Colin Woodard
came from the Deep South, Italy, or Eritrea. 11
    The remainder of the book is divided into four parts organized more or less chronologically. The first covers the critical colonial period, with chapters on the creation and founding characteristics of the first eight Euro-American nations. The second exposes how intranational struggles shaped the American Revolution, the federal Constitution, and critical events in the Early Republic. The third shows how the nations expanded their influence across mutually exclusive sections of the continent, and how the related intranational struggle to control and define the federal government triggered the Civil War. The final part covers events of the late nineteenth, twentieth, and early twenty-first centuries, including the formation of the “new” nations and the intensification of intranational differences over immigration and the “American” identity, religion and social reform, foreign policy and war, and, of course, continental politics. The epilogue offers some thoughts on the road ahead.
    Let the journey begin.

PART ONE
    ORIGINS
1590 to 1769

PART TWO
    UNLIKELY ALLIES
1770 to 1815

PART THREE
    WARS FOR THE WEST
1816 to 1877

PART FOUR
    CULTURE WARS
1878 to 2010

CHAPTER 28
    The Struggle for Power II: The Red and the Purple
    C ontrary to popular opinion, the Dixie bloc has not been a particularly stable coalition. The dominant parties—the Deep South and Greater Appalachia—have been archenemies for much of their history, having taken up arms against one another in both the American Revolution and the Civil War. The junior partner, Tidewater, was always less committed to apartheid and authoritarianism than its southern neighbor and today is increasingly falling under the influence of the Midlands. The Deep Southern oligarchy, whose economic interests the bloc ultimately serves, has had to contend with the enfranchisement of millions of black voters in its own region, a tendency toward gentlemanly moderation among the Tidewater elite, and the powerful populist sentiment of many Borderlanders. All of these forces threaten to undermine the Dixie coalition.
    The goal of the Deep Southern oligarchy has been consistent for over four centuries: to control and maintain a one-party state with a colonialstyle economy based on large-scale agriculture and the extraction of primary resources by a compliant, poorly educated, low-wage workforce with as few labor, workplace safety, health care, and environmental regulations as possible. On being compelled by force of arms to give up their slave workforce, Deep Southerners developed caste and sharecropper systems to meet their labor needs, as well as a system of poll taxes and literacy tests to keep former slaves and white rabble out of the political process. When these systems were challenged by African Americans and the federal government, they rallied poor whites in their nation, in Tidewater, and in Appalachia to their cause through fearmongering: The races would mix. Daughters would be defiled. Yankees would take away their guns and Bibles and convert their children to secular humanism, environmentalism, communism, and homosexuality. Their political hirelings discussed criminalizing abortion, protecting the flag from flag burners, stopping illegal immigration, and scaling back government spending when on the campaign trail; once in office, they focused on cutting taxes for the wealthy, funneling massive subsidies to the oligarchs’ agribusinesses and oil companies, eliminating labor and environmental regulations, creating “guest worker” programs to secure cheap farm labor from the developing world, and poaching manufacturing jobs from higher-wage unionized industries in Yankeedom, New Netherland, or the Midlands. It’s a strategy financial analyst Stephen Cummings has likened to “a high-technology version of the plantation economy of the Old South,” with the working and middle classes
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