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<\/a>We’re Here. This is our new home!<\/p><\/div>\n
These distinctive shared cultures, because they are driven by shared dynamic drivers, can be mapped out geographically. They produce sexy colored maps, usually with counties as the unit of analysis, which allow each economic developer to easily locate themselves and then to perhaps understand how these cultures affect them. But be careful! The maps are what the Curmudgeon calls “heuristic”, i.e. useful; they are not the inspired word of God and should not be interpreted as a\u00a0definitive and timeless description of the attitudes, values and expectations of every blessed soul in the county. What the maps do say is that the mapmaker believes that at critical times, in some manner, these bottom line attitudes, values, and expectations, shared as they are by the bulk of that county’s population will manifest themselves, and raising their ugly head will somehow inflict themselves upon economic development policy-making and implementation. It is also to be expected that different demographics within the county will embrace the culture with varying intensity–and some demographics will outright reject the dominant culture.<\/p>\n
Be careful then not to set up a straw man when one uses culture. Understanding culture is meant to be helpful, not a complete explanation of everyone’s actual behavior. Remember, it tries to get at what people are “thinking”, and what values they hold most dear. How these people actually act or vote can be more idiosyncratic, and being cross-pressured by other forces they may act in ways counter to what they think and want. Imagine that? Culture is often a fuzzy concept, it has a strong emotional core,\u00a0and don’t ever expect high culture\u00a0R squared correlations with anything. But the thing about culture is that it is deeply held, surprisingly hard to change, and over the long run tends to set the tone and the character of public policy making in that community.<\/p>\n
OUR FIRST BRUSH WITH CULTURE: INTRODUCING POLITICAL CULTURE<\/h2>\n
Over the years a number of sociologists and political scientists (not economists) have tried to understand culture and its affect on individual behavior, institutional values,\u00a0and political action.\u00a0The Curmudgeon wants to spare the reader from a more or less tedious summary and instead will focus or a more or less tedious subset of this literature: public policy-making\u00a0(a branch of political science). For public policy scholars\u00a0a phenomena\u00a0 they label political culture (which includes just about any attitude, value, or shared historical experience which can affect political behavior) has always been important to understanding the development and implementation of any public policy, including economic development.<\/p>\n
We have selected a\u00a0work of very recent vintage which is one of the latest academically acclaimed\u00a0books using American political culture. Its merit to us is that it makes the argument that the political cultures of our earliest colonial immigrants still exists to this very day, and it very much affects institutional and political behavior of its members. This is wild. Are we still voting as Benjamin Franklin did? Do we expect government, and economic development to resemble colonial and early American Republic politics? Tea Party to the contrary, this seems like quite a leap.<\/p>\n
<\/a>I cannot tell a lie. I voted for Reagan!<\/p><\/div>\n
American Nations makes that leap, whether you accept it or not. In explaining its position American Nations outlines eleven distinctive political cultures which the author believes existed and still exist. In so doing, he introduces us to many sub-concepts and relationships which help us to better understand culture and how it can last over surprisingly long time frames-even across massive economic change such as the Industrial Revolution. Our take on American Nations will depart from its current description of American politics and instead acknowledge on the inertia or durability of culture expressed in our political institutions, especially State Constitutions and municipal and county charters.<\/p>\n
Our current economic development obsession with economics and regional economies simply ignores or even depreciates the notions that (1) fragmented, parochial communities and their residents\u00a0matter (2) and that differences among and within these communities matters equally little to economic developers or economic development.<\/p>\n
To be sure, economists agree that each economic region is in its own way different in its configuration of clusters, industries, sectors, and value chains. But these sectoral differences pale in significance to the economic reality that they all share a common goal–economic growth expressed in jobs created and the macro-economic, mega city\u00a0environment pervading all economic regions equally\u00a0is a shared third wave, knowledge and information based era and the best, dare we say universal magic bullet for economic developers to create these jobs in such an age is technological growth, productivity, innovation and entrepreneurship–all of which rests upon a set of skills (and even lifestyle values) which are required.These economic regions, however, are\u00a0composed of good folk, not full time economists, and these good folk do not think solely in economic terms,\u00a0or draw exclusively on\u00a0economic values and assumptions.<\/p>\n
