America's Puritan Do-Gooders

Writes commenter John at Reason's Hit & Run:

There has always been a never ending supply of puritan dogooders in this country. They come in two varieties, the eat your peas yankee and the fire and brimstone southerner. The Yankees have largely renounced religion and have become the puritan secular left. The fire and brinstone southerners have become the religous right of the Republican Party. I will say this in defense of the southerners. Unless you lived in their part of the country or tried to enforce your view of the world on them, they generally kept to themselves. Granted there were lots of people caught growing up in bible thumping towns in the South, but they could always leave when they grew up. The eat your peas Yankees have always been the more virilent and dangerous lot because they didn't just stay in the Northeast, they took over nearly all of academia, moved out across the country and used the courts and trial lawyers to control as many lives as possible. Granted both groups are like locusts, but one seems to move around a lot more.