- It's easy in America's 250th anniversary year to find things that divide us.

But today's guest says we're still bound together as a people by the ideals of our founding.

He's Colin Woodard this week on "Story in the Public Square."

(bright classical music) (bright classical music continues) Hello and welcome to "Story in the Public Square," where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

And my guest this week is a friend and colleague.

Colin Woodard is an award-winning journalist and bestselling author.

At Salve Regina University, he runs Nationhood Lab, and his new book is "Nations Apart: How Clashing Regional Cultures Shattered America."

Colin, welcome back to the show.

- Thank you, it's a pleasure to be here.

- "Nations Apart" is just a really remarkable read, and I don't think anything I've read recently is as timely and as important as this book.

We're gonna talk about it at length.

It does begin a little darkly, right?

- Right.

(laughs) - So, it it begins, "Democratic collapses like bankruptcies happen gradually, and then all at once, so do collapses of countries.

Americans are experiencing what it's like when both are happening at the same time."

Why are we facing such a profound and perilous moment as we approach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence?

- I mean, our country's always been more vulnerable than a lot of other democracies out there, because in reality where this federation, this awkward federation of a bunch of separate stateless nations, if you will.

You know, the different parts of the country were founded at different times by different colonial projects with, you know, people with distinct ideologies, religious background, ethnographic characteristics, and so on.

A lot of those things have stayed, so we've always had this rift, these divisions in the country.

And the thing that holds us together, this story, the set of ideals that after 1776, when these different regional cultures found themselves together, these different colonies, they had to come up with a reason why they were together.

And one answer there is that they're devoted to trying to create a society that can achieve those lofty aims in the beginning of the Declaration of Independence, to create a society where individual humans can be, you know, sustainably and meaningfully free, each one, and that they all have these, you know, inborn rights to not be tyrannized and to pursue their happiness and so on, but that was contested.

Some regions, the deep political culture was against that proposition from the whole time.

So, if you end up in a situation like we are now, where the ideals are being questioned, where they're being overthrown, that's the gravity that holds these different parts together.

You lose that and, you know, all kinds of chaos ensues, which is what we're experiencing now.

- And so, you know, you've written extensively and quite successfully about this regionalism and how it shapes American politics.

You know, for folks maybe who aren't completely familiar with your work, maybe just a quick summation of what that regionalism is, how it manifests itself.

- Right.

- But then what I really wanna ask is, why do political cultures that existed when colonial projects joined the republic still matter in 2026?

- Right, how could they still be here?

- [Jim] Exactly.

- Yeah, I mean, cultural geographers have wondered that.

How do cultures, how do societies get started?

- Because there's migration, there's immigration, like, there's a lot of change between- - Tons of things have happened.

- Yeah.

- Yeah, but the poll, the power that the initial group of people who set up a new society or, you know, take land from somebody else and set up a new society, the academic theories around that, on which my work is built, is that those groups, their characteristics and idiosyncratic ideas, they're really sticky.

They don't go away easily.

That that initial group of people's attitudes will have an outsized influence over the future trajectory of that society.

Even if the numbers of the first group were really small and zillions of people came later, which they did in most parts of this country, those things remain.

And indeed, you can recognize the imprint still of these initial colonial cultures three and 400 years later.

For instance, you know, in New England, you know, the Puritans, a group of people who thought that they were in an Old Testament style, you know, covenant with God who'd chosen them to do specific things to make a more perfect society.

They were on a mission from God as a group, and so they collectively, you know, had these things to accomplish.

The individuals', you know, needs weren't necessarily the top priority if it compromised the mission.

They believed in their shared institutions they created.

So, it's like this communitarian, you know, project with a sense of ideal and mission.

Whereas other regions, like the whole Greater Appalachian space starting in Southwestern Pennsylvania and going through the Southern Uplands and the Ohio River Valley, all the way down through the Lower Great Lakes States.

That's a culture that was set up primarily by Scots-Irish immigrants coming in the 1730s who came from the war-torn parts of the British Isles, you know, the Ulster, you know, the Lowlands of Scotland, and so on, places where there were no government institutions, where you had to protect your kith and kin yourself, you know, where everyone was out to get you and your people, so you had to, you know, be like John Wayne, you know, defend your hearth, you know, cut down your log cabin, isolate it in the woods, and protect it from all the, you know, invaders who might come through the ferocity of your spirit, right?

