What Unites U.S.?

American Legion, July 2026

The United States is many things as we celebrate our 250th birthday—populous, prosperous and powerful, distracted, diverse and dynamic—but we’re not particularly united. Our map is divided between blue states and red states. Twenty-three percent of us want our state to secede. One in three of us say violence directed against our own government is justified. A record-high 80% of us say America is “greatly divided.” As if to punctuate our divisions, the surprise hit film of 2024 was “Civil War,” a chillingly realistic depiction of a second war between—more accurately among—the states. ‍ ‍

What, if anything, do we agree on in this divided country? Perhaps more than we can see from our social-media feeds. Beyond the apps that pretend to build community but actually accentuate division, beyond the atomization, beyond the outright tribalism, there still exists common ground.

Fractures
Before unearthing the common ground that unites us, we need to be realistic about the nature of the fractures dividing us.

Seemingly-insurmountable differences are part of America’s story, but in recent years the differences have been hyper-accentuated by new forms of echo-chamber media; the fractures have grown deeper; and our disagreements have devolved into violence.

In the past six years alone, we have weathered: an armed attack targeting the president and the cabinet; two attempted assassinations of a presidential candidate; an attempted assassination of a Supreme Court justice; a fire-bombing attack targeting Pennsylvania’s governor; the attempted kidnapping of Michigan’s governor; and cold-blooded murders of a state lawmaker in Minnesota and a national political commentator in Utah. In the summer of 2020, there was a wave of rioting that killed 25 Americans. In the winter of 2021, there was a “heinous attack on the United States Capitol” marked by “violence, lawlessness and mayhem” that “defiled the seat of American democracy.” (Those are President Trump’s words.) In 2024, there were 9,474 threats against members of Congress; in 2025, that number jumped to 14,938. And from Los Angeles to Minneapolis to D.C., many of our cities have become faultlines and frontlines–complete with federal troops—in a sometimes-deadly battle between national and local authority. 

The presence of U.S. troops on U.S. streets is a jolting reminder that the words of Ecclesiastes are true: There’s nothing new under the sun. Political violence, after all, scarred America in the years just after the founding (the Shays Rebellion and Whiskey Rebellion); in the 1860s (the Civil War); in the early 1900s (deadly waves of anarchist bombings and assassinations); and in the 1960s (systemic state violence in the South directed against black Americans; assassinations of President Kennedy, Rev. Martin Luther King and Sen. Robert Kennedy; riots that spread to 100 cities and left 39 dead; 4,ooo+ bombings that claimed 43 lives).

Yet the notion that America has been here before—that today’s political violence parallels yesterday’s—is perhaps more troubling than comforting.

The good news is that our history reminds us political violence is not tolerated by the vast majority of the American people—and that we have always found a pathway back to building a more perfect union.

That brings us to the common ground that unites us.

Political Freedom
We believe in what might be called our “core freedoms”—religious freedom, freedom of speech, a free press, the right to bear arms, the right to peacefully assemble, the right to privacy.

AP-NORC polling reveals that 90% of us believe freedom of speech to be “extremely important,” and 83% of us believe the right to peacefully assemble to be “extremely important.”
On some fundamental level, we understand that even if we despise what the TV talking heads say, what the newspaper publishes, what the neighbors display in their yards, what the influencer posts on social media, or what some group is protesting (that word “peacefully” is important), our freedom to say, write, express, post or promote ideas we cherish depends on their freedom to say, write, express, post or promote ideas we disdain. Equally important: We recognize that it is the free exchange and even the clash of ideas—not their suppression—that helps us build a more perfect union.

Seventy-seven percent of us believe freedom of the press to be “extremely important.”
Our free press plays an important part in that free exchange of ideas. According to Jefferson, “Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press.” Madison added, “A popular government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both.” He explained that “diffusion of knowledge” is “the only guardian of true liberty.” Jefferson, Madison and their fellow founders recognized that a free press disseminates information, shines light on government activities, and serves as an extra check on government misconduct.

Eighty-four percent of us believe religious liberty to be “extremely important.”Eighty-three percent of us believe in God.
It is not a particular faith that unites us, but rather our respect for faith, our embrace of religious freedom, our recognition that there’s something bigger, something more enduring, something more important than the state or the party, the masses or the individual. This respect for faith helps support our political system. “I do not know whether all Americans have a sincere faith in their religion,” Alexis de Tocqueville observed in Democracy in America, “but I am certain that they hold it to be indispensable to the maintenance of republican institutions.” We don’t have to worship on the same days or in the same ways—or at all—to recognize this.

