Does one of these eleven political cultures speak to you the most?

Introduction
In these critical reflection assignments I am going to ask you to read an article, watch a video, or play a simulation, and then answer a few questions about it. In this first one you will be reading an article by Colin Woodard, a political journalist. It’s very similar to Elazar’s theory of the three political cultures, but it expands on it a bit. Start by rereading pages 6 to 11 in the book so you have Elazar’s theory to compare it to. Then read Woodard’s piece titled “Up In Arms”. While much of the piece is about violence, there is also quite a bit embedded in it about political culture, which is the piece we are most interested in. I’ve copied it below and also linked to it, although sometimes the link seems to go down.
Once you’ve read them both, I’d like you to write a 300-500 word reflection that covers the following:
1) What is Woodard’s main argument in this piece? What evidence does he use to support it?
2) How does Woodard’s theory differ from Elazar’s?
3) Do you Woodard’s theory compelling and believable? Why or why not? Which of these regions have you lived in (if any)? Does Woodard’s description of that region sound accurate to your experience living there?
4) How does knowing about this theory change the way you look at the country? How does this help you study the variation in states?
5) Does one of these eleven political cultures speak to you the most? In other words, which one seems to be the closest to what you currently think about government and politics?
Rubric
For each of the five questions above, you can receive up to 5 points each:
5 points: Fully answers the question and offers supporting evidence.
4 points: Either misses a small part of a question, lacks some evidence, or has some small factual inaccuracies.
3 points: Does not answer a part of a question or lacks evidence or has moderate factual inaccuracies.
Less than 3 points: Has substantial factual inaccuracies or fails to address the question.
You can also receive up to 5 points for the quality and clarity of the writing.
Paper Structure/Citations
You can set up your paper however you would like. If you would like to answer each question one at a time, that is fine (in other words you do not have to write this as a formal essay with a thesis statement or anything like that). If you are using information from the book or the included article you do not need to cite it, unless you directly quote it, in which case you should put it in direct quotes and say something like: According to Woodard, “XYZ”. If you use any outside sources other than the book or the article, you should absolutely cite it. You may use any citation system you would like – MLA, APA, Chicago, etc. – so long as you are consistent.
The Article
You can possibly find the article here (Links to an external site.), though the link seems to go up and down from time to time, so I’ve also copied the article below for you:
(Links to an external site.)”Last December, when Adam Lanza stormed into the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, with a rifle and killed twenty children and six adult staff members, the United States found itself immersed in debates about gun control. Another flash point occurred this July, when George Zimmerman, who saw himself as a guardian of his community, was exonerated in the killing of an unarmed black teenager, Trayvon Martin, in Florida. That time, talk turned to stand-your-ground laws and the proper use of deadly force. The gun debate was refreshed in September by the shooting deaths of twelve people at the Washington Navy Yard, apparently at the hands of an IT contractor who was mentally ill.
Such episodes remind Americans that our country as a whole is marked by staggering levels of deadly violence. Our death rate from assault is many times higher than that of highly urbanized countries like the Netherlands or Germany, sparsely populated nations with plenty of forests and game hunters like Canada, Sweden, Finland, or New Zealand, and large, populous ones like the United Kingdom, Germany, and Japan. State-sponsored violence, too—in the form of capital punishment—sets our country apart. Last year we executed more than ten times as many prisoners as other advanced industrialized nations combined—not surprising given that Japan is the only other such country that allows the practice. Our violent streak has become almost a part of our national identity.
What’s less well appreciated is how much the incidence of violence, like so many salient issues in American life, varies by region. Beyond a vague awareness that supporters of violent retaliation and easy access to guns are concentrated in the states of the former Confederacy and, to a lesser extent, the western interior, most people cannot tell you much about regional differences on such matters. Our conventional way of defining regions—dividing the country along state boundaries into a Northeast, Midwest, Southeast, Southwest, and Northwest—masks the cultural lines along which attitudes toward violence fall. These lines don’t respect state boundaries. To understand violence or practically any other divisive issue, you need to understand historical settlement patterns and the lasting cultural fissures they established.
The original North American colonies were settled by people from distinct regions of the British Isles—and from France, the Netherlands, and Spain—each with its own religious, political, and ethnographic traits. For generations, these Euro-American cultures developed in isolation from one another, consolidating their cherished religious and political principles and fundamental values, and expanding across the eastern half of the continent in nearly exclusive settlement bands. Throughout the colonial period and the Early Republic, they saw themselves as competitors—for land, capital, and other settlers—and even as enemies, taking opposing sides in the American Revolution, the War of 1812, and the Civil War.
There’s never been an America, but rather several Americas—each a distinct nation. There are eleven nations today. Each looks at violence, as well as everything else, in its own way.

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