Thanks to Marilyn W.!
By David Horsey Seattle Times cartoonist
Washington, Oregon and California have banded together to coordinate policies for dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, as have states in the Northeast. Meanwhile, several states in the South and the Mountain West have gone rogue, relaxing social distancing rules and allowing massage parlors, barbershops, bowling alleys and beaches to open up for business.
It is easy to interpret these contrasting approaches merely as red states and blues states running off in predictably opposite directions. However, the way regions of the country have responded differently to the current national health crisis may be evidence of enduring cultural values that go far deeper — as far back as the first colonies in North America and even to the English Civil War.
In his 2011 book, “American Nations: A History of the Eleven Regional Cultures of North America,” journalist and historian Colin Woodard notes that the United States is not just one big, homogenous cultural lump. Similarly, journalist Joel Garreau wrote in “The Nine Nations of North America,” the continent could easily be divided into nine distinct countries, including a cohesive coastal society running from San Francisco up through Seattle to Vancouver and beyond. Garreau called that elongated land Ecotopia. Woodard identifies the same area as the Left Coast, but he takes his premise beyond Garreau’s observations into recurring patterns of history.
Woodard’s central premise is that the founding cultures that colonized North America have not vanished in the American melting pot. By his reckoning, the diverse philosophies and ways of organizing society that guided European settlers as they established communities in the New World still drive powerful undercurrents in our fractured federation.