I haven’t visited there much but I get the impression the southern parts like San Diego and Los Angeles have more of a materialistic and status oriented sort of culture while northern parts of the west coast (Portland Oregon, Seattle, the Bay area although the bay area isn’t exactly northern on the west coast) are more progressive or live and let live.
Is there any truth to this assumption (that the northern west coast has a different culture than the southern)? Obviously there are areas in the northern parts that are very status and materialistic, and parts in the south that are laid back and progressive.
If so, what could cause it? Would the weather be a cause?
I’ve read that Southern California, New Mexico and Arizona were settled mostly by Southerners, the rest of the West mostly by Northeasterners and Midwesterners, and that this had a “hearth culture” effect on their present cultures. (See Vietnam: The Necessary War, by Michael Lind, Chapter 4, “The Fall of Washington,” for an analysis of how this determined different regional attitudes towards the war.)
I have lived in WA state for around 15 years off and on. I would say that the STEREOTYPES he mentions definitely exist in a lot of people’s minds, I am not sure how you could accurately measure such a thing though.
(BTW, we go by “Northwesterners” or “Pacific Northwesterners” for OR and WA, “northern west coast” sounds strange to me).
I think all humans are fairly materialistic. I think in WA and OR it is definitely much more casual in dress, less flashy and most people won’t bat an eye if you look like a straight up slob or bum on the street, whereas in Socal that probably isn’t as acceptable. I think the cultures between the northwest and southern california are vastly different, but I wouldn’t qualify it as a “materialistic” difference mainly. To me northwesterners are some of the most passive people on the planet in speech and behavior, and as a native Chicagoan this can often INFURIATE me. Californians in general are much more direct in how they speak and act.
Pretty much all young people on the west coast speak the same lingo IMO, I wouldn’t assume someone in their 20’s is from Cali because they say “hella” for example, but using that word got me weird looks back home in Chicago.
I’ve lived and worked in the greater S.F. Bay Area and felt there were strongly noticeable geographic-based cultural differences just within that region. (Is this despite or because of high mobility?)
San Francisco has had a longstanding, historical feud with Los Angeles that defies description in a single post. Suffice it to say that Los Angeles and San Francisco do not feel that they share a culture in any way, shape, or form.
On top of that, the Valley, the Southern Coast, the Northern Coast, the Desert, the Mountain North, and the Sierra Nevada each have separate political cultures that deny any sympathy with SF and LA. Both SF and LA are hugely Democratic, but California is a hugely Republican state when measured by land area.
Finally, there is the undying movement for the State of Jefferson. These folks have been agitating forever, and have attempted every means short of armed rebellion. Should they ever succeed in seceding, I will move there the very next day.
nachtmusick, by “desert” do you mean the central Sacramento/San Juaquin valley or something different? Eg, did you mean “Death Valley” type desert or central valley semi arid with droughts type desert? Having grown up in the Crapramento valley, I think it should be on your list.
And I’m moving to Seattle soon, so watching this thread with a lot of interest.
There is most definitely a cultural difference between the Pacific Northwest and Southern California. I couldn’t say why it turned out that way though. I would have to guess that part of the reason is the movie industry moving to Southern California caused them to be more like the east coast, getting more city-fied and glitzy. We had none of that up here and we all stayed as lumberjacks and fur traders, etc. and for the most part did what we wanted and just wanted to be left alone. Then in the 60’s we started attracting nutjobs, hippies and other types of treehuggers. Since we’re also known for our laid back and live and let live attitudes, they tended to stay.
We also have a standing rivalry with Southern California. We say ‘california’ but really mean just the southern part in the LA basin and further south. That imoregon.com site is hilarious! Those are the kinds of weirdos we’re famous for. I’ve heard of the state of Jefferson, but I never knew how close we got to actually having a secession happen in the 20th century. If WWII hadn’t happened I bet we’d have at least 51 states.
I think in order to correctly answer this you need to compare economic regions with in the areas
For instance, LA is the largest manufacturing center in the USA. It also has most of the entertainment industry. And a huge part of the winter agriculture of the USA.
San Francisco is big on finance, and (through San Jose) the high tech industries.
San Diego has a huge military base.
Just looking at those three you see the industries that produce the wealth in the respective. A factory worker is going to have a different perspective from that of a banker or a navy man.
It doesn’t really have to do with where they live so much as the work they do.
You have to look at resource allocation to. It’s estimated without the Colorado River the LA area could support about 4 million people. The city of Los Angeles has more than 4 million alone, not counting the rest of the metro area. And this leaves out San Diego all together.
San Francisco and Norhtern California have lots of water.
You see different resources will produce different views.
It’s not like a conservative person from LA is going to move to SF and become liberal, but once he moves his job and the resources of the area become a concern for her/him and it changes one’s outlook and views.
Born in L.A., grew up in San Diego, high school and early [del]adultery[/del] adulthood in the Mojave Desert part of Northern L.A. County, 18 years living in L.A. proper, 6-1/2 years (and counting) in Northern Washington.
