Perhaps I'm an idealist, but I see nothing broken about my understanding of statehood and it's more than an the existing distribution of power. If we're using the dictionary definition, a state is:

"a nation or territory considered as an organized political community under one government."

Which is exactly which each US State is. My home state, NC, is a territory which has a distinct culture and community, and it's own governing body. I'm a 10th generation North Carolinian, and I respect that fact that NC existed before I was born - and will continue existing after I'm dead. A state is more than the people who are currently residing in it or it's current power distribution - it's a long-standing culture, governing body and community of people that are inextricably tied to their own geography and their own decisions, past and future.

I don't care about preserving the current power structure for future generations - but you can bet I care about preserving NC's culture, environment, and state sovereignty for future generations. Those things are all bigger than any individual, and I certainly still believe they are worth fighting for. NC has the world's first public university and an amazing state university system in general. We have amazing food and BBQ culture, we have 3 different unique dialects of American English, we have our own tradition of folk music, we have our own religious traditions and our own way of going through our lives.

Also, FWIW - if you think Americans think of themselves as a single nation with minor variations - you really haven't spent enough time in the South.

I appreciate the concept of a state as a culture. But like the concept of a state as a community, that means nothing without people. I grew up in a country (long, long ago [0]) that takes it culture so seriously that it frequently forgets this association, and believes that culture has some kind of existence above and beyond the people who might (or might not) share it. NC, relative to the UK, is a young place, and it should not make that mistake. This is how you block change, this is how you oppress the future, this is how you become irrelevant.

But I also think that your connection between the concept of a state and its culture in a political context seems odd, to put it mildly. What possible decision can the US Senate make that has any real bearing on any of what you consider NC's "culture" to be? I mean, I suppose that if they were to ban BBQ (to use one of your examples), it would be a problem, but this is hardly the work of the Senate. There's really nothing about a state as a culture and/or community that the Senate makes decisions on. So when a NC Senator takes their seat in DC, what is it that is driving their decision making process? It's not voting for a particular folk music tradition. What are they voting to defend? To maintain? To extend? It's not your dialectical plurality, I assure you.

Next: your NC traditions have a history that goes back much further than the founding of NC. To imagine that they are somehow the unique property of NC is quite a stretch. Just yesterday, I watched an incredible documentary [1] about how southern baptist and presbyterian "line singing" is almost certainly a continuation of a presbyterian (read scottish) religious song form. And a great book [2] talks at length about how 4 British "folkways" (you have to read it to understand what is meant) form the basis of the majority (not all, obviously) of white culture in North America. Picking the declaration of independence and/or creation of NC as a state as some definitive breaking point with history is, IMO, not reflective of how human cultures work.

At the same time, those traditions do not stop at the borders of NC, but twist and change across the state and across state lines.

> if you think Americans think of themselves as a single nation with minor variations - you really haven't spent enough time in the South.

Possibly not. 7 years in Seattle, 23 in Philadelphia, 2 in Santa Fe. And I do acknowledge that an overriding impression I have of Texas where I've spent several months is that the people there consider themselves Texan's first and Americans second. Nevertheless, I would posit that with the level of migratory behavior in the US today (still not huge - the median American lives 18 miles from their mother, apparently), for an awful lot of people this sort of strong state level association has become much weaker. When you have children spread to the 4 corners of the country, which is quite common these days, it's hard to view their home states as "the other" with quite the same vehemence.

[0] please don't accuse me of not "getting" the US by virtue of being an immigrant. There's a reasonably good chance, based purely on the demographics of HN, that I've lived here longer than you :)

[1] https://vimeo.com/82304757

[3] https://bookshop.org/books/albion-s-seed-four-british-folkwa...

I think people underestimate how much state ties people have. My wife’s family has been in Oregon for 150 years. They all still pretty much live there, a couple of hours from where their family homestead used to be. There’s a strong separatist (secessionist) streak in Oregon too.

Even here in Annapolis, an hour from DC, it seems like everyone is from here.

Even in England, which nobody would dispute is "one nation" (note that I used England here, not the UK), you can travel around to various regions and find exactly the same level of regionalism as you're describing. People from (say) Cornwall (extreme southwest) feel a distinctly different identity for themselves compared with (say) the far north east, and particularly with the southeast. We're talking across distances of just a few hundred miles.

So I don't think that this has anything inherently to do with "states" per se. People like to feel affiliated with a region and/or a community that they feel they can get their hearts and minds around. In the US, for so many reasons, "states" tend to be the natural attractor for such feelings. But even then, as you note, the "95ers" versus eastern OR is still a thing.

