A review by bobbo49
American Character: A History of the Epic Struggle Between Individual Liberty and the Common Good by Colin Woodard

4.0

A very good - complex and thought-provoking - read for the present moment in our fractured America. Written before the 2016 election, with a forward written just after, the book looks at the perspectives at the heart of our current divide, between a socio-political orientation toward either the individual or the community. With chapters going through analyses of every period of American history, Woodard suggests that we are a conglomeration of 11 different geo-political/cultural nations, with the starkest extremes in the Deep South (extreme individualists) and Yankeedom (extreme communalists), and everything in between (such as Appalachia, individualists but community-oriented, or the Left Coast, communalists but also individual-oriented). In light of our current politics, Woodard provides some good insights into how we got here - and how the divide has played out through our history - as well as some hopeful words (again, written in 2016, and clearly from the perspective of a communitarian) about how we can come together in most of the 11 districts in a manner that narrows the issues that divide us and allows us to preserve our liberal democracy experiment.