Seriously: what's going on with Elon Musk? And what happens when "free speech absolutism" runs up against the realities of running the nation's de facto digital public square? How has Joe Biden performed in his first two years in office? And what can Americans expect from Braver Angels in 2023? In the final episode of the year, Ciaran O'Connor convenes fellow Braver Angels leaders John Wood, Jr., Monica Guzman, April Kornfield, and Gabbi Timmis for a freewheeling roundtable discussion.
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While en route to surrender his Army of Northern Virginia to General Ulysses S. Grant on April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee rode past Appomattox Courthouse in rural Virginia.
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The Civil War Never Really Ended, But an American Union Could Finally Help America Truly Heal
Jun 19, 2026
In previous essays, I argued that the United States should seriously consider a new governing structure — an “American Union” — in which red and blue America peacefully separate into two sovereign nations while preserving a common military alliance, shared currency, and freedom of movement, with each new nation having its own constitution reflecting its own political consensus.
Simply put, the United States is too politically, culturally, and geographically divided to function effectively under the existing highly centralized, winner-take-all system in which every election determines how more than 330 million people must live.
What is largely unspoken — but in many ways still underlies the country’s long-standing divisions — is that the United States never truly reconciled the conflicts that led to the Civil War.
While the North won militarily, the country settled for legal reunification without genuine cultural or political resolution. More than 160 years after Appomattox, many of America’s deepest divisions still follow the fault lines that led to that bloody conflict.
The result is a politically divided nation in which many in red America feel ruled by distant institutions that neither understand nor respect them, while many in blue America still view the South primarily through the lens of slavery, segregation, and rebellion. Both sides increasingly believe the other threatens the American experiment itself, and our current federal structure gives neither side room to step back.
Every presidential election feels existential. Every Supreme Court decision feels apocalyptic. Every cultural disagreement becomes a national political war.
Somewhat counterintuitively, an American Union could finally allow the United States to heal from the Civil War itself — by creating conditions of genuine self-government that permit the American people to move beyond it.
Historians widely recognize that the postwar South developed a “Lost Cause” narrative — an interpretation of the Civil War that downplayed slavery, romanticized the Confederacy, and reframed the war primarily as a defense of Southern identity and self-government.
The Lost Cause developed because defeat without reconciliation demanded a soothing story. Rather than helping the South honestly confront slavery, absorb defeat, and recover dignity within a repaired national community, postwar America left white Southerners to build their own mythology.
Every presidential election feels existential. Every Supreme Court decision feels apocalyptic. Every cultural disagreement becomes a national political war.
Somewhat counterintuitively, an American Union could finally allow the United States to heal from the Civil War itself — by creating conditions of genuine self-government that permit the American people to move beyond it.
Historians widely recognize that the postwar South developed a “Lost Cause” narrative — an interpretation of the Civil War that downplayed slavery, romanticized the Confederacy, and reframed the war primarily as a defense of Southern identity and self-government.
The Lost Cause developed because defeat without reconciliation demanded a soothing story. Rather than helping the South honestly confront slavery, absorb defeat, and recover dignity within a repaired national community, postwar America left white Southerners to build their own mythology.
Germany’s post-World War I “stab-in-the-back” myth is one well-known example. That story turned military defeat into a narrative of betrayal and humiliation, feeding resentment against democratic institutions and political enemies rather than allowing Germans to confront defeat honestly.
The end of slavery was a moral imperative. So was the later destruction of Jim Crow. No serious account of American history can treat human bondage or legally enforced segregation as anything other than profound injustices that had to be ended.
But moral necessity and national healing are not the same thing.
America did what justice required. But it never found a healthy way for the South to confront that history without retreating into grievance — or for the North to move beyond victory, judgment, and disdain.
While Reconstruction imposed a new political order, it did not produce reconciliation. Then, just over a decade later, the federal government largely abandoned Reconstruction, leaving the South to rebuild its identity without anything resembling a genuine national process of truth, accountability, forgiveness, and cultural repair.
