Atheists, agnostics, long-haired widows, short-haired widows, vandal, gulag. I'm the government, hug the government, hug the government, hug the government, love, the government, hug the government, love, the government, hug the government. Welcome to the politics, guys, a place for bipartisan, rational, and civil debate on American politics and policy. I'm Northern Kentucky University political scientist Michael

Barronowski. My guest today is New York Times bestselling author, historian, and journalist Colin

Woodard. His latest book is Nations Apart, How Clashing Regional Culture Shattered America,

which we'll be talking about today. Colin Woodard, welcome to the show.

Thanks so much for having me.

I thought we'd start kind of at the very beginning because you argue that the United States isn't really one nation, but actually sort of a federation of cultures.

And so for people who aren't familiar with your previous work where you kind of started to develop this, what do you mean by American

nations? Yeah, that comes from the title of a book in 2011 I wrote that kind of laid out this

way of understanding American history. And it's that to try to understand the United States as

being a single nation state with a single American culture is impossible.

It's why we have such difficulty interpreting our history and understanding the regional divides

and why are there red states and blue states? Why does ideology map to geography? That doesn't

necessarily make any sense. But if you realize that we're really a federation of,

think of them as stateless nations, each with their own cultural background and original

intents and ideologies and political characteristics and religious traditions, everything makes a

great deal more sense. And indeed, the reason where this way is boils down to the

fact that the rival European colonization projects, the Puritans in New England, the Dutch

originally around what's now New York City, you know, the William Penn's Quaker Utopia that

started in Delaware Bay around Philly, the tidewater

gentry, the lesser sons of the big English country, aristocratic families, the ones who

weren't going to get the estate at home trying to create a manorial, you know, manor home,

Lord Grantham, Downton Abbey kind of world in the Virginia wilderness

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