with Yankeedom in every presidential election since 1988. With Dixie and Far Western populists railing against the dangers of Mexican immigration, El Norte can be expected to back the Northern bloc for some time to come.

 

Finally, let's step back for a little perspective.

Consider for a moment what U.S. politics and society might be like if the Dixie bloc never existed, or if the Confederacy had peacefully seceded in 1861. You don't have to stretch your imagination, because this very scenario has been playing out north of the U.S. border.

Canada, created in 1867, is a federation composed of a slightly different mix of nations than the United States. To the east are Canada's older English-speaking societies—the Yankee Maritimes—and New France. In the center are Midland-settled southern Ontario and Manitoba, with their pluralistic and pacifistic leanings, home to both the federal capital, Ottawa, and Canada's most important city, Toronto. Beyond the 100th meridian the Far West spreads across the border, carrying libertarian thought and the extractive economy through much of Saskatchewan, Alberta, and interior British Columbia, and on into southern parts of the Yukon and Northwest Territories. British Columbia's Pacific coast is an extension of the Left Coast, with environmentally conscious, socially liberal Vancouver and Victoria identifying more closely with their neighbors on Puget Sound and the Olympic Peninsula than with the right-leaning energy magnates over the mountains in Calgary.

Anglo Canadians often complain that they lack a shared cultural identity other than “not being American,” and there is some basis for that. English-speaking Canada is really four nations—five, if you count the British Isles' lost colony of Newfoundland, whose people still say they are “going to Canada” when they board ferries to the mainland. As in the United States, the Yanks, Midlanders, and Left Coasters get along fairly well, supporting national health care, gun control, and multiculturalism. All experience friction with the Far West, which was the stronghold of the Reform Party, which sought to reduce taxes, regulations, and the size and scope of federal services while championing agribusiness, free trade, and the oil, gas, and oil shale industries. (It merged with the Conservatives in 2000, and at this writing has one of its own, Stephen Harper of Calgary, leading the country as prime minister.) After the divisive 2000 U.S. election, a map started circulating on the Internet dividing the continent into two countries, “the United States of Canada” and “Jesusland.” Within days, a Canadian wag had added a third country, “Alberta,” suggesting the depth of the philosophical divide between the Far West and other parts of Canada.

As discussed in chapter 13, the nations in Canada had limited control over their own destinies during the century after the American Revolution, a period when British aristocrats in imperial service governed. This altered the course of their development, preventing the spread of strong town governments in the Maritimes, for example. But what has really made Canada fundamentally different from the United States is that the four Anglo nations squared off not against an authoritarian, white supremacist Dixie bloc but rather against an extremely open-minded, socially relaxed, socialist-minded society founded on unusually enlightened ideas about race and multiculturalism.

Comparative early-twenty-first-century sociological surveys have found that New France is the most postmodern nation in North America. It is the region with the lowest proportion of people who believe in the devil (29 percent) and hell (26 percent). Asked if they agreed that the “father of the family must be master in his own house,” only 15 percent of Québécois said yes, compared with 21 percent of Far Western Canadians, 29 percent of New Englanders, and 71 percent of respondents in Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee. Another academic pollster found them to be more tolerant of homosexuality, extramarital affairs, prostitution, abortion, divorce, and having neighbors with AIDS, large families, drug problems, or emotional instability. Québec, one scholar found, was the region of North America with the highest degree of enlightened individualism and the least respect for traditional forms of authority. (British Columbia and New England were its closest rivals in this regard, Dixie states its polar opposite.) Montréal, New France's metropolis, reflects many of these attitudes, combining “the tolerance of Amsterdam, the élan of Paris, and the fine dining of the San Francisco Bay” with a large bohemian quarter (the Plateau) reminiscent of the Greenwich Village of old. While the Dixie bloc pulls the U.S. federation hard to the right, New France pulls Canada well to the left.
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Champlain's legacy has also, via New France, enabled Canada to build a remarkably successful multicultural society since the cultural revolution of the 1960s. French and English have equal standing in the federation, of course, and Québec has been recognized as a “separate society” and allowed to conduct its affairs entirely in French. But its multiculturalism extends beyond that to the Canadians' attitudes toward its Native American peoples, many of whom have been able to maintain their cultural distinctiveness, language, and customs, even passing some on to Canadian society at large. Due to New France's benign attitude toward Indians, many northern tribes are now reclaiming sovereignty over what amounts to a majority of the Canadian landmass and spurring the emergence of the largest nation of them all.

 

I
f the power struggles among the nations have profoundly shaped North America's history over the past four centuries, what might they hold for us in the future? Will the political map of the continent in the year 2100 look the same as it did in 1900 or 2000? Will it still be divided into three enormous political federations, or will it have morphed into something else: a Balkanized collection of nation-states along the lines of twentieth-century Europe; a loose E.U.-style confederation of sovereign nation-states stretching from Monterrey, Mexico, to the Canadian Arctic; a unitary state run according to biblical law as interpreted by the spiritual heirs of Jerry Falwell; a postmodernist utopian network of semisovereign, self-sustaining agricultural villages freed by technological innovations from the need to maintain larger governments at all? No one, if he or she is being both thoughtful and honest, has any idea.

What can be said is this: given the challenges facing the United States, Mexico, and, to a lesser extent, Canada, to assume that the continent's political boundaries will remain as they were in 2010 seems as farfetched as any of these other scenarios.

At this writing the United States appears to be losing its global preeminence and has been exhibiting the classic symptoms of an empire in decline. Kevin Phillips—the political strategist who, back in 1969, used regional ethnography to accurately predict the following forty years of American political development—has pointed out the parallels between late imperial Holland, Britain, and the present-day United States. Like its superpower predecessors, the United States has built up a staggering external trade deficit and sovereign debt while overreaching itself militarily and greatly increasing both the share of financial services in national output and the role of religious extremists in national political life. Once the great exporter of innovations, products, and financial capital, the United States is now deeply indebted to China, on which it relies for much of what its people consume and, increasingly, for the scientists and engineers needed by research and development firms and institutions. Its citizenry is deeply divided along regional lines, with some in the “Tea Party” movement adopting the rhetoric of the eighteenth-century Yankee minutemen, only with the British Parliament replaced by the federal Congress, and George III by their duly elected president. Its military has been mired in expensive and frustrating counterinsurgency wars in Mesopotamia and Central Asia, while barbarians have stormed the gates of its political and financial capitals, killing thousands in the surprise attacks of September 2001. Add in the damage to public confidence in the electoral system caused by the 2000 election, the near-total meltdown of the financial sector in 2008, and extreme political dysfunction in the Capitol, and it's clear the United States has not started the century auspiciously.