We're hosting our discussions at Café Walnut, near the corner of 7th & Walnut in Olde City, caddy corner from Washington Square Park.
Since we're using the cafe's space, they ask that each person at the meetup at least purchase a drink or snack. Please don't bring any food or drinks from outside.
The cafe is fairly easy to get to if you're using public transit. With SEPTA, take the Market-Frankford Line & get off at the 5th Street Station (corner of 5th & Market), and walk 2 blocks south on 5th and then turn right on Walnut Street and walk 2 blocks west. For those who are driving, I'd suggest parking in the Washington Square parking deck at 249 S 6th Street which is just a half block away.
HOW DO REGIONAL CULTURES AFFECT AMERICAN POLITICS?
PART 1 - THE "DEEP CULTURE" OF THE EAST, SOUTH & MIDWEST
This discussion will address various theories about the way that regional cultures influence American politics. In particular, we'll test the idea that US regions have enduring "deep cultures" that persist across multiple generations & even centuries. We'll focus on the regions east of the Rocky Mountains in this discussion, and we'll save the western regions for our next discussion.
So first of all, what is "deep culture"? According to the anthropologist Edward T. Hall's "cultural iceberg" model, culture is split into a highly visible but superficial "surface culture" and a more elusive yet substantial "deep culture". Most people tend to view only the surface aspects of culture — observable behavior — sometimes known as the "five F’s": food, fashion, festivals, folklore, and flags. Below the surface, "deep culture" includes elements such as child-raising beliefs; concepts of self, beauty & personal space; eating habits; facial expressions & eye contact; work ethic, personal discipline, and approaches to problem solving & interpersonal relationships; and religious rituals, moral values, cosmologies & world views.
Over the years, there's been a variety of models that try to explain the regional differences of the United States. The simplest models are the various "belts" of the U.S., a term that was first applied to growing regions for various crops (e.g. Corn Belt, Wheat Belt), but was later applied to economic, demographic & cultural regions (e.g. Rust Belt, Black Belt, Bible Belt). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_belt_regions_of_the_United_States
Urbanization patterns have also led to belts of cities known as "conurbations" or "megalopolises". In 2005, the non-profit Regional Plan Association in their "America 2050" identified 11 emerging "megaregions" of networked metropolitan areas that are important to the US economy in the 21st century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megaregions_of_the_United_States
Dante Chinni & James Gimpel combined the belt & megaregion approaches in their 2010 book Our Patchwork Nation and identified 12 distinct types of counties based on demographic & economic factors, and Chinni later expanded this to 15 community types in his work for GWU's American Communities Project. https://www.americancommunities.org/
However, there's also some theories of regional "deep cultures" that draw more heavily on American history, most notably Joel Garreau's Nine Nations of North America (1981), David Hackett Fisher's "four British folkways" from his book Albion's Seed (1989), and Colin Woodward's "eleven rival regional cultures" from his book American Nations (2011). These theories look at the interplay between the original cultures of different settler groups and the geography & economy of the regions they settled, aiming to show how regional differences in political views emerged from this process. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nine_Nations_of_North_America https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albion%27s_Seed
These regional cultures have been connected with theories of American political culture. Fisher's 4 notions of freedom (ordered, reciprocal, hegemonic, natural) can be compared with the 3 dominant political cultures (moralistic, individualistic, traditionalistic) identified by Daniel Elazar in American Federalism (1966) and the 4 theories of foreign policy (Wilsonian, Hamiltonian, Jeffersonian, Jacksonian) identified by Walter Russell Mead in Special Providence (2001). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_culture_of_the_United_States https://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2018/Klingalbion.html
In this meetup, we'll discuss how well these "deep culture" theories map onto demographic reality, using public polling & voting data, psychographic studies, and local ethnographies.
