“The Great Dismal Swamp” may sound like a nickname for Washington, D.C., but it’s actually an enormous wildlife refuge that sprawls from southern Virginia into North Carolina. If you ever decide to drive across the whole country—perhaps to mark America’s 250th birthday, which is finally upon us—it would take 40 hours, through 12 states and three time zones, to travel in a straight line from the Great Dismal Swamp to Las Vegas.
Only then would you finally find yourself in a congressional district that Donald Trump did not win in 2024, 2020 and 2016.
That’s 2,500 uninterrupted miles of MAGA. And a whole lot more if you took a detour into six reliably Republican Deep South states.
It’s been a decade now since Donald Trump turned American politics upside down. Which means that for 10 years, very smart people from very prestigious universities and media companies—not to mention the entire Democratic Party—have been saying that this onetime reality-TV star represents an unprecedented threat to America’s economy and environment, its standing in the world and democracy itself.
At some point, we have to ask if Trump’s critics have their own reservations about democracy, given the vast chasm between their dire warnings and actual American voting patterns.
If Trump really is an existential threat, at what point does the American left’s inability—or unwillingness—to connect with flyover-country voters start to seem like a kind of resignation? Have progressives decided that they might as well build their own walls, and play the role of loyal, righteous opposition only within the confines of their cosmopolitan silos?
As we speak more and more openly about the nation’s imminent collapse, or an authoritarian takeover or a second civil war, is it really so taboo to at least consider some kind of amicable national breakup, with certain states or regions going their own way, while we can still give peace a chance?
Colin Woodard’s recent book, Nations Apart: How Clashing Regional Cultures Shattered America, offers a unique perspective on our troubled times, mainly because it is organized around geography, a topic readers tend to associate with grade school rather than fierce culture wars.
To Woodard—who runs the Nationhood Lab at the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy at Salve Regina University—the United States may have 50 states, but far more important are 11 distinct regions “that were founded at different times and by very different people.” A “few hundred or even a few score initial colonizers,” Woodard adds, laid down “cultural DNA” hundreds of years ago that influences political behavior to this day.
So, New England is better understood as what Woodard calls “Yankeedom,” stretching from northern Maine through most of New York State all the way out to parts of Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota. And the “tri-state area” with New Jersey and Connecticut revolving around New York City? The core of this metropolis is better understood as “New Netherland,” while south Jersey and Philly belong to the American “Midlands,” which squiggles its way across Pennsylvania and the Midwest to parts of the Dakotas and even northern Texas.
As for Virginia’s Great Dismal Swamp, that’s part of “Greater Appalachia,” a region “characterized by a warrior ethic and a deep commitment to personal sovereignty and individual liberty.”
Having reframed the national landscape, Woodard then analyzes how each section contends with specific issues, including religion. “After the American Revolution,” he writes about Greater Appalachia, “millions of Americans embraced novel religious forms…weakening the established churches.” He adds: “The region’s religious heritage buttressed its individualism,” placing great “emphasis…not on improving this world, but on one’s personal salvation in the hereafter.”
For Woodard, these influences have evolved in troubling ways. “America’s democracy is collapsing,” he laments, largely because of the “single-minded pursuit of individual freedom [which] is driving us to the brink of despotism.”
Woodard defends the more communitarian traditions of Yankeedom and the Midlands, as well as what he calls the Left Coast, all of which have higher rates of “health, safety, happiness, wealth and longevity.” And still, Woodard laments, “nearly half the American public thought it was a good idea to return [Trump] to power, apparently because they are more concerned about post-pandemic consumer price inflation than the survival of American democracy.”
The problem, though, is not that “nearly half” of Americans have voted for Donald Trump—in three consecutive elections, it should be emphasized. It’s the stark, not-very-complicated geographic distribution of those votes: Urbanites reject conservatives, rural types loathe liberals, and folks in the middle pretty much decide elections. And despite his many well-documented flaws—and years of relentless criticism from the broad left—a lot of folks in the middle have long believed that Donald Trump is precisely what the United States needs.
