The new American Nations

In traditional media, the American political and cultural divide is broken down into two factions – red states and blue states, representing the ends of the one-dimensional political spectrum from conservatism to liberalism (the colors, oddly, being reversed from the typical historical association). But author Colin Woodward finds not two, but eleven distinct American regional cultures. A writeup in the Tufts University alumni magazine comes with a tantalizing graphic:

The deep cultural differences in the United States prevent regions from coming to agreement on national policy and influence the formation of coalitions. For example, the attitude towards federal government regulation is different between the descendants of communal Quakers and Puritans in Yankeedom and the fiercely independent Scots-Irish of Greater Appalachia.

I’m addicted to secession-maps, so you get one more. This blog post shows what would happen if the State and Federal governments of the USA collapsed and territory fell under the control of city-states. The power that a city can project over each point of land area is modeled as a function of population divided by an exponential function of the distance, with the most powerful city winning dominion.