“I am worried about our country, as I was about Bosnia 30 years ago,” General Michael Hayden, former director of the National Security Agency and Central Intelligence Agency under George W. Bush wrote in a recent article on The Cipher Brief. “We have a fundamental issue. Can we solve it, or not?”
That fundamental issue, Hayden writes, is the democratic backsliding within the United States, itself the result of unaddressed divisions between — yes — the regional cultures I identified in American Nations, the map to which he shares in the piece. “Colin Woodard wrote his prescient 2011 book, American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America,” Hayden adds. “He really worried about America. I didn’t realize that before, but I should have.”
Like Hayden, my journey to American Nations started in the Balkans and, especially, Sarajevo, where a sophisticated, cosmopolitan, multiethnic city was surrounded with artillery, mortars, and sniper’s nests — many of them planted on the ski slopes of the 1984 Winter Olympics — and Europe and the world just watched on as it was terrorized and destroyed. The veneer of civilization, I took from that, is very thin, as are the institutional, moral, and ethnical sinews that hold it together. It’s never wise for a multi-national federation with a history of civil war to tear away at all of those at once. The collapse into barbarism, as Sarajevans learned the hard way, can come with shocking speed.
COLIN WOODARD is a New York Times bestselling author and award-winning journalist. He is the author of six books that have been translated into a dozen foreign languages and inspired an NBC television drama. He is currently Director of Nationhood Lab at the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Affairs at Salve Regina University. As State and National Affairs Writer at the Portland Press Herald and Maine Sunday Telegram he won a 2012 George Polk Award and was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in 2016. He is a contributing editor at POLITICO and his work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Economist, Smithsonian and dozens of other major publications.