The Eisenhower Institute at Gettysburg College has kindly invited me to deliver their Constitution Day Lecture this coming Tuesday, September 17, which I’ve entitled “Why is U.S. Democracy in Crisis?: How We Got Here, Why We’re Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It.” I’ll be talking about the structural problems of our federation — that we’re a Balkanized federation of rival regional cultures — how the bonds between us were dissolved and, most importantly, the work we’re doing at Nationhood Lab to help restore them, based on the natural rights propositions in our opening statement as a people, the Declaration of Independence.
We just completed a months-long message development and testing project, including multiple national surveys and in-depth qualitative interviews with Americans across the ideological, regional and socioeconomic spectrum. I’ll be sharing some of what we learned in the talk.
The historian in me is especially pleased to be doing this at Gettysburg, where Lincoln gave perhaps the most important speech ever given in defense of this U.S. civic national narrative in 1863 and where Woodrow Wilson betrayed it with an amoral, functionally ethnonationalist speech in 1913, stories I unpacked in my most recent book, Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood.
The talk kicks off at 7 pm in the Mara Auditorium in Masters Hall. Registration details are here.
COLIN WOODARD is a New York Times bestselling author, historian and award-winning journalist. He is the author of seven 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 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, The Washington Post, Politico, The Economist, Smithsonian and dozens of other major publications.