From “One Nation” to “Us Versus Them”
The MAGA movement, with Donald Trump as its author and chief evangelist, didn’t stumble into division as a side effect of politics as usual. Division is the product. The strategy runs on a simple premise: a frightened, resentful electorate is a controllable electorate, and nothing manufactures fear and resentment like telling people their neighbors are the enemy.
Layered on top of that is a brand of Christian Nationalism that treats the country not as a pluralistic democracy but as a covenant handed down to one tribe, with everyone else cast as an interloper. It’s married to a version of American exceptionalism that isn’t the humble kind, the kind that says we have obligations because of what we’ve been given, but a grievance-driven kind that says we owe the rest of the world, and much of our own population, nothing. Put those two ideas together and you get a politics where compromise is betrayal, pluralism is decline, and cruelty toward the outgroup is treated as a feature to campaign on rather than something to be ashamed of.
That is about as far from the spirit of the day after, September 12, 2001, as it’s possible to get. The men who flew the planes wanted us to tear each other apart. For a brief window, we refused. Two decades on, a domestic political movement figured out that tearing each other apart was profitable, and it stopped needing outside enemies to do it.
The Hypocrisy Doesn’t Stay in Washington — It Comes Home
It would be easy to write all of this off as a national story, something that happens on cable news and in D.C., far away from daily life. But the same pattern of saying one thing and doing another shows up locally, and it shows up here in McHenry County, in the county Republican Party’s own conduct.
Take the property tax posture. It is a reliable applause line at every county GOP event: taxes are too high, government spends too much, families are being squeezed. Fair enough, that’s a legitimate position, and plenty of residents genuinely are stretched thin. But that same party apparatus turns around and fights for increases to public officials’ own salaries, including the salaries of the very elected positions its own candidates hold or aspire to. You cannot credibly campaign as the guardian of taxpayers’ wallets while quietly padding the compensation of the people spending taxpayers’ money. That isn’t fiscal conservatism. It’s fiscal conservatism as a talking point, reserved for other people’s raises.
Then there’s Home Rule. This is the more revealing example, because it shows the same trick from the opposite direction. When it serves the party’s interests, county Republicans have pushed forward referendum language and process, Home Rule and County Executive questions get placed in front of voters, framed as the public having its say. But when the actual substance of Home Rule threatens the current arrangement of power, or complicates the narrative that county government should stay small and unaccountable to modernized structures, the same people who put the referendum on the ballot turn around and campaign against it. They want credit for “letting the people vote” and credit for making sure the people vote the “right” way. That is not deference to democracy. It’s stage management of democracy, and voters in McHenry County deserve to see it named as such.
Why the Contrast Matters
I don’t raise the county party’s contradictions to change the subject from the national story, I raise them because they’re the same story, just closer to home and smaller in scale. The national MAGA project has taught a generation of Republican officials, from Congress down to county boards, that voters will tolerate inconsistency as long as it’s wrapped in enough grievance and enough certainty. Say you’re for the little guy while cutting deals that help the connected. Say you trust the voters while working to make sure the vote doesn’t count if it goes the wrong way. Say the country belongs to “real Americans” while writing off huge portions of the actual country as illegitimate.
None of that is what September 11th asked of us. What it asked of us, and what we briefly gave, was harder and less profitable than any of that: it asked us to set aside the differences that didn’t matter and hold onto the ones that did, and to treat our neighbors as people we were in this with, not people we needed to be protected from.
Twenty-five years out, the honest question for anyone who still gets a lump in their throat looking at those old photographs isn’t whether we remember that day. It’s whether we’re willing to hold our own leaders, in Washington and in McHenry County alike, to the standard those photographs represent, or whether we’ve decided that unity was just something that happened to us once, rather than something we choose to keep doing.