this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2025
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The "50 countries in a trenchcoat" thing is so stupid.
No other country in the entire world does federalism apparently.
most of the time i hear about it, it’s not even that, it’s about the US’s internal variety, as in the variety of dialects, culture and the such
which is very funny because for a country of it’s size and population, the US (white, colonial) culture is shockingly homogenous. even england, just england, has more internal variety! and that’s not even mentioning countries like india or china
the claim that the US has a ton of cultural variation would make sense if we were talking about Indigenous people and diaspora communities. but it’s never about them, strangely, it’s always about how north texalifornia says scrimble and west massachuvania says jonkle…
Is it soda or is it pop? Or is it a coke? Or this one will get ya, is it soda pop? We have so much variety in America /s
It's a common refrain that the United States geographically is one of the most heterogeneous places in the world, but we way we build our cities and towns and how we choose to operate as an overall society is super homogenous.
Although I disagree with the notion that there isn't diversity within the US (some states may be less diverse than others however), there is a degree of truth that we tend to have the same people doing the same things from Alaska to Florida. That's not to say there aren't tweaks to the system depending on what the populations want (Compare California's government policies to North Dakotas for example), but we have sort of accepted a homogeneous lifestyle as the way to do things, for better or worse.
Great video from Wendover Productions explaining this
There are 3 major places in the US. Cities, Suburbia and the countryside. Possible 4th is small towns/college towns, though suburbia is always trying to absorb them if there are jobs to be had (or at least real estate value to be extracted).
Gentrification is also how suburbia tries to take over cities it’s not afraid of, or that it can’t ignore the all that value it wants to extract.
Suburbia is what most people see most of America as. Right wing media see it that way too and cast anything else as dangerous, especially cities that haven’t largely gentrified. They
My point is that you are stating differences between states, when your states are country sized. We have differences between regions in the country itself, wilder differences that yo have in your whole ass country.
There ought to be some differences in a country the size of 5 countries. What shocks us is how little differences there are.
Well, the US is about 250 years old as a society. How old is your country bud?
I mean, then don't go saying that it's very diverse? Idk.
Spain is about a thousands older, my region even more.
Do me a favor and look up the Diversity Index of the US, France, and Spain. It's literally a measure of how diverse a group is. Tell me which scores higher - the highest score would be the 'most diverse' by definition.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_ethnic_and_cultural_diversity_level
Funny enough, Spain and the US are both almost 0.5 by the looks of that chart. Most of Europe are way less diverse. Holland, Greece, and Switzerland not withstanding, though I bet if you use income diversity, Switzerland turns navy blue.
Less than 200 years old. And we have 3 languages, a huge cultural divide between the north and south, and more diversity in our provinces than in between us states.
What country?
Belgium. The current country was founded in 1830. We have Wallonia and Flanders who speak different languages, each province has or had its own dialect but it has merged mainly into french and dutch, with a bit of German in the east. The country itself is probably smaller than any us state, but I don't know all the sizes of them.
Funnily enough, there is a small town in the US with Belgian immigrants that still speak older dialects of Walloon.
Didn't realize Belgium was that diverse - according to the data it is slightly more diverse than the US with a diversity index of 0.55 compared to the US'S diversity index of 0.49. both of which are SIGNIFICANTLY more diverse than France (0.17) and more diverse Spain (0.42) according to this statistic. Many European countries that tut about diversity and varied culture fall pretty low on that list.
Also your point about the US community that speaks Walloon sort of illustrates my point. Almost every other culture in the world has a community or cultural center somewhere inside the US
It got a bit more homogeneous after Walloon and dutch dialects were removed in favor of Paris french (while Flemish stayed a bit more different than Dutch but officially it's NL Dutch).
For the sub-cultures hub in the USA yeah, there's a lot of them, a direct result of the colonisation of the continent. But I think what most Europeans compare against is the exported American culture (from movies, music and whatever fads start there), which is pretty homogeneous (ie, mostly capitalist and individualist) but doesn't really reflect the variety you can find "on the ground".
Tbf, the Walloon settlement in the US (Namur, Wisconsin) is pretty small, I couldn't find exact numbers but seems to have a population of a thousand, and the Walloon language is disappearing
To be fair people have been living in the area that is currently Belgium a hell of a lot longer than the US has existed
And I actually looked up how big Belgium was compared to US states out of curiosity, and apparently it's bigger than 7 states. Granted, they are all small east coast ones. Belgium is slightly (3k km^2) bigger than Massachusetts. It is only 0.3% the size of the entire US though, just goes to show the size disparity in US states.
Weren't there native tribes living on the continent before the us was created?
But yeah, the land here has been inhabited for a long time. There's a major Paleolithic site near where I live.
Seems Europe as a whole also has a distribution of small and large countries, even though the us has more of them and more land
True, there were, I think I was more thinking along the lines of like the current culture/society being there probably, because unfortunately very little of native culture is present in the modern day US
There's more variety in language in the freaking Basque country, a subregion of France and Spain. We have our own language with 7 variations, inside those there's major sub variations from town to town, and then we have all the other Spanish and French languages.
They speak of differences between states when their states are the size of countries, and inner state variance is minimal. Compare Texas to Spain, we have several regions with wild cultural and language differences...
It's laughable.
You think Texas is homogenous?
Not as diverse as Spain lol.
Yep,
And things like Reservations are also always conveniently left out of debates about the electoral college and states representation in the US senate. Like, I'd like to hear them advocate for representation for the first nations before I buy that they really believe the bullshit they spew about "states rights" and "small states need to be protected from big states".