So, I mean, highly individualistic, a belief that freedom, you know, is about the individual's autonomy and maximizing their freedom and not trusting any of those institutions that the Puritans to the north were completely invested in, and then they end up in a country together, and then multiply that by 10, 11 times.

So, those sticky characteristics stayed, and not only did they stay, these different regional cultures, they colonized in separate settlement bands, you know, essentially mutually exclusive all the way out to the 1830s and 1840s, which allowed them, you know, over sort of two-thirds of the continent that one or another of these settlement bands, you know, unfolded and sort of formatted the cultural hard drive, if you will, and the attitudes and assumptions in those different places.

And so- - And it remains.

- And so, you've written about how they wind up in a nation almost by accident- - [Colin] Yeah.

- A single nation almost by accident.

You've written about this extensively prior to "Nations Apart."

- Yeah.

- But as foundation for this conversation, what sticks us together then?

What is the thing that kludges these different political cultures together in the United States of America?

- So, like, 250 years ago, they rose up, each of these colonies, against the British 'cause there was a change in British imperial policy that threatened the way that each of these separate places did things, and so they banded together to protect each of their own, you know, cultures and political cultures and power paths and all that from the British.

And lo and behold, they won, but that meant they were inside this United States of America thing, an ad hoc thing that had just been created, you know, in an emergency.

It was sort of like you created, you know, a NATO alliance, you know, sort of defend yourselves and that you needed some, you know, way to coordinate, so you created like an EU to try to coordinate for it.

But nobody was sure, when the war ended, what that meant, or even after the Constitution was drafted what is this United States thing.

Because, you know, they were a strong sense, like if you ask somebody in 1800 or even 1830, "What country are you from?"

They would've said, "I'm a South Carolinian."

- "Virginia."

- "I'm a Massachusetts."

"I'm a Rhode Islander."

- Yeah.

- Right?

The answer to what would it mean to be a United Statesian above that was unclear, and so somebody needed to come up with an answer 'cause by the 1830s, right, the generation who fought the American Revolution was gone, and the tensions over slavery, and as the antithesis of the values in the beginning of the Declaration, all those things were starting to tear the country apart, so they needed an answer, and so there was a story to try to hold us together that was created, and that was, "Hey, a generation ago, look at this thing in our opening statement as a people, the Declaration, this idea that humans have these inborn rights to be free and to pursue their happiness, to understand it, and to, you know, live in a representative, you know, government.

Can we make that possible?

That's our mission.

To be an American is to be pledged to these ideals."

And then there were other regions of the country where the intellectual class rose up instantly and said, "No way, that's completely wrong," right?

"We're the ethno state of the superior Anglo-Saxon people.

We're a classical republic like Ancient Greece or Rome, where, you know, a small minority has the liberty or privilege to practice democracy and subjugation and slavery of the natural lot of the many."

That was republican theory at the time, and so that was a- - Little republican theory.

- Little republican theory, classical republicanism of the slave states of classical antiquity.

But, you know, at that point in 1770s, 1830s, that classical republican notion was the one with, you know, 1,000 years of political history and philosophy behind it.

And this other liberal democratic notion was the sort of radical upstart, and that was the battle.

- Right.

- We have had this battle ever since over, are we a civic nation devoted to the Declaration, or are we a bloodline state, you know, where certain people, you know, are the true Americans, and it depends on your heritage and lineages, who belongs?

- And this is not just sort of an academic conversation.

Vice President Vance- - [Colin] Oh, yeah.

- Gave a lengthy speech, extolling sort of that heritage sense of America's national identity.

- Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, the current administration has been very explicit in its endorsement of heritage Americans, or essentially the contemporary version of this ethno-national take on the United States.

In Vice President Vance's, you know, speech, which he's given a number of times now, it's that American is not an idea, it's a people, and specifically the people, it is according to the vice president, are those descended from people who either fought in the Civil War or participated in the conquest of Indigenous America, which ended in the 1880s.

- Yeah.

- Who's not in that definition?

I mean, the entire great immigration wave of the 1880s through the 1920s, so that's, like, most Catholic people, Jewish people, and Orthodox Christians.

That's where most of that wave came from.

Most people, you know, subsequently from any other part of the world other than Europe, are excluded.