Instead, oh most horrible to relate, these economic regions contain (1) antagonistic populations, bickering within inefficient and economically meaningless boundaries, (2) bearing longstanding divisive historical and cultural baggage (including a 150 year old civil war, massively different ethnic\/racial migrations and immigrations, and recent regional population shifts), (3) are composed of distinctive combinations of demographic\/social (and yes, even economic groupings) which value different things and advocate for substantially different economic and political programs, and work out of different types of economic development organizations. Even if they allegedly all profess agreement with the goal to secure meaningful employment, the residents of economic regions (4) define meaningful employment differently and use different tools, strategies and concepts to obtain it. All this dysfunction is just not very relevant to an economics-based perspective in that sound thinking folks should understand the underlying correctness of the economic models and correlations and simply faithfully execute the correct programs which will inevitably be required if their community, region, is to compete in this era of global competitiveness. How can rational thinking folk think otherwise?<\/p>\n
Well, it should be pretty evident to anybody that works in economic development that they do. And perhaps it’s time to put down the professional blinders and look outside our office windows at the folks passing by. The reality is that our profession confronts all this internal economic regional dysfunction on a daily basis, and moreover economic developers are themselves probably lined up on one side or another of the cultural landscape. Certainly, it is a sure bet the citizens and politicians, who directly or indirectly sign their paycheck, or awards those grants and contracts,\u00a0are players in the cultural wars. Political culture matters to an economic developer!<\/p>\n
AMERICAN NATIONS (and you thought Colonial was a type of housing)<\/h2>\n
On the recent academic best seller list, at least if one correctly judges the publicity and the reviews afforded this work, is Colin Woodard’s, AMERICAN NATIONS, (Viking, 2011). In many ways, American Nations is the latest effort\u00a0in a persistent, and by now relatively longstanding strand of academic\/journalist literature which chronicles the interrelationship of geography and cultural values\/attitudes\/structures on, usually, political phenomena. For instance, economic developers\u00a0may be aware of Joel Garreau’s Nine Nations of North America (and even his more recent Digital Divide). There are tons more out there. Academics will have\u00a0read or heard of\u00a0David Hackett Fisher’s, Albion Seed, or Morris P. Fioria’s, Culture War: the Myth of a Polarized America, and the Curmudgeon’s “cultural bible” Claude Fisher’s, Made in America: A Social History of America’s Culture and Character.<\/p>\n
Politics junkies all speak (or squeak) of Red States and Blue States and some of our readers might remember Kevin Phillip’s works (which Woodard relies on and respects greatly), The\u00a0Emerging Republican Majority. Others, usually of the more liberal persuasion will have read\u00a0Thomas Frank’s, What’s the Matter with Kansas (Holt Paperbacks, 2005), or Bill Bishop’s, the Big Sort, and, of course, Patchwork Nation. The latter two works are the subject of summary articles in this edition of the Journal. A brand new work, and\u00a0already controversial, is Charles Murray’s, Coming Apart: The State of White America, Crown Forum, 2012.<\/p>\n
Economic developers may not have tuned into culture, but the reader must admit, a lot of other bright folks\u00a0have, and it has had considerable impact on the non-economic development world. There are more, lots more, and there will be more in the future, given the fascination with and the enhanced importance of cultural and political polarization and the “sudden” awakening to the ever startling fact that Americans don’t all think alike, that we want and value different things, and in recent years\u00a0have become\u00a0ever more intense about these differences in values and politics.<\/p>\n
A lot!<\/p>\n Ok! Than how does an economic developer understand and deal with these differences that obviously exist and obviously affect his\/her performance and effectiveness? The Curmudgeon thinks American Nations is a good place to start.<\/p>\n First, let the Curmudgeon admit that this article does not intend to provide a complete review or assessment of American Nations. The Curmudgeon will briefly summarize\u00a0Woodard’s main points, but as the reader will quickly discover, the massive detail and the various contemporary\u00a0political assessments Woodard makes are of little relevance to our topic. We are most interested in his conception of how regional cultures first developed in the United States. In this issue of the Journal. we will\u00a0review other works (Patchwork and Big Sort) for our discussion of the contemporary regional cultures.