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Comment by iteria | Hacker News Reader

Look at all those nations you listed that are very homogeneous. I want a nation with significant culture tradition differences listed that is like that. American exceptionalist is mostly BS but we do have some ways that we are very unique as a nation and that is how many different kinds of major cultures we have hanging out in US. People handwave the US as all the same but that is very much not the case. Even for as good as American indoctrination is, nothing is gonna change that living in Montana is nothing like living in Florida. What rural urban even means in both states is so different. And we've been this heterogeneous.

I'm willing to accept your premise, but I want an example where there isn't one overwhelmingly dominant culture. I'll accept 2 equally dominant cultures.

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It's not just homogeneity, they are also tiny. I didn't check all of them but I would guess Portugal is probably the biggest of those, with about 10 million people or 1/30 of the population of the US.

25% of people living in NZ were not born in NZ. Add to that, NZ was founded out of an agreement between the British Crown and some, not all, of the Iwi (indigenous tribes) that already lived there.

Tell me that NZ is a homogeneous place with no cultural or political divisions that make working together tricky, go on.

>nothing is gonna change that living in Montana is nothing like living in Florida

The problem with this argument is that Montana and Florida vote for the same political party, and then their representatives generally vote the same way once in Congress

I don’t think that necessarily follows; you could argue that rather it’s because states are so different that the best (national) strategy is to have a broad uniform national platform that can appeal to the most voters. Our political (electorally and procedurally) system does not favor having a multitude of regionally distinct parties.

>Our political (electorally and procedurally) system does not favor having a multitude of regionally distinct parties

We use FPTP, which famously does favor having regionally distinct parties. Smaller parties can get outsized seats in the legislature by running up the vote in just a few districts, whereas if they had the same number of voters nationally but were spread out they'd get 0 seats. If you looked at all of the electoral systems globally and said 'pick the 1 that favors regionally distinct parties the most', it'd be FPTP.

In the UK which also uses FPTP the Lib Dems got 11.5% of the vote nationally and 11 seats in the last election. The SNP got 3.8% of the vote and 48 seats

> Look at all those nations you listed that are very homogeneous.

New Zealand isn't.

Canada is bicameral but with a dysfunctional senate, meaning that it's effectively a unicameral system - and it's a highly diverse country.

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