1/10/26 Senator Chris McDaniel. Saying out loud what many think
I keep hearing folks say this is just another rough patch for our country. Another season of hard feelings. History will smooth it out, they say. Time always does.
I’m not so sure this time.
What I see now feels different. And you see it, too. It’s not louder. But Deeper, in a way that ought to worry us more than shouting ever could.
We’re not just divided over policies anymore. We’re divided over who we are. What we owe each other. Whether the other side even belongs to the same country.
For most of my life, we argued inside a shared frame. Of course, we disagreed about taxes, wars, schools, and courts. But there was a common understanding underneath it all. We were Americans first. We stood under the same flag, even if we argued beneath it. We trusted the same basic story about how this place came to be and why it mattered.
That frame’s gone now.
What’s replaced it isn’t one big argument, but two entirely different ways of seeing the world, occupying the same geography. Two hostile tribes that use the same words but mean different things when they say them. Freedom. Justice. Equality. Rights. Even the word country itself.
One side still sees America as something worth preserving. Flawed at times, yes. But worthy of loyalty all the same. A place shaped by inherited ideas, traditions, customs, and restraints that deserve respect because they’ve held the whole thing together longer than any of us have been alive. This is the side to which I belong.
The other side sees America as a problem to be fixed. A structure built wrong from the start. A system whose foundations have to be torn up before anything good can grow. To them, tradition isn’t a safeguard. It’s an obstacle. Patriotism isn’t love of home. It’s suspicion. Sometimes even worse.
Those two visions don’t argue well with each other because they aren’t really arguing about policy. They’re arguing about legitimacy.
And that’s the dangerous part.
You can see it in the places where the old glue used to hold us together.
Church attendance is collapsing. Not just belief, but belonging. The old habit of sitting beside people who didn’t think exactly like you, but still shared a sense of right and wrong, fades away. What disappears with it isn’t theology so much as a shared moral language.
Patriotism follows the same path. For some, it still means gratitude for a country that made room for freedom and self-correction. For others, it’s treated as naïve at best, dangerous at worst. In polite company, it becomes a punchline. Everywhere else, it turns into a test. Love this place the wrong way, or too openly, and you’re suspect.
Some folks are now openly hostile to religion. And openly hostile to patriotism. Not because faith or country ever failed to live up to their ideals, but because both imply something larger than the self. Faith suggests moral limits. Patriotism suggests an inherited obligation. Neither sits comfortably in a culture that’s come to treat personal autonomy as the highest good.
That same tension shows up in how we talk about self-government. Not how it should work, but whether it should exist in its current form at all. You hear the argument more and more, sometimes whispered, sometimes said out loud. Ordinary people can’t be trusted. They vote the wrong way. They believe the wrong things. They cling to outdated loyalties. Better to manage them. Guide them. Perhaps override them when necessary.
That’s not a policy disagreement. That’s a philosophical break.
One side believes that free people, grounded in shared moral habits and loyalty to something larger than themselves, are capable of governing their own lives. The other believes freedom is dangerous unless closely supervised, and tradition is something to be dismantled before it does harm.
Those two visions don’t merely disagree. They collide.
So what binds us now?
Not blood. Not faith. Not language. Not shared memory. Not even a common understanding of what this country is supposed to be.
We no longer speak of America as a home we inherited, but as a project to be redesigned. The old language of obligation has been replaced with the language of grievance. Duty gives way to demand. Gratitude gives way to accusation. Loyalty, once assumed, now has to justify itself.
A nation can survive disagreement. But it cannot survive the loss of common allegiance.
For generations, Americans have argued fiercely, but as members of the same family. They believed they owed something to the past and something to the future. Today, many reject both. The past is treated as a crime scene. The future as something to be engineered, not entrusted.
If there’s no shared faith, no shared story, no shared moral boundary, then citizenship becomes purely transactional. What do I get? What do I demand? What do I withhold if I don’t get my way?
