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One of my first questions after Vice President Kamala Harris tapped Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate requires a bit of context:
Is Walz a Midlander, or does his addition to the Democratic ticket mean it now has someone from the Yankeedom nation on board?
This is definitely the type of question a political nerd would ask. But bear with me because the answer is not only intriguing but has broader insights about how to knit a divided nation back together after Nov. 5.
Back in 2013, I wrote about a relatively new book called “American Nations,” whose author Colin Woodard was a Maine journalist at the time and now directs the Nationhood Lab at Salve Regina University’s Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy.
The book’s premise is that the United States is less a happy union of 50 states and more of an uneasy alliance between 11 dominant North American regional cultures — or stateless nations — jockeying for advantage.
The 11 nations’ boundaries don’t adhere to state lines but do hew to geography. Their character is rooted in the “contrasting ideals of the distinct European colonial cultures that first took root on the eastern and southern rims of what is now the United States, and then spread across much of the continent in mutually exclusive settlement bands, laying down the institutions, symbols and cultural norms later arrivals would encounter and, by and large, assimilate into,” according to the Nationhood Lab’s overview.