ContentsIntroduction
1. Nations
2. Guns
3. Health and Survival
4. History Wars
5. Belonging
6. Abortion
7. Climate
8. Democracy
9. Authoritarianism
10. Holding the Country Together
IntroductionDemocratic 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.
The United States is an awkward federation of distinct regional cultures, created as an ad hoc alliance to resist a common, British, opponent. At the moment of this creation, a handful of the most eloquent Founders proposed its ideals: to create a place where all people could live in freedom.
We’ve been fighting over these ideals ever since, yet, ironically, they are the one thing that can hold us together.
To achieve these ideals, Americans fought for and slowly built a liberal democracy, a form of government where people have both civil and political rights. Across a large swath of the country, this required a revolution, the civil rights movement of the 1960s, to overthrow what had been illiberal, authoritarian regimes under which a person’s rights depended on their bloodlines. When those former Confederate states became liberal democracies, America finally did, too.
Now that’s all coming apart. Politicians no longer respect election results and have taught their followers not to believe them. Federal judges routinely make nakedly partisan rulings. Supreme Court justices have put the state in charge of women’s bodies and put presidents above the law, subject to only their very subjective review. Elected officials, poll workers, public health officials, reporters, and even the grieving parents of murdered children face mob violence and intimidation. An outgoing president encouraged a violent coup attempt at the Capitol to keep himself in power; Republican senators couldn’t bring themselves to impeach him, a Democratic attorney general failed to bring him to justice, and voters saw fit to restore him to the presidency in 2024, despite his promises to imprison his enemies, deploy active-duty troops against protesters, round up “vermin” into concentration camps, and pardon convicted insurrectionists en masse.
Our democracy is backsliding. Both the Economist Intelligence Unit and Freedom House—organizations that tourists and businesspeople once looked to for information on the state of democracy in developing countries—declassified the United States as a flawed democracy years ago and warn that we continue moving in the wrong direction.
The authoritarian movement threatens the federation, too, because it is far stronger in some regions of the country than others, creating increasingly unmanageable political, legal, and constitutional tensions. There are swaths of the U.S. where there are political leaders who push for total abortion bans, who argue that climate change is a natural phenomenon and that transgender people should be driven underground, and who want to deploy Jesus Christ and firearms in every classroom. In other regions, political leaders think reproductive rights are sacrosanct, climate change is a pressing issue requiring immediate redress, church and state are to be kept apart, guns should kept securely at home and far from schools, and more transgender people should hold public office. There are giant blocks of the country that overwhelmingly support an authoritarian ethnonationalist’s presidential bids and other blocks where the same man is overwhelmingly reviled. Everywhere there’s a growing share of the population that says we’d all be better off if we broke apart; in early 2024, nearly a quarter of American adults and about three in ten Californians, New Yorkers, and Texans said they’d support their state seceding from the United States. Of Republicans surveyed in 2022, 54 percent thought it was likely the country would descend into civil war in the next decade.
How did this happen? What can we do to reverse it?
This book seeks to answer those questions using original data and polling results interpreted through the work of historians, political scientists, social psychologists, health researchers, and other scholars. It concludes with an evidence-based strategy for bringing America’s people and regional cultures together around the ideals in our original mission statement, the Declaration of Independence. It reveals the depth and contours of the challenge, but also that the American people are not nearly as polarized as our political leaders on the hot-button issues, and are remarkably united around our ideals.
We can save our democracy, our country, and ourselves. It will take hard work and sound strategy by millions of us over many years, but I believe we’ll succeed.
I’m a scholar of nationalism, nationhood, and democracy, a historian of North American regionalism, and a former foreign correspondent who spent years reporting from countries that had descended into civil war or overthrown dictatorships or became authoritarian states after one or both of these events had taken place. I’ve covered atrocities, ethnic riots, war crimes trials, and peace and reconciliation efforts from the Balkans to Bikini Atoll and from Honduras to The Hague. I did academic work on how and why cynical leaders use lies and provocations to get people to kill one another, and how ethnic conflicts come about, before turning to the question of why my own country, the United States, is and has always been so regionally divided. For the past two decades, I’ve focused on this problem and how we can fix it before it brings down the republic and shatters our federation.
