Political Culture and Politics in State and Community

General culture has its direct impact on politics from the outside, as it were. Political culture, that differentiated aspect of overall culture which is itself a truly political phenomenon, has its direct impact from the inside. The United States possesses a political culture of its own spread nationwide. Each of the states of the American union possesses its own distinctive manifestation of that political culture. The individualistic political culture emphasizes the conception of the democratic order as a marketplace. The moralistic political culture emphasizes the commonwealth idea as basis for democratic government. The traditionalistic political culture is rooted in an ambivalent attitude toward marketplace coupled with a paternalistic and elitist conception of the commonwealth. The character and degree of complexity in the geology of specific local settlements in the United States determines whether a particular state or civil community comes closer to resembling one of the three political cultural models or combines elements of more than one within its boundaries.