As the social contract our liberal democratic system relies on has been weakened by decades of drift into more extreme forms of individual liberty — the story told in American Character — it’s now under direct attack again by authoritarian ethnonationalism. It threatens to destroy both the federation and the republic.
How did this happen? What is the nature of the problem? How do we respond to reverse the damage. My thoughts laid out in the new issue of Washington Monthly, written in early December when we were already trundling toward the attempted coup on January 6.
For more, please consider the three books of the American Nations trilogy, starting with Union.
Thanks to Real Clear Politics for plugging the article earlier this week and to Monthly editors Paul Glastis and Daniel Block for their suggestions and improvements to the piece.
My last print edition story for Washington Monthly was this review of John Keane’s The New Despotism.
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.