Would you enjoy it if the U.S. was run from L.A.? I get the feeling the government would run better, because everyone would be more laid back and cooperative than in the boiler rooms of the Northeast. It would also balance things so that the West Coast gets more political clout.
I’m imagining that Congress would take surfing breaks. Immigration and shark attacks would be the hot button topics of the day. There would be many more ties between Congress and movie stars. Warren Beatty would at least be a senator, if not president.
I’ve never been to L.A. though, so I’m only going on stereotypes
First of all… Washington D.C. is not in the “northeast”… it’s in the South (Maryland and Virginia are southern states).
Second of all, LA is a hellhole, possibly the worst place on earth. I hear DC might be as bad in some ways but… let’s not make our nation’s capital any worse!
If the US capital was in LA instead of DC, it would stand to reason that the New World was conquered, and settled in, from the opposite direction. So our major influences would be Asian instead of European.
Let’s see, Buddhism would be the predominant religion, our math scores would be through the roof, and we’d all be singing about paddy fields instead of waves of amber grain.
I think you’d have to assume the capital was moved sometime after around 1910. Before that, L.A. wasn’t significant enough to bear the nation’s capital, either geographically or politically. From 1848–1906 you might have moved it to San Francisco, though it would be strange to put it in newly conquered territory and awkward when California wasn’t contiguous with any other state. Before 1848, it’s just inconceivable to put the US capital in Mexico.
So let’s say it was moved in 1940 as World War II loomed on the US horizon. Honestly, I don’t think much would change. Better investment in the nation’s railroad infrastructure, and better attention to the issues specific to the Southwest such as water management and relations with Mexico. Perhaps a more sensisble immigration policy. With greater awareness of Asian and Latino citizens, perhaps the black / white issue wouldn’t have been so polarizing and Civil Rights legislation would have been considered earlier, immediately after WWII rather than 20 years later with slow implementation. Otherwise, no big deal.
That’s historically. Culturally, economically, and politically, Maryland and Delaware have been northeastern for decades now. And Northern Virginia becomes less and less southern by the moment.
I’ll go with Washington DC being in the MidLantic. They don’t have a clear Northern or Southern identity in the land of my birth. But technically it is south of the Mason-Dixon line.
What might change things would be if all the different cabinet departments were spread out in different cities. I read that suggestion in an OpEd sometime back, and the argument was that decentralizing all that power - Department of Agriculture in Omaha; Department of Education in Boston; Department of Transportation in Detroit - would slow the growth of the massive, incestuous political machine in DC. That might make a difference, for good or ill.
