On the solemn trek home a few weeks ago from a festive White House Correspondents’ Dinner cut short by the violent intrusion of alleged attempted assassin Cole Tomas Allen, I received a text from a worried friend. I called her to say that I was fine and that near as I could tell no guests had been injured, evacuation of the enormous Washington Hilton ballroom had proceeded in an orderly fashion, and the chilly evening air suited the night’s chilling events. Before hanging up, I expressed the worry that while the nation had dodged a catastrophe, the shots ringing out in the ballroom foyer that evening would exacerbate the fever gripping both parties.

Soon I was walking by the National Zoo, where on any given day one can casually mingle with Washingtonians of diverse classes, races, ethnicities, and political affiliations. How remote was that taken-for-granted civic achievement, I thought, from the crush-and-destroy mentality currently favored by the political class and the dark narrative of American depravity, pouring fuel on the partisan fires, routinely promulgated at our colleges and universities.

Later in the evening, not long after my private musings about the sources of civic strife in America, President Donald Trump held an impromptu and surprisingly conciliatory press conference at the White House. The president appeared composed, focused, and determined. Instead of faulting hotel security for allowing the heavily armed intruder to charge the ballroom, he lavished praise on the Secret Service’s and law enforcement’s response. And rather than exploit the occasion to denounce Democrats and the left, he praised constitutional principles that citizens of diverse persuasions should share.

Although he had boycotted previous White House Correspondents’ Dinners while president, Trump emphasized the gala’s importance as “an event dedicated to freedom of speech that was supposed to bring together members of both parties with members of the press.” He was pleased to see at the Hilton “a room that was just totally unified.” The president insisted that the dinner should be done “again within the next 30 days” because “we’re not going to let anybody take over our society.”

It will require a great deal more than the good cheer and uplifting words with which President Trump initially addressed the alleged third effort to assassinate him in less than two years to rescue liberal democracy in America from the spirit of recrimination and resentment that holds the nation fast.

A recent Pew survey found that “Americans are more likely than people in other countries surveyed in 2025 to question the morality of their fellow countrymen.” Among adult Americans, 53 percent take a dim view of their fellow citizens’ morality and ethics while “Democrats and independents who lean toward the Democratic Party are much more likely than Republicans and Republican leaners to rate fellow Americans as morally and ethically bad (60 percent vs. 46 percent).” Prominent politicians of both parties intensify the partisan enmity by routinely decrying the opposing camp as an existential threat to the nation. And prominent professors, particularly of the postmodern-progressive left, increasingly joined by those on the post-liberal right, whip to a fever pitch grievances against America already impressed upon students throughout their journey through the U.S. educational system.

Amid the bad blood coursing through the body politic, and with citizens’ decreasing willingness and ability to listen to the other side, you might expect professors of politics and law to bring a sober sensibility to the national debate. After all, their academic posts and lifetime tenure provide a special opportunity to stand back from the political arena, rise above the partisan fray, place today’s grievances in comparative and historical context, and give due weight to America’s stunning accomplishments as well as its excesses and inadequacies.

Instead of endeavoring to calm citizens’ nerves and illuminate the extraordinary experiment in individual freedom and human equality to which all of us are heir despite our differences, professors of the radical left and radical right announce in essays, books, and social media that America is a land of vain hopes and dashed dreams. And rather than explaining that Americans, despite our different backgrounds and self-definitions, are engaged in a common political enterprise, and that our shared task is to preserve and improve our country, they enjoy bourgeois comfort while declaring that the scale of the crisis engulfing the nation demands revolutionary or counterrevolutionary measures.

Despite their homes on opposite sides of the political spectrum, postmodern progressives and post-liberals share a contempt for the modern tradition of freedom—encompassing both classical liberalism and the Enlightenment—out of which America rose. Both indulge utopian ambitions, but their radical ambitions point in opposite directions. Postmodern progressives seek to radicalize America’s constitutional promise of equal rights by equalizing outcomes through redistribution based on race, ethnicity, and sex. Post-liberals aim to break radically with that promise by returning to a premodern standard supposedly defined by classical Greek philosophy, biblical faith, or a medieval synthesis of the two.