When I was little I loved living in San Diego. I thought it was much better than what I’d seen of L.A. on TV. After I left, and as I entered my teens, I developed the impression that there are two kinds of people in San Diego (aside from military): Rich people and bohemians. San Diego is a good place for both lifestyles. My sister used to take me to PB, so I was exposed to the beach lifestyle. My mom preferred more upscale circles. My friends and my sister’s friends basically didn’t amount to anything. They liked to party and get high. My mom worked for Gibbs Flight Service, so I saw a lot of people who had the money to fly. I saw a lot of nice cars in San Diego, and lots of gold jewelry. I also saw a lot of cut-offs and T-shirts and beer. Generally my impression of San Diego as a whole is a fairly Conservative place where the people who are not content to hang out at the beach have rather materialistic aspirations.
L.A. and its environs have about 10 million people. I experienced a much wider range of lifestyles there. People in L.A., in my opinion, seem obsessed with ‘image’. (Oh, I lived on the West Side.) This image can be ‘hipster’, ‘entertainment industry’, ‘upscale’, or whatever. But it seemed to me that people were very concerned about appearances. Again, materialism was rampant.
Seattle does have an environmentally-friendly image, and an ‘outdoors’ image. Where L.A. was crawling with Porsches, the vehicle-of-choice up here seems to be a Subaru. One thing that still strikes me is how old the houses are. Most houses are old, I guess, but up here they seem really old. Seattle is sandwiched between Puget Sound and some mountains. Not a whole lot of space for expansion, compared to SoCal. I just don’t see the Brand New Housing Developments here as often as I did in SoCal. Seattle seems much more laid-back than L.A. And we’re very proud of our natural wonders such as the Sound and the mountains and the forests. (I say ‘our’ as a recent transplant who lives 100+ miles north of The Emerald City.) Materialism seems less of an issue up here. Not that there isn’t any, but ISTM people consider how they’d be seen if their materialism is too blatant.
Here’s the thing, though: San Diego and L.A. have a mix of neighbourhoods, rich and poor, materialistic and non-materialistic. Seattle seems an island of Liberalism to me. Get much out of the city or county, and it may as well be Central California. Cities are smaller here than down South, and rural areas tend to be fairly conservative. I often see Libertarians waving banners from freeway overpasses, and there are Tea Party signs on my drive home. Where I live there were a lot of Bush signs during the last election. In Bellingham the signs were for Obama.
So based on what I saw where I’ve lived, this is my general impression too. I found SoCal to be much more materialistic and status-conscious than Seattle. But outside of places like Seattle and Bellingham, people tend to be much less progressive.
Oregon and Washington themselves are different: Oregon was founded by missionaires and farming families; Washington by lumberjacks. The old saying is that Portland was seen as a great place to build a church, Seattle a good location for a whorehouse.
Movies shot in Seattle before the dot-com boom, like Cinderella Liberty or McQ, show a 1970’s working-class city with its share of broken windows and trash in the gutters. After the dot-com money, it was as if Disney came to town and built “Seattle-Land” in its place.
I’ve only visited OR, but I’ve lived in Washington, Hawaii and California. Both Washington and Hawaii share the “Californians came and fucked this place up” attitude, but then so does California itself. Boom or bust, everyone who was there during a previous era will tell you how it was better in the past: when you could hang out all night on the Sunset Strip in the 60’s and not get hassled, or you could drive for miles through orange groves in the 40’s, etc.
This is true of almost all the states: Rural areas tend to be more conservative, while urban areas tend liberal. Given that there are close to the same number of conservative and liberal people, and that rural areas by definition have lower population densities, it’s natural that Republican regions would cover much more area than Democratic regions.
Pretty much. I think nearly all large cities are at least somewhat (if not heavily) democratic, in part due to the large minority and white liberal populations in those areas. Even Salt Lake city is democratic.
The combined population of the red states of Wyoming, North Dakota, Alaska, South Dakota, Montana, Idaho & Nebraska is about the same as the blue city of New York.
I remember an earlier version of this, which divided the west into Ecotopia and El Dorado. At the time (mid 80s, before Microsoft ate Seattle), people went to LA to get into showbiz and to the Northwest to breathe pine air. In this earlier version, there was no “empty quarter.” It’s a little arrogant to think there is one now.
It’s empty in the sense of being sparsely populated, outside of a few major cities, for lack of water. That’s what distinguishes it from rainy Ecotopia, and from the Breadbasket. (Its distinction from MexAmerica is mainly cultural.)
This was true in the past, but as of the 2008 election it’s actually false, though it comes really close. Blue counties have an edge of around 10k square km (of a state of 500k), due to to blue shift happening in many Southern CA counties. E.g., Riverside and Imperial counties, two of the biggest in land area, swung to Obama in 2008. That’s the most interesting demographic trend going on in CA right now.
Which isn’t to undermine your point, as California is far from monolithically Democratic. Shasta is more Republican than Idaho, and Kern County (home of the oil rich Bakersfield) votes largely similarly to the land of its Okie ancestors.
California alone is a huge place; lumping San Diego, LA, the Inland Empire, and Orange County all together does a disservice to all of them, as each could be its own state. Then you have the Central Valley, and Jeffersonia (which itself has a sharp red/blue split, between Redding Tea Partiers and Eureka pot growers). And of course there’s the Bay Area, land of silicon and wine and Black Panthers and organic local food and hippies and hipsters. Throw in Oregon and Washington, and you’ve got a huge place
I’m sure you could find some dividing cultural line between SoCal and not-SoCal, but I’m skeptical about whether it’d be that meaningful.