And how many African Americans were able to fight in the Civil War?

None in the Confederacy, and very few in particular units.

So, I mean, it's a specific vision that is limiting and constraining the idea of Americanness to essentially white Protestants, and that is a tradition that is very old and very powerful in this country, and has indeed governed the whole country at times in our history.

- So, turning now to "Nations Apart," one of the things that you do in the book is you document how these different regional cultures manifest themselves in public attitudes to specific public policy questions along those different regional lines.

Let's run through just a couple of these.

- Sure.

- And I wanna start with guns, a hugely divisive issue in American politics.

How do those regional differences manifest themselves in the way people approach the issue of gun control and gun safety?

- Yeah, and there's enormous differences.

I mean, those examples I gave of that Greater New England space, I call it Yankeedom, and the Greater Appalachian space that the Scots-Irish, other borderlanders set up, and none of these regional cultures follow state lines 'cause the settlement patterns didn't.

You have to follow at a county level.

But we do analysis, we crunch the numbers, and I knew that, you know, places where Greater Appalachia kind of controlled-state government, you know, tend to have capital punishment.

They tend to have, you know, like stand-your-ground laws.

If you poll people in those regions and you ask them, which is more important?

To protect the rights of gun owners or the safety of the public when they come in contrast?

In Greater Appalachia, people say two to one the gun owner.

In that Yankee New England space, they say two to one public safety.

So, you know, this communitarian ethos, what's most important is to protect everybody, versus a libertarian ethos where the individual's rights and freedoms are essential to protecting freedom.

Now, what happens when you've done run the data, like theoretically, is one, create a place where gun violence is worse?

And the answer is yes.

We were able to take CDC data on gun deaths and examine it via the regional cultures.

We took from all the gun deaths in the country per capita from 2010 to 2020 by county, and then calculated all the regional differences, and it's pretty shocking.

Like the Deep South, the sort of Lowland Cotton South parts of the south, you know, South Carolina, the lower two thirds of Alabama and Georgia, most of Mississippi, most of Louisiana, out into sort of Texas surround Corpus Christi and Houston and so on, that region has two and a half times the per-capita gun death rate of the Greater New England cultural space, which goes out through Upstate New York and, you know, the area around Cleveland and Northern Ohio and, you know, includes Detroit.

- Two and a half times the gun deaths.

- Two and a half times the per-capita gun death, and more than five times the per-capita gun deaths of the area around New York City, which has its own settlement history 'cause it was set up by the Dutch.

Has a completely different value system.

It was a global commercial city-state, multicultural, multi-ethnic, very different from anywhere else.

That region, you know, the Deep South has, like, five times the rate.

And consider that, New York City is the most diverse and densely populated part of the entire continent, and its per-capita gun death rate is comparable to Switzerland's.

I mean, these are enormous differences.

That's- - And they didn't go away when we looked at just gun suicides or gun homicides or where the victim was Black or where the victim was white, just looking at rural counties across them, just looking at urban ones.

You know, it stayed, even if you controlled for other factors.

- That's remarkable.

So, one of the other highly contentious issues that you look at is abortion.

So, how does that manifest along these regional lines?

- Yeah.

Similarly, you see it at a county level, both in policy attitudes.

Like if you look at the Dobbs decision, you look at which states have done what since on the abortion issue, you'll see a clear dividing line.

It's also mirrored by public attitudes.

There's been some big polling data sets that were done by others that were large enough, you know, polling over a year and a half and polling 500,000 Americans on a whole range of issues, including abortion, it was done by the UCLA Nationscape project, and we were able to take their data and examine it, and yeah, you know, there should be a total, you know, abortion ban, even if it's life of mother or rape victims.

The percentage of people who agree with that varies quite a bit by region.

It's about a, you know, 30% difference overall between the big regional cultures.

- So, you know, a lot of times, when I'm watching political analysis or reading political analysis, it's talking about Democrats, it's talking about Republicans, it's talking about independents.

And there's almost the sense that if you really wanna do something, you gotta get one of the two parties and then a majority of the independents, and then you've got control.

You're not talking about any of those labels, right?

- No.

- So, if you're interested in creating a legislative agenda around gun control or around abortion rights, or, you know, you also talk about healthcare, you also talk about climate change- - Yeah.

