The United States of Grudges
Monday Memo 3/16 AD2026
This is not the United States of amnesia, this is the United States of grudges.
We keep waiting for a civil war that looks like a map of red versus blue. What we have is messier: a necrotic web of private grudges. It is no longer a “political divide”; it is a brawl over status and the purpose of politics. We are being strangled by small ideas rather than torn apart by big ones.
And many remember all too well the past before becoming American.
From my work on race, and on the Troubles in Northern Ireland, I know one of the worst things a society can do is let resentments lay buried and simmering. We have to be open about disagreements.
Tracking the online fights across the spectrum of social media has revealed critical shifts in perception about what matters in American politics and what is going wrong. The tone of criticism of the federal government is changing. Critics are developing arguments against both the state’s operation and its operators. In both the GOP and Democratic camps, there is a belief that for many political players, the American present is merely a staging ground for the Old World’s unfinished business. The discontented charge that the USA has imported wounds and expected them heal in the melting pot, but that pot has instead become a pressure cooker for diaspora vendettas. When a Los Angeles deli becomes a proxy for the streets of Tehran, or a South Florida primary turns on the unreconciled accounts of 1959 Havana, foreign policy ceases to be seen as legitimate. Instead, it is viewed as a neighborhood brawl not with fellow citizens debating the national interest but with descendants—and sometimes survivors— of foreign tragedies, tending ancestral fires that will never warm America but can burn.
From the anxieties of pro-Israel Jewish American activists over the security of Israel, Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s interest in the Cuban regime, and the Iranian exiles seeking a reckoning with post-shah Iran, to the Americans outside of what they see as tribal grudges, the national cul-de-sac looks like the race track for every outsider grievance left over from the 20th century.
The new neighbors are irking the old timers.
The result is a profound rage and a new “othering” that attracts strange bedfellows. In recent Virginia elections, Democrats defeated the Republicans because the GOP team did not run on kitchen-table issues: immediate, everyday concerns that directly affect your wallet, health, and quality of life. In 2024 voters reacted against the Biden administration over the perception they were not focused on domestic concerns. Now guilt has switched sides with the GOP in control of all three branches of the federal government, but the anger is bipartisan. There is a real risk that the loud diaspora politics of the Trump-47 era will supercharge the xenophobic “real Americans” rhetoric—those whose families historically have no other “home”—and win converts from others who feel like background characters in someone else’s conflict. This is the potential birthplace of a new angry nativist coalition including not only old “heritage” Southern and Northern WASPs, but also white Catholics, and many non-white minorities. Folks more interested in keeping the price of gas low in America than they are about turning off the lights in Cuba whose national energy grid collapsed today.
It is a slow-moving revolt against a political class that appears to have forgotten which country it governs and expects Americans to move on from elite scandals. Such policy differences are fair game; each American can advocate for different approaches to foreign policy or alternative national priorities. However, calling such policy differences bigotry is self-defeatingly provocative as we found during the height of Ibram X. Kendi phenomenon. Today, Americans have lost the ability to see nuance, making our disputes ugly. It is leading us to dark places, but our government is not led by those with the maturity to shine a light or lead us out of the tunnel of despair and anger.
This may not have immediate political consequences because the feelings of being left behind exists as a divide contained within both major parties. The fights will occur in the primaries, but we will still see the red versus blue fights in November. However, the social consequences are likely to felt sooner. If main-street America feels that kitchen-table issues are being thrown aside to accommodate the world’s vendettas, the reaction will not be a polite tolerance but a new national animosity that we do not need. Traditionally, Congress was the place where intractable debates were settled, often loudly, but the problems were put on the floor. Now Congress is absentee, and presidential unilateralism and social-media mob rule have filled the void with a web of antagonism.
