Below, Colin Woodard shares five key insights from his new book, Nations Apart: How Clashing Regional Cultures Shattered America.
Colin is a historian, award-winning journalist, and the founder of Nationhood Lab at Salve Regina University’s Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy. As a foreign correspondent, he reported from more than 50 countries on seven continents and, as an investigative reporter at Maine’s Portland Press Herald, he won a 2012 George Polk Award and was a finalist for a 2016 Pulitzer Prize. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Politico, The Economist, and dozens of other major publications. Today, he is a scholar of U.S. regionalism, nationalism, and national identity, and a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society in London.
What’s the big idea?
America isn’t a single nation but a patchwork of centuries-old regional cultures whose differences still drive our politics, health, and well-being today. Understanding these “stateless nations” reveals why we disagree so fiercely, and where overwhelming common ground actually exists.
1. The United States isn’t a nation-state, but rather a federation of stateless nations.
We’re really a collection of stateless nations, each with its own intents, ideals, and stories of national purpose. These stateless nations—these regional cultures—go back to the beginning of European conquest and settlement in the 17th and early-18th centuries.
The original clusters of colonies were settled by people from distinct regions of the British Islands—and from France, the Netherlands, and Spain—each with their own religious, political, and ethnographic characteristics. Each was first colonized at a separate time and under a different political model.
Some championed individualism, others utopian social reform. Some embraced an Anglo-Protestant identity, others ethnic and religious pluralism. Some valued equality and democratic participation, others deference to an aristocratic order modeled on the slave states of classical antiquity. The Puritan project in New England had little in common with the neo-feudal, aristocratic society of the Chesapeake Country, the Dutch commercial colony encompassing what is now Greater NYC, New Spain’s far-flung northern frontier, or the West Indies slave society planted in the Deep Southern lowlands by English planters from Barbados.
For generations, these discrete Euro-American cultures developed in remarkable isolation from one another, consolidating their own cherished principles and fundamental values, and expanding over the continent in nearly exclusive settlement bands. They saw themselves as competitors—for land, settlers, and capital—and even as enemies, taking opposing sides in the English Civil War, the American Revolution, the War of 1812, and the Civil War.
There’s never been an America, but rather several Americas, and today there are nine major ones plus enclaves of several others (primarily located outside our borders). These Americas have always been divided on key issues, with profound effects on American history, society, and democracy.
2. Differences between regional cultures profoundly shape American life.
At Nationhood Lab, we study these effects, which dramatically influence most aspects of American life: from elections to gun control, from popular opinion on abortion, climate change, and immigration to stark divides in life expectancy, household creditworthiness, economic mobility, and a wide range of health outcomes. These gaps persist even when controlling for wealth, race, education, urbanity, and other factors.
“There’s never been an America, but rather several Americas, and today there are nine major ones.”
If you map these phenomena at the county-level (election results, COVID-19 vaccination rates, FICO credit scores, or per capita gun deaths) the centuries-old rival settlement patterns stare you right in the face.
3. Regions disagree on how to create a free and healthy society, but data does not.
One seminal difference between our regional cultures: they’ve never agreed on how to go about the American Experiment and create a society where humans can be maximally and sustainably free. Do you emphasize individual liberty—maximizing individual autonomy by keeping taxes low and regulations, services, and the safety net weak—or the building and maintenance of a free society, which requires the opposite policy stance? Our politics, up until 2016, centered on this question.
The individualistic regions (in the south and interior west) always supported the more individualistic party: the Jeffersonians in the 1810s, the Jacksonian Democrats in the Antebellum period, white supremacist Democrats from the 1860s to the 1960s, and Republicans today. The communitarian ones—Yankeedom, New Netherland, Midlands, Left Coast, El Norte—for the Federalists in the 1810s, Whigs in the 1830s, Lincolnian Republicans in the 1860s to 1960s, and Democrats today.
