Outside The Box

I think of my uncle in July. For several years after my aunt passed, he would “come down to Georgia” on the Fourth and spend a week or so at the old family home of my grandparents, where he joyfully set himself to the task of reanimating a beloved house that sat empty most of the year. He would sweep out the cobwebs, fix what needed repairing, or lay down a coat of paint or two. I would often hear him singing when I visited, perhaps in memory of my grandparents, who harmonized with each other as they went about their daily tasks.

He could have made that visit at any time during the year, but something about the Fourth inspired the trip. I understood his desire to surround himself with cherished memories. Sentimentality runs through my family like tendons through muscle. And though I never knew exactly what memories rested at the foundation of his choice, I know that faith provided the bridge between those memories and whatever future someone in their eighties can anticipate. It was a bridge strong enough for him to walk its length with a spring in his step and a song on his lips.

As the Fourth of July approached this year, I found myself looking backward as well, and—along with many Americans—taking stock not only of my own journey across the bridge, but the greater journey of a 250‑year‑old republic. Faith gives me confidence in the engineering of my support system. Gratitude for freedom and abundance is a song in my heart, but I sing it softly, in humility, for the sacrifices that paid the piper.

Some very loud voices are not singing or celebrating our founding. The freedoms still available to us are insufficient to assuage their fears, and they seem content to exchange those tangible freedoms for the feeling of security promised by the warm embrace of collectivism. Some demand that the bridge we all stand on be torn down, though there is no blueprint for its replacement and no guarantee that everyone can swim in the troubled waters below.

It is a fact—however one chooses to judge it—that the majority of dissenting voices are at present collected under the banner of what we now, for lack of a more accurate descriptor, call “Democrat.” The contradictions are glaring. It is a coalition stitched together from factions whose worldviews cannot coexist beyond “the enemy of my enemy” or preposterous memes like “gay Islamic communism.”

This unlikely coalition includes a professional‑managerial class and a multiracial working class—the former pushing symbolic and performative politics onto an economically progressive but culturally moderate-to-traditional array of Black, Latino, rural White, union households, and service workers who often resent being pigeonholed and lectured to by their elite saviors. They are more interested in wages, cost of living, crime, and housing than they are in ideology.

Also crowded together in increasing discomfort are the activist left and the institutional liberals: DSA‑adjacent, abolitionist rhetoric, anti‑capitalist, anti‑Israel, anti‑police, climate maximalists currently voting alongside Obama‑Biden technocrats, union leadership, mainstream Black political leadership, and national‑security Democrats.

Then we have the net‑zero absolutists—anti‑fossil, anti‑nuclear (historically), anti‑mining, anti‑pipeline idealists—at odds with the labor wing: the building trades, manufacturing unions, miners, and resource‑extraction workers whose livelihoods depend on the very things the absolutists want to abolish.

And we’re not done yet. We see the maximalist open‑border, sanctuary‑city idealists who frame immigration as a moral obligation versus the realists—mayors, governors, social‑service agencies, and working‑class communities—absorbing the actual inflow, doing the work and paying the costs required by the ideals.

Season the stew with jihadists, communists, and the pronoun police, and you might as well serve peaches and okra with ketchup on ice cream. As James Carville very succinctly put it, “We’re letting the faculty lounge run the party.”

Saddest of all, from where I stand, is that the binding force of this coalition is actually negativity: anti‑Trump, anti‑capitalist, anti‑establishment, and—to a relatively small but uncomfortably caustic degree—anti‑American. You may disagree defensively with this statement, but you will be hard‑pressed to demonstrate that you speak for any faction other than your own.

Conservatives and Republicans have their problems. They are as likely to get it wrong as they are to get it right. Both sides have a tendency to extend their opinions far beyond the places where they actually have skin in the game, and both are too generous with their commentary from the comfort of their recliners or the warm pixelated glow of their mother’s basements. But the right at least has a bridge. Its supports are anchored in the traditions of the past, and its faith extends that bridge into the future. The left—or at least several of its factions—rejects the past and collectively has no defining vision that presents a clear path into the future. For them, the faith and tradition of the right is a bridge too far. But for the nation, they offer a bridge not far enough.