My guest today is Colin Woodard. He is an author, historian, and award-winning journalist, and the director of the Nation Lab at Salva Regina University. He came to my attention several years ago with his book American Nations, which we have previously covered on this program, in which I will link to in the episode notes. But he joins us today to discuss his latest work, Nations Apart, How Clashing Regional Culture Shattered America. You can find that book, as with all books discussed on this program, by going to mightyheaton.com-fished. Hello, Dr. Woodard. Hi. Pleasure to meet you. I have not completed my PhD yet, so you have to refer to me as Master Woodard. Is it Master Woodard? So I just assumed that you were a doctor, but I'll go with Master Woodard. I like the tone of that. So Master Woodard, can you walk us through the underlying American Nations thesis, which is the kind of foundational element, your latest book? And then from there, what have you built upon it in the new book? Yeah. So American Nations, which sounds like you've discussed to your audience, came out in 2011.

And the central argument of that book was that you can't understand American history, American politics, our constitutional arrangements, much of anything without understanding that the United States is really not a nation state at all,

but a federation of stateless nations, if you will, regional cultures that have always been

distinct, that have had their own characteristics, ideological, ethnographic, religious,

just like separate countries. And the reason for that is that almost all of them track back to one or another of the rival colonial projects that took shape on the eastern and southwestern rims of what's now the United States. And, you know, the Puritan project in New England, you know, a bunch of people, the Puritan's coming, believing that they were in a, you know, like a covenanted relationship with God, like the Old Testament Hebrews, who chose them to do certain things in the world, in that they had to, they were on a mission to do those things, they'd be punished or rewarded as a group for those things. You know, the individual might mess that up. So the important thing was

that the mission succeed, the individual when it conflicts, you know, stands down, not super

libertarian, right? Compared to that, say, at the same time period, another English colony in the

Chesapeake zone was, the leadership group were the second and third and fourth and fifth sons of the big English

manner families, you know, the Lord Grantham types in the aftermath of the Civil War,

the English Civil War in the 1640s. And these were the ones who weren't the firstborn.

They weren't and inherit the manor estate. So when the new world opened up, suddenly there was a

possibility to go create

your own manner and recreate what was already in England, right? A sort of feudal system,

enlightened gentlemen, you know, Lord, you know, take care of and rule over the hands, who are many,

but there weren't any, you know, people to play the role of the peasants in their world. So

they tried indentured servants and then end up in the slave system. But imagine how different those are. One is aristocratic,

conservative in the sense that it is just trying to reproduce what already existed on the other

side of the Atlantic. The other one are people on a religious mission, utopic, their middle

class moving in family groups, highly educated for the time period, and

organizing their society is like a community mission that has to be executed. And then, you know,

you had Scots, Irish in the back country, of people moving from, you know, the Lowlands of

Scotland and Ulster and the English marches, war-torn places. You know, this you know, Lollins, Scotland's where Braveheart was from, you know, are incredibly dangerous areas. There are no institutions to trust. If government shows up, it's to, you know, kill you and your family with, you know, lances and arrows. Nothing good is going to come of institutions and government. You have to protect your kith and kin yourself. They were not farming people. They were pastoral, so all their wealths and

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