In a previous book,
American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, I showed that there has never been one America, but rather several Americas, regional cultures that were founded at different times and by very different people and which expanded across mutually exclusive swaths of the continent, laying down their own institutions, fundamental values, and original intents. I demonstrated that we’ve never been a nation-state in the European sense, but rather a federation of nations, more akin to the European Union than the Republic of France. I showed how this fundamental fact has complicated efforts to find common ground, be it in a policy issue like social spending, gun control, abortion, or the environment, or in more fundamental ideas, like where our society comes from, who can truly belong, and even whether we should be a democracy at all.
In a sequel,
American Character: A History of the Epic Struggle Between Individual Liberty and the Common Good, I explored how these “American Nations” have fought with one another over the best way to achieve the liberal democracy envisioned in the Declaration. Some regions have always emphasized maximizing the freedom and autonomy of individual citizens (though not everyone could be one), while others have championed the creation and maintenance of a free society, a social project to cultivate a republican citizenry and to ensure that individuals can be meaningfully free even if they are born poor and powerless. I warned that over a half century, our federation had drifted so far into individualism that the social contract had come apart, with a growing gulf between haves and have-nots and fewer ways for people to cross it. I warned that if we didn’t change course, people would turn against democracy. The book was released in 2016, a few weeks before Trump secured the Republican Party’s nomination for president.
After Trump’s inauguration, I started thinking a lot about my time in Yugoslavia before, during, and especially after its civil war. I kept coming back to a day in Bosnia in September 1996, not long after the war had ended. It was election day, actually, and under the watchful eyes of NATO troops and international administrators, Bosnians were voting for the first time since ethnic Serbs had started shelling the capital and murdering their Croat and Bosniak neighbors before a world television audience. I’d hitched a ride with a Canadian election observer to Sokolac, a large village deep in the hills above the burned-out skyscrapers, bullet-ridden Olympic stadiums, and grave-filled city parks of Sarajevo. We drove through unlit road tunnels, past a Bosnian Serb checkpoint and fields marked with minefield warning signs and then, beyond the former front, into forests, mountains, roadside sawmills, and compact lumber towns that looked much like northwestern Maine, where I grew up. Instead of rounding the bend into Farmington or Rangeley, we’d confront an armored column of French peacekeepers or a billboard plastered with pictures celebrating the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić, who was later convicted of genocide by an international court.
We’d come to Sokolac to see if any of the ethnic Croats and Bosniaks who’d been forced from their homes by the Serbs’ ethnic cleansing campaign had returned to vote under international protection. There was no line at the polling station set up for them, but we found a big crowd at the one for Serbs across town. One of the men in the crowd marched up to me, surrounded by curious onlookers. He was well-dressed and self-assured and had an aggressive manner accentuated by a menacing smile. He’d just returned from Switzerland, where he’d spent most of the war in comfort and, in those pre-internet days, completely outside the Serbian propaganda bubble, where up was down, night was day. Within this bubble, the Bosnian Serbs’ rape camps didn’t exist and their execution of thousands of civilian men and children at Srebrenica was a heroic act to defend Christendom from Bosniaks, Bosnia’s largest ethnic group, whose ancestors had converted to Islam when the region was part of the Ottoman Empire. “Why does the world tell such lies about the Serbs?” the man demanded to know. “All these stories about concentration camps and mass graves—these never existed! Nobody was killed in Srebrenica, and yet you journalists show pictures of corpses they are digging up. Is this any way for democratic countries to behave?” He patted my shoulder with theatrical warmth. “We’re saving Europe from the Muslims and you treat us like criminals?”
I spent many hours trying to understand how Karadžić and his mentor, the Serbian dictator Slobodan Milošević, had convinced this guy and millions like him that what they saw with their own eyes never happened, that the most indisputably evil and despicable acts were the work of heroes, that the victims were aggressors and the aggressors were victims. I’d by then spent years in Eastern Europe and the Balkans and had witnessed the collapse of Communism and the withdrawal of Soviet troops, the rise of demagogues, and what raw animal instinct wrought in the trenches and villages on the Slavonian front between Croatia and Serbia. Years of disruption, decades of dictatorship, and centuries of despotism had done something to the people of this unlucky region, I told myself. These lies would never take root in a free society like my own.
Yet they have. And my work now focuses on ensuring that we remain a free society, one that never goes down Bosnia’s path.
Our divisions flare up over policy flashpoints. In this book, I’ll show that the great hot-button political issues of our times have been shaped and are largely explained by the presence of the “American Nations,” our underlying regional cultures. Covering topics from abortion and health to gun violence and immigration, this book presents the hard data illustrating just how profoundly settlement patterns from two, three, and four centuries ago shape the world we live in today. This knowledge helps us to understand not only how and why these divisions exist but also the historical and sociocultural forces behind those differences, enabling us to find solutions that can bridge these divides.
