WALSH: IT IS TIME TO FACE THE FACTS. WE CANNOT BE UNITED

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My basic thesis in that piece was that our country, though existing still as a legal and geographic entity, cannot be meaningfully described as “united.” We have nothing but the law and the land holding us together anymore. That is not enough to make a nation or a people. There needs to be something else. Some uniting principle. Some defining commonality that binds us. If we are going to be united, we must be united around something or by something. Today, all of this holds true, only more so. The key difference between now and three years ago is that we no longer have the law. Between the unconstitutional lockdowns and the sudden abandonment of those policies in order to allow rampaging leftist mobs to wreak havoc in the streets for weeks on end, the rule of law has broken down. And with our borders still about as porous as they’ve ever been, it is hard to say that we are meaningfully united even on a geographic level. With these two pillars crumbling – pillars that were already insufficient in themselves to keep a country together – what is left? Many nations around the world and throughout history have been held together by the bonds of their common heritage, ancestry, language, and tradition. The United States has always been different in this respect, but we once had a language and at least some traditions. Now, it is ethnocentric, xenophobic, and racist to expect immigrants to learn the language of the country they are immigrating to.

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quote]If we cannot be united around tradition, language, or heritage, and we also cannot be united around a shared belief in freedom and human rights, then what is left? We would appear to be, already, two different countries. Or perhaps several different countries. Even that may be an overly generous way of describing our current state. Really, when a man tells me that he believes babies aren’t people, biological sex doesn’t exist, men can get pregnant, police departments should be abolished, America is racist to its core, and I am a white supremacist because I disagree with him on these points, I find myself questioning whether we are from the same planet, or the same universe, let alone the same country. That is how absolutely opposed we are, on all levels, with almost no common ground, or shared frame of reference. It is not hard to see why our debates are fruitless and our conversations go nowhere. We are speaking different languages, both literally and metaphorically. We are a people divided by gaps that cannot be closed. There is no bridge that can connect the Left to the Right. The differences are too deep, to wide. For unity to occur, one side or the other must simply abandon almost everything they believe and profess, and join the ranks of the other. That is not likely to happen any time soon. So the divisions will remain, and grow deeper, and we will be less united over time. I don’t know where to go from here, or how to fix it, or if it can be fixed at all, but I know that any path forward must begin with an honest assessment of the situation. This is my honest assessment, for what it’s been

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