Colin Woodard, per my expectations, is still an amazing historical author suffering from a lack of political imagination. Woodard’s book “American Character” picks up where “American Nations” left off, outlining the coalitions of the nations and the essential conflict they can never resolve: the balance between the primacy of the individual and the state. He does some analysis of current problems, refers back to his definitions in “Nations” and generally does the breezy, good pop-ideological work that is out of the ordinary in the United States nowadays.
That said, I have a major set of two critiques. I was very disappointed, because his last book has provided much to chew on in the past two years, new heuristics and sorting mechanisms that lend intelligibility to a world that is rapidly becoming unintelligible. In this case, it was merely an application of the heuristic he developed in “Nations” to a set of current issues. The new bit in the Woodard canon is his synthetic concept of “national liberalism”–his attempt to create the synthesis from the thesis/antithesis of the individual rights/social and civil rights divide.
National liberalism is an interesting concept, and perhaps one worthy of further analysis, but in the context of this review, all that needs to be said about it is that it is the demonstration of Woodard’s lack of imagination, incarnate. It supposes no grand revolutionary break with the past, no attempt to steer the ship of civilization away from the (rapidly melting) icebergs ahead. No, instead it proposes rhetorical changes to the ways that issues are presented to Americans, assuming that narrative and rhetoric are the supreme political values like all good liberals do.
The disturbing conclusion that a hardcore environmental leftist gets to by the end of the book is that perhaps the post-Westphalian nation state is insufficient for dealing with the enormity of climate change, that even a national ethic based in Yankeedom working toward the goal of mitigating climate change might be insufficient. You start to realize that the problems of climate and capitalism are so large, systemic, and universal that no single nation can even make a dent. And that’s a really unhealthy rabbithole to go down as a leftist, to be honest.
So, aside from the fact that Woodard is a liberal who would be an aspirational leftist if the US school system didn’t intentionally omit leftism, and that–as a result–he lacks the political imagination to either imagine the ultimate solution or ultimate dissolution, the book is a breezy thinker. While I’d obviously recommend “American Nations” more, there is actionable and useful stuff in “Character” and that is a credit to Woodard. After all, it’s hard to put pretty lipstick on the dying liberal pig.