<\/p>\n The question why we divorce ourselves from Woodard’s contemporary cultural\/political\u00a0perspective (regional “coalitions”) stem from our concerns that (1) Woodard is evidently not without his biases–he has been critiqued with good reason as an anti-Southern, Yankee (progressive liberal) and that his comments on the recent past political history, while interesting, are not adequately objective or adequately supported; and (2) that he does not\u00a0properly deal, again in the Curmudgeon’s estimation, with the vital question of how the original colonial and early American regional cultures persist to the present day. The latter is the more important concern relevant to this article.<\/p>\n Woodard’s first nine chapters detail in rather broad strokes, supported with\u00a0sufficient historical background,\u00a0the evolution of eleven distinct North American “nations” (he includes Canada and northern Mexico, but interestingly not Hawaii or Alaska). He “very consciously used the term ‘nations’ to describe these regional cultures” because previous to the formation of our present constitutional republic in 1789, “each had long exhibited the characteristics of nationhood”. (P.3) He defends his use of “nation” by defining a nation “as a group of people who share–or believe they share– a common culture, ethnic origin, language, historical experience, artifacts and symbols…. North America’s eleven nations are all stateless (they do not possess a sovereign policy entity (government))” (p.3-4) Intellectual distinctions aside, whether we call these eleven geographical regions “nations” or “regional cultures” is not something the reader should get hung up about.<\/p>\n I need to sign the State Constitution. Do you have a Penn?<\/p><\/div>\n These eleven nations are entitled: Yankeedom, New Netherlands, the Midlands, Tidewater, Greater Appalachia, the Deep South, New France, El Norte, the Left Coast, the Far West, and the First Nation (which could include Alaska).\u00a0These “nations” will form coalitions with each other and for a time each will dominate or significantly affect\u00a0national politics for a period of time. The core of Woodard’s argument is that various\u00a0\u00a0 coalitions fo these eleven nations have been the\u00a0catalyst\u00a0for much of American national politics and Presidential elections. Indeed, the rivalry between Yankeedom and the Deep South (which to the Curmudgeon’s surprise really seems to have been important to understanding the Civil War and Reconstruction–sarcasm folks) is both long-standing and pervasive and almost a permanent feature of our politics.<\/p>\n These nine chapters are very interesting reading and are the best part of the book. As a “degreed”, but amateur historian (who\u00a0 currently teaches undergraduate history), the Curmudgeon, for what it’s worth, believes Woodard’s history is more or less pretty accurate (yes, inevitable mistakes, but not consequential) and although told in rather broad sweeps and some generalization, his analysis and description offer considerable value and understanding to the non-history major.\u00a0Woodard really does describe the American colonial period best\u00a0and the early American Republic\u00a0accurately and realistically.<\/p>\n Given that the underlying detail of American colonial history is virtually\u00a0left out of the\u00a0high school curriculum, and most college courses for that matter, many readers will be surprised at the picture drawn by Woodard of these early periods. Our early history is far different than most Americans think it was, in that it has been reduced to myths, holidays, and anecdotal stories, without a cohesive and integrated overview. Americans should understand the roots of their Nation and Woodard’s American Nations offers a wonderful and enlightening perspective that in the main can be relied upon-certainly for a US History 101, less so for US History 102. In short an economic developer could do worse than better understanding his nation (and region’s) early history.<\/p>\n An economic developer can\u00a0draw from these nine chapters how eleven distinctive political and cultural regions formed over time, then spread across the continental USA.\u00a0He even has a map in which you can locate your county. Suffice it to say, if we follow Woodard, there are eleven Americas, not one, and Americans are not all alike, do not think identically, or want the same things. As to the\u00a0so-called nationalization of American culture, he offers that “Few (researchers) have shown any indication that they (the eleven nations) are melting into some sort of unified American culture. On the contrary, since 1960 the fault lines between these nations have been growing wider, fueling culture wars, constitutional struggles, and ever more frequent pleas for unity”.(P.3)<\/p>\n So what are these eleven nations and\u00a0how do they differ? Focusing on the more geographically dominant\u00a0nations, and employing Woodard’s own words, we briefly summarize each region’s key and distinctive values and perspectives. THE DEEP SOUTH— “founded by Barbados slave lords as a West Indies-style slave society so cruel and despotic that it shocked even its seventeenth-century English contemporaries”, a “bastion of white supremacy, aristocratic privilege, and a version of classical Republicanism modeled on the slave states of the ancient world, where democracy was the privilege of the few and enslavement the natural lot of the many…. a one-party entity where race remains the primary determinant of one’s political What’s For Supper?