How we got here, the stakes and where we go now (in Washington Monthly)

The United States, which was a state before it came up with an argument for being a nation as well, has always been vulnerable to dissolution. An accidental alliance of stateless nations -- the regional cultures described in American Nations -- it had to invent a national story to paper over the massive (and enduring) differences between its component sections (a story told in Union.)

As the social contract our liberal democratic system relies on has been weakened by decades of drift into more extreme forms of individual liberty -- the story told in American Character -- it's now under direct attack again by authoritarian ethnonationalism. It threatens to destroy both the federation and the republic.

How did this happen? What is the nature of the problem? How do we respond to reverse the damage. My thoughts laid out in the new issue of Washington Monthly, written in early December when we were already trundling toward the attempted coup on January 6. 

For more, please consider the three books of the American Nations trilogy, starting with Union.

Thanks to Real Clear Politics for plugging the article earlier this week and to Monthly editors Paul Glastis and Daniel Block for their suggestions and improvements to the piece.

My last print edition story for Washington Monthly was this review of John Keane's The New Despotism.

Reviewing Keane's "New Despotism" in Washington Monthly

Liberal democracies are under siege worldwide and a range of thinkers have been probing the reasons why.

John Keane, a professor of politics at the University of Sydney, has a new book explaining the threat, an allegedly new type of regime, The New Despotism. What are its characteristics? How does it differ from despotisms of the past? How does it threaten to unfold at home?

I explore these themes and offer a bit of my take in this review in the new print edition of the Washington Monthly.

My last review for the Monthly was of Jason DeParle's A Good Provider is One Who Leaves, an intimate portrait of global migration.

American Nations and the geography of the pandemic

The geography of the U.S. response to the Covid-19 pandemic follows, like so many other things in American life, the fissures of identified in American Nations to a startling degree. I wrote about this briefly back in early April for Washington Monthly, when there was a notable divergence in the public policy response. With the Trump administration abdicating leadership, we're now seeing the case trends following these regional contours.

With the help of my Press Herald colleague Chad Gilley and the New York Times's county-level case data, we crunched and graphed the numbers and presented the results in this article in this week's Maine Sunday Telegram. There are detailed data tables for each of the eleven "nations" in the sidebar if you click through. It follows the individual liberty vs common good divide I discussed in American Character.

If you're not familiar with American Nations, here's the publisher's book description, a New York Times OpEd on how it trumps the rural/urban divide in US politics; a Washington Monthly piece on how it doomed the Tea Party, another piece on his it drives differences in violence and gun policy, and an analysis of the 2016 presidential election.

The American Nations and the Geography of the Pandemic Response

Depressingly, as the global coronavirus pandemic unfolded, President Trump took measures that helped it along: denying it existed; denying it was more serious than the seasonal flu; denying it was no longer contained; claiming it was a hoax perpetrated by his enemies in politics and the media. State and local leaders have been left on their own to decide what to do.

The result has been a macabre laboratory of federalism, where states decided whether or not to protect their citizens and economy from a clear and inevitable threat. The geography of the response has been sobering.

As I wrote in American Nations and further explored in its sequel, American Character, the fundamental philosophical divide between these regional cultures is over the question of how best to organize American society. Three large and important ones have cultures that see freedom’s path lying almost exclusively with individual liberty and personal sovereignty. Four other large ones prioritize the common good and the building of a free community, even if it requires sacrifices of individuals. Corona-19 proved a test of these values.

Over at Washington Monthly you can read the disturbing match of our centuries-old cultural geography to the geography of the pandemic response. Let me know what you think.

Reviewing DeParle's book on migrants in Washington Monthly

Jason DeParle, a George Polk Award–winning reporter for the New York Times, embedded with a family of Manila slum dwellers thirty-three years ago and has kept contact with them ever since, allowing him to do something remarkable in his new book. A Good Provider Is One Who Leaves tells the story of global migration through the experiences of a single migrant family over three generations in intimate, often eyewitness detail. It’s a journey that starts in a one-room shanty open to rats and rain and ends on a cul-de-sac in a newly constructed Texas City subdivision. 

I had the privilege of reviewing  the book for the new issue of Washington Monthly and hope you'll take the time to read it and the book. It's a story that will leave you better understanding how the world works today and where we’re likely headed.

The 2018 midterms, the American Nations and Washington Monthly

I have an expanded version of my American Nations-powered analysis of the results of 2018 midterm election here in the U.S. over at Washington Monthly. Please check it out.

