Nationhood Lab’s founder also discussed his new book, Nations Apart, on the Dallas NPR superstation’s hour-format interview program, which is carried by public radio stations in 29 states nationwide
Nationhood Lab director Colin Woodard was a recent guest on Think, the long-format interview show produced at Dallas NPR affiliate KERA and broadcast by public radio stations in 29 states, where he was interviewed by host Kris Boyd about his new book Nations Apart, the work of Nationhood Lab, and the threats to the American republic. The show broadcast Nov. 21.
“We’ve had this dedication to trying to create a society where humans can be individually free over time, running against the whole current of 5,000 years of history,” Woodard said of the American story, and the hidden strength of telling it, warts and all. “We’ve had setbacks and betrayals, but people have heroically pushed that forward, sometimes against incredible odds. That’s a rousing and inspiring story, and the materials that can make you proud of your nation, recognizing what a struggle it is, and that there’s both things to be proud of and also a reckoning for the times that we betrayed our ideals.”
“United States identity hads always been contested, and there was this contest between defining ourselves as a people devoted to the ideals in the Declaration or a counter narrative that came forward at the same time in the 1830s…that said no, the Declaration is wrong, humans are not equal,” Woodard added. “In fact, only a subset of people could possibly realize the promises in the declaration, originally the Anglo-Saxon race, as they called it, and argued that we are a classical republic like ancient Greece or Rome where a small minority of people at the top of the pyramid have the liberty or privilege to practice democracy and subjugation and slavery of the natural lot of the many.”
That battle between ethnic and civic nationalism has been our eternal struggle, he noted, and shared Nationhood Lab’s work to rejuvenate and retell our the civic, Declaration-story here in the 21st century.
Think, one of the most downloaded, locally produced shows in the public radio system, is also broadcast across the statewide public radio networks of Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, Rhode Island and South Carolina, as well as Jefferson Public Radio in northern California and southern Oregon, San Antonio-based Texas Public Radio, WHYY in Philadelphia and Richmond’s WMRA.
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.