America is waiting for a political savior, but the problem is structural.
This dynamic was illustrated during two recent broadcast appearances by journalist Katy Tur. Discussing modern secessionist movements on June 15, 2026, Tur found optimism in a poll showing 54 percent of Americans still believe we share core values, and she later expressed hope that future leaders could reunite the country.
Yet, as this sixth essay in my ongoing series argues, no unifier can repair what is fundamentally a structural failure. The U.S. needs a path toward an American Union — a serious structural reform that preserves practical bonds while acknowledging that one national framework can no longer successfully govern us all.
In earlier essays, I argued that an American Union could allow Red America and Blue America to form two sovereign republics while preserving the practical bonds Americans still have every reason to keep: common defense, a shared currency, free movement, integrated markets, and a shared national inheritance.
The purpose is not to make Americans strangers to one another. It is to reduce the zero-sum struggle for control of one national government so Americans might have a better chance of living together peacefully, productively, and even affectionately.
Even the pollster who measured that 54 percent reached for the same hope as Tur, concluding that Americans are ready to come together and that the country is simply waiting for its leaders and institutions to do the same.
But waiting for leaders is the dependency, not the cure. A healthy governing system should not require a political savior — or a whole generation of them.
We should not need a uniquely benevolent, charismatic, emotionally intelligent president every four years to make the country governable. We should not need a Lincoln, a Roosevelt, a Reagan, or some future national healer just to persuade Americans that they still belong to the same political community.
And if our civic life depends on finding the rare leaders who can make half the country stop fearing the other half, the problem is not merely leadership — it is structural.
Effective political systems are supposed to reduce the need for heroic leadership. They are supposed to channel disagreement, lower the stakes of political defeat, protect basic rights, and allow citizens who disagree to keep living together without believing every election is a struggle for survival.
Our structure increasingly does the opposite. The president is expected to be head of government, head of state, cultural symbol, emergency manager, economic steward, commander-in-chief, national therapist, partisan warrior, and national unifier.
No human being can effectively do all of that for a country of more than 340 million people divided almost evenly over first governing principles.
The citizens of many developed democracies — like Britain, Canada, Germany, France, Japan, New Zealand, Spain, Australia, and the Scandinavian countries — have serious debates over immigration, taxes, crime, energy, education, religion, regional identity, national culture, economic policy, and the proper role of government. But in those countries, leadership change does not always feel like regime change.
Parties lose power. Prime ministers resign. Coalitions collapse. Presidents become unpopular. Governments change direction. Yet the basic rules of political life remain intact. Elections are accepted. Power transfers. Courts, legislatures, civil services, local governments, and ordinary public administration continue to function. Citizens may dislike the new government, but they do not usually experience every election as a final battle over whether their way of life will remain legitimate.
The point is not that other countries are wiser, more virtuous, or less divided. They are not. Nor is the point that America should copy their policies. The point is that these other countries have enough agreement on the basic rules of governance that ordinary, unremarkable leaders can effectively govern.
A healthy system should be able to survive ineffective leaders, disappointing leaders, and leadership turnover. It should not require a once-in-a-generation political healer just to keep the country from falling into warring camps.
That is why the 54 percent figure should alarm us more than reassure us.
In that national NBC News survey, released in June, the question was posed as a choice: 54 percent said most Americans share the same core values but disagree about policies and issues, while 44 percent said most Americans have fundamentally different core values. The reassuring reading hangs entirely on that first option’s qualifier — that the disagreement is only “about policies and issues.”
But the American divide is not, at bottom, about tax rates or regulatory detail. It is about first principles — about whose moral vision the national government will enforce. A near-even split on whether Americans even share core values is a dangerously thin foundation for a country that asks one national government, one president, one Congress, one Supreme Court, and one national structure to settle the most contested moral and cultural questions for everyone.
Many Red Americans believe national institutions are controlled by hostile cultural, bureaucratic, educational, corporate, and media elites. Many Blue Americans believe democracy itself is endangered whenever those who reject election results gain power.
Many Red Americans believe federal power threatens their families, faith, communities, and freedoms. Many Blue Americans believe their rights, safety, dignity, and equal citizenship are endangered when national power falls to people hostile to them.
Each side sees the other not merely as wrong, but as dangerous, and no single leader or group of leaders can remedy that through force of personality or messaging.
A charismatic leader might temporarily calm the waters. But no president can create durable stability when the underlying governing structure keeps convincing each side that defeat is existential.
A country can survive fierce political disagreement when both sides believe the rules are fair and the stakes of losing are bounded. It is much harder to govern when large numbers of citizens believe losing means cheating, domination, or national ruin.
An American Union would not make Red America or Blue America harmonious. Both would still have factions, scandals, ideological fights, regional tensions, class divisions, ambitious politicians, and bad policies. But each would be easier to govern, because each would begin from a more coherent set of first principles and common values.
Red America could debate policy within a broadly shared commitment to local control, religious liberty, gun rights, lower taxes, stronger borders, public order, skepticism toward centralized bureaucracy, and greater room for traditional communities to govern themselves.
Blue America could debate policy within a broadly shared commitment to civil rights, environmental protection, gun regulation, public investment, broader social protections, and a more active national government.
The problem is that today, both visions are forced into one national governing structure, where each side must try to capture the same presidency, Congress, courts, and federal agencies in order to protect itself from the other. That is why elections feel existential.
And the problem is not that America has failed to find the perfect leader. The problem is that our structure asks any leader to do the impossible.
Under an American Union, neither Red America nor Blue America would need an extraordinary leader to make government function. Each would need capable people — as well as debate, compromise, accountability, restraint, and institutional trust.
Each would still argue, still stumble, still produce disappointing leaders. But neither would have to wait for a singular figure to persuade half of the country that the other half will not use the central government to destroy its way of life.
That is the practical promise of an American Union: not the elimination of political conflict, but conflict made governable, because each republic could debate policy within a more coherent governing settlement instead of carrying the impossible burden of settling every first principles dispute for the whole continent.
The American Union idea offers a new path: structural reform that preserves what Americans still have reason to share, while allowing democratic majorities to govern under arrangements that “We the People” can actually accept.
The goal is to reduce the political conditions that make Americans experience one another as existential threats.
The American founders did not design a system that depended on saints. They understood ambition, faction, pride, fear, and human weakness, and they tried to build institutions that could work despite those realities.
But they built a structure meant to channel ordinary faction — debates over tariffs, internal improvements, and regional commerce — not a totalizing, geographic divide in which both sides have come to doubt the legitimacy of the central government itself. That is the burden our system was never designed to carry, and no individual leader can carry it.
Katy Tur is right to worry about secessionist movements. They can be reckless, simplistic, and dangerous. But the answer cannot be to hope that the next generation of politicians will somehow make our divisions disappear.
America does not need a savior. It needs institutions strong enough that it no longer has to wait for one.
An American Union can do just that.
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