<\/p><\/div>\n GREATER APPALACHIA— “founded…by wave upon wave of rough bellicose settlers from war-ravaged borderlands of Northern Ireland, northern England, and the Scottish lowlands …. this culture had formed in a state of near-constant war… fostering a warrior ethnic and a deep commitment to individual liberty and personal sovereignty…. Intensely suspicious of aristocrats and social reformers alike”. (P.8)<\/p>\n THE MIDLANDS— “founded by English Quakers …. Pluralistic and organized around the middle class, the Midlands spawned the culture of Middle America and the Heartland, where ethnic and ideological purity have never been a priority, government has been seen as an unwelcome intrusion and political opinion has been moderate, even apathetic… an ethnic mosaic….society should be organized to benefit ordinary people, but are extremely skeptical of top-down governmental intervention” (P.6-7)<\/p>\n THE LEFT COAST— “originally colonized by two groups: merchants, missionaries, and woodsmen from New England Yankeedom)…and farmers, prospectors, and fur traders from Greater Appalachia….the Left Coast retained a strong strain of New England intellectualism and idealism even as it embraced a culture of individual fulfillment. Today it combines the Yankee faith in good government and social reform with a commitment to individual self-exploration and discovery”. (P.11)<\/p>\n EL NORTE— “Overwhelmingly Hispanic, it has long been a hybrid between Anglo- and Spanish America, with an economy oriented toward the United States rather than Mexico City….Hispanic language, culture and societal norms dominate…. Split by an increasingly militarized border,… El Norte … resembles Germany during the Cold War.” (P.10-11) By 2050 the Pew Center predicts that Hispanic growth will double and “Much of that growth will take place in El Norte”. (P.11)<\/p>\n THE FAR WEST— “environmental factors truly trumped ethnic ones …. conditions so severe they effectively destroyed those who tried to apply farming and lifestyle techniques … (of) other nations. … couldn’t be effectively colonized without the deployment of vast industrial resources: railroads, heavy mining equipment… dams and irrigation systems…. (hence) colonialization … was facilitated and directed by large corporations … or by the federal government …. settlers were dependent (on corporations and NEW NETHERLAND— “from its start a global commercial trading society: multi-ethnic, multi-religious, speculative, materialistic, and free trading…. where no one ethnic or religious group has ever truly been in charge …. a profound tolerance of diversity and an unflinching to the freedom of inquiry … passed down to us as the Bill of Rights …. its influence over the continent’s media, publishing, fashion and intellectual and economic life is hard to overstate”. (P.6)<\/p>\n The Curmudgeon said Woodard talked in broad strokes and painted with a wide brush and the above descriptions transmit the flavor of what you get in this book. Those of us more anal and detail-oriented are now recovering from stroke or heart seizure induced by\u00a0 these generalizations, stereotypes, and simplifications. But hold on! Let’s give him his historical due and see if these eleven nations, however, charmingly, but with some bias, can be useful constructs to better understand our present local cultures.<\/p>\n So back to Woodard! Each of\u00a0his eleven “nations” is in our terminology a distinctive political (and social\/economic) regional culture. These cultures were all established by the original settlers of the geographic territory–as far back in the case of El Norte to the sixteenth century. For Woodard, the culture, values, perspectives of the original\u00a0settlers persist to the present day. Certainly, all would concede these original cultures are obviously a bit long in the tooth\u00a0by 2012 and one should\u00a0assume that Woodard clearly understands they have adjusted, modernized and\u00a0mutated over the years to accommodate our present day realities. He really does not\u00a0object that current specifics\u00a0are different, that issues change, but he does argue that core values from which we decide current questions\u00a0do not.<\/p>\n So make no mistake, the fundamental thrust, orientation toward politics and priorities of values of each original culture does endure, however modernized, over the years. This constancy in the fundamentals of the original culture of each “nation” must be accepted in order to get the most out of Woodard. We shall deal with this issue of constancy\/durability of the core culture off and on in this article, but our concern with constancy is one, but not the only reason, why we believe American Nations is more useful for US History 101, but less for History 102.<\/p>\n Do we have reverse gears on these things?<\/p><\/div>\n How do the fundamental values, perspectives, orientations of each of the eleven nations survive to the present? Political scientists have for many years messed around with a concept of how\u00a0values and beliefs\u00a0persist across time and spread to new geographies (i.e. population mobility), diffuse into diverse\u00a0demographic groups, and are transferred to younger generations. They entitled this process “political socialization”.