Woodard the guest on the Philadelphia public radio superstation’s hour-long live public affairs interview show, “The Connection” with Marty Moss-Coane.
Nationhood Lab director Colin Woodard was a recent guest on Philadelphia public radio superstation WHYY’s The Connection, speaking with veteran host Marty Moss-Coane about his new book Nations Apart, the work of Nationhood Lab, and the threats to the American republic. The show, an hour-long interview format, broadcast Nov. 14.
“We’re already what a political scientist, being fair, would call a hybrid regime. We’re no longer a wholly free democratic society; rule of law is not being implemented; the constitution is bot being enforced in obvious ways, the most comically and hyperbolically is the president — without advanced warning and completely unlawfully — knocking down the East Wing of the White House,” Woodard said.
“We’re also not yet an authoritarian dictatorship,” he added. “We just had free and fair elections where the opposition party routed the ruling party. So we’re not there yet, but we’re in between, and that’s a scary spot to be in because it’s much harder to get out of an authoritarian dictatorship once its happened then to prevent it before it consolidates.”
WHYY, the Delaware Valley’s largest public broadcasting operation, has 482,000 weekly radio listeners and their website received more than half a million unique viewers each week. Marty Moss-Coane, a former associate producer of Fresh Air and the creator and host of the long running Radio Times program, created The Connection in 2023.
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.