We can talk all we want about the Electoral College and deindustrialization, Joe Biden’s age and the mere 107 days Kamala Harris had to campaign. At some point, the president’s relentless critics need to confront some inconvenient truths about millions of non-urban voters and whether or not any “communitarian” Democrat can secure substantial support from them any time soon.
Woodard tries to conclude on a positive note, with some intricately worded polling and lofty rhetoric about the “ideals” of the Declaration of Independence, which he claims are “deeply revered by the vast majority of Americans outside of the most die-hard Trumpist right.” The “rest of us”—“70 or 80 percent” of Americans, he ventures—don’t “want to live in a fascistic world.”
It does not make you a fascist to point out that the 2024 presidential election was a broad and “powerful repudiation of Democratic policies and strategies,” as the Nobel Prize-winning economist Daron Acemoglu wrote in a recent Financial Times essay. But give Colin Woodard credit. He’s right that debates about geography, individualism and communitarianism deserve a lot more attention than they’re getting right now.
A Healing Role for Christianity?
Woodard’s book is complemented by two other recent publications, Daniel Darling’s In Defense of Christian Patriotism and Phil Christman’s Why Christians Should Be Leftists. Both authors are earnest, intelligent men of faith who have written thoughtful books about the challenges facing the nation and the healing role Christianity might play.
Each author is enlightening, and maddening, in their own way. Both illustrate more about how we got into this mess than how we might get out.
Raised in a “fundamentalist Baptist” family, Christman attended a Christian college in Michigan, where he had an epiphany. “What I needed, what I so feared I’d never have, was already there…the possibility of universal solidarity,” he writes of the faith he shared with fellow students. “The way of life that The Sermon on the Mount suggested was (already) available to me and to them.” Christianity, Christman adds, “led me out of conservatism, past liberalism, to the left.”
Christman then takes us back to the financial cataclysm of 2008, when “unrestrained capitalism…led to a world historical economic crisis,” and Bernie Sanders and Occupy Wall Street suggested that the moment for a robust, new American left had arrived.
But the most consequential outcome of the ’08 crisis turned out to be the right-wing Tea Party movement. As even Colin Woodard notes in Nations Apart: “Between 2010 and 2016, [Tea Party supporters were] deployed in almost every part of the country harnessing legitimate popular anger about the misgovernment of the country.”
A broad coalition of conservatives spent the Obama years doing the unglamorous work of winning town council, school board and state legislature elections—positions of great influence, it turned out.
What were various “leftists” doing at this same time? Perhaps counting down the days until America’s changing demographics banished the religiously devout in general, and conservative Republicans in particular, to the dustbin of history. As late as 2021, the G.O.P. was going “the way of the Whigs,” at least according to Jelani Cobb, the dean of Columbia University’s School of Journalism and a New Yorker contributor. Harvard’s Thomas Patterson wrote an entire book detailing how the Republican party was “destroying itself.”
When legacy institutions lament their waning influence, these are the kinds of analyses they should recall.
The resurgent religiosity of the Trump years has resulted in “constant hand-wringing by the press, progressives, and a handful of religious scholars,” at least according to Darling, a Southern Baptist pastor. “Freaking out over faith seems to be strangely one-sided,” adds Darling, since “the mixing of politics and the pulpit is so common in progressive-leaning churches and barely registers a blip,” yet conservative “Christianity’s influence on government [is seen] as a threat.”
This may be a simplistic take on a complex matter. But historically speaking, progressives have been skeptical of the devout, and vice versa—something, perhaps, the “leftist” Christman should have explored in greater depth. As for Darling, it’s not exactly clear which “American Christians” he believes must “resist the misguided notion that to be faithfully Christian is to retreat from the public square.”
In the 21st century, Republicans did not take control of the White House, Congress and the Supreme Court by “retreating” from issues like abortion, taxpayer support for religious education or “drag queen” story hours. They spoke openly of the United States as a Christian nation and of Donald Trump as God’s chosen candidate.
“I’m writing this book,” Darling nevertheless declares, “for Christians who love America but are afraid to express it.”
