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Colin Woodard of Freeport is the author of “ Nations Apart: How Clashing Regional Cultures Shattered America,” on sale Nov. 4. He is the director of Nationhood Lab at Salve Regina University’s Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy.
The U.S. is in the midst of a rapid transition from a democratic system to an authoritarian one. We’re not fully one or the other right now; we’re a hybrid regime. We’re still having elections. Opposition politicians still hold office. Judges are defending the Constitution, even if our highest court isn’t helping. People can still protest or write pieces like this in newspapers and be fairly confident they won’t be arrested.
But we’re a long way from where we were just nine months ago. The president has sent the military to intimidate the inhabitants of American cities, and on Tuesday, he told the nation’s generals to expect to go to war against them.
Masked federal agents have been seizing tens of thousands of completely legal residents — including doctoral students and South Korean auto plant engineers — and abusing them in crowded detention facilities. They’ve arrested a mayor and charged a member of Congress who tried to inspect an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility.
At the regime’s behest, television networks have fired comedians and prosecutors have gone after those who tried to hold the president accountable for the misdeeds of his first term in office. The president himself has threatened to revoke the citizenship of comedian Rosie O’Donnell, Elon Musk (who contributed $288 million to Trump’s cause last election cycle) and presumptive next mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani.
The president has seized personal control of the federal budget and is using it to bully universities, cities and states into complying with his demands. He closed entire agencies that were created by Congress and can only be abolished by it, and stopped the distribution of federal grants that had already been awarded to study climate change and other now-disfavored issues.
Leaders of the Republican-controlled Congress — including the Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Susan Collins — have let him seize their power of the purse, further concentrating power in the Oval Office.
The administration isn’t hiding its agenda. It’s what scholars call ethnonationalism, the effort to define a nation in blood-and-soil terms. The nation, in this way of thinking, belongs to a particular ethnoracial group, and others should be disempowered or ejected. For the Trump administration, that group appears to be the descendants of the people who colonized indigenous North America between 1600 and 1890.
“America is not just an idea,” Vice President J.D. Vance recently said, rejecting the core message of the Declaration of Independence. “We’re a particular place with a particular people and a particular set of beliefs and way of life. Our ancestors realized that to carve a successful nation from new land meant creating new tangible things … to tame a wild continent. That is our heritage as Americans.”
Vance’s “our” excludes Indigenous people whose “wild continent” needed taming and the descendants of enslaved people, as well as the Catholic, Orthodox Christian and Jewish immigrants of the Great Wave of 1880-1924, whose presence forced Protestant America to accept a wider circle of national belonging. Vance is channeling the same argument the Southern slaveholders used: that the U.S. was created by and for “Anglo-Saxons.”
Now for the good news. The vast majority of Americans are against all of this.
Trump and his policies are underwater by double digits, according to recent polls, and Americans reject ethnonationalism by even wider margins. Our polling at Nationhood Lab, the project I founded at Salve Regina University, found most believe our national purpose is to achieve the declaration’s civic ideals.
In one national poll fielded last year, we asked nearly 1,600 Americans which of two statements of American identity they preferred. It found that 63% — including majorities of all genders, generations, races and education levels — endorsed one built on “our shared commitment to a set of American founding ideals: that we all have inherent and equal rights to live, to not be tyrannized, and to pursue happiness as we each understand it.”
The Vance-like option — that we’re united “by shared history, traditions and values and by our fortitude and character as Americans, a people who value hard work, individual responsibility and national loyalty” — was preferred by only a third of respondents, and barely half of Trump voters.
In a subsequent poll, we asked Americans if they agreed that we are duty-bound, as Americans, to protect one another’s natural rights to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness and to participate in our representative self-government. They did, by an incredible 97-2 margin, one of the widest our pollsters had ever seen.
Americans believe in the American Experiment, the effort to create a society where everyone can exercise these rights. Now they need to defend it.
This regime can be compelled to respect our laws, ideals and Constitution, but only if citizens and their representatives stand up for them and the rights and freedoms they protect. The data show this is not an issue of Republicans versus Democrats or liberals versus conservatives. It’s between an unpopular authoritarian project and a popular democratic one. The sooner everyone realizes this, the better the prospects that the American Experiment won’t perish from the earth.
