Hello, Lord Uncle Heaton here. This week, we are going to have Colin Woodard on the show,

who is the foremost living proponent of the idea that America is really 11 or so distinct nations,

which have been lumped together into a single unwieldy polity,

and that the friction between them pretty much explains everything.

So beforehand, we are going to play today a fun rerun with Rudyard Lynch on this topic

that we did a couple of years ago, exploring that idea and really getting into what those

distinct cultures are.

And then tomorrow we will hear from The man of the hour, Colin Woodard.

Enjoy.

Hello and welcome to the political orphanage, a home for plucky misfits and problem solvers.

I'm your host, Andrew Heaton.

And I hail from a part of the country where people take neighbors very seriously.

And I've always fancied that the cultural import we place on neighbors, the Sinus As Sanctus,

is a remnant of our not-so-distant frontier days.

When you were out on the range, hours from town, and your barn burned down, or your wife got bitten by a rattlesnake, or bitten by a vampire, or by a venomous bear or something, where your water pump broke,

I don't know, stuff that happened on farms.

You had to rely on your nearest neighbor or you'd die.

And so, they're developed an unspoken emphasis on knowing neighbors,

treating them well, watching their property, and when they fell on

hard times, you'd help them, because neighbors were your insurance policy.

That could be nonsense. I don't think it is, but it could be nonsense. It could well be that everywhere

there are people, there are neighbors, and they take them seriously, and it's

...