Eighty-eight percent of us believe the right to privacy to be “extremely important.”
Thanks largely to the Fourth, Fifth and Ninth Amendments, we have a right to privacy, which turns each of our homes into a little sphere of sovereignty. We take for granted that the burden is on the government to prove guilt, not the citizen to prove innocence—and that our founding documents aim to promote individual liberty and limit the reach of government. For millennia, the scale tilted in the other direction.

Seventy-eight percent of us believe the right to bear arms to be “extremely or somewhat important.”
We understand that our freedoms must be protected from those who have contempt for the law. But since law-enforcement response times are never zero minutes, we understand that law-abiding citizens are always the first-responders—and always have the right to defend themselves. That’s exactly what the founders believed. “Bearing arms for personal protection was an unquestioned right in the minds of the founding fathers,” constitutional-law expert Stephen Halbrook explains. “The founding fathers in general strongly endorsed the right to bear arms for self-defense; they gave written expression to their views through the Second Amendment and personally exercised the right by owning and possessing arms.” More than 81 million of us follow their example today.

Economic Freedom
When Jefferson declared our “unalienable” right to “life, liberty and the pursuit happiness,” he was borrowing from John Locke, the English philosopher who argued that each person has the right “to preserve his property—that is, his life, liberty and estate against the injuries and attempts of other men.”

Indeed, in their charges against King George III, the founders condemned him for “cutting off our trade,” “imposing taxes on us without our consent,” “plunder[ing] our seas,” and unleashing “swarms” of customs officers to “eat” the wealth and property of the colonies.

In other words, the Declaration of Independence was a demand not only for political freedom, but also for economic freedom.

Two-hundred-fifty years later, we still believe in economic liberty. Eighty-one percent of us have a positive view of free enterprise. Seventy-one percent of us believe free-market economics to be superior to other alternatives. Sixty-two percent of us say the federal government has too much power. And 59% of us say federal income taxes are too high.

Rule of Law
All of those freedoms depend on a foundation of law and order. Without the law—and without people and institutions to enforce the law—freedom descends into license and ultimately into anarchy. The very first sentence of our Constitution makes plain that the central purpose of our union is to “insure domestic tranquility”—law and order. The vast majority of us support the rule of law, and we support those who enforce it.

The rule of law means just what it says: The law is what rules—not the law of might-makes-right, not the law of one-man rule, not the lawlessness of mobs.

‍A whopping 96% of us believe the rule of law is “central to the country’s future.” Eighty-one percent of us believe presidents must follow the decisions of the final arbiters of our laws: the federal courts. Sixty-three percent of us oppose qualified immunity—the idea that government officials can be shielded from legal liability.  In short, like the founders, we believe that no one is above the law.

We also believe that those who enforce the law are essential. Seventy-four percent of us have confidence in our local police; and more than 80% of us oppose “defunding the police.”

National Security
We are united on multiple measures of national security, which shouldn’t come as a surprise. Throughout our history, external threats have served as a powerful unifying force: The British army’s massacre of colonists in Boston and the British government’s “intolerable acts” united the not-yet United States. Imperial Germany’s attacks on civilian shipping and its diplomatic treachery galvanized America to enter the Great War. Japan’s bombing of Pearl Harbor transformed an isolationist America into a global military juggernaut. The communist bloc’s attempt to seize West Berlin and South Korea rallied Americans for the Cold War.

Today, the actions of China, Russia and their partners are awakening Americans to Cold War 2.0.

Eighty-nine percent of us view China as an enemy/competitor; 75% of us express distrust in PRC dictator Xi Jinping; 77% of us support defending Taiwan against PRC aggression.

Eighty-eight percent of us view Russia as an enemy/competitor, and 83% of us express distrust in Russian strongman Vladimir Putin. That explains why 74% of us support maintaining or increasing U.S. commitment to NATO—and why 62% of us support sending weapons to Ukraine.

Finally, 79% of us support increasing defense spending to deter China and Russia.

Common
To get a sense of how large all those majorities are, consider this: Only one presidential candidate since our bicentennial in 1976 has garnered more than 54% of the popular vote.

This blizzard of polls and percentages suggests that beneath the fractured surface, there’s a lot of connective tissue, a lot of things we agree on—enduring, essential, foundational things that unite us. And so, our challenge is not to search for common ground, but to recognize that there’s common ground all around us—and to meet our neighbors on those patches of common ground.

At an hour when America was not just politically divided but literally divided, President Lincoln inspired Americans with words that can still guide us. “With malice toward none, with charity for all,” he intoned, “let us strive on…to bind up the nation’s wounds.”

President Lincoln understood that before we can meet on common ground, we must first turn away from anger and malice and score-settling. We must instead approach our neighbors with a sense of charity, which in his day meant a “disposition of heart which inclines men to think favorably of their fellowman.” And then we must do the work of caring for—and caring about— our neighbors.

That’s the pathway back to building a more perfect union.