<\/p>\n Socialization\u00a0is performed by “agents of socialization” such as parents, schools, churches, government & laws, and the media. The core unit of political socialization is usually the family and through ethnic intermarriage, upbringing by different generations of family members these cultural values are transmitted to young whippersnappers. As a meaningless tangent, now that present society has effectively destroyed the traditonal family,\u00a0political socialization\u00a0should get really interesting in the future. In any case, the gurus of political socialization do have a way to explain and justify durable and persistently held values across both time and geography.<\/p>\n Still most Americans\u00a0probably tend to think in terms of constant change and new “cool and awesome” innovations, a world in which nothing is timeless. Sociologists and political socialization gurus, however,\u00a0when they survey actual real people find much less change, and much more persistence, than our average American would expect. For example, an excellent work by Claude Fisher (a gray hair and dean of American Sociology), Made In America<\/span><\/strong>, University of Chicago Press, 2010, demonstrates rather effectively how constant over time and generations are our values and beliefs. In short, Mr. & Mrs. Reader, take your skepticism\u00a0 regarding the persistence of cultural values down a notch and be more willing to believe, as does Woodard,\u00a0that past values somehow\u00a0persist, largely unseen and unappreciated, but firmly embedded in our mental and political DNA.<\/p>\n But at least two observations can be made before we move on.<\/p>\n Remember that\u00a0Woodard\u00a0writes a chapter on most of these cultures\/nations–and that we have reduced his observations to a handful of descriptive phrases. Woodard does capture real differences that existed in the past and continue to the present. Don’t be quick on the gun because the Curmudgeon himself oversimplified Woodard. Likewise,\u00a0Woodard can explain and account for\u00a0a lot of history with these rather gross, yet plausible,\u00a0overstatements.\u00a0Cut him some slack. The reader ought to bear with\u00a0the fuzziness of the cultural approach, the broad sweeps\u00a0of history. True, those more mathematically inclined\u00a0will be tempted to denounce the\u00a0lack of rigor in the book. and one certainly does wish Woodard had backed some of this up with\u00a0more concrete\u00a0social research and survey data, but that is likely to follow as others test his ideas.<\/p>\n To be sure Woodard does\u00a0pick and choose his\u00a0historical examples and that is always an issue, but the larger problem is that the culture concept seems a poor substitute\u00a0to competing alternative rationality-based economic criteria and methodologies. Culture ignores-semingly defies- specifics;\u00a0culture is\u00a0more like impressionism than landscape art. Its essence is more emotional\u00a0 and\u00a0almost intangible, especially historical cultural analysis. Culture lacks the nail to the wall proof, the statistics, and the data sets. But however warm and fuzzy it may be, cultural analysis does get hold of the soft underside of rationality, a side we “all know exists” but can’t articulate,\u00a0and sometimes\u00a0even\u00a0fear to touch: the irrational or\u00a0the emotional elements of our being that allow us all to divide humanity into in groups and out groups–which separate and bind us from and to ourselves.<\/p>\n The key to our thinking about Woodard’s nations is exposed by our hesitancy to apply him to US History 102. After the Civil War and Reconstruction the USA may have changed its earlier ethnic-based value consensus rather radically. Woodard, of course says no, but there are obvious changes which, to the Curmudgeon at least, need more thought and perhaps some survey research for support.<\/p>\n For instance, ending slavery could and perhaps should have created a 12th nation and,\u00a0if so this new nation has subsequently\u00a0 migrated across and into\u00a0all their other “nations”. Recent immigration from Africa (and Caribbean Hispanics) have added further depth and diversity into the African American nation but also rendered the El Norte Hispanic nation a more complex grouping. Certainly, the massive Southern and East European immigration that poured into Post-1870 America, stopping only in the 1920’s, had to inject Catholicism and Judaism somewhat and somehow into the heretofore exclusive Calvinist and Quaker-inspired nations. Asians now are a rapidly growing demographic. As we proceed through the twentieth century, one has to wonder how all these population and attitudinal shifts imprinted themselves on the early and original American character, and we are unsatisfied with Woodard’s somewhat cavalier treatment of this issue.<\/p>\n Honey, Stop at the next gas station and get directions!<\/p><\/div>\n Woodard argues, but provides little support, that the original eleven nations assimilated these new entries and converted them into the mind frames and mentality of the the original culture. He alludes to a dominant theme in the political socialization literature which emphasizes the human need to conform, to seek security through uniformity, and to satisfy ambitions by joining the dominant culture. Assimilation, Woodard argues, did force modernization and some adjustment in the original cultures of the eleven nations, but left the essential core beliefs, values, perspectives largely unaltered. Hence they persist today and underlie the current national electoral and issue dialogue.