- If you wanna build a national governing agenda, how do you navigate those different competing value systems across the regions?

- Yeah, you have to be aware of them and think about those value systems as you are promoting your policy.

I mean, the funny thing is, you know, we talked about that abortion polling, you know, we did polling gun control and, you know, here are different measures, gun safety measures, you know.

Should we close the loopholes in gun background checks?

Should we ban extended magazines?

There's differences between the regional cultures, but most people want most of those things.

You know, you wouldn't realize it by how contentious the gun debate is.

So, given that, let's say you wanna promote one of them.

You think that policy X would marginally mitigate the terrible crisis we have.

You know, our country is alone in wealthy democracies in having these kind of per-capita gun deaths and gun homicides, and, you know, you think that policy X would mitigate that.

If you wanna sort of sell and promote that policy in Greater Appalachia, you have to say, you know, "If you do X, it will help you defend your family."

And if you wanna promote this policy in that Yankeedom Greater New England, you know, extended New England space, you have to say, "If you pass policy X, it will make the community safer."

Right?

Mirroring even that polling on, you know, the individual's rights, the individual's gun rights, and everything else versus the common good.

And if you reverse those messages, they wouldn't work as well in either region.

- Yeah.

- So, it's understanding those things in order to make your argument.

- Do public office seekers understand this, particularly at the national level?

(Colin laughs) I don't know that I've heard anybody approach it with that level of sophistication in an era where you can segment messaging in ways that, you know, even a decade ago would've been hard to do.

Now, you can really do that, but is anybody doing that kind of work?

- Not with the overarching picture, right?

At an ad hoc level, people realize, "Hey, in this place, maybe you need to make this argument, and this place that."

- Right.

- You know, like, the local people know it, the statewide, you know, activists and lobbyists.

But the big national entities, which often are dumping money either in the form of political action committees and dark money campaigns or national advertising campaigns, no, they don't realize this.

Not to the degree that you need to to understand the actual sort of, you know, national population level ideologies of these different regions and how they would interact with whatever public policy phenomenon or controversy you're trying to deal with or govern through.

So, yeah, there needs to be a much better understanding of this overall picture for, you know, good things to happen.

(Colin chuckles) - You know, we're taping this in early March of 2026, and 2026 has had a lot of news on the immigration front and immigration enforcement, and the relationship between the Federal Government, local communities, and states and citizens.

- [Colin] Mm.

- It's been a very, very difficult year for us already, and we're not even at the quarter mark yet.

But you spent some time thinking about what it means to be an American in these different regional contexts.

How does that play out?

- Yeah, I mean that does as well because each of these regional cultures had their own take on what they thought the United States should be or thought everybody else agreed with or not.

- Right.

- You know, or in some cases that they have a distinct culture different from the United States, and they want it to be X. And that played out also in ideas of, who can be an American?

You know, what's involved in being American?

Can an immigrant become one, and if so, how?

And the sort of extreme outliers are, again, you could take somewhere like Greater Appalachia, where because of a quirk of its history, right?

The exact time that the great immigration wave of 1880 to the 1924 was happening, and that was a wave where, for the first time, there were tons of immigrants who weren't Protestant and sometimes weren't European, and this was, you know, threw everyone for a loop.

Legacy Protestant America thought that, you know, all Catholics would take their orders from the Pope.

They can't possibly go to Republicans, they're too different, you know.

The same with, you know, Orthodox Christians and Jewish people and large numbers, and yeah, there was this idea that Protestantism and the British Anglo-Saxon heritage were inherent to being good republicans.

And then, at the same time, people like, you know, educated intellectuals and such were discovering the people living in incredible poverty in the hollows of Appalachian Kentucky and West Virginia and the, you know, Uplands of North Carolina and so on, and they were like, "Oh my gosh, look at these people.

They came here in the 1730s and 1740s and they're trapped there.

And they've retained," 'cause they were so isolated, "they've retained the characteristics of our original settlers," they said.

"They're still speaking Elizabethan English and they're using old technology.

They have the old-time religion.

They are our Anglo-Protestant forefathers captured in amber."

They were like sort of championing these people away from the taint of all these weird foreign influences that were coming, you know.

"There's Italian people and French people coming.

Oh my, you know, the republic won't survive."

And so, that was taken in in Greater Appalachia in this idea that yes, we are the real Americans, we're like the pure Americans not tainted by all these foreign ideas.

