The morning after, Colin Woodard spoke to the hosts of the province’s “Mainstreet” program about the consequences for democracy, world stability, and the US-Canada relationship
The day after former President Donald Trump won the 2024 election, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation interviewed Nationhood Lab director Colin Woodard about the results, an analysis via the American Nations regional model and the implications of the insurrectionist, convicted felon, and textbook authoritarian reassuming control of the world’s most powerful country.
“This isn’t an ordinary election where you have a conservative candidate and a liberal candidate. [Trump’s] someone who supported and backed an insurrection against our Capitol to keep himself in power,” Woodard told host Jeff Douglas. “He’s facing a couple dozen criminal indictments related to that and… [he has] an authoritarian’s playbook.”
Woodard noted that most of the states controlled by Deep South and Greater Appalachia — Trump’s strongest regions of support in all three of his presidential runs — were until the 1960s one-party authoritarian regimes backed by apartheid laws and death squads. “You can look at them as being young democracies, and so democratic backsliding is possible to happen early on,” he said, noting the anti-democratic laws and policies enacted in those states over the past 15 years.
In the days before the election Woodard also spoke with the New York Times, the Minnesota Star-Tribune, BBC Mundo, and Maine’s Portland Press Herald.
CBC-Nova Scotia is the provincial television and radio bureau of the CBC, Canada’s national public broadcaster, founded in 1936. Mainstreet, produced in Halifax, airs weekdays in prime time, 3pm to 6pm Atlantic.
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.