<\/p>\n To explain this persistence Woodard employs Wilbur Zelinsky’s 1973 concept: the Doctrine of First Effective Settlement. “Whenever an empty territory undergoes settlement, or an earlier population is dislodged by invaders, the specific characteristics of the first group (are) able to affect a viable, self-perpetuating society of crucial significance for the later social and cultural geography of the area, no matter how tiny the initial band of settlers may have been.” (P.16)<\/p>\n Don’t reject this argument too quickly. The literature in political socialization does provide some support for the assimilation of new groups into the attitudinal framework of the original settlers–but we need some evidence for this before we can uncritically apply all of Woodard to the present day. What persisted? What didn’t survive? What changes occurred? Are existing nations now composed of a variety of sub-cultures which imperfectly have assimilated the ethos of the original dominant culture? Even Woodard suggests the last phenomenon is likely.<\/p>\n The Curmudgeon, however, with all his typical modesty, would suggest that this assimilation and perpetuation of the core perspective of the eleven nations in post-second World War period\u00a0could easily have\u00a0undergone a significant mutation. As a consequence of (1) the decline in traditional religion, (2) the rise of ethnic and racial intermarriage, (3) the increase in rates of higher education and the\u00a0(4) subsequent class and occupational mobility (upward and downward), and (5) huge\u00a0inter-regional and intra regional population shifts, the core values and perspectives of each of the eleven nations (probably in varying degrees) delinked from ethnicity and religion and\u00a0diffused\u00a0throughout the general population in the form of interrelated ideas and values which, with the proper psychological, social and economic triggers, hardened or\u00a0jelled into something akin to an “ideology”– a way of looking at the world somewhat peculiar to the historical cultural traditions of each of the eleven nations.<\/p>\n All this is way too tortured for an economic developer to imagine. Woodard’s present day political and cultural scenarios are interesting to read, but an economic developer is looking for a firmer, more relevant insights into the the culture of her region. For this insight, the reader is urged to take a gander at other more useful current treatments such as Patchwork Nations or the Big Sort. We will conclude, however, with one specific insight of potential utility to an economic developer\u00a0which can be drawn from Woodard’s American Nations: the notion that the cultural values of the original founding fathers persist in the constitutions of the several states, constitutions which create, define and demarcate the powers and responsibilities of local governance and the willingness of the state to allow for its peculiar degree of\u00a0local self-governance, decentralized administration of programs, and the intrusion of local cultures into administrative decision-making.<\/p>\n Any economic developer, the Curmudgeon would warrant, who has worked in several of the American “nations” would be willing to grant that management, political values, and even administrative behavior is not the same in Los Angeles, Chicago, Birmingham Al, or Crofton Md. This is the starting point for our commentary. Economic developers ought to be sensitive to cultural variation in the practice of economic development. For any economic development goal, tool or strategy to take root and be successful, it should be adapted to that culture and politics-a trite generality perhaps, but one usually ignored in the literature or lost in the implementation process.<\/p>\n<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Ok you answer, but counter with the question\u00a0“what does all this have to\u00a0 do with economic development”?<\/p>\nA TIRESOME SUMMARY OF THE AMERICAN NATIONS<\/h2>\n
<\/a>
\nYANKEEDOM—founded by radical Calvinists in Massachusetts desiring a religious utopia. A culture “that put great emphasis on
\neducation, local political control, and the pursuit of the ‘greater good’ of the community, even if it required individual self denial, Yankees have the greatest faith in the potential of government to improve people’s lives, …and a vital bulwark against the schemes of grasping aristocrats, corporations, or outside powers. Yankees have sought to build a more perfect society here on earth through social engineering, relatively extensive citizen involvement in the political process, and the aggressive assimilation of foreigners”
\n(P.5) Contemporary Yankeedom is labeled by Woodard as “secular Puritanism”.<\/p>\n
\naffiliations”. (P.9)<\/p>\n<\/a>
\ngovernment) …. its political class tends to revile the federal government for interfering in its affairs…while demanding it continue to receive federal largesse. It rarely challenges its corporate masters.” (P.12)<\/p>\n<\/a>Are we pushing Woodard’s eleven nations too far?<\/h1>\n
<\/a>\u00a0Of What Use is This Stuff to an Economic Developer?<\/h2>\n