Project director Colin Woodard was the guest on Iowa Public Radio’s statewide, hour-long public affairs show “River to River” and WVIK’s popular “Heartland Politics” show, serving eastern Iowa and northwestern Illinois
Nationhood Lab’s director, Colin Woodard, discussed his new book, Nations Apart, and the project’s work showcased therein on the flagship public affairs programs of Iowa Public Radio and WVIK, the Rock Island, Illinois based NPR affiliate serving the Quad Cities region.
Woodard joined IPR’s statewide, hour-long interview program “River to River” on Nov., 26, speaking with veteran host Ben Kieffer. The program is carried live across IPR’s twenty-seven stations, which reach all 99 of the state’s county and a weekly listener base of 205,000. He’d joined the program several times previously, including for the launch of American Nations back in 2011, and Kieffer asked him about the changes since then.
“We’re in a very different space now,” Woodard said. “In the end of American Nations, I warned to some controversy that if our country continued the way it was, if we didn’t find a way to reconcile some of the ideological differences between the regions that the country could eventually fall apart.”
“People thought that was absurd. ‘We have norms! We have cohesion! That could never happen!’ And of course now people are realizing that that is entirely true. The new book looks… for where common agreement might exist over what we share as United Statesians, as Americans, as members of this federation.” They also discussed the Midlands in detail, the regional culture that dominates almost all of Iowa.
On Dec. 26 he was the guest on WVIK’s “Heartland Politics,” the interview program hosted by veteran political consultant Robin A. Johnson. WVIK, based in Rock Island, Illinois, serves the “Quad Cities” around Davenport, Iowa, and Dubuque. Among other things, they discussed Nations Apart’s thesis that, post-2008, many states controlled by the three “Dixie” regions have moved back toward their authoritarian, one-party state pasts, creating conditions that helped ethnonationalists seize control of the federal government.
“The states dominated by those regions are young democracies, and as political scientists know, young democracies are prone to backsliding,” Woodard said. “Those places have become increasingly authoritarian, with radical gerrymanders to stop their own people’s will from being expressed…. denying powers to incoming (Democratic) governors, changing regulations on who can vote and how they can vote, all efforts to institute one-party rule.”
Woodard’s new book, Nations Apart: How Clashing Regional Cultures Shattered America, showcases Nationhood Lab’s research into regional divisions in the United States and the shared national story that can hold the country together. It goes beyond this work as well, with original historical and sociological research on how we got here as a country. It was released by Viking/Random House Nov. 4.
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.