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Colin Woodard: regional cultures explain U.S. political and public‑health divides; polling finds broad support for a civic national narrative
Summary
On the U.S. Helsinki Commission’s Transatlantic podcast, author Colin Woodard said the United States functions as a federation of rival regional cultures that show up in county‑level voting and health outcomes, and he described Nationhood Lab polling that he said finds strong public support for a civic national narrative.
On the Transatlantic podcast produced by the U.S. Helsinki Commission, Bachte Nishano interviewed Colin Woodard, the author of American Nations, who argued that ‘‘we’re not a nation state. We never have been. We’re a federation of rival stateless nations,’’ and that those regional settlement patterns still shape today’s politics and public health outcomes.
Woodard, director of Nationhood Lab and a long‑time journalist, told the commission the different colonial projects that settled North America — Puritan New England, the Dutch New Netherland around present‑day New York, the Chesapeake planter societies, and the Spanish Southwest — produced regional cultures that do not line up with modern state borders and nonetheless predict county‑level differences in voting, chronic…
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