Planning the Next Great Migration

Missouri, in Colin Woodard’s take on American regional cultures, is Appalachian in the southern half and Midlands in the northern half. It has two large, diverse metropolitan areas, Kansas City and St. Louis, at the western and eastern edges of the state respectively. However, its government is entirely dominated by the rural areas, and in the present climate of what Will Wilkinson terms the “Southernification of rural America,” we may presume that it would join the Confederacy or Red republic if the Union broke up today, whatever the urbanites might think of that.