The extensive powers our constitution reserves for the states have given us “laboratories of democracy” that allow us to experiment with different approaches. Our data delivers some inescapable verdicts on which experiments are working and which are not. There is a clear pattern. Individualistic policy approaches—financing tax cuts by reducing public services, for instance—have reduced our health, safety, happiness, wealth, and longevity. Communitarian ones, which presume that social investments in shared goods like public parks, libraries, schools, universities, health insurance, or basic scientific research grants can improve individual lives, have had the opposite effect. Deteriorating social conditions, especially in regions with highly individualistic cultures, have created precisely the sort of environment where demagogues thrive. Here’s how my fellow Mainer Heather Cox Richardson, professor of history at Boston College, puts it, distilling the essence of Hannah Arendt’s
The Origins of Totalitarianism:
Authoritarians rise when economic, social, political or religious change makes members of a formerly powerful group feel as if they have been left behind. Their frustration makes them vulnerable to leaders who promise to make them dominant again. A strongman downplays the real conditions that have created their problems and tells them that the only reason they have been dispossessed is that enemies have cheated them of power.As I write later in this book, the single-minded pursuit of individual freedom is driving us to the brink of despotism. Chapters 2, 3, 5, 6, and 7 show how as they parse regional differences across five emotive issues: gun control, social and health spending, immigration and belonging, abortion, and climate change.
Regional cultural and political traditions also differ on democracy itself. It’s not fully appreciated that some regions of our country were governed by ethnonationalist authoritarian regimes until the late 1960s—the Jim Crow South was a racial apartheid system backed by formal law and extrajudicial death squads—and, like fragile democracies the world over, are susceptible to counterrevolution. Chapter 4 reveals the mythic histories of the respective regions, which have differing implications regarding democracy, equality, diversity, and belonging. Chapters 8 and 9 relate the role the “American Nations” have played in the current authoritarian crisis, which started with the shock of the 2008 financial collapse, years before Trump stepped onto the political stage.
Holding this Balkanized federation together has always required a shared vision, a national story of purpose and belonging. Ours is a truly amazing story, a people engaged in a common effort to create and maintain a society where humans can be truly and sustainably free.
The American Experiment is the quest to ensure, in Abraham Lincoln’s words, that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth. It includes the American Promise, that we are all created equal and should be treated as such. It’s also been contested from the outset by champions of a counternarrative that holds people as inherently unequal and believes that a superior subset should have dominion over all. After the end of the Cold War, many of our leaders told us history had ended, that America had “won,” and that, in a sense, the Experiment had come to a successful, triumphant conclusion. We stopped talking about it, stopped acting on its principles, and the Promise began to wither. We need that story now, in a form that speaks to twenty-first-century life. Chapter 10 provides an answer, informed by original research, polling, and in‑depth qualitative interviews. We can fix our country and find a new birth of freedom.
Much of this work was undertaken at Nationhood Lab, the project I founded at the end of 2022 at the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy, the think tank at Salve Regina University in Newport, Rhode Island. Broadly speaking, Nationhood Lab studies the problems of U.S. nationhood and how to solve for them. In practice, we use the American Nations model to analyze past and present phenomena where regionalism is important in an effort to better describe and improve the situation. Ahead of the Semiquincentennial, the 250th birthday of the United States and the Declaration in 2026, we’ve focused on developing, testing, and deploying a renewed civic national story for the country, backed by historical understanding and hard, present-day data.
For data analysis and visualizations, we’ve partnered with Motivf, an Alexandria, Virginia-based geospatial consultancy that incorporates cultural factors into its work; they created many of the maps and graphics within these covers. On health and social issues, I’ve collaborated with a shifting team of academic researchers across the country led by Ross Arena, a physiologist at the University of Illinois Chicago, and Nicolaas Pronk, president of the Minneapolis-based HealthPartners Institute, to produce an expanding corpus of peer-reviewed studies driven by the American Nations model. While we strive to maintain standards of academic rigor, Nationhood Lab is primarily focused on driving constructive change outside the academy’s walls, and I’ve shared portions of the research and analysis in articles in
Politico,
Smithsonian, the
Washington Monthly, and other media outlets. If you find this book useful, I encourage you to follow our work online.
Copyright © 2025 by Colin Woodard. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
