Colin Woodard

When discussing North American regionalism one is bound, sooner or later, to explore the stark division of the country between Waffle House and IHOP restaurants, two franchises whose territories almost never overlap. Yesterday over at the Washington Post’s The Fix, Chris Cillizza obliged, demonstrating with state-level data that Waffle Houses are concentrated in states won […]

A couple of weeks ago I wrote that the real split in the Virginia governor’s race – and in opinion toward the Tea Party – is between the section of the state dominated by the centuries-old culture of Greater Appalachia and that of the Tidewater. Those – and nine other dominant regional cultures – are […]

To the surprise of nobody, Republican Chris Christie was reelected governor of New Jersey in a landslide Tuesday. Commentators have rightly observed that a relative moderate like Christie can do for Republicans what the Tea Party never will: win in a “blue” state. Or, more accurately, Christie showed how Republicans can be competitive within the […]

For two years now, I’ve been arguing in this space, in the pages of the Monthly, and elsewhere, that the Tea Party was doomed on the national stage because it’s agenda is anathema to the cultural traditions of vast swaths of the country. Instead, it would become isolated in the South and interior West, the […]

In my book, American Nations, I argue that we’re not one country, but several, and have been since the colonial era. We may be bound up in a generally successful federation, but our greatest internal crises – the Civil War, the corrosive effects of Jim Crow, the recent threat of federal default – have been […]

Outside the Deep South, Appalachia and interior West, the Tea Party is over.

In February, the political establishment here in Maine was rocked by Sen. Olympia’s Snowe’s late and entirely surprising announcement that she would not seek reelection. The Senate, she said, had become a frustrating place, where “an atmosphere of polarization and ‘my way or the highway’ ideologies has become pervasive in campaigns and in our governing […]

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 […]

A remarkable thing happened last Tuesday. The Republican Party was virtually extinguished from the land of its birth. I’m speaking of Yankeedom, a great swath of the country from Maine to Minnesota that was effectively colonized by New England Puritans and their descendants. This cultural region – one of eleven that make up our continent […]