Razib Khan

March 19, 2009

Albion’s Seed is one of the most insightful books on American history because it elaborates on the cryptic ethnic variation of our age, that between different British cultural traditions which are now subsumed under the catchall term “white.”  One of the points which is not well understood by me as a Northerner is the relationship between the lowland English culture and the highland Scots-Irish one today.  Specifically when it comes to conservatism how do these two traditions relate? Historically the elites of the lowland South seem to have had an internationalist outlook specifically because of their export-driven economy, which made them vociferous proponents of Free Trade for much of our nation’s history.  Could this relate to possible contemporary differences in interventionism?

I decided to look in the GSS for this.  I limited the sample to Protestant Whites who resided in the South (“South Atlantic” and “East South Central”) and queried them on the variable “USINTL”:

Do you think it will be best for the future of this country if we take an active part in world affairs, or if we stay out of world affairs?

Here’s a chart of the results:

Here are the raw results with 95% confidence intervals in the parentheses for those who affirmed that the United States should take an active part in world affairs:

England & Wales 74.6 (70.0-79.2) N = 461

Ireland 65.2 (60.2-70.1) N = 265

More to come….