And that there's like a real, like, white American ethnicity.

And that's sort of like in the subtext in Greater Appalachia, which makes arguments that are parallel with that, like Vice President Vance's, like the immigration policy of Trump, which is very much oriented towards non-white, non-Christian people being sort of purged, you know, even if they're asylum seekers, even if they're here legally, and have green cards, is, poof, off to a detention camp.

That's an ethno-national project.

And it does quite well in Greater Appalachia.

You go to another region, though, like, say, the Midlands or that area around New York City.

The Midlands were the area founded by William Penn and the Quakers.

It starts in sort of Philadelphia, Delaware Bay, New Jersey, extends out through the middle of Pennsylvania, out through the middle of the Lower Great Lakes States, and on into, like, Iowa and the Heartland.

That's a place that was always culturally pluralistic.

Like William Penn or the Quakers were like, "Oh, you know, people have an inner light.

They're basically good."

They let people from all over the place come to their colonies.

And the idea was, you could come and keep your culture forever.

You go set up your own neighborhood or your own village where you speak Danish or whatever it is, practice your religion, have your newspapers and schools all in that language.

There's no dominant group, right?

So, that cultural pluralism is like the opposite of the Greater Appalachian point of view.

And in that zone, this stuff is incredibly unpopular because it rubs against the sort of traditions of the whole region.

- We probably don't have time to get into it right now,, and I'm assuming that the response that we've seen then from the people of Minnesota, in Minneapolis in particular, is consistent with the values of, that would still be Yankeedom, right?

- Yeah, that's Yankeedom, that's the Greater New England space with a sort of devotion.

It came linked to a devotion to that sort of mission and the Declaration, that the idea in Yankeedom was, people can come here, but you must become like us.

It was the melting pot you have to assimilate, but that we are, together, a group and a community, and that each person in that community has these natural rights.

And so, yeah, when the Federal Government came in, the reaction, the self-organizing of people in Minneapolis and in Minnesota generally, you know, with great restraint 'cause you're trying to avoid an actual shooting conflict with these federal agents.

But the degree to which mutual aid and confronting ICE agents and all that has been pretty amazing.

And in a smaller degree, you know, I'm from Maine, also part of that same space, at the same time, there was a smaller scale operation happening in Maine also targeting, you know, our Somali and Sudanese American community.

Same thing was happening, both public officials and ordinary citizens kind of organizing against that.

It is, like, extremely unpopular and considered fundamentally un-American in that region.

- So, I told you this was gonna happen, now that we've got about 80 seconds left.

I'm gonna ask you to try to be a little optimistic here.

- [Colin] Sure.

(laughs) - So, we're coming up on the 250th anniversary.

You've written also extensively about that unifying power of that opening part of the Declaration of Independence.

As we approach the 250th, what makes you optimistic about this moment and our ability to still emerge from these current challenges still as one nation?

- Right, you know, I'm one of those who's been warning of the coming authoritarian threat for a decade now, and it's here.

Unfortunately, you know, not enough Americans kind of realized it was coming, not enough of our media class.

It's here now, but now that it's here and Americans who weren't paying attention necessarily are seeing, in the form of ICE's behavior in Minneapolis, are seeing what this is, an authoritarian regime, even in some aspects of actual fascism.

Americans hate that.

And the way that they're self organizing, you're waking the sleeping giant of the American people, particularly in many of these regions, but that's what is going to sort of save the country, is that the people are responding.

And, you know, we're sitting here in March, 2026, but you're seeing that in polling and special election results and almost anything you look at.

The American people are not endorsing ethno-national authoritarianism or this particular project of JD Vance.

So, that makes me very hopeful on the 250th that you're seeing that commitment to the sort of Declaration's values happening now among ordinary people who've lacked real leadership from anybody to do this and are, you know, doing it themselves to save the experiment.

- This book is leadership.

"Nations Apart," Colin Woodard, thank you so much for spending some time with us today.

That is all the time we have this week, but if you wanna know more about the show, you can find us on social media or visit salve.edu/pellcenter.

You can always catch up on previous episodes.

I'm Jim Ludes.

Thank you for spending some time with us this week.

I hope you'll join us again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

(bright classical music) (bright classical music continues) (bright classical music continues) (lively guitar music)