18 Quotes by Colin Woodard

I am an aristocrat," Virginian John Randolph would explain decades after the American Revolution. "I love liberty; I hate equality.

Other sovereign democratic states have central governments more corrupted other than our own, but most can fall back on unifying elements we lack: common ethnicity, a shared religion, or near-universal consensus on many fundamental political issues. The United States needs its central government to function cleanly, openly, and efficiently because it's one of the few things binding us together.

Culture is always on the move.

The Inuit language has no difference between he or she, or between mankind and animal,” she adds. “They’re all equal.”5.

Most Americans know the Dutch founded what is now Greater New York City. Few realize that their influence is largely the reason New York is New York, the most vibrant and powerful city on the continent, and one with a culture and identity unlike that of anyplace else in the United States.

Since 1877 the driving force of American politics hasn’t primarily been a class struggle or tension between agrarian and commercial interests, or even between competing partisan ideologies, although each has played a role. Ultimately the determinative political struggle has been a clash between shifting coalitions of ethnoregional nations, one invariably headed by the Deep South, the other by Yankeedom.

But what would cause Yankeedom eventually to be so loathed by the other nations was its desire – indeed, its mission – to impose its ways on everyone else. For the Puritans didn’t merely believe they were God’s chosen people, they believed God had charged each and every one of them to propagate his will on a corrupt and sinful world.

Deep Southerners assumed Appalachia would rally to the Confederacy because of a shared doctrine of white supremacy. Instead, Borderlanders did as they always had: they took up arms against whatever enemy they felt was the greatest threat, and fought ferociously against them. To the planters’ shock, most Appalachian people regarded them as a greater threat to their liberty than the Yankees.

The Midland Midwest would develop as a center of moderation and tolerance, where people of many faiths and ethnicities lived side by side, largely minding their own business.