With midterm Election Day approaching, Democrats are making affordability and President Donald Trump’s war with Iran central to their campaign. The issues are real. Rising energy costs and another uncertain American commitment in the Middle East deserve scrutiny. But an election fought entirely over Trump’s failures would let Democrats avoid a more difficult question: What remains of the American nation after three decades of politics that treated its people chiefly as participants in a global economy? Voters may punish Republicans in November for expensive gas and another Middle East war. Still, winning on frustration alone will not tell Democrats how to govern a country that no longer feels like one nation.
For much of Washington, America became a commercial enterprise with a flag: a destination for capital, labor, and competing private ambitions, with economic expansion presented as sufficient evidence of national progress. Democrats did not invent this outlook. They did, however, give it a powerful cultural dimension. Their increasingly cosmopolitan conception of America has too often elevated mobility, individual identity, and universal openness above the historical bonds that make a people conscious of a shared fate.
The economic promise was seductive. Global trade would increase efficiency, lower prices, and lift living standards. What the promise obscured was the distinction between a country becoming richer and its citizens becoming more secure in the lives they had built.
Manufacturing communities experienced that distinction firsthand. Following China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001, it is estimated that the country lost more than two million manufacturing jobs, including in places like Youngstown and Allentown. Import competition contributed to persistent employment and income losses in parts of the industrial heartland. The consequences did not end at the factory gates. When a plant closes, a family may lose the ability to remain in the town where grandparents worked and children grew up. Main Street businesses lose customers. Civic institutions lose members. A lifetime of local attachments becomes a liability in an economy that rewards the ability to move.
Washington called this adjustment. Laid-off factory workers were told to learn software or move to coastal cities. But a family forced to abandon its home cannot simply reproduce its history somewhere else. That is why the cost of globalization cannot be counted only in wages or output. It also appears in weakened communities and disrupted family formation. An economy can register progress while the society beneath it loses continuity.
Here the Democrat Party’s cultural politics compounded an economic mistake. Progressive leaders increasingly described America as an open-ended collection of identities and interests, while treating inherited national traditions as obstacles to be revised rather than a common inheritance to be sustained. Public schools began teaching the nation’s founding chiefly through its worst flaws. For years, party leaders also treated strict border enforcement as prejudice, appearing to change course only when migrants overwhelmed budgets in New York and Chicago. Even Biden’s factory subsidies were sold more as climate policy than as a way to keep working-class towns alive.
But a nation is not merely a jurisdiction in which people pursue separate futures. It depends on obligations that preceded any particular individual and should outlast any particular generation. The family, the neighborhood, the workplace, shared customs, and a recognizable national story give citizenship a meaning that paperwork and purchasing power cannot provide. When political leaders regard these attachments as secondary, they should not be surprised when national solidarity becomes fragile.
The disagreement is visible in public opinion. A 2025 Pew Research Center analysis found that 54 percent of American conservatives considered sharing American customs and traditions “very important to national belonging,” compared with 14 percent of liberals. That is not proof of anyone’s patriotism. It is evidence of how far Americans have diverged over whether common cultural inheritance is essential to the nation itself.
Supporters of the progressive approach argue that a modern country can be united by rights and economic opportunity rather than inherited customs. Yet rights define what individuals may demand from institutions; they do not, by themselves, explain what citizens owe one another. The question is not whether Americans should be free. It is whether freedom can retain a national home when everything binding that home together is considered negotiable.
Republicans share responsibility for the historical failure. The trade consensus crossed party lines, from the Clinton administration to the Republican establishment. Under George W. Bush, neoconservatives added their own global project: remaking foreign societies through American force. The post-9/11 wars generated U.S costs estimated at $8 trillion. While the globalists reorganized economic life, interventionists consumed resources and attention in the pursuit of political transformations abroad. Different doctrines, the same neglect of the American home front.
Trump’s rise was a revolt against that neglect. For those of us who heard something meaningful in America First, the promise was not that one man would always be right. It was that Washington would stop treating the country as a platform for other people’s grand designs. American families, communities, and cultural continuity would finally rank ahead of the ambitions of the governing class.
That promise now faces a contradiction. The war with Iran risks drawing conservatives back into the logic of indefinite foreign commitments, where appeals to patriotism are used to discourage questions about cost, purpose, and an exit. The danger is not only another expensive war. It is another excuse to postpone the domestic work that made America First necessary in the first place. Questioning that course is not disloyalty; it is fidelity to the priorities the movement claimed to represent.
Democrats may gain politically from the war, but opposition to Trump supplies no answer to their own crisis of national identity. Republicans cannot repair that failure by repeating the foreign-policy habits they once denounced.
A politics built around belonging would start with different priorities. Trade and industrial policy should be judged by whether families can stay in their hometowns and earn enough to raise children, not just by cheaper imports or stock prices. For Democrats, it also means admitting that shared national life requires real borders, a common language, and schools that pass down American history with some affection. For Republicans, it means ending the habit of spending trillions on Middle Eastern wars while towns at home decay.
The choice that matters is not simply between two parties. It is between a Washington that measures America by the markets it can enter and the conflicts it can manage, and a politics that remembers the country is a home before it is a global enterprise.
