The 2026 Fracture: The “Rally Around the Flag” is Dead

Friday Flashpoint: March 6, AD2026

Mar 07, 2026

Welcome to our many first-time readers.

What I try to do on Fridays is notice when something occurs in U.S. or World politics that shifts the trajectory of our country or the global system.

America is suffering from a growing web of antagonism, much of which can be laid at the feet of a new elite who are disconnected from American tradition and from the American people. If the argument is that unique American traditions led to a stronger, more stable, wealthier society than the old world, then the departure from those traditions will likely have the opposite result. That gets me to the Israeli-America Iran War.

The current war, which is being called in some cases, the 3rd Gulf War, is not desired by two-thirds or more of the American people. Only the War of 1812 began with this kind of public skepticism, and even then, President James Madison at least made the case to Congress. Fox News says that “America is divided”—which has become the popular line for both the Democrats and the Republicans to use whenever the case is that most Americans disagree with their positions. Saying “divided” is a way to avoid confronting the fact that the American public actually can reach a consensus, and it is often not what the bipartisan elite wants to hear.

Most polls do not show a divided America, most polls show a country that does not want to fight a war with Iran and that most Americans consider Iran an annoyance but not an existential threat.1 Many now wish that Barack Obama’s deal with Iran was still in place. Americans do not like that the US attacked while Iran was negotiating; Americans did not like it when the Japanese did it on December 7th, 1941.

You can try to persuade the American people and maybe they reject your arguments, but they historically resent it when they are not consulted and things are just done to them. They will not simply rally around the flag and analysts like Nate Silver were noticing this as early as 2014.2

And then there is this: On September 10, 2001, the total U.S. National Debt was approximately $5.67 trillion. Today, the U.S. National Debt is approximately $38.9 trillion. Now, while the debt was not added at a uniform pace, that is still adding an average of $1 trillion every 9 months for a quarter of a century!

The Chosen—But Not By Us—War

Almost as important, the wars in the Middle East after 9/11 shaped the mindsets of a generation of Americans, both those who served and those who did not serve. The wars, the bailouts, the lack of accountability all rewired the millennial brain and Gen-Z’s viewpoints were heavily impacted by the social dysfunction of the government. You cannot evade 25 years of American memory. This is why there is no rally around the flag moment.

Long-term, if a majority of Americans conclude that the Israeli cabinet has more of a say over whether America goes to war than they do, they will not have a positive opinion of Israel. This is not a complicated concept, and we can see the breakdown in both the Democratic Party and increasingly in the GOP. This is a concerning development, one that did not need to happen, the Constitution is clear, and it does Israel no good to be linked to anti-Constitutional behavior by a particular president no matter the party that president leads. The conventional wisdom was that Israel always benefited from being a values-based bipartisan partner of the USA. There is no indication that the conventional wisdom was wrong.

The coalition assembled by 45/47, which we call MAGA, began as a constitutionalist and nationalist rebellion against the GOP status quo of George W. Bush, which it seemed the establishment was determined to force them to accept through his brother J.E.B. Another Bush presidency was not going to give the GOP rebels what they wanted: border control, reduced government spending, and an end to foreign entanglements in the Middle East. Many excused Trump’s failures in his first administration by blaming the old guard GOP that occupied much of his administration. That is not the case this time and what MAGA has seen over the last few months is the direct opposite of an America First policy or constitutional conservatism.

I think too many on the right have adopted the Democrat Party’s caricature of MAGA as merely angry voters who can be appeased by “owning the libs.” That is a convenient belief that misses the point that while many like chaos, many others genuinely were simply frustrated conservatives who were willing to give Trump a chance to address their concerns in a non-traditional way. In their view, the classic GOP of the Bush family failed repeatedly to respond to the party base. The failure of Trumpism will lead to another reaction, one that looks set to give the Democrats control of Congress and make some old GOP strongholds more competitive. Whatever the GOP evolves into is probably being determined in the fights over the “Epstein class” and the new Middle East War.

Other notes from me this week

My latest essay for the Institute on Religion & Democracy is a dive into a major signal I’ve been tracking: the decline of 19th-century dispensationalist thought among younger American Protestants.

By listening to the conversation shift toward sacramental traditions and the rise of postliberal critiques, we can see that the most significant consequence of the dispensationalist decline is the collapse of the theological firewall that historically shielded the relationship of conservative Protestants with Jewish Americans and Israel.

Outside the Academy w/ Dr. Albert Thompson

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