Staff writer Kate Tuttle interviewed the project director for a dedicated feature on the Pell Center project’s work on regional divides, threats to democracy, and the shared American story that can hold us together
The Boston Globe‘s Kate Tuttle interviewed Nationhood Lab project director Colin Woodard for a dedicated feature on the project’s work on regional divides, threats to democracy, and the shared American story that can hold us together. The Q&A feature, which ran in the Globe‘s Ideas section Nov. 9, followed the release of Nations Apart, Woodard’s new book showcasing the Pell Center project’s work.
“If you map data on public opinion at the county level, you will often see the patterns matching the American Nations settlement patterns from three and four hundred years ago,” Woodard said. “It breaks down into how the regions think about how you create a free society: by maximizing the autonomy of the individual – you know, ‘less taxes, less regulation, less government would make individuals more free,’ — or whether they think that you have to build and maintain a free society via a shared social project, which might require investments in roads, clinics, public schools, public universities and basic science.”
They also discussed in detail what Americans have in common, and the importance of making use of that to prevent a collapse of our democratic system of government, with the ideals in the Declaration of Independence playing a central role. “Hardwired into Americans is this notion that all people have equal moral rights to pursue their happiness — that’s deeply woven in, and that’s what we need to reinvigorate,” he said.
The Globe interview is available online to subscribers. The paper is New England’s largest and most influential, and is thirteenth in the nation in print circulation. It has more than a quarter million digital subscribers.
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.