But in terms of which approach has better outcomes, the data is clear in terms of health, wealth, longevity, safety, and resilience. In almost every data set we analyzed—life expectancy, social vulnerability, intergenerational economic mobility, per capita levels of gun deaths, diabetes, disabilities, obesity, arthritis, stroke, COVID-19 mortality, sleep disturbances, household debt, food insecurity, and metrics of wellbeing—the communitarian regions had better metrics than the individualistic ones.
“Do you emphasize individual liberty…or the building and maintenance of a free society?”
For instance, per capita white gun homicides are five times higher in the southern regions than they are in the Dutch-founded area around New York City. The COVID-19 death rate in the Deep South was two and a half times higher than on the Left Coast (the narrow plain between the Pacific and the mountains, stretching from Monterey, California, to the Alaska Panhandle) and five times that of Hawai’i. Life expectancy in the richest counties in the United States that are in the Deep South is lower than that of the poorest counties in the United States that are in Yankeedom (the Greater New England cultural space that spans much of the upper Great Lakes region).
4. The ultimate American struggle pits the Declaration’s ideals against blood-and-soil nationalism.
Our country came about accidentally. The regional cultures on the eastern seaboard allied in 1776 to face off a common threat: a change in British imperial policy that threatened each colony’s own ways of doing things. Miraculously, they won and found themselves inside something called the United States of America. But nobody knew what that really was.
The story of United States nationhood—of what the country’s purpose was, who belonged, or where it came from and where it was going—had to be created ex post facto. And by the time we really got down to doing so in the 1830s and 1840s, there were two stories of America competing with one another that could not co-exist. This contest over identity and purpose has continued to this day.
One story said that, yes, we may lack a shared history, religion, or ethnicity, but we share those ideals in the Declaration: that each human has a natural and equal right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. To be American, in this tradition, is to be committed to this set of propositions about the nature of the universe, and to create a society dedicated to making these ideals a reality.
But it was contested immediately, from the 1830s onward, by a counter-narrative crafted by a circle of Southern intellectuals who said: no, the Declaration is wrong. Humans are not equal. Only the Anglo-Saxon race, they argued, had the genius and ability to secure the promises in the Declaration. We’re a classical republic like Ancient Greece and Rome, where a minority has the privilege or “liberty” to practice democracy, and subjugation or slavery are the natural state of the many. It was an ethno-national and inherently authoritarian vision.
“This contest over identity and purpose has continued to this day.”
This has been our defining conflict ever since. The ethnonationalists actually ruled this country in the 1910s and 1920s, when the first Deep Southern president, Woodrow Wilson, segregated the federal government; when they were putting up the Confederate statues we’re now tearing down; when Birth of a Nation was all the rage, a film celebrating the KKK’s successful terrorist campaign to restore white supremacy in the occupied South; when the Immigration Act of 1924 imposed racial quotas to defend the “Anglo-Saxon” character of the country. And now, they’re back.
5. Most Americans agree on what kind of country we’re supposed to be.
At Nationhood Lab, we’ve been studying how our past struggles for national identity shaped our nation’s fateful trajectory. We conducted months of historical research, multiple national polls, and dozens of in-depth interviews with representative Americans. The most surprising thing we learned, right from the outset, is that most Americans support and prefer the Declaration’s ideals over those of ethnonationalists like Vice President J.D. Vance, who argues that Americanness is linked to one’s ancestry, specifically to the almost entirely white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant colonizers who tamed wild indigenous North America between 1604 and 1890.
In our polling, we offered registered voters competing statements about our national purpose, American identity, and the meaning of our past. In each case, one was keyed to the ideals in the Declaration, the other rooted in more intrinsic characteristics such as ancestry, heritage, character, and values. In every case, substantial majorities of Americans preferred the Declaration’s universal, civic values, regardless of gender, age, race, education, or region.
We later tested whether Americans agree with the argument that we are duty-bound, as Americans, to protect one another’s natural rights to life, liberty, and so on. They did, by an incredible 97-2 margin—one of the widest our pollsters had ever seen. This included 95 percent of Republicans, Trump 2020 voters, and Evangelicals. That’s common ground we can work with.
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