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.

Transcript

A (0:00)

We as a species, we're a storytelling species. That's how we organize information and share it, and even our own identities, the stories we internally tell ourselves about who we are, teenagers trying on different versions and different stories trying to figure it out. We need those things. And every nation also needs the meta identity that if you belong to the German nation or Japan or Belgium or Canada or United States, that what that means is a story. And 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.

B (0:56)

Hello, and welcome to the GD Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Druck. Oftentimes, when we talk about what divides the United States or determines someone's politics, we talk about things like education, race, gender, class. But my guest today makes the argument that there's something else fundamental at play that stretches back hundreds of years, well before the founding of America itself, and that's the regional cultures that were developed by. By the people who originally settled America's colonies. It may seem like a stretch to say that after waves of immigration and internal migration, technological and social change, that the Pilgrims and Quakers and aristocrats and pioneers are still with us. But Colin Woodard argues that we can't actually understand our contemporary politics and the fights we're having today without that context. In his previous book, American nations, he laid out what he described as the 11 different quote, unquote nations or culturally distinct regions within America. In his new book, Nations Apart, he looks at the political and social differences across them on everything from voting to health outcomes to gun violence. He also suggests what kinds of common narratives have united us in the past and what might work today based on public opinion research. Colin is the director of the Nationhood Lab at the Pell center for International Relations and Public Policy at Salve Regina University. Colin, welcome to the podcast.

A (2:25)

Pleasure to be here, Galen. Thanks for having me.

B (2:27)

It's my pleasure. Can we just begin by identifying some of the main, quote, unquote nations that you say make up the United States?

A (2:34)

Yeah, I mean, you can't understand the country, its history, our current political environment, our constitutional arrangements, anything, without first realizing that 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. Different ethnographic and political and religious characteristics, different plans of the society they wanted to create. For instance, the Puritans coming to New England were, you know, a group of people who thought. Thought they were in a covenanted relationship, like the Old Testament Hebrews with God, right? And that God had sent them to, you know, do certain things in New England wilderness, and that they would be punished or rewarded as a group. So they had an important mission, you know, light on a hill, air in the wilderness, but also an individual among them could screw everything up for everybody. So the important thing was the mission and the success of the group, not the individuals like, you know, liberty and charging forth. Very different than some of the other regions. You go to somewhere like the Chesapeake country, which was settled also by English people, also at roughly the same time. But that leadership group was a totally different set of people after the English Civil War. In particular, they were the second and third and fourth and fifth sons of the English manor families, the Lord Granthams, their Downton Abbeys in that time period. The ones, though, who weren't the firstborn sons, they weren't the ones who were going to inherit the manor at home. And suddenly with the discovery of the new world, they could imagine going and creating a new manor for themselves. So they were going and trying to reproduce the existing, you know, grand country estates where they would be the enlightened gentlemen and they would have duties towards the hands below them. But in the end, they were obviously the people who should be leading this place. Problem was, there weren't any people who could stand into the new world to be peasants or wouldn't tolerate doing that. So they relied on indentured servants. And then, as the 1600s came to an end, started bringing in an actual slave system based on what they'd seen in the West Indies and in the deep south in the back country, you'd have what I call Greater Appalachia, which was founded primarily by Scots, Irish and Lowland Scots coming from the war torn parts of the British Isles, English marches, Lowlands of Scotland, especially Ulster, places that had had generations warfare, where institutions were weak, where you couldn't count on the government, or if the government came, it was usually in the form of, you know, lancers and, you know, archers trying to kill you and your family. You had to protect your kith and kin yourself. Nothing good is going to come of government and kings and princes and any of that. And they were not farming people, they were pastoral people. In other words, their wealth was in livestock, which could be easily killed or stolen. And so anthropologists have recognized that throughout the world, pastoralists often have a sort of culture of honor whereby people have to have a terrifying reputation so no one will mess with their stuff. Don't key that guy's car, he'll mess you up and that. So there was a sort of warrior culture with a strong ethos around individual liberty and personal autonomy and a distrust of institutions, but totally the opposite of the Yankees with their mission and their institutions and going out on the frontier and immediately setting up a collectively governed congregation, a meeting house and a taxpayer finance compulsory public school on the frontier for theological reasons. You take those. And Spanish settled southwest and the West Indies style slave society transplanted from Barbados to the new colonies in the Carolina subtropics and a number of other cultures. And they don't have a lot in common. They didn't in the colonial period. They were rivals and even enemies. And the lasting effect of that is with us today also because they each settled mutually exclusive strips of the country out through the 1830s where they laid down their values. And once you know, that geography of the rival settlement streams at a county level, they don't respect state or even international boundaries, you'll start seeing that spatial pattern over and over again in data mapped today.