In case you haven’t noticed, politics and public policy have become something of a three-ring circus. Maybe it’s five rings.

In just the last few weeks, a GOP desperately in need of a handful of votes to pass its Big Beautiful Bill (dubbed the “BBB” by some) has turned on several of its own, inducing Senator Thom Tillis (N.C.) and Rep. Don Bacon (Neb.) to resign from office 18 months ahead of the 2026 midterms over their differences with the White House on the massive reconciliation bill. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party, which staggered through Pride Month and its nude parades mourning the loss of public support for transgenderism, has responded by nominating for mayor of New York an open communist committed, as communists often are, to legalizing “sex work” and celebrating other forms of liberation in the city.

The most important tell in these bizarre proceedings is that they don’t seem in the least strange. It’s what we’ve become accustomed to. One month the topic of the day is the acquisition of Greenland against its will. Next it’s the incorporation of Canada as the 51st state against its will (making it the largest of the U.S. states, much to its chagrin). Then it’s the Democrats displaying their radicalism by voting against a congressional proposal to reinforce a guarantee that a child who survives a late-term abortion won’t be set aside in a utility closet to die without attention. Then it’s the president repeatedly suspending, with no apparent authority, a law of Congress designed to deny the Chinese Communist Party access to the online files of America’s youth so that they can imbibe more cat videos.

In this environment, it’s not at all strange that Americans are at each other’s throats, because it seems it’s exactly where they want to be. The raging argument is over which side’s crazies are more likely to shoot at each other and shout vile names. One leader suggests a state’s governor should be tarred and feathered. An assassin proclaims he “went to war” when he donned a mask in the middle of the night and shot four people in a Minneapolis suburb. Charges of treason and demands for impeachment fly back and forth with the greatest of ease. A national debt that will soon hit $40 trillion draws invective but little action. The patron of DOGE chills with the president in the Oval Office one day and gets hints he may be deported barely a month later by the man to whom he donated hundreds of millions of dollars.

No, make that 20 rings. This is all the more amazing because our nation is deeply divided politically, despite all the talk about landslides and mandates. The last four presidential elections have been decided by popular vote margins of 3.86%, -2.09% (not a misprint), 4.45%, and 1.48% (the 2024 election). The closeness of margins is evident in current polling on most issues but especially in the make-up of Congress. The GOP nominally controls both Houses of Congress, but by party identification it is 220 R to 2012 D with three Democratic vacancies in the House, and 53 R to 45 D (plus two liberal Independents) in the Senate. The result is straightforward: on party-line votes (which seem to be demanded these days), the GOP can afford to lose four votes in the Senate and just three in the House.

There is no margin for error. In normal times, which may never have existed, these conditions would compel legislators seeking votes to work with caution to retain all of their own votes and to pick up, if possible, a few from the other party. It might even induce the majority party to moderate at least its rhetoric and seek to garner the votes of politicians in congressional districts or states that are tinged purple. Such is our condition now that moderation (excluding issues of profound principle) is the last thing our national public life can produce.

The effect for Republicans is the fomenting of division to the degree that prominent social media “influencers” cheer wildly when a longtime ally like Tillis or Bacon announces he has had enough, or a Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) or Rand Paul (R-Ky.) insists he cannot vote for yet another bill that postpones a debt reckoning. The effect on Democrats is perhaps worse: rather than admit that 80% of Americans are basically tolerant but don’t want males undressing in their daughters’ locker room, or that abortion at 34 weeks in an epiphany of horror, they vote for policies that are even more extreme — like taking away the right of a Maine legislator to represent her district in any vote in the chamber because she defends the privacy of young females.

We needn’t wonder why the times are mad. We are making ourselves so. How to climb down from these frigid heights where the oxygen is thin and hypoxia has set in? For Republicans, the stark prospect of resuming their congressional losing streak should be bracing enough. One way the polemicist press lives day to day is by refusing to live in the present — for them life is one constant election in progress. It’s already the midterms. But the polls this time are indeed showing a narrow (yes, Mr. President) Republican majority at risk of alienating and losing its edge — mostly over style, lack of respect and judgment — in short order. This is inducing some to act with reckless haste and lack of public relations sense, accelerating the decline. Americans want a secure border, yes, but they are not fans of spectacle (no gloating over alligator and python prison guards, no fathers of loyal Marines wrestled to the ground).

The Democrats, if they knew it, have an opening for moderation of their extreme views which, inter alia, regard the collapse of the family and attacks on faith as healthy developments. They could clean up and announce they no longer believe in telling four-year-olds they are right to see themselves as gophers, dragons, or the opposite sex. They could see the mutilation of a confused teenage boy or a baby at 24 weeks’ gestation and say, well yes, we want to be kind, but there has to be a limit to our formerly aggressive permissiveness. They could hearken back to the words of a Democrat who breezed to a massive electoral victory in working-class Pennsylvania and was ultimately muzzled by his party:

“And here is where the difference between power and authority come in. In the best of worlds, the law commands both. The law confers power on the rightful authority, and invests authority with power. The integrity of our laws rests on this continuity, a corpus juris reflecting the accumulated experience of our civilization. Laws are the conventional application of permanent principles. And if democratic government depends on any one central idea, it’s that raw power alone, laws that flout these permanent principles, cannot command our respect. Our obedience, yes. Our allegiance, no.”

Alexander Hamilton put it this way: “The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of Divinity itself; and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.” Even the more secular-minded Thomas Jefferson agreed: the “only firm basis” of freedom, he wrote, is “a conviction in the minds of people that their liberties are gifts of God.”

It is near-impossible to ponder a leading Republican or Democrat thinking or speaking in these terms in 2025. It would likely garner them only a pittance of clicks or campaign cash. But our nation does need a rebirth of conscience and conviction, resolutely but gently expressed. The hazards of the contrary road, a nation of extremes viciously posited and zealously defended, are in evidence all around us.

Our liberties, and even our duties, are gifts of God — and this Fourth of July is the perfect time to renew this conviction for the journey ahead.