I cannot speak to the solidity of the author's main premise - about the eleven rival regional cultures in the US - I simply don't have the background/knowledge base - but it's interesting, and I suspect that like most classification systems, it has some truth and some conclusions open to challenge. But the analysis of the probable future of the Tea Party "movement" is hopeful of it's not-too-distant eclipse - a happy thought. Besides, the cultural analysis certainly has pertinence in our ongoing war against the Oligarchs/Corps (see particularly the description of the Deep South:
http://www.alternet.org/story/153255/a_loo...
A Look at America's Geography Shows That the Tea Party Is Doomed
Even as the movement's grip tightens on the GOP, its influence is melting away across vast swaths of America, thanks to centuries-old regional traditions.
...Established by English slave lords from Barbados as a West Indies-style slave society, this region has been 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. It spread apartheid and authoritarianism...
... the Tea Party has encountered little resistance to its agenda in the four nations of the Dixie bloc, as it is a carbon copy of the Deep Southern program of the last two centuries: reduce taxes for the wealthy and services for everyone else, crush the labor unions, public education, and the regulatory system, and suppress voter turnout.
In the author's analysis, other regions have very different cultural norms (thank the goddess), thus preventing the Tea Party from gaining lasting power in them. (The description of the LePage governorship in Maine is quite hilarious and worth reading.)
It's also worth noting, I think, that the strategies the author suggests for capturing those "swing" voters in regions where the culture "prizes personal freedom and resents domination by outsiders" marks their strain of a sort of Libertarianism might include:
If progressives were to campaign in these regions on promises to bring rogue bankers, mortgage lenders, mining interests, health insurers, seed companies, and monopolistic food processors to heel, they would have far wider appeal; here, regulation can be sold as a matter of justice, the closing of tax loopholes a matter of fairness.
are exactly the strategies that our wholly owned so-called "Representatives" of both the R & D stripes can't undertake without alienating their Corporate Masters. (Oh, well - so much for "hope")
All in all, this article is more a WE submission, but it's only Tuesday, and by Friday I'll have read hundreds of other articles and forgotten about it ... thought some here might enjoy it.
