GD POLITICS — Episode Summary

Title: Is America Really 11 Nations?
Host: Galen Druke
Guest: Colin Woodard (Director, Nationhood Lab, Pell Center)
Date: December 4, 2025

Main Theme & Purpose

This episode explores historian Colin Woodard’s provocative theory that the United States is not a monolithic nation-state, but instead a federation of eleven culturally distinct “nations.” Drawing on Woodard’s books American Nations and Nations Apart, Galen Druke and Woodard investigate how these regional cultures—rooted in rival colonial projects—still fundamentally shape America’s politics, social attitudes, and identity debates today, despite mass immigration, technological change, and extensive internal migration.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Identity and Storytelling in Nationhood

• The importance of story in nationhood: Woodard opens by discussing how both individuals and nations rely on shared stories to define identity and purpose.
  • Quote:

    "We as a species, we're a storytelling species... Every nation also needs the meta identity... If you don't have the story, you don't have a definition to have any kind of coherent public action."
    (A/Colin Woodard, 00:00)

2. The United States as a Federation of 'Nations'

• America’s regional cultures: Woodard explains that the U.S. is a union of rival colonial cultures, each with deeply different organizational blueprints, values, and ideas about society and the role of government.

  • Examples:

    • Yankeedom (New England Puritans): Communitarian, collective mission, distrust of individual liberty when it threatens the group.
    • Chesapeake/Tidewater (English gentry): Hierarchical, aristocratic, saw America as a place to re-create manors with rigid class divisions.
    • Greater Appalachia (Scots-Irish, Borderlands): Fiercely individualistic, mistrust of government, "culture of honor."
    • Spanish Southwest/Deep South/Other regions: Each with unique, mutually exclusive histories and values.

  • Quote:

    "We're not a nation state. We're this federation of sort of these separate stateless nations, regional cultures that tie back to the rival colonial projects that formed...on the eastern and southwestern rims of what's now the United States. Projects that had very little in common."
    (A/Colin Woodard, 02:34)

• Spatial persistence: These cultural regions established boundaries that are still visible at the county level today, affecting voting, laws, and social outcomes.

3. Why Haven’t These Differences Disappeared?

• Impact of mass immigration and migration:
  • Druke questions whether waves of immigration and social change have eroded these differences.
  • Woodard responds that modern data show regional differences are growing more pronounced, not less.

    • Internal migration: People moving within the U.S. tend to assimilate values of their new regions rather than import their old beliefs (“the big sort”).

    • Immigration waves: The famous 1884–1924 immigration brought numerous non-Protestants, which forced some regions (like Yankeedom and New Netherland) to expand definitions of who could be “American,” while others (Greater Appalachia, Deep South, Tidewater) remained highly insular.

      • Notable Data: In 1900, foreign-born populations were just 1–3% in the Southern “nations,” but 20–30% in others.

    • Quote:

      "The differences between these regions...is increasing over time, not decreasing...People who feel frustrated in the place where they grew up...move somewhere where people believe [differently]...So that's a countervailing force—'the big sort.'"
      (A/Colin Woodard, 07:58)

4. Individualism vs. Communitarianism: U.S. vs. Europe

• Enduring American debate: Druke raises the contrast: Europe, from whom these cultures descended, has a much narrower window between individualist and communitarian worldviews—most countries are more communitarian overall.

  • Woodard suggests these colonial cultures in the U.S. are idiosyncratic and evolved on different tracks than their places of origin.

    • Quote:

      "It's hard to map back to Europe always, because in many cases, these idiosyncratic colonial cultures that…"
      (A/Colin Woodard, 12:25)

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On national identity being rooted in story:

  "If you don't have the story, you don't have a definition to have any kind of coherent public action. So what's your country's purpose? Who belongs and who's eligible to belong? Where did it come from? Where should it be going? Those are incredibly powerful ideas."
  (A/Colin Woodard, 00:00)

• On the exceptional persistence of regional cultures:

  "The basic lesson has been that in political terms, they [internal migrants] tend to resemble their destination point, not their point of origin."
  (A/Colin Woodard, 07:58)

• On the starkness of old immigration divides:

  "In the southern regions...in 1900 were 1% foreign born in Greater Appalachia, 3%...Whereas all the other regions...were 20, 25, 30% foreign born, 25 or 30 times that."
  (A/Colin Woodard, 09:13)

Important Timestamps

• 00:00–00:56: Woodard and Druke open with the storytelling nature of human identity and nationhood.
• 02:27–06:53: Woodard outlines key founding cultures (“nations”), their rival agendas, and the enduring regional divides they created.
• 06:53–11:41: Debate over whether internal and external migration, technological change, and immigration have diluted cultural divides; Woodard argues the divides have actually grown.
• 11:41–12:34: Discussion shifts to why America’s individualism-communitarianism debate differs so much from Europe.

Episode Structure

• Opening Theme: Exploring the power of national story and identity.
• Main Interview:
  • Foundations of America’s “11 nations.”
  • The persistence of colonial regional cultures in modern politics and society.
  • Dynamics of migration and assimilation in shaping and hardening regional divides.
  • The distinctive evolution of the American political debate compared to its European roots.

Takeaways for Listeners

• America’s regional divides are not merely about state lines, race, or class—they’re about deep cultural histories dating to rival colonial projects.
• Even centuries after settlement, and despite massive social change, these “nations” fundamentally shape political attitudes, laws, and conceptions of American identity.
• Understanding these persistent cultural patterns is essential to making sense of contemporary U.S. politics and conflicts.

For the full conversation and deeper exploration of these themes—plus insights from polling and Colin Woodard’s prescriptions for forging unity across America’s “11 nations”—listeners are invited to subscribe at www.gdpolitics.com.