Quote:
Originally Posted by Cali Panthers Fan
Again, it is a nation of individual states that are more or less coalesced together. It's 50 individual nations that present a united front internationally, but are very different from each other within the nation.
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I don't know if that's really that true anymore. Is there really a substantial cultural difference between the States? I don't think there really is, I think the differences can seem significant because the similarities are so many, and so vast, that small differences really stand out.
I mean Canada is
incredibly similar to the US in most respects, and the differences between Canada and the US are more substantial than between any two States.
The big difference in the US, as it is in Canada, is the Urban-Rural divide. People who live in St. Louis or San Diego or Philadelphia or Dallas aren't going to have much cultural differences between them, generally. And people who live in rural Missouri or California or Pennsylvania or Texas are going to be culturally quite similar between each other (when you control for other demographics like race). While between the two groups I think you see the largest differences.
The issue of the Urban-Rural split is an enormous political challenge for the geographically-large democracies (Canada, The US, Australia, Brazil, etc.). Right now, 70% of Americans live in urban areas, yet the rural vote power substantially exceeds them.
Here's a great article about the urban-rural vote split:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/polit...s-rural-urban/
Interestingly, median household income does not vary significantly between these groups of districts:
In total, in 2022 157 disticts fall into the "more urban" half of these six groups, while 278 fall into the "more rural." Pure urban is represented by 34 House members while pure rural has 73. Finding ways to navigate the power imbalance and the cultural differences between urban and rural is going to be the major problem for these geographically large democracies.