December 5, 2024
KINGSTON, R.I. — Project Director Colin Woodard has been speaking about Nationhood Lab’s work across the country, with recent events at Brigham Young University, the Gloucester Meeting House in Gloucester, Massachusetts, the University of Rhode Island, Gettysburg College, University of New England, Bates College, the University of Maine and, virtually, with the National Conference of State Legislatures’ Base Camp 2024 in Boulder and the State of the Unions Conference hosted in Brussels by the German Marshall Fund and the Foundation for European Progressive Studies. He also participated in a small private dinner conversation at the German Ambassador’s residence in Washington, D.C., Dec. 1, with visiting former chancellor Angela Merkel, where he shared elements of Nationhood Lab’s polling work on public attitudes toward liberal democracy, ethnonationalism, and Trumpism.
“Inflation and the economy are driving elements in people’s minds, but the real question is that we have a candidate that has incited violence and has been in trials for it,” Woodard said of the election two days after the fact to attendees of the State of the Unions conference, which aims to help Europeans understand the dynamics and implications of U.S. election results. “There will be a descent into authoritarianism. The fact that the electorate has endorsed someone who led an insurrection will have all sorts of effects.”
He also gave post-election analysis Nov. 16 at a special symposium hosted by the Gloucester Meetinghouse Foundation in Massachusetts, that filled the historic 1805 Universalist meeting house. “Americans are about to learn what it’s like to live under an unstable, authoritarian regime,” he warned. “We’ll also learn if they – if we – are capable of standing up for our founding ideals, of fighting for our freedom now that it must be fought for. I know we can do it – the regime will be stupid, incompetent, chaotic, and unpopular. The question is if we will.”
At the University of Rhode Island, he joined Rhode Island Humanities director Elizabeth Francis for presentations and a discussion of the humanities role in preserving liberal democracy and civic health Dec. 5, the finale of the university’s yearlong Sustaining Democracy speaker series.
Ahead of the election, Woodard spoke at Gettysburg College as part of the Eisenhower Institute’s Conversations for Change, presenting preliminary conclusions from Nationhood Lab’s national narrative testing polls; at Bates College and the University of New England on the crisis facing U.S. democracy; virtually to 300 attendees of the NCSL’s Boulder base camp meeting of state legislators and staff members; and at the University of Maine, where he delivered the 2024 Libby Lecture on how that crisis would effect environmental and natural resource policy, a topic touched on recently in the project’s data journalism work.
“Authoritarian and autocratic regimes are unresponsive to the plight of those outside the ruling circle, especially those at the bottom who suffer first and most as ecological systems come apart,” he told the audience at the University of Maine’s flagship campus in Orono. “The economy is a subset of the environment, but environmentalism is the child of liberal democracies.”
Woodard also delivered the Chauncy D. Harris Lecture Oct. 3 at BYU in Provo on America’s regional cultures and the American Nations model. The annual address is hosted by the university’s geography department and, in the past, has almost exclusively featured geographers from Ivy League and flagship state universities.
In the coming weeks, Woodard will be speaking at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C (Dec. 11), NCSL’s legislative leaders professional development symposium in Austin, Texas (Dec. 12), Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio (Feb. 10) and the 2025 Camden Conference in Camden, Maine (Feb. 23.) Links to details on those can be found here.
Nationhood Lab, based at the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy at Salve Regina University, is an interdisciplinary research, writing, testing and dissemination project focused on counteracting the authoritarian threat to American democracy and the centrifugal forces threatening the federation’s stability. The project delivers more effective tools with which to describe and defend the American liberal democratic tradition and better understand the forces undermining it.