The union was preserved legally, but not psychologically or sociologically repaired. The South was defeated, but not reintegrated. Black Americans were emancipated, but soon abandoned to Jim Crow. The result was a nation formally united but emotionally divided — its moral and social growth stunted by a conflict it never learned how to resolve.
Social psychology research suggests that when criticism feels like a threat to group identity, people become more defensive and less open to change. When that threat is reduced, they become more capable of hearing criticism and considering reform.
That matters in a South whose political identity has long been shaped both by slavery and segregation and by a deeply rooted memory of defeat and outside judgment. The result has been tribalism, which has come with a heavy price.
A country perpetually fighting a cold Civil War cannot fully attend to its future. Other advanced democracies have, in many cases, outpaced the United States in life expectancy, mathematics performance, and social mobility, while comparative data also show serious challenges in civic trust and democratic confidence in the United States.
The conflict has also trapped both sides in mutual caricature. The South too often sees the North as arrogant, secular, elitist, and contemptuous of tradition. The North too often sees the South as ignorant, intolerant, and trapped in the past.
In many respects, American politicians in both parties avoid confronting this uncomfortable reality. In his famous 2008 election night victory speech, Barack Obama declared: “We remain more than a collection of red States and blue States. We are and forever will be the United States of America.”
While laudable and well-intentioned, that aspiration is no substitute for reality. When politicians insist Americans are one united people while citizens experience contempt, distrust, and cultural hostility all around them, the result is not unity. It is disillusionment.
The first step toward genuine reconciliation is honesty: honesty about the scale of America’s cultural divide, honesty about the lingering psychological legacy of the Civil War, and honesty that forcing increasingly incompatible political cultures into a single centralized system does not heal division — it perpetuates it.
Real healing requires something harder than rhetoric or national mythology. It requires building a political structure that allows Americans with profoundly different identities, histories, and moral visions to coexist peacefully and develop in a healthy manner without feeling compelled to dominate one another.
Under an American Union framework, red and blue America would remain joined by free trade, freedom of movement, shared currency, and mutual defense, while pursuing different political and cultural futures without trying to govern one another through a single federal system.
The South’s own evolution could accelerate because it would no longer unfold under the shadow of Northern disdain. When cultural change feels like capitulation to people who hold you in contempt, communities often resist reforms they might otherwise embrace. But when change arises from within — from local pride, local leadership, and local democratic choice — it can become a source of dignity rather than humiliation.
Blue America, too, might change once relieved of the perceived need to police, defeat, or morally manage the South. Permanent conflict has distorted blue America as well. It has encouraged many progressives to see conservatism not as a competing democratic tradition, but as a pathology to be corrected.
Freed from the fear that red America might impose its values nationally, blue America could become less punitive, less absolutist, and less vulnerable to its own fringe progressive excesses — including rigid identity politics, speech policing, moral conformity, and the tendency to treat disagreement as harm.
It could also become more open to forms of wisdom it too often dismisses: faith, family, local attachment, patriotism, religion, military service, and skepticism of concentrated power.
Some critics will argue that allowing red America to govern itself would simply unleash the worst instincts of the old South. That fear greatly underestimates how much the South and broader red America have changed.
The modern South is not the South of Bull Connor or George Wallace. Interracial marriage, once illegal across much of the South, is now part of ordinary American life. In 2010, Pew found that 14 percent of new marriages in the South were interracial or interethnic — slightly above the Northeast and Midwest.
The South also remains the fastest-growing region in the country, adding more people than all other regions combined from 2023 to 2024. And minority leadership is increasingly visible: Raphael Warnock and Tim Scott, both African Americans, represent Georgia and South Carolina, respectively, in the U.S. Senate. Ted Cruz — the son of a Cuban immigrant — represents Texas. Jon Ossoff is Georgia’s first Jewish member of the U.S. Senate, and North Carolina recently elected Gov. Josh Stein as its first Jewish chief executive.
