Nationhood Lab director Colin Woodard talked at length with the U.S. correspondent of one of Germany’s newspapers of record about the election results and the crisis Trumpism represents to American democracy
Die Welt, the conservative German daily, published a featured interview with Nationhood Lab Director Colin Woodard Dec. 26, where he discussed the 2024 election results and what they mean for the survival of American democracy.
The interview, first published Dec. 30, appeared under the headline “„In den Appalachen kann der lokale Sheriff zu Ihnen nach Hause kommen und Sie terrorisieren“,” a quote from the article in which Woodard emphasized the threat to the civil liberties of ordinary Americans during a consolidating authoritarian regime would vary by region. “In states such as Maine, New York, or California, where the opposition party controls all three branches of local government, it could be difficult for federal authorities to entirely implement their program,” Woodard said. “But many of the states where Trump’s allies control everything are exactly those states that had long been one-party regimes with racial apartheid systems maintained by deadly force….There, the local sheriff might come to your home and terrorize you.”
Woodard also discussed his regional analysis of the presidential vote published at Nationhood Lab last month, which showed Trump making modest gains in most every region compared to 2016 and 2020, but also revealed how little partisan shifts there have been in most of the American Nations regional cultures over the past quarter century.
We have “a shared liberal democraatic national narrative, a nation committed to the natural rights in the Declaration,” he told Die Welt‘s New York correspondent, Hannes Stein. “This is was the story of the American Republic, of the American Experiment to achieve universal, sustainable individual freedom. If we lose this story, our federation has little to fall back on to bind it together, because we’ve never had a shared ethnicity, history, or ideology.” The states, he added, might continue to diverge until they “The federal states would rapidly diverge in terms of their political orientation; they “soon won’t even be able to agree on whether two times two equals four or five.”
Woodard previously spoke with Die Welt in the summer of 2023 for an article on the Balkanized nature of the U.S. federation.
Die Welt, founded in Hamburg by British occupation forces in 1946, is owned by the Axel Springer group, which recently purchased POLITICO. It has a print circulation of about 180,000.
Nationhood Lab, a project at Salve Regina University’s Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy, delivers more effective tools with which to describe and defend the American liberal democratic tradition and better understand the forces undermining it.