- For nearly 250 years, Americans have marked the 4th of July as the birthday of the nation.

And in July of 2026, we'll celebrate 250 years.

Today's guest argues that the "Declaration of Independence" is as relevant and vital today as it ever was, and that its promise is essential to preserving the Republic.

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

(inspiring music) (inspiring music) (inspiring music) Hello and welcome to a "Story in the Public Square" where storytelling meets public affairs.

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

- And I'm G. Wayne Miller, also with Salves Pell Center.

- And our guest this week is an old friend of the show who's now a colleague.

Colin Woodard is an award-winning journalist and a bestselling author who now leads Nationhood Lab at Salve Regina University.

Colin, it's great to be with you today.

- Likewise.

Thanks for having me.

- So, when we last had you on in 2021, it was at the tail end of the book process for "Union," but since then you have created Nationhood Lab at Salve.

Tell us a little bit about the lab.

- Yeah, I mean, when I'm talking to an academic audience and they ask, "What's Nationhood Lab about?"

I say, "Well, we study and try to solve for the problems of United States nationhood."

But what that means is, you know, we're trying to understand why the US has the vulnerabilities it has, what's held it together in the past, and how could you hold it together more successfully in the future.

So that involves a lot of things, understanding the structural problems in the US that are historical and cultural and have been passed down over the centuries, but also to understand the stories and the glue and adhesives that hold our fractious federation together.

- So, like a lot of Americans, you are concerned, I think it's safe to say at this point, just by what you're studying, there's implicitly some concern about the ability of that union and that confederation to endure.

That the forces trying to drive us apart are greater now than they've been in a long time.

Why are you worried and what specifically worries you?

- Yeah, I mean, I've been concerned for at least a decade.

I mean, the divisions, the disagreements in the country aren't just political, they're geographic.

And the growing fissures between the regions on fundamental questions, the balance between church and state, what government should and shouldn't do, you know, the meaning of keywords in our lexicon like freedom and liberty have been growing over time.

And as we've gotten into more recent period, especially the past few years, I mean, we actually had an insurrection against our government, and the person who encouraged it and was to benefit from it and was facing criminal indictments for it, has been reelected president and pardoned the violent people who attacked our capitol building.

That alone, just that fact, shows that your country, your western or liberal democracy is in a bit of crisis if that's the situation you found yourself in.

So yes, there's many reasons to be deeply concerned about the health of the republic and for various reasons the health of the republic and the survival of the federation as a unified entity in the middle and long term are tied together.

- So these geographic divisions are not new, they have historical roots.

Just talk about that a bit.

- Yeah, they go back centuries.

I mean, we talk about the differences between north and south, but really our country is this accidental federation of a bunch of separate nations, if you will, because the continent was colonized in separate colonial projects along the eastern and southwestern rims of what's now the United States.

Projects that didn't think that they were gonna be part of one country together.

The Puritans in New England, a bunch of people who thought they'd been chosen by God, that they were in a covenanted relationship like the Old Testament Hebrews, to do certain things in the world, they were gonna come to the New England wilderness with a mission.

That's a very different society than the Dutch who settled the area around what's now New York City.

This highly commercial trading colony.

Or the aristocrats who came to the Chesapeake country trying to recreate the aristocratic system of country estates and manners, you know, serfs working the land and all of that, that they had experienced back at home.

Or the borderland Scots-Irish sort of warrior culture that had been developed and shaped in the lowlands of Scotland and in Ulster, who were then brought as these border people to guard the borders of the colonies from the indigenous people who the colonies were grabbing territory from.

All of these cultural projects were very different.

They were settled at different times by people with different religious and ideological and cultural characteristics.

And they settled mutually exclusive parts of the continent out through the 1840s.

And a lot of the fundamental characteristics that go back to the 1600s and 1700s, you can still recognize today.

In other words, we're a strange federation of cultures that don't have enough consensus on a lot of core ideals to make for smooth sailing as a single country.

- Well, so a lot of that is laid out in your first book in the series of books, "American Nations."

Do those same divisions manifest themselves in the political culture of the United States?

Does the New England states have a different political culture than the deep South or the Midwest or the far West?

- Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, there are enormous differences between these regional cultures.

The biggest thing it boils down to, which the second book in the series gets into, "American Character," is they've been struggling over how do you execute the American experiment.

Once they all ended up in a country together, and that was an accident of the 1770s.

