We did not lose the ability to argue. We lost the expectation that leaders must govern everyone when the arguing ends.
There was a time when high office imposed limits that were not written into statute but understood as part of the job itself. Presidents and governors were never neutral. They were partisan, ambitious, ideological. But the offices they occupied required a change in posture, a discipline of language, an understanding that power was borrowed rather than owned and that the state or the nation did not belong to a party.
That understanding has collapsed.
Today, political leaders routinely speak as if half the population is not merely mistaken but illegitimate. Opponents are no longer competitors in a democratic system but threats to be neutralized, enemies to be defeated, obstacles to be removed. Language once reserved for foreign adversaries is now applied to fellow citizens.
This is not authenticity or bluntness or honesty. It is the corruption of office. And it carries consequences.
Partisanship is as old as the republic. Hamilton and Jefferson loathed one another. Lincoln governed through rebellion. Franklin Roosevelt shattered political coalitions. Yet even in those moments, the office itself remained larger than the occupant. Presidents argued fiercely but spoke as custodians of the nation. Governors were expected to speak as stewards of entire states, not as warlords over factions.
Lincoln, standing atop the largest mass grave the nation had ever known, refused to describe his enemies as irredeemable. Eisenhower warned against the deliberate manufacture of fear as a political tool. Kennedy spoke of shared civic obligation. Reagan described ideological conflict as proof that democracy could absorb disagreement without collapsing into internal war. None of them were naïve. They were guarding the architecture of the system.
For nearly half a century, the United States lived under the pressure of a rival that openly predicted its failure. The Soviet Union did not merely contest borders or influence. It contested the claim that pluralism itself could survive power. American leaders understood what was at stake. Domestic cohesion was strategic infrastructure. Every riot, every assassination, every constitutional crisis raised the same question: could a free society remain governable?
The Cold War distorted politics, suppressing some truths and inflaming others, but it preserved one discipline. Leadership required restraint. The presidency and the governorship were meant to absorb shock, not amplify it.
When that external pressure vanished, so did much of the restraint. Political parties sorted into rigid ideological camps. Media learned outrage outperforms seriousness. Technology learned anger travels faster than fact. Politics shifted from persuasion to humiliation, from governing to mobilizing, from building coalitions to policing identity.
The result is the culture we now inhabit, one in which loyalty to party routinely outranks loyalty to institutions and electoral defeat is treated not as an outcome but as a crime.
Donald Trump did not create this environment, but he stripped away its remaining guardrails. He treated the presidency not as a trust but as a possession, opposition not as legitimate but as subversive, institutions not as binding but as obstacles. He governed as a factional leader who happened to control the state.
That model has spread.
In Alabama, it is now being marketed as executive leadership.
Senator Tommy Tuberville currently serves in the United States Senate and is seeking to become Alabama’s next governor, an office historically understood as stewardship of the entire public square. This is not a question of tone or personality. It is a question of constitutional fitness.
Tuberville has built his political identity around confrontation rather than governance, grievance rather than institutional responsibility. He shut down the U.S. military’s senior leadership for nearly a year by blocking hundreds of promotions, an unprecedented move condemned by defense officials of both parties as reckless and dangerous, in order to protest Pentagon policy he opposed. Not legislation. Not treaty obligations. Policy.
He defended January 6 rioters as “patriots,” minimizing an assault on Congress that injured police officers and halted the constitutional transfer of power. He has repeatedly described political opponents as un-American, portrayed elections he dislikes as suspect, and treated federal institutions as corrupt when they contradict him. He falsely claimed white nationalists were “part of the left,” rewriting reality to absolve his political allies.
This is not disagreement. It is delegitimization, the steady conversion of political opposition into something foreign, dangerous and undeserving of equal standing. It is the language of exclusion applied to democratic government.
A governor is not meant to rule by suspicion. He is meant to govern by authority recognized across disagreement. He is meant to serve as custodian of a public square shared by people who detest one another but accept the same rules. Tuberville does not offer that model. He offers conflict as identity, grievance as policy, retaliation as leadership.
Alabama has lived under this system before.
George Wallace built a career by converting politics into tribal warfare, simplifying every problem into betrayal, every compromise into surrender, every critic into an enemy. The formula worked electorally. It failed historically.
For decades, the state paid the price. Investment slowed. Universities struggled to recruit. Talent left. Alabama became shorthand for dysfunction and hostility to modern life. Wallace accumulated power. Alabama accumulated losses.
Division did not fortify the state. It shrank it. Fear did not build prosperity. It drove it away.
That lesson should have ended the argument. Instead, it has been forgotten.
States grow when their institutions are trusted, when their courts are boring, when elections are settled, when governors speak to the whole state rather than to the loudest corner of it. Alabama does not need another season of theatrical resentment. It needs legitimacy, continuity, competence and trust.
The tragedy is not disagreement. Americans have always argued. The tragedy is that we now tolerate leaders who profit from dissolving the idea of common citizenship, who treat office as conquest, who confuse winning an election with owning the state.
We did not lose the ability to argue. We lost the demand that those who win must still govern everyone.
That demand is not cultural or nostalgic. It is constitutional. It is the difference between a republic and a faction. And once it disappears, no election can restore it.
