Culture Clash
After simmering for the better party of a century. North America's cultural Cold War broke into open conflict in the late 1950s and the 1960s. Each coalition underwent an internal civil war in this period;in the Dixie bloc, African Americans rose up against segregation and the caste system, while the four nations of the Northern alliance faced a youth-led cultural uprising. Both of these destabilizing events started as homegrown phenomena led by disaffected people from within each bloc but soon drew intervention from outside their respective regions. In the first uprising-the civil rights movement-the northern nations' assistance proved decisive, as it marshaled federal power and troops to force whites in Tdewater, Appclachia, and especially the Deep South to dismantle their cherished racial caste system. In the second "uprising"-the sixties cultural revolution-Dixie-based political leaders intervened in the Northen alliance-based cultural shift by opposing the young revolutionaries from the Left Coast, New Netherland, and Yankeedom, whose agenda was diametrically opposed to everything the Deep South and Tidewater stood for. Weakened by revolution at home, Dixie bloc leaders were unable to stop the youth movement in the short term, but they have since spearheaded efforts to roll back much of what the rebellion accomplished. The interbloc resentment stemming from these twin uprisings widened the divide between the nation, poisoning efforts to find common ground and mutually acceptable solutions in early twenty-first-century America.