Postmodern progressives tend to argue that the oppressors in America employ equal rights, the rule of law, science, and the claims of objective reason to hoodwink and subdue the oppressed. So say critical race theorists, radical feminists, and more exotic variants on Marxist themes. Undergraduate programs in education and graduate schools of education, which serve as gateways to employment in K-12 education, are rife with these ideas. The postmodern progressive perspective suffuses The 1619 Project, which The New York Times Magazine published in a special issue in 2019 and then turned into a K-12 curriculum, a bestselling book, and a Hulu documentary. It places slavery and its consequences—rather than the principles of freedom in the name of which slavery was defeated and outlawed—“at the very center of our national narrative.”

According to postmodern progressives, the country is a prison of perversity in which virtues long thought central to freedom and democracy, such as self-restraint and industriousness, only serve to control the inmates. These professors maintain that notwithstanding individuals’ expressed opinions, and institutions’ formal purposes, the nation’s unwritten norms and systemic biases are inscribed in its laws and policies, perpetuating racism, sexism, and other forms of bigotry. For the postmodern progressives, there is no escape other than to scrap the classical liberal and Enlightenment ideas and institutions in which the nation is grounded in favor of a future in which government ensures true freedom and equality by eliminating noxious opinions and redirecting the economy toward citizens’ authentic wants, needs, and desires.

Right-wing post-liberals typically maintain that an irrational and debilitating faith in total freedom is embedded in America’s dedication to universal rights. Prominent among them is University of Notre Dame political science professor Patrick Deneen, whose 2018 Why Liberalism Failed proclaimed the utter exhaustion and comprehensive failure of the ideas on which the United States was founded, establishing him as a transnational public intellectual. In his 2023 Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future, Deneen serenely proposed what he called “aristopopulism,” a regime in which a virtuous elite governed in the interests of the working class, which he acknowledged would require “the application of Machiavellian means to achieve Aristotelian ends” (emphasis in the original).

According to the post-liberal right, America is a den of iniquity in which the nation’s founding principles authorize citizens to view freedom as license and to despise duties as shackles. The post-liberal right traces much of the nation’s dysfunction to government’s narrow focus on securing individual freedom and promoting economic growth, which permits citizens to neglect virtue, mock excellence, and disdain faith, rather than find happiness in family, community, and worship. For the post-liberal right, there is no escape other than to scrap the classical liberal and Enlightenment principles in which the nation is rooted and reorient government around its proper task, which they believe is care for and improvement of citizens’ souls.

Dystopian exaggerations of America’s flaws, and hyper-romantic visions of what it might become, have united postmodern progressive professors and their post-liberal counterparts on the right in feeding the illiberal impulses roiling the nation.

The purveyors of left-wing conventional wisdom hold that Trump is not merely vulgar, arrogant, and wrong about what’s best for the nation but—as they routinely contend in prestigious op-ed pages, magazines, talk shows, and podcasts—that he also poses a fundamental threat to the American constitutional order. But if this polemic is taken at face value, and the president is rightly regarded as a would-be dictator endeavoring to overturn democracy in America, aren’t responsible citizens obligated to take all necessary steps to foil such malign ambitions—the very justification given in the manifesto of the man attempting to storm the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, who sent the president, members of his administration, and the nation’s premier political journalists scrambling for cover?

Like his political opponents, President Trump has promoted the poisonous notion that those on the other side are not just wrong but enemies of the nation. Because he occupies the bully pulpit, it is particularly incumbent on the president to set the tone and dial down the fury and scorn. Trump did just that scarcely two hours after the alleged third attempt to assassinate him. Rising to the occasion on that harrowing night, he mustered a goodwill toward all Americans and an enthusiasm for constitutional essentials that few in the media have managed to match despite composing their pieces facing no greater threat than a looming deadline. Still, the media’s neglect of its responsibilities does not release the president from his. It would serve the public for the president to further rein in his vituperation and champion the equality in individual rights that makes it possible for our large, diverse, and commercial republic to prosper.

Much needs to be done to put the nation’s political house in order. This year, the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, provides an excellent occasion to ease the fever gripping both parties by renewing our acquaintance with the principles of free and democratic government and the constitutional traditions that have enabled America to survive and thrive and provide hope to lovers of liberty around the world.