When a Nation Turns Against Itself

America's problem isn't polarization but the loss of a common inheritance.

Photo by David Trinks on Unsplash

Many younger Americans now speak more readily of dismantling the American project. That’s a symptom of a deep failure of civic formation.

For many Americans who came of age in the late twentieth century, patriotism seemed vaguely embarrassing. We would stand for the anthem, recite the pledge, celebrate the Fourth of July. But earnest patriotism belonged somewhere in the same category as country music, oversized pickup trucks, and other markers of provincialism from which sophisticated people instinctively distanced themselves or punctuated with an ironic “’Merica!”

Civic forms and rituals remained, albeit hollowed. Into that vacuum grew a competing moral vision that offered a sense of moral clarity without the burden of moral complexity. It supplied what an attenuated civic formation didn’t: a feeling of purpose and belonging, innocence and guilt, heroes and villains, and the exhilaration of participating in a moral struggle. Identity politics gave this vision its social form, organizing Americans as members of rival tribes. Cultural heroes no longer needed to achieve moral excellence; they needed only expose the evils of others.

This rival moral vision emerged in both slow and sudden ways. As an example of the latter, in 2016, Colin Kaepernick refused to stand for the national anthem, first sitting and then taking a knee to protest racism and police brutality, once with pigs dressed in police uniforms on his socks. Some saw his protest as courageous, but it filled me with dread. Civic life inevitably involves protests and demands for reform. But these are meant to occur within the context of a shared body politic. Kaepernick’s protest of the flag and the anthem declared something different, that we’re partisans before we’re citizens.

It was one of many flashpoints that felt like a railroad switch. The movement of the lever was small and the trains continued down the tracks. Only later would we discover that we’d arrived somewhere entirely different.

Many Americans have since stepped outside of our shared American inheritance, reimagining themselves as global citizens or granting primary allegiance to political identities while regarding their American one with contempt. The recent resurgence of democratic socialism among younger voters isn’t so much an economic phenomenon as a civic one. A generation taught to regard its inheritance primarily through the lens of grievance will naturally become more interested in replacement than stewardship.

This divide now is often explained as polarization. Such language is misleading. Opposite poles remain part of the same magnet. They share a common center and a common field. What confronts us is more existential. Our problem isn’t simply that Americans occupy opposite poles, but that many no longer believe they belong to the same body.

A healthy body possesses an immune system capable of recognizing wounds without attacking the organism. It distinguishes between an injury and the body that bears it. When the immune system malfunctions, the protective response loses its proper object and begins to turn against the host. Our civic life increasingly resembles this sort of autoimmune disorder. The wound becomes the defining story, until the body appears unworthy of loyalty, gratitude, or even preservation.

This same autoimmune pathology increasingly afflicts family life, as seen in the alarming rise of the no-contact phenomenon, which I examine in my forthcoming book, No Contact. The rise in estrangement affects friendships and families alike and particularly inclines adult children toward cutting off parents over ideological and political differences. The underlying pathology is the same. The wound gradually eclipses the body. The nation becomes its sins; the family becomes its hurts. In both cases, ideology acquires a greater claim than inheritance.

One of the clearest signs of an immune system in distress is the erosion of proper distinctions. Grave harms and ordinary frictions start to occupy the same moral category. In the no-contact movement, people often struggle to distinguish abuse from discomfort or violence from political differences.

This conflation almost always moves in one direction toward catastrophizing. Ordinary conflict becomes trauma. Disagreement becomes abuse. Political dissent becomes violence. The effect isn’t greater sensitivity to genuine suffering but a diminished capacity to recognize it. When every wound is catastrophic, the truly catastrophic is harder to see.

Also lost is an understanding of the purpose of ordinary conflict. The friction inherent in family life is an essential condition for growth. Disagreement and discomfort teach humility and patience. Forgiveness requires offense. Living among imperfect people is one of the primary ways human beings mature.

Our civic autoimmune disorder followed a similar pattern. The category of racism expanded outward, attaching itself to surprisingly ordinary targets: mathematics, Dr. Seuss, the nuclear family, standardized testing, farmers’ markets, birdwatching, punctuality, objectivity, hard work, and the scientific method. This was never principally about racism, which remains a real and grave sin. Rather, the growing suspicion that racism might be hidden anywhere increasingly implied that it was present everywhere. The search for particular wounds expanded into an attack on the body. The object shifted from discrete injustices to the culture that produced them.

Both familial and civic life depend upon the restoration of a healthy immune system. Families and nations need the capacity to recognize injuries and injustices without rejecting the whole and to reorient ourselves as friends, family, fellow citizens.

The family is, in many respects, the cellular structure of the republic. The habits that permit us to feel a debt of gratitude toward imperfect parents are the same habits that induce us to feel civic piety even with knowledge of real and at times enduring injustices.

Gratitude toward an imperfect inheritance naturally gives rise to concern for posterity. What’s received as a gift becomes something to preserve, improve, hand on. This helps explain why the founders spoke so often of future generations. John Adams wrote during the Revolution, “Posterity! You will never know how much it cost the present generation to preserve your freedom.” The founders understood themselves as stewards standing between the dead and the unborn, inheritors of a civilization they hadn’t made and trustees for generations they’d never meet.

Perhaps no American president confronted deeper national wounds than Lincoln. Yet even amid civil war he appealed to loyalties deeper than factions. In his Second Inaugural, he spoke of binding up the nation’s wounds, “with malice toward none, with charity for all.” The republic was gravely injured, but it remained a body worth healing.

The challenge before us now is civilizational. Decades of civic malnourishment left many with the rituals of patriotism but few of the antibodies necessary to resist a politics of grievance. The solution isn’t simply to lower the temperature or tolerate one another a little better. It’s to recover civic habits of gratitude and piety and form the future with a robust and rich sense of history that includes the struggles and the failures while never losing sight of the greatness of those whose sacrifices preceded us.

The wounds are real. But the body isn’t the disease. America remains the last best hope of ordered liberty and self-government. And nations, like families and like bodies, can’t long endure once they learn to turn against themselves. May we prove faithful stewards of what we’ve inherited. More importantly, may we become worthy of what we’ve been given.

Noelle Mering is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and the author of Awake, Not Woke: A Christian Response to the Cult of Progressive Ideology, co-author of the Theology of Home series, and a forthcoming book, No Contact: How a Seductive Ideology Broke Families and Friendships—and How We Can Repair Them (Forum/PRH, 2026).