Our Country Is Crumbling Because We’re No Longer United

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What, historically, made the United States great? Of course, before we answer that, we have to acknowledge that things have never been perfect — not even close. Our wonderful founding fathers who we admire so much were slaveholders. Europeans came to the New World for freedom, and then slaughtered the natives and shipped over slaves from Africa. So much for freedom, eh?

Even after we freed the slaves, they didn’t have full rights of others. Even today, Black people are consistently, routinely treated worse due to common cultural prejudice. Others are treated unfairly as well, mostly others with darker skin.

But when we look back at our “greatest” periods, they are times when the country was largely very united for different purposes — to get freedom, to stop Nazi fascism and genocide, to bring better base working conditions and standards to all Americans, to set up social safety nets like Social Security and Medicare, to stop the Vietnam War, to launch a rocket ship into space and step on the moon, to stop acid rain and horrible air pollution. Americans of all stripes and cultural persuasions came together time and time again to make the country better and to make the world better.

Nowadays, it feels like everything is a fight. Every topic is a massive cultural and political fight. Everyone is pissed and thinks “the others” are working to tear down our country. Granted, this is in large part caused by political leaders who have taken this approach to “winning” in politics — going all the way back to the late 1990s. The idea of compromise is toxic to many politicians now, and the followers they’ve influenced. It has to be “winning,” and never compromising. The fact that about half of voters consistently vote for one party and about half consistently vote for the other party somehow doesn’t lead many people to think, “Hey, how about we work together on what we can agree on, compromise, and move forward together?” That was the politics of much of the 1990s, when the budget was last balanced, and Americans didn’t hate each other so much.

It’s not just politics, though. It’s also media. We used to have heavily shared media, and so we walked around with similar things in our heads, and both news and entertainment we could easily bond over. Democratization of media and splintering of media has led to less and less of a shared experience. But, of course, it goes far beyond that. Social media sites, which now dominate as a source of news and discussion, encourage outrage. They feature “viral” posts that enrage, that thrill, that garner interaction/engagement and more views. People don’t get their information and ideas from traditional, shared sources that make sure to have 3 verified sources to run any story. They get their information from chronically online “superusers” on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, reddit, X, Bluesky, and numerous other networks. They get posts tailored to “their group,” which is often something negative about the opposing group. It’s a social tragedy, and one that’s been supported and often seeded by our adversaries, by opposing countries that would like to see the US — and the whole democratic “West” — infighting and falling apart, rather than united.

Some people have been demonizing the United Nations for decades, but that was generally a niche thing. Now it’s common to hate on the UN, the World Health Organization (WHO), and NATO, as well as US agencies meant to serve all Americans — the Department of Education, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy, etc.

It’s been so easy to get people fighting with their neighbors, hating their fellow Americans, seeing people with a different opinion on policy matters as “the enemy within” and making them forget that we are better together, stronger together, world leaders only when we are united.

I don’t have a solution, unfortunately. There are some fun, enticing ideas, but they aren’t realistic. There are no signs that anything is going to change with social media, politics, or our culture to unite the country again.

Of course, China is united, and it is moving forward rapidly on the tech of the future. Europe is not living a fairytale, but it can unite around critical matters much better than the US can anymore, so it is likely to keep moving faster than the US in key areas. Our former friends are uniting over their need to protect themselves from an antagonistic, abusive, dangerous US and thus their need to leave the US behind or on the outside. Naturally, losing the alliances, partnerships, and openness we had with so many countries hurts us again. We are less united internally, and we are also less united with neighbors and former friends and partners.

We are becoming more and more isolated at the same time that we’re becoming more and more self-destructive. It’s hard to see how this could end well. We are just the latest empire to crumble, but that is certainly what we’re doing.