Red America is a complex, changing, multiracial society in which minorities increasingly exercise political, economic, and civic leadership.
The current structure of American politics also tends to amplify fringe voices. In an intensely polarized winner-take-all national system, highly engaged and ideologically intense voters can gain disproportionate influence, especially through party primaries. That dynamic empowers ideological absolutists, racial demagogues, conspiracy theorists, and grievance-driven movements that would likely remain marginal in a healthier political environment.
Research on U.S. polarization has found that political fear, anger, dehumanizing rhetoric, and threat perceptions can normalize hostility and increase the risk of political violence. Yet America too often treats its loudest factions as though they represent entire populations. They do not. Most Americans reject political violence, value democratic government, and reject explicitly white supremacist or neo-Nazi views.
In that sense, peaceful separation would likely strengthen moderation and stability — not by eliminating disagreement, but by lowering the stakes that give fringe voices outsized influence far beyond their numbers.
History offers a useful analogy. France and Germany spent many generations in rivalry, war, occupation, and mutual suspicion. Over time, economic integration, mutual respect, self-government, and shared institutions helped turn former enemies into close partners at the core of the European Union.
Military victory alone rarely produces lasting reconciliation. Genuine reconciliation becomes possible only when alienated populations recover dignity, self-government, and a future that no longer depends on permanent cultural defiance.
In an American Union, red America would no longer need to organize itself around resistance to blue America, and blue America might very well finally see the South more clearly — recognizing its complexity, evolution, and capacity for growth. That could create something America has not achieved since the Civil War: genuine mutual moral curiosity.
Perhaps the deeper lesson of the last 160 years is that forcing two increasingly incompatible political cultures into a single centralized national system has prolonged the very conflict the Civil War was supposed to resolve.
And perhaps the next stage of American history is two American nations learning, finally, how to coexist peacefully within a common Union — and perhaps, with less fear and less resentment, gradually truly discovering one another.
The Civil War Never Really Ended, But an American Union Could Finally Help America Truly Heal was originally published by The Western Journal and is republished with permission.
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America's moving season is slowing to a historic standstill. Discover how mortgage lock-in, housing shortages, and declining mobility threaten economic opportunity and the American Dream.
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America Has Stopped Moving
Jun 18, 2026
The arrival of early June traditionally signals the great seasonal stirring of the American demographic engine. As school districts wrap up and corporations align their fiscal calendars, hundreds of thousands of families pack up moving vans, pull up stakes, and chase opportunity across state lines. This radical freedom to move - to escape an economically stagnant region, abandon a declining industry, and claim a stake in a booming frontier - has long been the primary safety valve of American democracy. It is the literal mechanism of self-reinvention, an unwritten article of the national faith that promises that where you begin is not where you are destined to finish. It was this spatial fluidity that historically distinguished the American social hierarchy from the rigid, ancestral geography of Europe, where a family's prospects were bound to the soil of their birth for generations.
Yet, as the peak moving season gets underway this year, real estate data reveals an eerie, unprecedented stagnation: domestic relocation rates have plummeted to modern historic lows, with the Census Bureau reporting the lowest mobility rate since tracking began in 1948. The great continental migration that has defined American economic vitality and cultural mixing since the days of the frontier has ground to a sudden, structural halt. From abroad, the silence of this once restless internal movement is even more striking – a demographic engine that once roared now barely hums.
The conventional financial narrative treats this paralysis as a transient macroeconomic headache. Market analysts are saying that it is a predictable, mathematical consequence of high interest rates, a stubborn housing inventory bottleneck, and corporate adjustments to post-pandemic hybrid work models. But to view this paralysis through a purely fiscal lens is to miss a far more profound civic mutation. The American professional class is being frozen in place, sorted into permanent geographic brackets. We are witnessing the quiet death of geographic mobility, and with it, the erosion of the central engine of American opportunity. If mobility collapses, the American promise collapses with it.
