America in 2025

I’ve got a lot going through my mind as we enter the new year. I’m not sure how much of it makes sense to me, but that’s why I have a blog, right? It’s the place where I can write, sort out ideas and thoughts, play with those ideas, and more. I don’t claim to have the answers, or even good answers. More often than not, I just observe things and point them out. I often am surprised no one else has said the things I’m saying. I don’t think what I write is all that radical, especially when I get messages from people thanking me for writing and that I put into words what they were thinking.

So here we are in 2025. We are on the verge of the second Trump presidency. There’s a whole lot of unknowns – probably for everyone. That seems to be a feature of Trump.

I haven’t watched the news since the election. It’s not that I’m uninformed. It’s more that I’ve made a decision on what I need to be informed about and how. I find most of the news is not edifying. And most of it is designed to either ignite some kind of emotional response or be offered in such a way as to grab attention. News organizations gotta pay the bills after all and the way they have decided to do that is through advertising, which requires eyeballs looking at what they are offering so people can also see the ads that pay the bills. There are better ways to fund news organizations that would shift us from emotionality and shock to something more newsworthy and oriented towards genuinely informing the public of things that mattered.

But I have been thinking about America ever since the election. I have found that most analysis that has been offered about the election to be rather lacking and simplistic – as if one reason could possibly explain an election.

The best analysis I have heard so far was from Harvard philosophy professor Michael Sandel. Here’s a 17 minute segment that is well worth watching:

Sandel makes some interesting points that I’ve been contemplating. Much of what he is arguing reminds me of what I read in “The Righteous Mind” by Jonathan Haidt. You can read my review of that book here. The biggest takeaway from the book that matches with what Sandel is saying is that there is a mismatch in values. Democrats and Progressives are not talking about the core, underlying values that the majority of voters care about – that they have “ceded” such things as patriotism, rather than offering what a progressive version of patriotism would look like. I think there is truth to this. In a sense, what we have are monopolies of values. And no one benefits from monopolies. We all end up losing.

Sandel offers a progressive patriotism that is rooted in what he calls the commons – public places and institutions where people from a variety of socio-economic situations come together and share space. Again, I think there is much value to this. It seems to hit on the need for community that has been talked about from across the political spectrum. What is interesting is that even though there is talk about the need for community, both ends of the ideological spectrum have done damage to this need for community – just in different ways. Most of this is because each end of the spectrum again values different things and dismisses the value of the other end of the spectrum.

For example, the MAGA movement is often associated with conservatism. And there is an effort to diminish, if not altogether eliminate, public schools. This comes because the right doesn’t like what is taught, believing that the parents are the customer of schooling. But the reality is that society is the ultimate customer of public education – creating students who can be contributing and well-informed citizens who participate in society. There is a conflict of values. And the right, in this instance is attempting to deal with that conflict by eliminating what the conflict is about – public schools. But in so doing, it will cause damage to the need for community. It is in a public school where everyone, regardless of socio-economic circumstances shares a public space, with the same information, having to deal with people who are different in life circumstances and beliefs.

For those on the left, there has been an unofficial move towards diminishing patriotism, as Sandel says – a type of ceding patriotism. That’s not healthy either. This results in people with a more progressive outlook and belief system equating the display of the flag with right wing ideology, rather than a common aspirational set of beliefs that go beyond ideological preference. This is also does damage to the need for community.

Much of this is also reminding me of another book I read recently – “A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America” by Richard Slotkin. In the book, Slotkin talks about national myths that exist in the country. He argues that there are five national myths: The Frontier Myth, The Founding Myth, The Civil War Myths (The Lost Cause, Reuniting Brothers), The Good War Myth, and the Myth of the Movement. In this book Slotkin argued that Trump’s campaign was tapping into three of these myths (Frontier, Founding, and Lost Cause), and that the Democrats don’t have a national myth. The closest they have is the New Deal, but it hasn’t reached national myth level yet. Slatkin’s closing argument (it was written well before the end of the 2024 election), was that MAGA could win and run, but it can’t govern, while Democrats were in their infancy and too disorganized to come together with a cohesive message that tapped into the national myths.

I think Slotkin offers some valuable insight into this. When I listen to Sandel and Slotkin, I come away with a couple of things.

First, MAGA has no governing philosophy. It’s not designed to. It is most concerned with winning. And not just winning, but making their opponents miserable. And if your primary concern is this, you are incapable of governing mostly because governing involves compromise and even loss. It requires you to see the humanity in your opponents, to listen and learn.

Second, It would be easy to incorporate a discussion about church into all of this. With the decline of the institutional church, we see a contributor to what Sandel is talking about related to the need for community. Churches have often been a public place where people from across socio-economic circumstances would gather, share common beliefs, and spend time together, seeing the complexity of one another. That is missing in most churches now though. It is rare to find a church that has socio-economic mixtures. I wonder what opportunity exists for churches in the midst of this. How can churches exist and most a community beyond their ideological set of beliefs to help people see their common humanity as well as what else they hold in common? Part of the challenge here is that far too many churches have bought into an ideological identity as well.

Third, I appreciate that all of this is extremely complex and messy. There aren’t nice easy answers. And more often than not, there are just more questions. It’s time for us to move past simplistic arguments and beliefs, to get comfortable with not knowing and being uncomfortable, and to let go of the desire to be right. Only then will we even begin to move in the direction of filling this need for community.