The Founding Fathers Set Us Up to Be Divided

If you think the U.S. has never been so fractured, you haven’t paid attention to history

Jeremy Helligar
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Photo: Tullio Saba (flickr)/Wikimedia Commons

“America has never been so divided.” If you’ve heard this stale cliché once, you’ve heard it a thousand times — usually courtesy of a Republican. They imply Democrats have torn the U.S. apart and should shoulder the responsibility of uniting the country. Conveniently, they forget four key facts:

  1. The onus to heal America isn’t solely on the political party in power.
  2. The GOP currently stands for whatever Democrats aren’t and nothing more, so division has become their specialty. If President Joe Biden were to call the sky blue, they’d likely say it’s azure.
  3. Their king of kings, Donald Trump, has never lifted a finger on behalf of unity.
  4. Division has defined America from the very beginning.

The View’s Meghan McCain recently warned, “We are heading more and more towards the most divided America of our time” while discussing the party-line debate over vaccine passports. Um, okay. But has she ever cracked open a history book? Division is in our bones, right down to “In God, we trust,” a national motto that’s divisive as hell (and clashes nicely with the First Amendment Republicans are so fond of citing).

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