For more than a century, national stability was guaranteed because regional economic pain was not a life sentence. If a textile town in New England shuttered, the workforce moved fluidly to the industrial Midwest; when the Rust Belt cooled, the Sun Belt offered a fresh, unburdened canvas. This constant circulation functioned as a societal radiator, preventing the calcification of rigid, permanent regional underclasses. It meant that family background and initial geography were mere parameters to be overcome through ambition and a tank of gas. The American map was not a cage; it was a ladder.
Today, that circulation has completely seized, replaced by a phenomenon best understood as structural immobility. A vast tier of the American middle and professional class is currently trapped in a state of prosperous confinement. Millions of homeowners who secured or refinanced into grandfathered 3 percent mortgage rates during the historical lows of the early 2020s are now staring at prevailing mortgage rates hovering near 7 percent. To accept a promotion in another state, to relocate for a superior school district, or to move closer to aging family members now requires an unthinkable financial sacrifice: forfeiting an affordable, stabilized asset to take on a hyper-inflated home price with double the monthly interest obligation elsewhere.
The result is a housing market defined not by economic dynamism, but by a modern variation of feudal tenure. Economists call this the lock-in effect, but its social dimensions are far more insidious than the clinical term implies. It functions as a set of golden handcuffs that effectively pins a generation to its current coordinates. Ambition has given way to asset preservation. A professional class that once prided itself on its agility and willingness to follow the market is now paralyzed by the sheer mathematics of their debt structures. A society that once celebrated motion now rewards immobility.
This structural freeze strikes at the very heart of national meritocracy. When geographic mobility is severed from professional ambition, the labor market loses its elasticity. Talented engineers remain in regional markets where their skills are underutilized because they cannot afford the transaction cost of moving to a tech hub; young families stay crammed into inadequate starter homes because the next rung on the property ladder has been kicked away. More critically, it creates an acute, toxic generational divide. While older, established asset owners remain insulated in their low-cost redoubts, younger workers entering the market face a dual barrier of prohibitive entry prices and a total lack of inventory, as no one can afford to sell.
The long-term danger of this geographic freeze is the political and cultural balkanization of the American populace. When citizens can no longer move fluidly between regions, states become echo chambers, and local identities harden into permanent, adversarial factions. As noted by Ryan McConnell, the baseline of standard relocation remains fundamentally beneath historic standards, keeping households stubbornly in place. The radical mix of backgrounds that once occurred naturally in rapidly growing corporate hubs and suburban developments is replaced by stagnation. America is transitioning from a dynamic society characterized by lateral movement into a rigid, localized caste system where geographic choice - the simple liberty to reinvent oneself in a new place - is increasingly a luxury reserved exclusively for the ultra-wealthy elite.
When a society stops moving, it stops mixing. The physical isolation of Americans within their current zip codes accelerates the sorting of the country into immutable political fiefdoms. The young professional who might have brought new perspectives from the Midwest to a coastal city, or vice versa, stays put, choosing the financial safety of a low-interest mortgage over the civic risk of relocation. If the American experiment loses its mobility, it loses its defining characteristic. The silence on the suburban streets this moving season is not merely a reflection of a paused housing market or a standard business cycle correction; it is the sound of a great democratic safety valve being permanently welded shut.
Unwelding this democratic safety valve requires a dual strategy that treats geographic immobility as both a macroeconomic bottleneck and a civic emergency. Mechanically, the housing market must be unburdened through the introduction of transferable mortgage frameworks and a sweeping liberalization of local zoning laws that artificially suppress supply and inflate entry costs. Philosophically, the nation must transition from an era of hyper-concentration to one of deliberate decentralization, using digital infrastructure and regional development to bring high-growth industries to the populations currently locked in place. The current stagnation is not an irreversible historical decree; it is a structural friction that can be remedied through innovative governance and financial engineering. By restoring the liquidity of the housing market and fostering regional economic dynamism, the historic link between spatial freedom and social mobility can be reestablished. Only then will the American map cease to be a cage of asset preservation and once again become a ladder of meritocratic ambition.
