Tony Woodlief

Don’t ever take sides with anyone against the family. I recall Michael Corleone’s warning to Fredo from The Godfather every time I see a political candidate’s family members denounce him in public. Even mobsters understood that family comes first. Not in agreement are the fourteen relatives of US Senate candidate Adam Laxalt of Nevada, who have endorsed his opponent. Ten of them likewise posed for a photo with the state's Democratic governor in 2018. One of Laxalt’s cousins accuses him of “using the family name to pursue a political career,” a claim you’ll only hear because she’s using the family name to advance it.

After attending NatCon, the recent National Conservatism conference featuring academics, wonks, theologians, and politicians like Marco Rubio, Rick Scott, Josh Hawley, and Ron DeSantis, I realized there are two factions within American conservatism: Team Frodo and Team Boromir. Readers of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring remember Frodo as the hobbit tasked with destroying the Ring of Power lest it fall into the hands of the evil Sauron. Boromir was the traveling companion who urged Frodo to let him use the Ring’s power against their enemies. “Why should we not think that the Great Ring has come into our hands to serve us in the very hour of need?” he asked. “Wielding it the Free Lords of the Free may surely defeat the Enemy.

Combatants within our nation’s political class never suffer for lack of insults — and in recent years they’ve taken to hurling back and forth a particular aspersion with increasing frequency: “un-American.” In recent weeks we’ve heard pundits and politicians declaim that it’s un-American to blame gas prices on Joe Biden, to tax billionaires, to let states decide their own abortion laws, to oppose admitting Ukraine to NATO, to forbid sex-change surgeries for ten-year-olds, and to treat Disney like any other Florida corporation. Still others have declared “whiteness,” the NFL draft and racial disparities in student debt to be un-American.

Viewed in one light, last week’s overwhelming rejection by the New Hampshire state legislature of a bill to put secession to a vote was a resounding win for unity in a fractious time. But it probably won’t be the last time we see such a proposal in a state house. A fatalistic argument from one of the bill’s thirteen supporters explains why: “National divorce is going to happen. It’s inevitable, and we have a chance to get ahead of this.” He may be right, if polls are to be believed. Last fall, a survey out of the University of Virginia brought the depressing news that 40 to 50 percent of Biden and Trump voters claim “it’s time to split the country.” Commentator David French declared the finding unsurprising, because Democrats and Republicans “loathe each other.

When several Proud Boys attended a New Hanover School Board meeting about 175 miles from my North Carolina hometown, I was reminded of the night years ago when I woke to the sound of my mother weeping. Klansmen demonstrating outside our local library had made the late-night news. The sight of those ignorant men outside the doors through which I’d recently exited with Where the Wild Things Are proved unbearable to my mother. She sent a blistering letter to the editor, inciting Klan supporters to call our house hoping to discuss, as one woman asked me before my mother snatched the phone from my hand, just what exactly her problem was with the Klan. And, oh, did my mother tell them.