Host David Brancaccio spoke with Project director Colin Woodard about the Pell Center project’s findings about a widely shared story of national purpose and belonging
Nationhood Lab director Colin Woodard discussed the project’s new report on a rebooted national narrative for the United States with American Public Media’s David Brancaccio on Marketplace Morning Report, the nationally syndicated segment that runs during NPR’s Morning Edition across the United States.
“What we were hunting for was: what is it that Americans might still have in common? Why should the red states and blue states stay together? Is there something that we still share as Americans?” Woodard explained in the segment, which aired April 9. “You know that’s our common umbrella, and that “That came very quickly to the question of well, what’s America for? What’s our purpose? Where did the country come from? Where is it going? Who belongs? All these questions that scholars would say is the ‘national narrative of a country,’ something every country needs.”
“We went out and did polling, and what we discovered almost immediately is the answer is yes,” there is a common story, he added. “Large majorities of Americans across race and gender and political, party and region and education levels do in fact prefer and believe in that narrative tied to the ideals and the Declaration [of Independence].”
Woodard shared this and other results from Nationhood Lab’s new report, released March 12, “The Story of America: A rebooted civic national narrative for the United States,” and explained why the U.S., as a Balkanized federation, is particularly vulnerable to collapse without such a story.
Marketplace Morning Report reaches 7.6 million listeners in a typical week, airing as part of NPR’s Morning Edition Monday to Friday starting at 06:51 in whichever U.S. time zone you live in. It’s carried by hundreds of public radio stations nationwide.
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.