For past electoral analysis in this vein, you may also be interested in:

The rural vs urban divide and the American Nations in the past three presidential elections, in the New York Times and, with data tables and such, at Medium.

The 2016 presidential election and the American Nations, including the hows, wheres, and whys of how Donald Trump succeeded where Mitt Romney and John McCan failed (at the Portland Press Herald.)

The 2013 Virginia governor's race and the American Nations.

The 2012 elections and the Republican problem in Yankeedom (Maine Sunday Telegram)

The 2012 primaries and the American Nations.

The 2011 off-year election and the Tea Party's problems at Washington Monthly.

Washington Monthly primer on American Nations and 2016 Election

While you're all waiting for Donald Trump's first press conference in half a year, here's a primer I posted over at Washington Monthly's Political Animal blog on my American Nations-driven analysis of the election (itself, data and all, over at the Press Herald.) It summarizes the paradigm for those unfamiliar with it, or who've forgotten it.

That is all.

Washington Monthly Reviews American Character

Just in time for the 2016 election, Washington Monthly has a review of my recent book, American Character: A History of the Epic Struggle Between Individual Liberty and the Common Good, the sequel to American Nations, in their new issue.

Novelist and journalist Jennifer Miller is the reviewer and focuses on how hyper-charged everything in this history seems in the context of the late phase of this insane election cycle. Of course, the book was finished in the late Spring of 2015 -- when Donald Trump was being discounted as a freak sideshow and nobody was expecting a little known Social Democrat from Vermont to give the Democratic frontrunner a run for the money -- which shows just how much more vitriolic our public discourse has gotten in little over a year.

This results in Miller writing this observation, ending with my favorite line of any review so far: "Even Woodard's discussion of evolutionary biology feels political," she notes of a passage countering the idea that humans' are natural state is to be individuals operating in a state of anarchy. "'Our evolutionary ancestors, Homo erectus, were using fire a million years ago, a game-changing innovation that led them to live in group campsites [and] share tasks responsibilities, and resources,' [Woodard writes.] And yet given the virulence of today's small-government evangelists and Ayn Rand individualists, it's difficult not to wonder: Is this how far back we need to go to make a case for the collective? To fire?"

Indeed, if you're to counter a ideology going back to Thomas Hobbes' musings on the origins of government, you do!

Thanks to Miller and the Monthly for reviewing the book.

Goodbye, Marrakesh

I've spent the last few days in Marrakesh, near the edge of the Sahara, attending "Atlantic Dialogues 2014", an international conference convened by the German Marshall Fund of the United States and the OCP Policy Center here in Morocco.

I've greatly enjoyed the proceedings and the opportunity to meet, converse, and share ideas with such an intriguing group of people from around the Atlantic Basin, including former heads of state, foreign ministers, policy advisers, scholars, parliamentarians, and journalists.

I also had the privilege to share the American Nations paradigm whilst part of a panel on "Decoding the United States" that included former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, former City of Denver chief of staff Kelly Brough, and the state department's special representative for global intergovernmental affairs, Reta-Jo Lewis. Thanks kindly to the Washington Post's Jonathan Capehart for deftly moderating the session, where I did manage to make a pitch for Maine and other essentially "city-less" actors on the global stage of trade, investment, and cooperation.

For those who attended and wanted to learn more about American Nations, we've posted this Washington Monthly article and this follow-up here and on the AD Connect app; it should give readers a broader sense of what the paradigm is all about and its utility in understanding ongoing events as well as historical ones.

Thanks again to GMF and OCP for inviting me. Now, back to Maine.

On the regional distrubution of Waffle House

The Washington Post's The Fix took up a classic question in American regionalism last week: the regional maldistribution of Waffle House and IHOP restaurants and their correlations to political behavior. It's an age old question, but one I could no longer remain silent on, given that commentators continue to rely on state-level analysis of the problem.

As with any other regional question, one has to look beyond state lines, which don't capture the true historically-based cultural fissures in our landscape. Over at Washington Monthly, I've done precisely this for the Waffle House question, showing the regional fissures are even more stark than a state-level examination would reveal.

Waffle House is based in Georgia, and Ed Kilgore (a native of that state) adds this at the Monthly's Political Animal. I'd also note that rival IHOP was founded and based in Los Angeles County, which suggests a cultural rather than purely spatial explanation for its dominance in distant New England and the Upper Midwest.

