Everybody keeps telling us America is divided in two.
Red versus blue.
Democrat versus Republican.
Left versus right.
But I’m beginning to think that’s wrong.
We’re not divided in two. We’re divided into millions.
We’ve become atomized.
We live in our own little worlds. We watch different news. We follow different people. We have different algorithms feeding us different versions of reality. We join smaller and smaller tribes until eventually everybody has a group — but almost nobody feels like they’re part of the same country.
And politics hasn’t caught up.
We still pretend that 340 million Americans can be neatly sorted into two boxes: Republican or Democrat.
Come on.
Even Pew Research has found that the political landscape looks much more complicated than that. There are conservatives who don’t recognize today’s Republican Party. Progressives frustrated with Democrats. Independents. Libertarians. Socialists. Centrists. And millions of people who have essentially said, “To hell with all of you,” and tuned politics out completely.
Maybe those people aren’t apathetic.
Maybe nobody is speaking to them.
That’s where I think something like the Truth Party can matter.
Not by creating another tribe.
We’ve got enough tribes.
The challenge is to create a place where all those tribes can meet again.
You don’t have to agree with me about everything. I don’t want you to. Democracy isn’t supposed to produce agreement. It’s supposed to give us a peaceful way to deal with disagreement.
We need conservatives at the table. Liberals at the table. Socialists at the table. Libertarians at the table. Independents at the table. And especially the millions of Americans who stopped coming to the table altogether.
Because underneath all those labels, there’s still a remarkable amount we share.
We want decent schools. Safe neighborhoods. Roads and bridges that work. Healthcare we can afford. A government that isn’t bought and paid for. A fair shot for our kids and grandkids. And some confidence that the people running the country are telling us the truth.
That’s not left.
That’s not right.
That’s citizenship.
Maybe the great political challenge of our time isn’t figuring out which tribe wins.
Maybe it’s remembering that we’re all part of something bigger than our tribe.
The United States was never supposed to mean the United States of Democrats and Republicans.
It means the United States of America.
And if we’re going to put it back together, somebody has to start bringing the atoms back together.
But first, we show up.
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