Nationhood Lab’s director was the guest on the episode for the week of April 19 of the public television series, co-produced by the Pell Center and Rhode Island’s Ocean State Public Media
Last week, Nationhood Lab director Colin Woodard was the guest on the nationally syndicated public television series “Story in the Public Square,” which is produced by the Pell Center and Rhode Island’s Ocean State Public Media and broadcast in 300 public television markets each week.
He joined host Jim Ludes — executive director of the Pell Center — to discuss the arguments in his new book, Nations Apart: How Clashing Regional Cultures Shattered America, which draws on the work I’ve been doing at Nationhood Lab. Woodard discussed the project’s research on the values and ideas that have come to define America and its citizens, on the eternal conflict between competing civic- and “blood and soil” national narratives, and the enormous regional disparities in everything from political behavior and public health to gun violence, economic mobility, and what social psychologists call “authoritarian mindsets.”
“I’m one of those who’s been warning of the coming authoritarian threat for a decade now,” Woodard said. “Now that it’s here — and Americans who weren’t paying attention necessarily are seeing, in the form of ICE’s behavior in Minneapolis, are seeing what this is, an authoritarian regime, even in some aspects of actual fascism — Americans hate that.”
Trump’s regime, he added, is ” waking the sleeping giant of the American people [and]…that’s what is going to sort of save the country, that the people are responding….The American people are not endorsing ethno-national authoritarianism… That makes me really hopeful.”
The segment began airing April 19 and the show, which is filmed at Ocean State Public Media’s Providence studios, airs on Sirius XM’s POTUS channel, has won 12 Telly Awards, a prize given to cable and local television productions. It airs
Nationhood Lab, a project at Salve Regina University’s Pell Center, examines regional issues in American life and has developed a revised civic national story for the 21st century United States tied to the ideals in the Declaration.