Virginia governor's race: debunking the "urban vs rural" explanation

Earlier this month at Washington Monthly, I wrote about the strong regional divide in the Virginia governor's race, suggesting the distinct political preferences of Tidewater and Greater Appalachia best explained the results of yet another Tea Party vs Not election.

A number of commenters suggested this was nonsense, repeating the conventional wisdom that the race pit urban and rural Virginia against one another, with Democratic money man Terry McAuliffe capturing the former. They're wrong.

This week, also at Washington Monthly, I presented the data, which refutes the received wisdom:

In Greater Appalachia, Cuccinelli won every category of county, from the very largest cities in the section (where he won 49.1 to 45.7) to counties without so much as a big town (62.8 to 30.8). In every category save the largest (category 2 in Greater Appalachia), he won by more than 20 points.

 By contrast, in Tidewater, McAuliffe won by large margins in counties large and small, taking five of the six categories. In the biggest cities he won 56.3 to 37.3. In the most rural counties he won by a convincing 51.0 to 41.1.

Virginia being home to half the Beltway crowd in Washington, the piece has gotten considerable attention. Mother Jones' Kevin Drum suggested the analysis offered nothing new, suggesting regionalism's importance has always been understood in Virginia's politics. Ryan Cooper at the Monthly's flagship Political Animal blog said the data had shaken his "understanding of the underlying realities of politics." 

The Wall Street Journal's MoneyWatch columnist Darrell Delamaide gave the most detailed treatment, describing some of my past work and saying:

"If Tidewater, the region where most of our Founding Fathers came from, has remained true to its sense of “noblesse oblige” and drifted away from the Republican Party as it has become more stridently intolerant, other regions may also be ready for change."

Meanwhile, my original post on Virginia was picked up by one of that state's important dailies, the Fredericksburg-based Free Lance-Star, and (with permission) run as an OpEd.

Comments on the new data focus on two criticisms.

One is that race is an important factor. I agree, but note that the profound difference in demographics between the two sections in this regard is itself a historical/cultural phenomenon and an outgrowth of the different founding characteristics of these two regions.

The other is that Virginia has more than two regions. True enough on a finer scale -- you can say the same of most anyplace -- but at the level of continental significance, I stand by the two-region division, though I acknowledge that Virginia has always had a wide transitional zone -- the Piedmont -- so the border between the two can be fuzzy in spots. Tidewater gentlemen -- Jefferson the foremost exemplar -- dominated much of it, but acted as colaition builders between the two sections, as they understood Appalachian concerns and principles better than their lowland peers in the House of Burgesses.

Now I'm really looking forward to a governor's race to analyze in, say, Ohio....

American Nations goes viral

Over the past four days, I've had the novel and enjoyable experience of having my work go, as they say, "viral" on the interwebs. Between Thursday morning and this (Sunday) evening, the map and ideas laid out in my most recent book, American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, shot first around the country, and then the world, initially building speed organically on social media, then getting the attention of first the "new media," then a prominent blog at a major newspaper. Next thing I know I'm being interviewed by the BBC World Service's Newshour, pretty much the coolest place ever for a former foreign correspondent to find himself.

Here, as far as I can put together, is the anatomy of my viral experience.

I wrote the cover story of the new issue of Tufts Magazine, the alumni publication of the university I attended, on the regional differences in violence, as clarified through American Nations. As hoped, it generated a lot of discussion -- some angry responses, a lot of positive ones -- and I plugged the piece last week over at Washington Monthly, where I post regularly on the paradigm and its implications in current events, like this week's election in Virginia. Things carried on quietly enough for a week and -- apart from some nice praise from the alumni magazine media critics at UMagazinology -- nothing seemed out of the ordinary.

But by Thursday morning, something was clearly brewing. Facebook friends were having the piece posted on their timelines by people outside my network from all over the country. Strangers started tweeting about it. Its sales rank on Amazon -- "crack for authors", my agent calls it -- started surging. In mid-morning, the web 'zine-cum-group blog Boing Boing posted this short plug for not only the Tufts article and the book, but for Republic of Pirates as well. (Thanks, guys!) I started getting e-mails from radio stations requesting interviews.Prominent figures were Tweeting the article.