Imran Khalid is a physician, geostrategic analyst, and freelance writer.
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Does citizen activism strengthen democracy or undermine majority rule? Explore how local activism shapes government responsiveness, public participation, and policymaking.
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Is More Local Activism a Solution to Our Political Ills?
Jun 18, 2026
Democratic reformers often assert that more citizen activism is the best remedy for local governments that are unresponsive to public wishes and cater to elite preferences. The thinking goes that if only residents would take advantage of the small-scale opportunities for direct engagement that localities have to offer, they could counter elite influence and promote policy that better reflects majority preferences. Others, however, see a darker side to such activism. Citizens can use their influence to promote exclusion, maintain residential segregation, or engage in “not in my backyard” (NIMBY) behavior. Activism can be used by the already privileged to magnify their advantages, and as a result, we might be better off if we restrict residents’ ability to use non-electoral participation to lobby the government.
This leads to a central question: Will more activism improve democracy and lead to more responsive government, or will it exacerbate existing problems? In my new book, Activism, Majority Rule, and Local Democracy, I explore this question by interviewing activists in San Diego, California, analyzing how they go about trying to influence local policy and identifying their effect on democratic practices.
Answering this question requires identifying the different mechanisms of public influence over government. We usually think about public influence in a democracy as being of one piece, usually in terms of popular majorities influencing government. This is frequently contrasted to “elite” influence: government either listens to the majority of the public or a small elite.
This binary, however, mischaracterizes how democracies actually work. We have institutions designed to allow public majorities to influence policy, the most recognizable of which are elections. But we also allow for subsets of the population to influence government as well. This could be a group of elites, but it could also just be average people trying to influence policies they care about (“activists” for short). Thus, there are two distinct paths of influence. The first is through majoritarian institutions, such as candidate elections or ballot initiatives, that allow for the public-at-large to influence policy (at least when they work well). The second is through activism, which allows groups of individuals with common goals to advocate for preferred policies.
The problem is that activism is usually not majoritarian, meaning it won’t lead to policy that reflects majority preferences even if the activists are “average people.” When residents become activists, they will inevitably specialize in a handful of issues, as there are too many issues and only so much time. They will not do this randomly, but rather focus on issues that have the biggest impact on their lives or the ones they care most about. As a result, the set of activists on any given issue will likely be biased: because interest in issues is not randomly distributed, when people self-select into groups based on interest, the resulting set of activists will be different than the public at large. Even if all residents were politically active, on any given issue, the set of activists will exhibit biases and likely advocate for policies different than what the majority prefers. This isn’t necessarily true for all issues—it’s possible that on some issues activists will promote policies the majority agrees with—but because activists are a self-selected subset of the public, on many issues they will act against majority preferences.
As a consequence, activism and majority rule are often in tension. We commonly understand activism as an alternative means for “the public” to get the policies they want, but rather than contributing to majority rule, activism can undermine it. Widespread activism may push the government away from adopting policies the majority prefers.
Both majority rule and activism have their merits. The majority of the public should be able to have their preferences reflected in what the government does, especially when they have clear and defined beliefs. But activism is also beneficial even if it promotes policies that are countermajoritarian. It allows individuals to have a direct say on the issues they care most about, which may increase satisfaction with government. It can also build civic skills, increase internal efficacy, and develop a greater appreciation for democratic processes. Activists are often more knowledgeable than the average resident, and in some circumstances may advocate for wiser policies than a largely uninformed majority.
A healthy democracy should have a measure of majority rule as well as extensive activism. Thus, it’s not a matter of deciding which one is better, but rather how to incorporate both into local practice and manage the tension between them. The first step is to decide when majorities should be able to obtain the policies they prefer. I posit three conditions that should lead to majority rule: when a large segment of the public cares about an issue, has sufficient knowledge about it, and has a defined preference. These three conditions are not often present. For example, there are some issues that most people care little about, and other issues where most people haven’t given the issue much thought and thus don’t have a defined preference as to what should be done. On these issues, it is appropriate for activists to influence policy even if they do not represent the majority opinion.