There was a threat to all of these separate cultures from a change in imperial policy that was gonna consolidate and force all these cultures to, you know, bow to the king and become homogenous.

So they all rose up together and they ended up in this country with a experiment.

An experiment that written down in the "Declaration" that you were to try to create a society where people could be as universally free as possible.

And the problem was that these cultures disagree on a sort of cultural and ideological basis on how you do that.

And it boils down to, do you do that through maximizing the autonomy of the individual, you know, personal freedom and autonomy and to try to reduce constraints from government or anyone else If you had less regulations and less taxes, you know, and less government, would you not axiomatically as individuals be more free?

Or there's this other point of view that says, no, the only reason that free societies, societies were individuals can be free, can exist.

It's the product of 5,000 years of human civilization building the gossamer-like nest of structures and institutions and norms that make that possible."

That to be a free society, you're involved in a collective project to maintain the possibility of individual freedom.

Maintain it intergenerationally, which means, you know, if somebody is born in poor or difficult circumstances, that they have a shot at becoming free and realizing their potential.

That requires investing in all sorts of things.

And in the current environment, you know, you need investments and shared infrastructure and you know, public health and public education and kindergartens and libraries and all those leveling mechanisms that make that possible.

It's a cultivation of a republican citizenry.

So you can see that if you're trying to maximize individual freedom or you're trying to build a free community, and you see that as the way to achieve the American experiment, those have opposite policy ramifications.

And these different regional cultures are very sorted between being extremely communitarian-oriented like the New Englanders, right, a group of people who believed initially that they were on a mission from God to achieve certain things in the world, they'd be punished or rewarded as a group.

Individual freedom didn't matter as much as the community achieving its goals.

And then you go to somewhere like the Scots-Irish settled back country of Greater Appalachia, I call it.

And those were people where institutions were incredibly weak where they came from.

You had to defend your kith and kin yourself in a situation where, you know, that you were the only person you could rely on in altster and elsewhere.

And so the lessons that that culture had are highly individualistic.

- So how does that manifest itself in 2025, if we're talking public health or gun violence or pick your favorite issue.

How does it play out?

- Think about it like guns, you know, your attitudes towards guns control will be very much influenced by that.

If you believe in, it's your individual responsibility to protect your kith and kin, you have to do it yourself and you can't trust the authorities, you're gonna wanna maximize a gun owner's rights and you're less concerned about the freedom of the community.

If you're from a culture that believes in this shared, you know, that the community freedom matters, you can trust institutions that the magistrates and officials are the ones who settle things and you work through courts and laws and stuff, you're gonna want to protect the community.

Or you know, you'd see that in, you know, abortion rights, in how much you invest.

Does your society want to invest in public institutions and public health, or do you want to have lower taxes and lower constraints so that there's a low service, low tax environment?

Those are two different options.

You could say that you have economic freedom if your taxes are low, whereas the other side would say, no, you have to have these institutions and invest in them or society and the economy won't work as well.

So they are strongly gradated and have throughout history consistently between that individualism and communitarian approach.

- So in "American Character" rather and "Union," you've explored the things that hold these disparate regional cultures together in one nation.

And we are still one nation.

What are they?

What are the factors that hold us together still?

- Yeah, that's the amazing thing.

I mean, despite this regional fractures, we emerged, you know, as one of the most powerful, you know, countries in the world.

For a while, the unipolar superpower after the Cold War.

Clearly something worked and Americans for a time at least believed that they were part of one shared project.

So what was that?

And that was something that I explored in both "American Character" and "Union."

But ultimately, if you are a federation like this, you need a shared story, right?

All nations need a story 'cause a nation is this abstract idea.

We all agree that a nation exists and that somehow as a member of a nation, we owe fellow members more loyalty than we do to people who aren't a member of that nation, that we might give our lives to that nation.

What is a nation?

You need a story that describes what its purpose is, where it came from, who belongs, what its characteristics are.

And it's really important if you're a federation like ours that has never had a shared religion or language or ethnicity or any of those building blocks.

So what's held us together is a story.

We need one, a national story.

In academic terms, we call it a national narrative, but it's your shared story of purpose and identity.

And humans use those kind of things all the time.

Ours was contested from the beginning because we didn't have a story in 1776 and we didn't have a story in until the 1830s.

And people started realizing, we need a story 'cause this country's breaking up.

You know, new Englanders tried to leave during the war of 1812.