Then, early Friday afternoon, the Washington Post's widely-read GovBeat blog piled on with this piece, which soon seemed to be absolutely everywhere. The Post's The Fix, New York Times columnist Charles Blow, and Der Spiegel tweeted my AmNat map to their combined half million followers. On Saturday, National Public Radio emailed about an interview. By this afternoon I was  on the BBC World Service's Newshour (0:49) whilst the London Daily Mail and Mexico's El Diario were posting articles based on the Post piece. My e-mail inbox runneth over.

As for the book, Amazon ran out of paperbacks earlier today and looks on the verge of selling out on hardcovers as well. If something of the sort is happening at bricks-and-mortar stores, it would seem the book has found some new audiences. And I'll never again doubt the power of digital social networks to disseminate ideas. If only one could figure out how to predict what makes one go viral.

[Update, 11/11/13: The American Conservative's Rod Dreher writes this afternoon: "I’ve received that map, and the accompanying story, about fifty billion times in the past week."]

[Update, 11/12/13: An update on the continuing media frenzy here.]

Regional divisions in the Virginia and New Jersey governors' races

This week's off-year U.S. elections featured two closely-watched gubernatorial contests. In Virginia, Democratic Party insider Terry McAuliffe squeaked by a Tea Party firebrand Tuesday in a race much closer than pollsters expected. In New Jersey, incumbent Gov. Chris Christie -- a relative moderate in the G.O.P. these days -- won re-election in a resounding landslide.

The results of both elections -- one close, the other a rout -- reflected the regional cultural fissures that cut each of these states in two. (See American Nations if you've no idea what I'm talking about.)

Yesterday afternoon, I wrote about the almost mirror-image differences in voting in Tidewater and Appalachian Virginia over at Washington Monthly's Ten Miles Square. This morning I added a piece on New Jersey, where Christie did significantly better in the (South Jersey) Midlands than New Netherland.

Both have significant lessons for national politics. Virginia shows the Tea Party is doomed outside Greater Appalachia, the Deep South and the Far West. And if Christie's support in the rest of the Midlands is even a shadow of what it was in Midland New Jersey this week, he could prove a formidable candidate in 2016. Details over at the Monthly.

Thanks also to Ed Kilgore, the Monthly's Political Animal, for his posts on both the Virginia and New Jersey pieces today, which include some additional insights from an Appalachian native son.

[Update, 11/23/13: This post provides links to updated data and third party commentary on the power of regionalism in the Virginia race.]

In U.S., violence is a regional issue

                                           [Cross-posted from Washington Monthly's Ten Miles Square:]

In my book, American Nations, I argue that we’re not one country, but several, and have been since the colonial era. We may be bound up in a generally successful federation, but our greatest internal crises - the Civil War, the corrosive effects of Jim Crow, the recent threat of federal default - have been due to inter-regional conflict. Recognizing the true regional geography of our country, you’ll continue to hear me argue, is essential to understanding our history, identity, and national pathologies.

Two years ago in the Washington Monthly, I argued that the Tea Party was doomed to national irrelevance because its agenda is anathema to the deep underlying cultural values of a vast swath of our federation. Earlier this month here at Ten Miles Square, I showed how this had come to pass, with the Tea Party fast becoming isolated in the regions I’ve described as the Deep South, Greater Appalachia, and the Far West. (See this map: )

But the paradigm is helpful not just for understanding voting behavior, but positions on important economic, social, and moral questions as well. A case in point:

In the new issue of Tufts Magazine - out this week - I offer this cover story on the remarkable regional variations in American violence and attitudes toward violence in both its public and private forms. By almost any metric - assault and murder, gun control voting, capital punishment - the same pattern shows up. On one hand, a set of regional cultures with indices of and attitudes toward violence that are similar to those of Canada or Western Europe, on the other, regional cultures with rates of violence many times higher, and policies to match.
Consider assault death rates and capital punishment policies:

Kieran Healy, a Duke University sociologist, broke down the per capita, age-adjusted deadly assault rate for 2010. In the northeastern states—almost entirely dominated by Yankeedom, New Netherland, and the Midlands—just over 4 people per 100,000 died in assaults. By contrast, southern states—largely monopolized by Deep South, Tidewater, and Greater Appalachia—had a rate of more than 7 per 100,000. The three deadliest states—Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, where the rate of killings topped 10 per 100,000—were all in Deep South territory. Meanwhile, the three safest states—New Hampshire, Maine, and Minnesota, with rates of about 2 killings per 100,000—were all part of Yankeedom.

