How to Save our Democracy

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Colin Woodard, one of the nation’s leading authorities on North American regionalism, describes how the United States has become unraveled -- putting the continued survival of the republic and the federation in doubt -- and what we must do to rescue the situation. There’s never been one America, he argues, but several Americas, each with their own, centuries-old ideals, values, and religious and cultural heritage. Tensions between these regional cultures have riven our balkanized federation and, in recent decades, created the conditions for the collapse of our liberal democratic experiment. And the main thing that has held us together – commitment to a set of ideals laid forth in the Declaration of Independence – is withering under a sustained attack by an expanding illiberal, authoritarian movement rooted in the darker corners of our national past. Woodard describes what pro-democracy forces across the partisan spectrum must do in both the short and middle term to heal our battered union.

Woodard is a New York Times bestselling author and award-winning journalist. He is a visiting senior fellow at the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy at Salve Regina University, where he is launching a project to help shore up U.S. democracy. He is also State & National Affairs Writer at the Portland Press Herald and Maine Sunday Telegram, where he won a 2012 George Polk Award, was a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting, and was named 2014 Journalist of the Year by the Maine Press Association.

A Maine native and a longtime foreign correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor, The Chronicle of Higher Education and The San Francisco Chronicle, he has reported from more than fifty foreign countries and seven continents, and lived for more than four years in Eastern Europe. He is the author of six books including Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood, American Character: A History of the Epic Struggle Between Individual Liberty and the Common Good and American Nations: A History of The Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America. A graduate of Tufts University and the University of Chicago and a past Pew Fellow at the Johns Hopkins University School for Advanced International Studies, he and his family live here in Freeport.