Some of the Scots-Irish tried to leave during the Whiskey Rebellion.

They had to come up with a story.

And by the time we started doing it, there ended up being two competing stories.

One said, "We're a people defined by our devotion to ideals in the American experiment," like I talked about before, the ideals and the "Declaration" and executing those, making a society where individuals can be free and free over time.

But there was a counter narrative that said, "No, the "Declaration" is wrong, humans are not created equal."

And these are in fact the ethno-states of a superior blank people.

Originally it was the Anglo-Saxon race.

So it was an ethno-national construction, not necessarily democratic and rather authoritarian that came out of the deep South and Tidewater, places that had slave systems already.

But how did they square that with being a republic?

Really easily, they just went back to classical republicanism.

To ancient Greece and Rome as examples.

They said, "Hey, these are societies where a small minority had the liberty or privilege to practice democracy and subjugation and slavery with a natural lot of the many."

They had, you know, thousands of years of classical writing from antiquity on their side.

So that is the massive divide in our country, is we need a story, but between those competing stories and those stories, you know, what we were fighting over in the Antebellum period and the Civil War and reconstruction and the Jim Crow period all the way up until the Civil Rights movement sort of brought the "Declaration's" values to the fore and created a consensus.

- So we have a highly polarized political situation here in the US today, certainly in Congress.

Culturally, we're very divided.

Can the center hold as it were?

I realize you don't have a crystal ball, but I think it's a question a lot of people are wondering now in these very contentious times.

- Yeah, absolutely, we need the center or something to hold and what it is, I mean, that's what Nationhood Lab does.

That's the big task we set out for ourselves is to understand these kind of problems.

And one of them was, is there a shared story that we all agree on?

Is the good story, I will call it, the one that is tied to those propositions in the "Declaration", right?

That we're a group of people tasked to make sure that each one of us can survive, not be tyrannized, pursue our happiness as we understand it, and access the representative self-government that makes that possible.

Are we a society devoted to those ideals?

So we went out to find that out.

Could we perfect a story that would work now in the 21st century built on those ideals?

Do people believe in them?

And so we did polling, we did national polling, a whole battery of them.

We did qualitative interviews, you know, having our pollsters talk to people in depth about their feelings and why they were answering questions the way they did.

And in the end, what we discovered without us doing anything is that most Americans, you know, like 65% to 33%, most Americans prefer to define our country based on the ideals in the "Declaration" rather than as attractive as we would present it, basing it on shared heritage or history or ancestry or characteristics that are more intrinsic to a people.

They're kind of tied to who are you and bloodlines and all that is the quiet thing.

Or the actual abstract ideals of the "Declaration".

People overwhelmingly prefer those and it went across gender, education levels, regional cultures, race, generations.

So it was a surprise just how much people already have that hardwired into them, - But a very critical finding.

Of course.

I mean, a good story.

- A wonderfully surprising... 'Cause I thought when we set these questions up, we set up the original poll was do you prefer this statement or this statement?

We had statements about, you know, our history, our identity, our national purpose.

And I thought that the heritage ones would win out because they just seemed more concrete and the other ones seemed like these abstract principles that seem, you know, lofty and in these, you know, language that seems archaic.

No, it was the other way around.

And we just asked people outright, "Do you believe that we, as Americans, are tasked to protect one another's natural rights as defined in the 'Declaration', you know, liberty, pursuit of happiness?"

It's like we thought, well we better test this.

You know, if you just put that as a proposition, is it still 60/30?

It was 97 to 2 in favor, which was the widest, you know, the most lopsided result are posters had ever seen in any question.

I mean, if you go and ask Americans and people have, you know, is the earth flat or round you get 80/10 with 10% undecided.

I mean, 97% is unheard of.

So Americans are generally like.

we actually have that in our culture baked in, we need to use that.

And we did in developing our messaging, we just tried to improve from there on how do you talk to people now in the 21st century?

How do you articulate these ideas?

- So with all of these regional divisions and the political divisions that Wayne just mentioned, does the same story work for everyone?

I mean you're talking about 65%, but if you're gonna go talk to somebody about this idea of the American Republican 2025 or next year on the 250th anniversary year of the "Declaration", does the same story work for everyone?

- Yeah, that was one of the things we wanted to know.

We thought, you know, will we need to create customized versions of this story for each of the regional cultures.

In American nations, there are, you know, 11 major and like three minor.

