The Finnish news organization spoke with Colin Woodard at length for their feature interview published earlier this month
Earlier this month, Nationhood Lab Director Colin Woodard spoke at length with Uuusi Juttu, the upstart Finnish news site founded by Denmark’s Zetland magazine, about the ongoing authoritarian takeover in the United States and what it means for European and world security.
“Our country is in a constitutional crisis and in the process of collapsing into an authoritarian system,” Woodard told reporter Anu Partanen for the article published Feb. 5. “It’s not going to be an outright dictatorship because we’re too big a country for that and because our federated structure is ultimately really hard to dismantle, no matter how hard you try. But we could become an unfree country.”
“We’re already on that path, and because we’re such a huge country, all of this is going to affect people all over the world,” he added.
Uuusi Juttu reached out to Woodard because of intense reader interest in a news feature the site had run in January on his American Nations model, which also forms the backbone of many of Nationhood Lab’s analytical projects.
Uuusi Juttu, the first “overseas” project of the member-centric Danish news portal, Zetland, was founded last summer in Helsinki. Its stories appear as text and audio podcasts.
Woodard, an expert on U.S. regionalism, the problems of U.S. nationhood, and authoritarian ethnonationalism, spoke with the New York Times, the Minnesota Star-Tribune, BBC Mundo, Montreal’s La Presse, and Maine’s Portland Press Herald ahead of the 2024 presidential election and with the German daily Die Welt and CBC-Nova Scotia in its aftermath.
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.