Colin Woodard, A91, says the divisions have deep historical and cultural roots, but that the differences mask a shared belief in freedom
“The divides are real, they’re persistent, and they matter today for democracy and much else besides,” said Colin Woodard. Photo: Anna Miller
While America seems to be politically fracturing—and there are good historical reasons for why this might be happening—there is a central narrative that could bring the country together again.
That was the message that Colin Woodard, A91, brought to a Tufts audience on Dec. 2, as he explained research being done at his Nationhood Lab at Salve Regina University’s Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy.
From the country’s very beginning, Woodard said, as the first colonists settled along the eastern shores of North America, different strains of cultural and political identity were established that are borne out hundreds of years later in the divisions that bring conflict in the U.S. today.
“Despite its myriad advantages, the United States has always been divided against itself and thus is vulnerable to collapse,” said Woodard, author of the recently published Nations Apart: How Clashing Regional Cultures Shattered America. The country “is not a nation-state at all, and it never has been. We’re a collection of stateless nations, each with their own intents, ideals, and stories of national purpose.”
He divides the country into 11 cultural areas that span the country. In the North, they include “Yankeedom,” which started in the early colonies like Massachusetts and spread across the upper Midwest, and “The Midlands,” founded by Quakers and then Pennsylvania Dutch, which spread through the central Midwest.
Toward the South, they include “Greater Appalachia,” populated by immigrants from northern Ireland, northern England, and southern Scotland; and the “Deep South,” initially settled by sugar plantation owners from the British West Indies looking for more land to run their slave-based operations, whose legacy now spreads as far as east Texas.
How Freedom Is Defined
“These regional cultures, which don’t respect state or even international boundaries, have never been in agreement over the really big questions like what’s the proper role of government, what’s the proper relationship between church and state, and even the meaning of such key words in the American lexicon as freedom or liberty,” Woodard said in his talk, which was sponsored by Tisch College of Civic Life and the Center for Expanding Viewpoints in Higher Education.
These “stateless nations, these regional cultures go back to the beginning of European conquest and settlement of this continent,” he said.
The cultural values that they seeded are still alive to this day, he said. “Do you emphasize individual liberty as the Scots-Irish-inflected culture of Greater Appalachia does, or the common good, as did the Puritans?” he asked.
Image: John Liberty/Motivf for Nationhood Lab
In other words, he said, is freedom ultimately about “maximizing the autonomy of the individual” or about the shared endeavor of building institutions “that ensure each person has a fair shot at achieving their potential of being meaningfully free, regardless of the circumstance of their birth?”
An “optimally functioning liberal democracy maintains a balance between these two essential forces of freedom,” he says.
These historical cultural divisions play out not just in how people vote, Woodard said. He showed a number of maps of the country with data divided at the county level, showing rates of obesity and diabetes, COVID-19 vaccination rates, life expectancy, credit rating scores, and incidents of gun violence. They all broke along the cultural lines, with Greater Appalachia and the Deep South showing much different data than Yankeedom and Greater Midlands. There were similar divides between the West and Southwest. “It’s about cultural transmission over time,” he said.
He also showed immigration rates around 1900, as a great number of mostly Catholic Europeans came to the U.S.—but not to the Deep South or Greater Appalachia, which stayed ethnically and religiously isolated from outside influences.
Not surprisingly, he said, that’s the only part of the country today where Christian Nationalism, “the political notion that the country was created by and for white evangelical Christians,” has a stronghold, he said.
It’s clear, he said, that “the divides are real, they’re persistent, and they matter today for democracy and much else besides.”
What We Have in Common
But what has held the country together? The original six Eastern cultural groups “wound up together in an accident of history,” Woodard said. They came together in 1776 to face off against the British imperial rule that was threatening their way of life.
Facing external enemies has brought the country together at other times—World War II and the Cold War, for example, he said. But now the differences are starker than ever, driven by politics.
What can overcome that divide? “That we’re all involved in this shared experiment to try to create a country where humans can be maximally and sustainably free over time,” he said.
“The battle between those two versions of America has been our eternal struggle,” Colin Woodard said. Photo: Anna Miller
The Declaration of Independence’s most recognized statement—“that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”—is something that united most Americans in the beginning.
But not all. “Those ideals were contested immediately and in real time from the 1830s onward by a counternarrative, first crafted by a group of deep Southern intellectuals who said, ‘No, the Declaration is wrong, humans are not equal.’ Only the Anglo-Saxon race, they argued, has the genius to be able to take advantage of the natural rights promised in the Declaration; we’re a classical republic like ancient Greece or Rome,” Woodard said.
The Battle Between Two Versions of America
“The battle between those two versions of America has been our eternal struggle,” he said. “This was the fight throughout the antebellum period and in the Civil War and Reconstruction and Southern redemption and the Jim Crow period and the civil rights movement.”
Still, when the Nationhood Lab researchers took a poll a year ago, they found that the vast majority of Americans are in fact united by the quest for freedom described in the Declaration of Independence.
But they need to be reminded of that, Woodard said. The Deep South and Greater Appalachia and their allies “have their narrative—their story of the kind of country they’re fighting for—all worked out: to return America to the imagined greatness as it was before that civic national triumph” of civil rights and liberal democracy.
But the rest of America “doesn’t have their story worked out, and that’s most of us, the 70 to 80% of Americans who polls repeatedly show don’t actually want to live in an authoritarian, ethnonational world,” he said. “But we’ve lost our story, our message … talking about what those civic ideals mean in practice.”
Even on hot button issues like abortion, climate change, and gun control, he said, “we’re not as divided as the political leadership and the polarization at our high level would lead you to think.”
That gives Woodard “some encouragement that there are enough bonds there, enough commonalities to hold the federation together,” he said. “What we share are a set of ideals.”
