Freeport Speech: How to Save our Democracy with Colin Woodard

As Freeport Speech wraps up its inaugural year, the organization welcomes Colin Woodard who has written extensively on North American regionalism, the sociology of the United States nationhood, and how our colonial past shapes and explains the present. There’s never been one America, he argues, but several Americas, each with their own, centuries-old ideals, values, and religious and cultural heritage. Tensions between these regional cultures have riven our balkanized federation and, in recent decades, created the conditions for the collapse of our liberal democratic experiment. And the main thing that has held us together – commitment to a set of ideals laid forth in the Declaration of Independence – is withering under a sustained attack by an expanding illiberal, authoritarian movement rooted in the darker corners of our national past. Woodard describes what pro-democracy forces across the partisan spectrum must do in both the short and middle term to heal our battered union.  

This event is free and open to the public.

This event is co-sponsored by the League of Women Voters of the Portland Area.

**Event is sold out.**  You can still tune in! Watch the livestream on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2y4XLNHGFw.

Register here