Divided We Fall
On January 21, 2026 I spoke at “The Dividing of America,” a program organized by Prof. Rodger Randle at the University of Oklahoma—Tulsa. This is an excerpt from that talk.
Why are we polarized? Social media. That’s the default, consensus judgment. Standard guarantors of truth and veracity have been broken in the onslaught of high emotion. Every form of authority is imperiled, from religion to medicine and, most especially, to journalism. We speak instead of alternative facts, of new realities constructed by influencers.
I remember the moment at the beginning of the Bush years when an administration truth-teller mocked the Left for its belief that it was operating in a fact-based politics. We are left instead with shrill, partisan voices, amplified by the tools of citizen journalism. It sounds so right, that we can all be journalists, but the reality is that it is entirely wrong, that people get their purpose-built, idiosyncratic truths from conspiracy theorists operating on X and Facebook.
But I think that it all goes deeper than that. Dictatorship is rooted in social disorder. It depends on chaos to take hold and prevail. We have a would-be dictator in our current president who declared that the world was broken and only he could fix it; who recognizes no constraints except his own morality, and the promptings of his delusional conscience. There were very good reasons to oppose Maduro, but seizing Venezuela is another story. Seizing Greenland will mean the end of NATO, but our president feels compelled to fulfill his dream of ownership, which means absolute power, the enchantment of strength.
At first Americans seemed amused by these displays. The base was entertained by the discarding of norms. There is something mesmerizing about an unconstrained id, not merely breaking the teacups but destroying the china shop. It’s like standing in wonder as Katrina makes landfall.
But the President clearly wants vastly more. He sees himself as a messianic figure. What that requires is so much chaos and disorder, so much violent, contentious, political polarization that only he can bring direction by the necessity of force. And so there are thousands of federal officials in Minneapolis, hauling citizens in their underwear onto the freezing streets, bringing shock and outrage to some of the people in this room. If you’re like me, you are hurling obscenities at the television. But the game is being expertly played. We cannot endure chaos forever, so it will be put down, if necessary, by dictatorial force.
And by expert, I mean a kind of virtuouso display. President Biden did not understand a political fundamental. While Americans are generally an open-hearted people (or like to be thought of as an open-hearted people), they are uncomfortable with the lack of essential controls. Yes, immigrants were welcomed by previous generations even if they lacked legal citizenship. They were braceros, willing to work in the fields and the slaughterhouses when native workers were in short supply or unwilling to do labor they found repellent. But eventually it felt like the border was non-existent. Whatever the economic advantages of that arrangement, it came to feel bad to rank-and-file Americans.
Trump understood that and weaponized it expertly, just like his predecessors on the 1920s. Closing the doors on undesirable immigrants is an old and dishonorable ploy in our politics. It happened in 1924 with the passage of a bill called Johnson-Reed which set quotas on immigrants based in country of origin. Western Europeans with an Anglo sensibility? Give me your tired and your poor and they will become Americans. Italians and Jews from Russia and Eastern Europe? We’ll take ten of each and call us again next year. It is no exaggeration that Johnson-Reed was the beginning of the end for European Jews. If I sound alarmed, it’s because what started in the 20s ended in Bergen Belsen, Treblinka, and Majdanek.
Our own administration has targeted immigrants because they are eminently targetable, and an ideal canvas on which to draw a new image of America. They are the test case for brutal, authoritarian behavior that probes our willingness to tolerate violence. Think of Minneapolis as a modern-day Kristallnacht, the proving ground for standards that run against the grain of Americanism. The more violence the better. As the grandson of immigrants, some undoubtedly illegal, I feel the force of this new attitude acutely. The more disorder and chaos the more legitimate the pretext for imposing a new version of the State and its authority.