Annie Asks You

I’ve been thinking about the Covid statistics showing that many more Republicans who were anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers died than did Democrats who took precautions.

The material that follows reveals a complex picture of life expectancy in general in these not-so-United-States.

Colin Woodard is a historian and journalist who calls the United States the “American Nations.” In fact, he wrote a book, published in 2011, titled American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America.

Woodard directs a research project that’s based at a small Rhode Island university (Salve Regina University). Nationhood Lab is “focused on counteracting the authoritarian threat to American democracy and the centrifugal forces threatening the federation’s stability.”

The project seeks to do so by providing ways to “describe and defend the American liberal democratic tradition and better understand the forces undermining it.”

His provocative article in Politico, which my friend Dennis Hirschfelder graciously sent to me, bears the title that appears above. (The subhead to this post is from Nationhood Lab, not me.)

Though I don’t feel I can do justice here to Woodard’s long, detailed article with clear graphics, I hope to give you a sense of its most significant conceptions and findings.

I’d never heard the term “American Nations” (though Woodard’s book was apparently a best seller), but it certainly seems worth pondering.

Woodard goes well beyond the North/South, urban/rural, and red state/blue state divides to report some paradoxical findings about longevity in disparate areas of the country that seem more alike than different in important respects.

As in previous studies his lab has done using the “American Nation model” on topics such as gun violence, he traces much of the dissonance to “centuries-old settlement patterns and the attitudes they spawned about government.”

He begins, for example, comparing Lexington County, South Carolina, with Placer County, California: two large, affluent, suburban, mostly white counties near the capital cities in their respective states.

Both counties were “at the vanguard” of Republican gains—Lexington switched from its Dixiecrat identity in the 1960s; Placer joined the 1980s Reagan Revolution. And they both went solidly for Trump twice.

But there’s a big distinction: life expectancy in Placer is 82.3 years—comparable to Scandinavia; in Lexington, it’s 77.7 years, slightly shorter than in China.

Woodard writes:

“The truth of life expectancy in America is that places with comparable profiles—similar advantages and similar problems—have widely different average life outcomes depending on what part of the country they belong to.”

This exploration into Americans’ longevity was premised on what Woodard calls “the bottom-line question: Is your region helping extend your life or shorten it?”

Of the eleven “rival regional cultures” he describes in his book, he discusses the nine largest in this article, calling them individual “nations” with “their own ethnographic, religious and political characteristics, distinct ideas about the balance between individual liberty and the common good and what the United States should become.”

They encompass populations from 13 million to 63 million.

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