Last week I was the guest on Philadelphia public radio superstation WHYY’s The Connection, speaking with veteran host Marty Moss-Coane about Nations Apart and the threats to the American republic. The show, an hour-long interview format, broadcast Nov. 14.
“We’re already what a political scientist, being fair, would call a hybrid regime. We’re no longer a wholly free democratic society; rule of law is not being implemented; the constitution is bot being enforced in obvious ways, the most comically and hyperbolically is the president — without advanced warning and completely unlawfully — knocking down the East Wing of the White House,” I said.
“We’re also not yet an authoritarian dictatorship,” I added. “We just had free and fair elections where the opposition party routed the ruling party. So we’re not there yet, but we’re in between, and that’s a scary spot to be in because it’s much harder to get out of an authoritarian dictatorship once its happened then to prevent it before it consolidates.”
WHYY, the Delaware Valley’s largest public broadcasting operation, has 482,000 weekly radio listeners and their website received more than half a million unique viewers each week. Marty Moss-Coane, a former associate producer of Fresh Air and the creator and host of the long running Radio Times program, created The Connection in 2023.
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.