Not surprisingly, black Americans have it worse than whites. Countrywide, according to Healy, blacks die from assaults at the bewildering rate of about 20 per 100,000, while the rate for whites is less than 6. But does that mean racial differences might be skewing the homicide data for nations with larger African-American populations? Apparently not. A classic 1993 study by the social psychologist Richard Nisbett, of the University of Michigan, found that homicide rates in small predominantly white cities were three times higher in the South than in New England. Nisbett and a colleague, Andrew Reaves, went on to show that southern rural counties had white homicide rates more than four times those of counties in New England, Middle Atlantic, and Midwestern states.

The pattern for capital punishment laws is equally stark. The states dominated by Deep South, Greater Appalachia, Tidewater, and the Far West have had a virtual monopoly on capital punishment. They account for more than ninety-five percent of the 1,343 executions in the United States since 1976. In the same period, the twelve states definitively controlled by Yankeedom and New Netherland—states that account for almost a quarter of the U.S. population—have executed just one person.

So why would violence - state-sponsored or otherwise - be so much more prevalent in some regional cultures than in others?

It all goes back to who settled those regions and where they came from. Nisbett, the social psychologist, noted that regions initially “settled by sober Puritans, Quakers, and Dutch farmer-artisans”—that is, Yankeedom, the Midlands, and New Netherland—were organized around a yeoman agricultural economy that rewarded “quiet, cooperative citizenship, with each individual being capable of uniting for the common good.” The South—and by this he meant the nations I call Tidewater and Deep South—was settled by “swashbuckling Cavaliers of noble or landed gentry status, who took their values … from the knightly, medieval standards of manly honor and virtue.”

Continuing to treat the South as a single entity, Nisbett argued that the violent streak in the culture the Cavaliers established was intensified by the “major subsequent wave of immigration … from the borderlands of Scotland and Ireland.” These immigrants, who populated what I call Greater Appalachia, came from “an economy based on herding,” which, as anthropologists have shown, predisposes people to belligerent stances because the animals on which their wealth depends are so vulnerable to theft. Drawing on the work of the historian David Hackett Fisher, Nisbett maintained that “southern” violence stems partly from a “culture-of-honor tradition,” in which males are raised to create reputations for ferocity—as a deterrent to rustling—rather than relying on official legal intervention.

Understanding these regional differences in violence and their deep historical and cultural roots makes it easier to understand why this country has had so much trouble finding national consensus on issues like gun control, gun rights, and capital punishment. On the other hand, the paradigm isn’t as helpful in parsing this. But everything has its limits.

On the shutdown, the Tea Party, and American regionalism

On the eve of the end of the world, I offer this analysis on the regional origins of the U.S. House's "shutdown caucus" and what it means for the future of the Tea Party on the national stage, all over at Washington Monthly.

The comments are informed by my most recent book, American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, which describes the locations, historical origins and fundamental characteristics of our rival regions and their effect on our history, institutions, and politics over the past four centuries. A full map of the cultures today is available here at World Wide Woodard.

For additional context, there's been a small outpouring of writing on the effect of regionalism and the old Confederacy on the (hopefully soon to be ended) federal shutdown and the (at this writing) looming threat of default. John Judis at the New Republic offered this, and was countered by Seth Ackerman at Jacobin. Gary Wills had this to say at the New York Review of Books, and Michael Lind joined the fray as well (distinguishing, I'm happy to see, between Appalachia and the Deep South.)

And now, let us hope the federal Congress is able to overcome its regional schisms before midnight.

How slavery undid the wartime Confederacy

With the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation upon us -- and an African-American about to be sworn in again as president of our union -- Washington Monthly has devoted their current issue to the issues the Civil War raised and only partially resolved.  My humble contribution to the effort was this review of a new history that shows how the ideology and institution of slavery crippled the Confederate war effort, and how the war itself undid slavery long before the surrender at Appomatox. (The book is Bruce Levine's The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South.)

Meanwhile, Thom Hartmann has an essay on Truthout.org that's been generating a lot of attention, as it presents a convincing historical argument that the Second Amendment was created at the behest of southern slave owners to maintain slave patrols.  Here's Patrick Henry of Virginia, laying out the need to add explicit protections for "well regulated militias": "If the country be invaded, a state may go to war, but cannot suppress [slave] insurrections [under this new Constitution]. If there should happen an insurrection of slaves, the country cannot be said to be invaded. They cannot, therefore, suppress it without the interposition of Congress . . . . Congress, and Congress only [under this new Constitution], can call forth the militia."

