Going by the SPLC’s recently published maps, it looks at first as if New Jersey is so plagued with neo-nazi skinhead groups that it makes the rest of the country look almost free of them by comparison. But a closer look shows that NJ groups are broken into many local chapters.
This is consistent with the NJ psyche as I know it, in which local organization is favored over regional. I think it to be one of those factors that keeps NJ from having an identity other than as a suburb of New York and a home for gangsters.
The main factors, of course, are that New Jersey is a suburb of New York and a home for gangsters. (Let us count Philadelphia as a suburb of New York, in that.)
