In the New York Times opinion section, Nationhood Lab director Colin Woodard argued America has a widely shared national story, and it’s based on the ideals in the Declaration, not the blood and soil ethnonationalism advocated by Vice President J.D. Vance and other members of the current U.S. administration.
The essay, published Nov. 3, described how the fight over the United States’ story of purpose and belonging has been the central struggle of our history, an eternal battle between defining the country in civic terms — on the ideals in the Declaration — and ethnonationalist ones, whereby people with certain bloodlines are privileged, and those with others are excluded. Woodard pushed back against Vance’s assertions in a formal speech at the Claremont Institute that the Declaration is deficient, and that being fully American is tied to having ancestors who participated in the conquest of Indigenous America and fought in the Civil War.
“If we’re to remain a free society, those committed to the American experiment are going to need to start expressing our civic national ideals as effectively and compellingly as the ethnonationalists articulate theirs,” Woodard wrote, citing Nationhood Lab’s polling showing the vast majority of Americans favor civic over ethnic nationalism.
“If we can come together in defense of the Declaration’s sacred ideas, then we indeed have a chance at revitalizing the civic vision after the challenge of the Trump era,” he concluded.
The essay was reprinted in the print editions of two major regional dailies, Utah’s Salt Lake Tribune and the Minnesota Star-Tribune.
The argument is fleshed out in greater detail in Woodard’s new book, Nations Apart: How Clashing Regional Cultures Shattered America, which went on sale the following morning, Nov. 4.
Nationhood Lab, a project at Salve Regina University’s Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy, delivers more effective tools with which to describe and defend the American liberal democratic tradition and better understand the forces undermining it.
[This post cross-published from nationhoodlab.org]
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.