Interesting stuff, and in harmony with the world of the 18th century Deep South and Tidewater portrayed in American Nations.

Snowe's Mixed Signals

In February, the political establishment here in Maine was rocked by Sen. Olympia’s Snowe’s late and entirely surprising announcement that she would not seek reelection. The Senate, she said, had become a frustrating place, where “an atmosphere of polarization and ‘my way or the highway’ ideologies has become pervasive in campaigns and in our governing institutions.” Rather than serve another term - her reelection was a given - she would “enter a new chapter” in which she would “help give voice to my fellow citizens who believe, as I do, that we must return to an era of civility in government driven by a common purpose to fulfill the promise that is unique to America.”

“I see a vital need for the political center in order for our democracy to flourish and to find solutions that unite rather than divide us,” she added, and later announced she would convert her campaign committee into a PAC to support such centrist, post-partisan change.
But here in Maine, where she is the perhaps most influential Republican, Snowe has not yet put her money where her mouth is.

As my story in today’s Portland Press Herald shows, Snowe, her husband, and her campaign committee gave exclusively to Republicans and in Maine’s state-level races this cycle, including divisive and polarizing figures like Gov. Paul LePage, with whom she shares a personal loyalty. Indeed, her staff say she gave to candidates based on their loyalty to her during her abortive reelection bid, and the pattern of her giving emphasizes party over ideology, as when she appeared in television ads to unseat the most avowedly centrist, non-partisan member of the state senate in favor of a Republican challenger.

Sources expect her political donations will change character going forward, now that her campaign committee has become Olympia’s List. Stay tuned.

Cross-posted from Washington Monthly

On the GOP's collapse in Yankeedom

I've written several pieces running this weekend on the effect of regional cultures on the U.S. election results this year. They all draw, of course, on the paradigm set forth in my most recent book, American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America.

The first posted last night over at Washington Monthly and focuses on the predictable but disastrous outcome for the Republican Party in the region of its birth: Yankeedom, the swath of the country first colonized by New Englanders and their progeny. It's the featured piece on their website this morning. As always, have a read and let me know what you think.

If you've just been introduced to my framework, you can download a high-resolution, county-level map of the eleven regional cultures here.

On Romney, Dixie, the Electoral College, and the American Nations

There's been a lot of talk in political circles about what it would mean if Mitt Romney won the popular vote but lost the Electoral College contest while carrying only the South. Would Barack Obama be said to have more of a mandate than he would if his popular vote loss wasn't confined to Dixie? Will such a development shore up support for retaining the Electoral College?

As the author of a book on North American regionalism, I've found the discussion intriguing. This evening I joined in, offering some thoughts at Washington Monthly's Ten Miles Square. Let me know what you think.

Things to watch and read, Oct. 25 edition

A few items that may be of interest to readers of this blog:

Case against McKernan-led firm moving forward: As I reported in the Portland Press Herald today, one of the two whistleblower suits against for-profit university company Education Management Corp., looks to be going forward. A magistrate judge has recommended four of six counts against EDMC go forward. Former Maine Gov. John McKernan was CEO when at least some of the alleged counts took place, and is currently EDMC's chairman of the board. He is married to U.S. Sen. Olympia Snowe, who announced in February that she is not seeking reelection.

Regional origins of violence: I've argued in my latest book, American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, that understanding our cultural geography is essential to understanding just about anything in U.S. (and Canadian) politics. Today Harvard University psychology professor Steven Pinker takes a similar approach to understanding regional differences in violence and other things over at the New York Times's Opinionator blog.

Is the Tea Party done for?: A year ago, I used the American Nations paradigm to show why the Tea Party movement is doomed to never become a dominant force in national politics in the Washington Monthly. Today, the Washington Post's E.J. Dionne argues the conservative ideas central to the movement are on the wane on the national stage. (Central evidence: Mitt Romney's sudden, necessary lurch to moderation.)

Republic of Pirates, the TV series: As many of you know, NBC announced in May that it was ordering a prime-time television series based on my third book, The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down. Neil Cross (of BBC Luther fame) is writing the show, which is now titled "Crossbones." For entertainment news hounds, this recent news item on the show has been circulating around the web.