You have 14 regional cultures, you have to create separate ones for, you know, different demographics, different, you know, racial groups, different generations.

The answer was basically, no, this one works pretty well with everybody.

The only thing we discovered is if you tweak the words here and there in this sort of, it's like a one page core narrative script is what communications people call.

But in this one pager, there were just a few changes we made that if you're talking to a uniformly conservative audience works a little bit better.

But, you know, they were pretty minor changes.

And in general it works with most everybody.

- How do you see this?

You're talking to people now, I know you're traveling the country talking to people.

How do you expect this narrative to resonate in the 250th anniversary year of the "Declaration"?

- Right, well, I think about it as how do we disseminate and push out this answer, right?

This story that's grounded on the best version of ourselves, it turns out to be really popular.

How do we get that out there?

You know, you're trying to hack the zeitgeist of a nation of 350 million people.

I see the "Declaration", the fact that next year is the 250th anniversary of the "Declaration" and the country, Americans are gonna be prompted for, you know, the first time in 50 years, to think about, well, what was the "Declaration" about?

What's the country's purpose?

What are we celebrating?

And so we're trying to leverage that moment to bring out these sort of talking points that people can frame how they commemorate and think about the 250th birthday of the country.

So I find that the most important thing, is this sort of a leveraging point because it's prompting Americans to think about what are really important issues, but on the face of it seemed like really esoteric ones.

- So what makes the "Declaration of Independence" so remarkable?

Start with what made it remarkable almost 250 years ago and today?

- Yeah, in the 1770s, this proposition that people have these inherent rights that were given to them by God or the universe, or nature's God, as the "Declaration" says it, that was this revolutionary idea in an era of empires and kings.

And you know, if you're a monarch change religion, then every single person in your polity had to change religion.

This idea that humans could govern themselves and that humans are inherently, each of us has this equal moral right to freedom and liberty and all of the rest.

In that world, that was a revolutionary idea.

- And not just the world of Europe, but the world.

- Anywhere.

Anywhere that had gotten a complex civilizations, individual human freedom had not been part of the equation for the 5,000 years since we started living in cities.

You know, as soon as that happened, you had, you know, despotism and different kinds of... - Yeah, hierarchies.

- Authoritarianism was the norm.

So that was an enormous moment, but it was kind of, nobody paid a lot of attention to it for 30, 40 years until Americans were starting to ask themselves what's gonna hold the United States together?

So those ideas were out there, but kind of ignored it first, and then people started realizing, "Oh, this is something that we could bring as the United States' mission and the story that would hold us together."

And so it became really important at that point.

And the ideals in there are so attractive to people, they're so moving that they started affecting other country's trajectories, being adopted all over the world and becoming a sort of inspiration, a world changing, you know, set of, you know, ideas.

Ideas are really powerful things.

And that one packed a punch.

- Earlier in your career, you worked in Eastern Europe in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War.

And I know that your experience there informs the way you think about the divisions sort of winding their way through American society today.

What did you see there that informs you about this moment in American history?

- Yeah, all of the work I do here in North America came out of being in Eastern Europe and the Balkans when communism collapsed.

I was there actually as a study abroad student in the fall of 1989 in Budapest.

And communism was there when I arrived, and it was gone when I left a few months later.

- [Wayne] Wow, what a time to be there, huh?

- Unbelievable - [Wayne] I bet.

I wast studying that.

I was a Soviet East European history major, and I saw all these events happen for, you know, saw the Berlin Wall fall, was in Ceaescu's, Romania before it was overthrown.

And I had to go back.

I went back the next summer on undergrad research grant, and after I graduated in 1991, I spent basically all of my '20s and all the 1990s in that region while it was transforming.

And that was a laboratory for all of this stuff that I apply in the Americas now.

You had places trying to create liberal democracies where none had existed before.

People trying to deal with historical memory issues.

Who are we as a people?

The Soviets said, "Your Hungary's national story is this," and now suddenly the Soviets are gone.

What is our national story?

Who belongs?

Who doesn't?

What aspects of our history matter?

Are those people over there who don't speak Hungarian but live in Hungary who are Slovak or Romani, are they Hungarians?

Can they be?

You know, wait, Hungary's borders are wrong.

They used to be this big and now they're this big.

All of those questions were happening and in some places there was demagogues starting to seize the situation for personal gain, getting people to attack each other based on the kind of dynamite you could light, ethnic conflict situations.