The problem is not that we have too much or too little activism, but that we have a misconception of the role that activism performs in local democracy. We often think about activism as a complement to majority rule, allowing public majorities to strengthen their influence over policy. Most people think that widespread activism by average citizens, coupled with responsive officials, will lead to majority rule. But it will not. Rather, it will lead to rule by activists. This misconception has negative consequences, as it prevents us from addressing the tension between activism and majority rule and leads to unproductive debates over whether activists are representative of the public. We should accept that activists are not proxies for the public-at-large, and focus on the more important question, which is what should be done to address public problems.
Whether we want more activism is dependent on what we are hoping to accomplish. If we want citizens to develop civic skills or want those with intense preferences to have a greater say, then more activism is called for. Activism can also reduce inequalities if the newly active residents are from disadvantaged groups (although privileged groups often are in a better position to exploit participatory opportunities). If, on the other hand, we want policy to better reflect majority preferences, then we should limit activism by making it more difficult to engage in effective non-electoral participation. Viewing increased activism as a path towards majority rule is misguided; it will enhance the influence of activists, but that’s not majority rule. Government should be responsive to the public, but whether it should be responsive to majority opinion or activists is an open question, one that depends on our goals and preferences.
Brian E. Adams is a Professor in the Political Science Department at San Diego State University.
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Elisee Byun
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From the Field to the Forum: Empowering Student-Athletes in Democracy
Jun 18, 2026
WASHINGTON D.C. — Student-athletes are increasingly moving beyond their sports to become active participants in the democratic process. At the forefront of this movement is "The Team," a nonprofit organization dedicated to integrating nonpartisan civic engagement into college athletics.
Elise Byun, the program coordinator for The Team and a former varsity gymnast at UC Berkeley, recently shared her journey from participant to mentor within the organization’s Engage Athlete Fellowship.
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The Team’s mission is centered on developing teammates, inspiring leaders, and empowering citizens by making civic involvement accessible and team-centered. For Byun, seeing this mission in action means watching the "next generation" of athletes take up the mantle of leadership on their own campuses.
"I think it's really cool to see the next generation really inspired and really just take that upon their mission to also inspire their teammates, their other fellow athletes at their university, and just try to make a difference on the campus level," Byun said.
The Engage Athlete Fellowship is a year-long program that brings together roughly 25-30 student-athletes from across all NCAA divisions. Each fellow designs a custom project tailored to their interests, ranging from voter engagement to mental health awareness. During her time as a fellow, Byun focused her project on "inspiring" and "mobilizing" the Berkeley community. This included hosting panels with local change-makers and organizing "Adopt a Week" recess support at local elementary schools.
"I found that as student-athletes, we need to show up for the community that shows up for us," Byun explained. "Every single weekend, fans come out, support us at our games, cheer us on, and I think as student-athletes, we should serve the community that serves us".
Byun’s commitment to advocacy was sparked by personal challenges during her athletic career, including two Achilles tendon injuries. These setbacks forced her to find her identity outside of the gym, leading her to leadership roles in the Student-Athlete Advisory Committee (SAAC) and the Pac-12 leadership team.
"I realized I really loved the advocacy portion of a lot of what I was doing, and that helped me find my ties to the team also around civic engagement," Byun noted.
The fellowship culminates in the Engage Athlete Forum in Washington, D.C., where athletes connect with professionals across various fields, from tech to sports, who link civic engagement to their careers.
"You bring such like-minded people in one place," Byun said of the event. "I leave the forum every single year of just feeling so inspired and so motivated to go out there and make change."
The Team is currently accepting applications for its fourth fellowship cohort for the 2026-2027 academic year.
Hugo Balta is the executive editor of The Fulcrum and the publisher of the Latino News Network.
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