That isn’t a nation. It’s a painful negotiation with no peaceful end in sight.
When people stop agreeing on the basic legitimacy of the country itself, compromise stops making sense. You don’t compromise with something you believe is rotten at the core. You tear it down. Or you defend it. Either way, the middle ground disappears. And I guess it must, if our foundations are to survive.
That’s how nations come apart.
You can feel it in everyday conversations. The way politics has turned personal. Not just “I disagree with you,” but “I don’t recognize you.” Not “we want different outcomes,” but “you are evil and not worthy of respect.”
Once you reach that point, the question stops being who wins the next election. The question becomes whether the losing side still believes the system is worth obeying.
I don’t have a tidy solution. I suppose real nations don’t get those. They’re held together by things that can’t be legislated and can’t be enforced at gunpoint. By shared memory. Shared sacrifice. Shared reverence for something that came before us and is supposed to outlast us.
A country isn’t just a boundary on a map or a set of procedures written down in law books. It’s people who believe they belong to one another, even when they disagree, even when they’re disappointed, and even when the country falls short of its promises. Once that belief erodes, politics turns existential. Every argument becomes final, and every election feels like a last stand.
When citizens stop seeing one another as countrymen, they start thinking in terms of exits. At that point, they stop asking how to fix what’s broken and start wondering whether it’s worth saving at all. New phrases enter the conversation. Separation. A national divorce. Not demanded, but mentioned the way people talk about things they once thought unthinkable.
Perhaps it’s time we get real and have a national conversation about where this leads. Not to hasten an ending, and certainly not to celebrate one, but because silence doesn’t mend fractures. It only allows them to widen. Honest conversation, however uncomfortable, is often the last tool a nation has before choices harden into outcomes.
Because if nothing binds us anymore, then the harder question isn’t whether we can govern ourselves.
It’s whether there’s still an “us” left to govern at all.
My Rrsponse:
I saw this in decades of growing division in the Methodist Church. (and other mainline denominations. We live today with more or less loosely-boundaried divisions and “equal but separate” kinds of existence for the most part because religious institutions allowed political agendas and political means to become so much a part of their own purpose, polity, and practice. So we live and let live. It is the divide been traditionalists and progressives, broadly defined. There seems to be no middle ground theologically or politically. For me, as a Christian AND one who loves America, I had to largely dissociate from affiliative religiosity and focus on my personal faith choices aligned with Wesleyan theological principles and practice, looking first and foremost to reliance on scripture, reason, tradition, and my understanding of the traditional perspective on spiritual experiences in community of active Holy Spirit evidence of life in Christ. Politically, I’ve had to disassociate from identification with and support for political parties. I weigh issues and candidates in the light of my values, my conscience, and my best judgment to remain at peace. What happens, happens. I will have done what I could. I will try to put guards in place to protect, insulate, or mitigate the damage to myself and my family that flows from special-interest agendas and that give rise to periodic tsunamis economically and in political policy changes that affect just about every area of life. I trust God’s redemptive work in my life and in the world even in the face of humanity’s overall perverse and self-serving ethic. We in the US largely lack unity of values, vision, and purpose as a national population with many increasingly diverse and demanding subcultures. People in the future will be forced further and further into choosing “sides” and drawing tribal boundaries to have a sense of belonging, security and significance in the face of bitter divisions perpetrated and perpetuated by politicians and their sycophants seeking power, wealth, control, and conformity of all to their agenda. I see little of statesmanship, honor, and integrity on which to stand politically. The self-interest based ethic of individualism reigns above order, statute, rule of law, compromise for the good of the body..and prevents agreement on shared values, common pursuit of “truths” we hold, cooperation, and pursuit of the public good. States are each cultivating their own “flavor” and culture and one can only migrate to where she feels she belongs. We will be an even more mobile and mobilized population. Maybe it is time to consider some formalized regionalization for the sake of peace and order.