The dispute over the result of the 2020 presidential election and the storming of the Capitol in January 2021 were emblematic scenes of America's political division. Conflicts over abortion rights, immigration, gun control and gender issues have continued, deepening the fractures in American society. In a poll conducted in early 2024, one in four American adults said they would support their state seceding from the United States.
The author, a scholar of American national identity and North American regionalism, argues that trying to understand U.S. politics and the history of its divisions through political parties is a futile exercise. The ideologies, policy platforms and regional bases of the Republican and Democratic parties have in fact flipped since the 1960s. As recently as 1916, the Republican Party championed communitarianism and civil rights, while the Democratic Party backed white supremacy and racial segregation.
What the author identifies as the cause of America's polarized politics and ideological wars is regional culture. He writes that the United States was never a country with a single identity to begin with, and that several Americas with different cultural backgrounds have coexisted. In the early days of the North American colonies, settlers arriving from Britain, France, the Netherlands, Spain and elsewhere built distinct regional cultures based on their own institutions and values, and those cultures persist today.
The author divides the United States into nine regional cultures: Yankeedom, New Netherland, the Midlands, Tidewater, Greater Appalachia, the Deep South, El Norte, the Left Coast and the Far West. He then sorts them into four types — aggressive and passive individualism, aggressive and passive communitarianism — according to how each views the individual versus the group and liberalism versus communitarianism.
Drawing on research in history, political science and sociology, along with polling data, the author analyzes how regional culture shapes major issues in American society today. Gun deaths are a prime example. The Deep South, settled by English slaveholders, had the highest rate at 15.6 gun deaths per 100,000 people. Yankeedom, founded by Puritans along Massachusetts Bay, had 8.6, the second-lowest after New Netherland. The author points to the strong hold of a "culture of honor" in the Deep South, where failing to answer an insult is seen as a loss of honor. Puritans, by contrast, prized self-examination and self-restraint, and believed God would not countenance revenge.
Regional culture also affects Americans' health and life expectancy. The worst performers on life expectancy and other health measures were the Deep South and Greater Appalachia, where aggressive individualism runs strong. In Greater Appalachia, settled in the early 18th century by Scots-Irish fleeing war, a culture that places extreme value on individual liberty took root. The author argues this is the result of elites in these regions turning away from investment in public services such as health care and sanitation over centuries in order to keep taxes low and labor cheap.
Differences in values rooted in regional culture have emerged as a force deepening U.S. political polarization, coinciding with the rise of Donald Trump. Trump won Greater Appalachia by 25 percentage points and the Deep South by 9 percentage points in the 2016 presidential election. Both regions are strongholds of the white evangelical churches that form his core base of support.
To overcome America's divisions and close regional gaps, the author stresses, the country must move away from excessive individualism toward a society that values communal solidarity and shared prosperity. He writes that "from gun violence to life expectancy, from poverty prevention and social resilience to climate change and diabetes prevention, to the question of defending the republic from authoritarians and fascists, a people aggressively pursuing individualism have turned in dismal results over the past 250 years and have repeatedly created the conditions to destroy the American experiment." He adds that "paradoxically, a culture that worships individual freedom has driven us to the brink of tyranny."
448 pages, 26,000 won.