Culture is such an interesting topic. I do think cultures do exist and have an impact even after they've lost their community (ie, how the great works from hellenistic culture and Roman culture continued to influence later scholars in the west), but you're right that they must ultimately be able to co-exist and progress with their own community to be relevant. That said, I happen to think that NC Culture has managed to progress and has the capacity to remain meaningful.

The fact that our culture is young and highly syncretic (as many cultures are) does not delegitimize it at all. The Scottish have an influence over certain elements - but so do the descendants of various African cultures, the English, German Moravian settlers, and local tribes like the Cherokee. It doesn't matter when my ancestors first decided that the label of "North Carolinian" suffices to encompass all that and more - it just matters that it happened - or rather, it matters that we believed it happened and acted accordingly.

As far as impact the US Senate can make on the state of NC, here are a few I can think of:

- Federal laws about cigarette labeling were very impactful to NC, since our tobacco industry was historically a huge piece of economy (and it remains significant today, though not as powerful).

- Laws that relate to climate change and rising sea levels - The NC outer banks is a fragile ecosystem and is already eroding.

- Funding for interstate transportation infrastructure - which cities should have priority to be put on future interstate routes? This is huge for tourism.

- Rural Broadband expansion - there are parts on the NC mountains, such as where my grandparents live, that STILL don't have high speed internet connection. In fact, the crazy pants representative my district just elected (Madison Cawthorn), despite being a "small government republican", made rural broadband core to his platform - because it's that important here. If NC can ally with other states that have underserved populations on this, then maybe we can get an "internet new deal".

Fwiw, your examples of Texans being Texan first, and American second is exactly the norm in the south that I'm talking about. I didn't even grow up in a particularly southern-culture dominant part of the south, but I only lasted for 5 years in Seattle before I got my behind back to NC. It wasn't just that I missed the trappings of home (though I did), but I still felt that I couldn't relate to how most people there were thinking and acting, and I felt like an outsider. I could have tried harder to change myself to be more like them I guess, but I don't think I would have liked myself as much. The other part of it was, the state of NC played such a big role in making me who I am - that I do feel that I have the duty to help NC as well.

I totally see what you're getting at and respect it - but it's just not in line with how I'm tuned to operate. As I said before, I'm probably just a hopeless idealist :)

Some great examples there. But let's dissect them a little.

But first, let me just that I had no intent to try to "delegitimize" NC culture at all. If anything I was more trying to just move the boundaries a bit, and insist that it is bigger than that description suggests. I see it as more like some sort of set theoretic thing: any given culture anywhere on earth is a complex set of overlapping previously-existing cultures, gathered from across time and space, and the exact mixture will vary if not inch-by-inch then probably mile by mile. My sister- and brother-in-law live are OBX'ers and from many visits with them combined with a few to friends in the NC mountains, one could scarcely imagine they even live in the same timezone let alone the same state.

Tobacco: a huge piece of the economy measured in terms of dollars, but measured in terms the percentage of the population directly involved in it, not so much. So on the one hand, we have an industry that made and keeps a small number of people very wealthy, and on the other we have an industry that provided nothing more than a regular wage to many others PLUS doing substantial harm to those who smoke, both in NC and elsewhere. Thus ... when a Senator from NC votes on tobacco related issues, I would insist that what they are generally voting for is to preserve the existing distribution of power and wealth within the state.

Now, with rural broadband, one could argue that this goes the other way. Surely, one might say, universal (and affordable) access to reliable high speed internet service changes things a lot, in ways that actually threaten to change the existing distribution of power and wealth in NC (and obviously elsewhere too). I don't think that this is wrong, but I think it's very important to dig deeper into such proposals. Why? Because so often when someone bothers to do this, we find all kinds of nefarious self-interest still at work, hidden under what is almost certainly excellent public policy. Does it matter if someone who is already among NC's "landed gentry" (they would never call themselves that, of course) gets a bit richer while a process that gives everyone functioning Netflix occurs? Maybe, maybe not. I'd just be curious to see how Cawthorn sells this idea to his wealthier donors compared to his more public facing version.

I am not surprised by your reaction to Seattle. As I mentioned in another comment here, most people want to feel part of a group of "similar" folks that is of a size that they can wrap their hearts and minds around. I was reading something this morning that mentioned an area of Manhattan called "Alphabet City" - a relatively tiny area but one that still contains enough people for its residents to think of themselves as living some aspects of life with shared experiences and goals. So this sort of association/community/culture building goes on everywhere and at all times.

I don't think your a hopeless idealist. I think your experience and outlook is probably much closer to that of a majority of Americans than mine.

> A state, is called the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly lieth it also; and this lie creepeth from its mouth: "I, the state, am the people."

-Friedrich Nietzsche