You know, Vladimir Meciar tried it in Slovakia, (indistinct) in Romania, and then Milosevic in the Yugoslav wars.

And the last phase of time I spent was covering the aftermath of what happened in Bosnia, Herzegovina and Sarajevo and the like, cities that had been destroyed and interviewing people whose, you know, families had been slaughtered in ditches.

But even more poignant interviewing the people who'd done the slaughtering and weren't at all sad about it.

And the sort of ability of a big lie to percolate in their minds and get, you know, good people to do terrible things.

So the idea of national stories, our identity, who we think we are as a people, how that can be manipulated is, you know...

I knew from that region where it's all plain and unveiled on the table, how consequential these things are.

These are not abstract academic ideas.

These are deadly serious.

And in our country, where we're not used to thinking about our history, we think that history doesn't matter and that, you know, we've transcended all of these things.

We desperately need to focus and have a good sense of who we're supposed to be as a people because, you know, it can happen here.

- Wow - A big piece of this is, as you think about telling the story, is education.

So how do we educate current generation and also, you know, students in schools, how do we educate them about, I guess it's civics, but it seems like it's more than civics.

- Yeah it's definitely more.

- It's some fundamental elements of American history, but really what are they about?

- Civics and values and history are all tied together.

And history is, you know, what do we tell?

What was important in our past?

And how do we frame it?

And the essentials are that, you know, we've neglected all those things.

The whole world thought after the collapse of communism, that history was over, right?

The end of history and nations won't matter, and the European Union is forming and nation state boundaries will disappear.

It'll all be about free trade.

None of that ended up being true.

(all laughing) - [Jim] Yeah, no kidding.

- History and all these things matter a lot.

We also, in this country, stopped having civics education as widely in public schools, and people weren't learning these things.

You know, we have to learn STEM and we have to do the essentials.

And they started pushing back on civics being available to new generations.

You need all that stuff desperately.

And also you need a history, you need to tell our real history, our actual story, that story of people taking on this crazy idealistic task and you know, messing it up constantly, betraying it, other people fighting for it.

I mean, it is a rousing and continuing story of the battle to see if humans can't, you know, have individual freedom and protect one another's freedom in the world.

You need to tell that story to people.

If you clean it up, if you start... And there's these efforts, political efforts.

- [Jim] To sanitize it.

- To try to sanitize it.

If you don't know about reconstruction.

Right after the Civil War, there's a terrorist campaign in the South to roll back and successfully end the political emancipation of African Americans in the South.

And that led to Jim Crow.

If you say, we're not gonna talk about what happened then, then it doesn't make any sense.

You're gonna be telling students about the, you know, the Union won the Civil War and then there was the Civil rights movement, why?

That story is a rousing story.

And if you tell it right, it's inspiring around national unity and civic health.

It doesn't erode, it increases people's understanding and young people's understanding of what's at stake.

And in a sense, pride.

- It's also a true story.

But final question, this effort can't just be the work of one individual.

How can people who are watching this get involved with Nationhood Lab?

- Absolutely, well go to nationhoodlab.org to learn all about what we're doing and to follow along as we continue doing this kind of work.

You know, if you're an educator, we're working developing ways with teachers at community colleges and high schools and elsewhere to actually teach this stuff.

- [Wayne] A curriculum then?

- Yeah, exactly.

If you work in communications in any form, we're starting to figure out how do you take this core narrative frame, this one pager I described, and you can get that at the website as well.

How do you use this in different formats?

How does one create a TikTok around this?

How does Gen Alpha learn these things and what would they do?

Do they create a meme?

All of those things need to happen.

And if you work in that space, get inspired and use it as well.

And if you are an elected official and you agree with the "Declaration"s values, think about that.

When you make decisions, is this law or initiative I'm going to pass furthering the mission of the "Declaration" or destructive to it.

If it's the latter and you believe in the "Declaration", maybe don't do that piece of legislation.

(all laughing) And if it is, you know, do that.

So, yeah, and ordinary people, you know, pay attention and think about these things and these values in your everyday life and conversations with people.

- It's hugely important work.

Colin Ward, thank you so much for being with us.

That is all the time we have this week, but if you wanna know, visit pellcenter.org where you can catch up on previous episodes.

He's Wayne, I'm Jim asking you to join us again next time for our "Story in the Public Square".

(inspirational music) (inspirational music) (inspirational music) (inspirational music)