There are valid critiques, of course, to be aimed at post-World War II Christianity and the compromises its leaders made to achieve a certain kind of cultural consensus. More recently, “anti-patriots” (as Darling calls them) arguably dominated woke social discourse, and some faith leaders uncritically followed along. But all of this ignores the politically active Christians who went on the offensive during such debates. Pejorative labels like “Christian Nationalist” were swiftly reclaimed by Trump cabinet members and Fox News anchors, who also kept a vigilant, unironic eye out for “anti-Christian” bigotry.
Darling admits there “are a few things I disagree with the current Republican party about,” and he acknowledges the “shameful events of January 6th.” Yet he has little to say about the conspicuous use of Christian symbols on that gruesome day, or, in fact, for the past decade. The $1,000 Trump-autographed Bibles come to mind, as do the endless varieties of flags on Pinterest or Etsy depicting a Rambo Jesus brandishing an automatic weapon.
“Jesus,” Darling reminds us, “boiled down the responsibility of a Christian to basic instructions: love God and love our neighbors. This is a consistent theme throughout the Bible.”
So, where exactly does “They’re eating the dogs!” fit into all that? The “invasion” of “garbage” from “shithole countries”?
It’s presumably futile to ask President Trump, or the nation’s second most powerful Catholic, JD Vance, to express support for the “Cabrini pledge”—named after the patron saint of immigrants—which affirms the dignity of all human beings. But to write a book about public Christianity and overlook the corrupt bargain so many Christians have made with the proudly crude and cruel Trump administration suggests you’re a few chapters short of the real story.
Say what you will about the likes of Rod Dreher and the Benedict Optioners. At least they see Trump not only for the con artist he is, but also as posing a threat to Christianity. Thomas Jefferson’s much-maligned wall of separation, after all, protects not only the public from a state-imposed faith, but also the church from complicity with unseemly state actions. Just as moderate Democrats now regret ceding influence to their party’s noisier factions, it’s easy to imagine droves of Christians soon lamenting the 30 pieces of MAGAfied crypto-silver for which they sold their reputations and congregations.
For now, the simple truth remains that there is not too much Christian charity, decency and humility in the public square, but far too little.
The Siren Song of Socialism
Among Democrats and the broader left, meanwhile, the siren song of socialism beckons again. Christman’s book was published before the proud socialists Zohran Mamdani and Katie Wilson won mayoral elections in New York City and Seattle, respectively. Time will tell if that changes many hearts or minds between Vegas and the Great Dismal Swamp.
But there is a growing sense on the left that moderates need to get out of the way and just let the firebrands fix the country.
More than 40 years after Robert Bellah wrote of the need for ideological regrouping and a “revitalized party system” in his now-classic Habits of the Heart, intra-factional divisions in the United States remain at least as troublesome as broader partisan strife.
If Democrats are, in fact, the party of majoritarian uplift and the “99 percent” (tax-the-rich wealth redistribution, organized labor, robust public services), to what degree can they also support an array of proudly nonconformist and minority cultural causes? How much longer can their progressive allies denounce government as structurally oppressive, secretive and racist, while at the same time demanding that it solve more and more increasingly complex social problems?
As for Republicans, their devotion to communal religious and family values remains wildly out of sync with a radically individualistic economic philosophy that empathizes with corporations as people more than it does with actual people.
If it is any comfort, 250 years ago, the founding fathers also struggled to balance the needs of city dwellers and farmers, majority and minority interests. But that was for a dozen or so Protestant villages hugging the Atlantic Ocean. The country has since been made vast by Manifest Destiny, then smaller, angrier and more narcissistic by technology.
“Hang together or hang separately,” went a famous bit of Revolutionary-era gallows humor.
Maybe there’s another way. Maybe, together, we need to consider living separately.
In her 2025 banger of a song, “Church and State,” Brandi Carlisle sings: “While the empire was failing…. Before the revolution started.” The lyrics that follow are apocalyptic and opaque—and, most provocatively, interrupted by an excerpt from Jefferson’s famous letter to the Danbury Baptists about the “wall of separation” that has divided Americans ever since.
“When the blackness slowly parted,” Carlisle bellows, before she articulates what may well be America’s fatal flaw: the collision of unstoppable optimism with immovable realities.
They don’t see
what we see…We’ll find a way
we’ll find a way
we’ll find a way
imagine if we could.
This article appears in May 2026.
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