America in the fall of 2025 feels one or two steps from a full blown social and civic crisis. Enough signs have surfaced, and enough “next step” events are easily imaginable, that could turn smoldering division into open political violence, constitutional collapse, or some other real threat to America’s national existence.
Right now, Donald Trump and his administration are disrupting enough norms of conduct and ongoing institutional workings that, for better or worse according to your political leanings, a general instability has become a kind of status quo. One sure fact is that Trump has blown the cover off of the moral weakness of all our institutions. When Trump stretches old ideas of governing authority, for instance to push a media network to fire a talk show host for political reasons, network executives race to appease him, opponents announce the death of free speech, and politicians of all stripes line up by party line.
When Attorney General Pam Bondi “testifies” to a Senate committee, while the government is in shutdown, in a decades-long budget brinksmanship that only escalates, the partisans use the forum to charge each other with weaponizing law for political purposes. And neither side denies it. But both use nasty language to land zingers on each other.
Our politics are bankrupt. It lives in partisan trench warfare, oriented not to governing and not even really to defeating the other side – we all know it’s a stand off – but to scoring points. Some politicians may truly believe this will help them win future contests, but the clear effect of these shows is to keep the media focused on them. This keeps up their stifling dominance of public discourse. It also deepens and further poisons the mutual alienation between the partisan identity camps, which energized both sides to keep fighting.
And while the media is thus drawn to the zingers and partisan pronouncements about life – ‘Portland is burning’ vs. ‘democracy is gone’ – the government is shut down, politicians are getting assassinated, China is outpacing our military production. People know the political drama is a sideshow to real life. Columnist William Galston notes that “74% (of Americans) said the biggest threats to the U.S. ‘come from within our country in the form of polarization, corruption in government or dysfunctional cultural trends.’” They also know that “if we can’t agree, we can’t act.”
Meanwhile, one Supreme Court ruling that hits the wrong nerve, one more assassination, one more week of government shutdown, one more round of confusion on vaccine recommendations, one more whatever, could be the match to dry tinder. Trust, not only in politics, but of, oh, health insurers, airlines, media, universities, and sports league management, to cite a few institutions, continues to unravel. If the wrong trouble crops up, who can we count on to contain the wildfire?
We, the American people, need somehow to pull the country back from our alienation, all by ourselves. We cannot count on politicians or media, we must not think we’re doing anything with self-righteous social media posts, and we know that political action as we know it always falls back into the partisans’ trench warfare.
The one point of hope to hold onto is that we, the bulk of the nation, know this. And we do know fair from unfair, even if we can’t trust any public figures in their claims.
The only way to heal division, to prevent a catastrophe, to pull us back from the brink, starts with our own realization, for millions of us personally, that most of our alienation is unnecessary. If we can do it now, with everyone somehow relegating the partisans’ antics to the side show they should be, we might have a meaningful politics. If not, we will have to do it later, amid the wreckage of whatever politicized catastrophe we let them herd us into.
Or we might never do it, in which case we effectively say, whether or not we understand, that “anti-MAGA” or “anti-woke” are more genuine identities, more real to us, than “we hold these truths …”
When America announced itself as a People, we identified our national self only by declaring our holding of the Declaration’s truths. Our self-conception came in a creed, of equally endowed, unalienable rights, and that government exists to secure those rights. That national identity was novel, and remains unique. It ignores blood and soil, and leaves each of us to pursue the holy and sublime Truths freely, not as dictate of a sovereign. In its novelty, this nation offered a whole new image of society, as a compact among free people. The possibility that that could endure was scoffed at by many, who will be proven right if this nation loses its tangible existence, or its fidelity to the founding creed. Every challenge to the nation, in our common conviction, is one more test in the perpetual experiment that America is. If we renounce our common identity for factional allegiances, if we leave it all to the partisans, we disprove the experiment. We lose America.
Simple realization of this deeper identity will not suffice – we will still need massive sustained efforts to build new institutions on lines we all trust. But it will allow us the comity to find agreement, across differences that no longer displace patriotism. It is the necessary first step, and it is hard even to see how to instill the concern. But this reaffirmation is the urgent need of our time.
Common Conviction 