Writing in Maine’s largest newspaper, project director Colin Woodard shares the findings of Nationhood Lab’s work on a rebooted U.S. national narrative
In an opinion essay in this Sunday’s edition of Maine’s largest newspaper, the Portland Press Herald and Maine Sunday Telegram, the Pell Center’s Colin Woodard shared the results of Nationhood Lab’s ongoing project to develop, test, and disseminate a rebooted civic national narrative for the United States.
“Authoritarians can be forced to respect our laws, values and Constitution, but only if the citizens stand up for them and the rights and freedoms they protect,” Woodard argued in the essay published April 6. “To do that, people have to set aside their lesser, partisan differences and rally in a common cause. But what common cause do Americans still share?”
The answer, Woodard wrote, is a resounding “yes.” Nationhood Lab’s polling and in-depth interviews with representative Americans from across the political spectrum found supermajority support for defining the United States and being American as being committed to trying to realize the natural rights ideals in the opening of the Declaration of Independence.
“The Declaration — our ‘mission statement’ as a country — argues that there is a natural right granted to all humans by God or nature to survive, to not be tyrannized, to pursue our happiness as we each understand it, and to take part in determining who represents us and in holding those representatives accountable,” he wrote. “And that we’re in a covenant, as Americans, to protect one another’s rights to these things.” Americans agree with that — and prefer it over instead defining both by shared heritage, history and character — by nearly two to one.
He shared other results from Nationhood Lab’s new report, released March 12, “The Story of America: A rebooted civic national narrative for the United States,” downloadable from here.
Woodard’s essay was the full-page featured essay in this week’s print edition of the Maine Sunday Telegram — that state’s only statewide newspaper — and also in that paper’s sister dailies, the Lewiston Sun Journal, the Kennebec Journal (in the state capital, Augusta) and Waterville Morning Sentinel.
Nationhood Lab, a project of Salve Regina University’s Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy, focuses on counteracting the authoritarian threat to American democracy and the centrifugal forces threatening the federation’s stability.