The Heart of America Still Beats for Connection

Now that our nation has reached its 250th anniversary, I keep returning to a simple truth revealed in our latest survey: Our hearts beat in similar ways. Beneath the noise of our politics, beneath the headlines that sort us into warring camps, most Americans want the same thing. They want relief from the anxiety that dominates our public life. They want to belong. They want the promise of this country to become real in their own homes, communities, and lives. 

The 4th Annual Heart of America Survey, conducted by Empirica Advisors for the National Collaborative for Health Equity (NCHE), was designed to look past the sound bites and take the pulse of the American people. What we found: a nation holding two truths at once. Americans remain deeply attached to the ideals this country was founded upon. And Americans are increasingly worried that those ideals are not being delivered in their daily lives. 

Patriotic, but Disillusioned 

The numbers tell the story. Sixty-two percent of Americans say they are proud to be American. That is still a majority, but it has fallen sharply from 72 percent just a year ago. At the same time, only 36 percent say the country is living up to its ideals of freedom, fairness, and equal opportunity. 

Think about what that gap means. Two out of three Americans do not believe the nation is honoring its own creed. This is not the cynicism of people who have given up. It is the disappointment of a citizenry that still believes. You do not measure your country against its highest ideals unless you take those ideals seriously. This is what I would call “ambivalent patriotism”: attachment without satisfaction, loyalty without confidence. 

The pressures driving this disappointment are concrete and immediate. Over half of Americans, 52 percent, now say the American Dream is out of reach. And the burdens they describe are anything but abstract: 81 percent feel pressure from grocery costs, 75 percent from wages not keeping pace with the cost of living, 72 percent from health care costs, and 71 percent from housing costs. One finding demonstrated how family strain escalates. Elder care, at 53 percent, now tops childcare, at 44 percent, as a source of family strain.  

The results help explain why the American Dream is slipping away from many. It has never really been about individual successes. It is about whether families have the support to care for one another across the generations. Right now, too many families feel they do not. 

A Shared Heartbeat 

What gives us hope is that, even in a divided country, Americans are not embracing division. They are reaching for something better. 

Eighty-nine percent say we need leaders who are transformers, people who can see through labels and political tricks and view the world in a new way. Eighty-three percent say they would support a leader who aims to unite everyone, even if they disagree on some issues. Eighty-four percent believe that through faith, kindness, and empathy, America can overcome its differences. And 71 percent remain hopeful that Americans can work through their differences and find lasting common ground. 

These are not the expressions of people who want to keep the fight brewing. These are people exhausted by conflict and hungry for connection. Eighty-five percent told us they believe Americans are hungry to belong, to connect, and to trust each other again. 

Since the 1990s, the dominant narrative of our public life has been about polarization and division. But that narrative muzzles a quieter, more persistent cry: the genuine cry of ordinary people to connect and to overcome what separates them. Our survey did more than notice that cry. We measured it. And the results are clear: the desire for unity and solidarity is overwhelming, looming under the radar. Eighty-five percent of Americans said they are hungry to feel connected to each other and trust each other again. 

Lessons From the Hero Next Door 

Many Americans across the political spectrum believe they are engaged in a cultural war. Like any war, it can stir intense and volatile emotions—not only in individuals, but also among their families and friends—pushing some into states of dysregulation and disrupting their normal emotional and physiological balance. For others, it can reveal a deeper sense of pride, conviction, and patriotism. 

As the United States faces growing internal division and war with Iran, Martha Raddatz, the ABC News chief global affairs correspondent, has published The Hero Next Door, which chronicles the experiences of soldiers who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Her work may also offer insight into the risks of today’s culture wars. 

Raddatz tells the stories of the young men and women whose sense of duty compelled them to serve multiple tours. These are stark, humbling reminders of our common humanity. 

When you walk alongside these warriors and their families, when you sit with them through amputations, brain injuries, and the long shadow of post-traumatic stress, something in you shifts. You stop seeing them through the lens of politics, region, or party. Instead, you are compelled to empathize, respect, and admire.  

These young people were willing to give what Abraham Lincoln called at Gettysburg “the last full measure of devotion.” They did it for the ideals reiterated during our nation’s Second Founding at the end of the Civil War: the right to life, to liberty, and to the pursuit of happiness. Their sacrifice should teach us something urgent. 

War is what happens when we fail to hear and address the persistent cries for unity, both within our nation and around the world. We consistently underestimate the true cost of that failure. The theaters of war reveal the most dramatic costs of conflict. But there are quieter costs, too. Continuous exposure to the culture war narrative generates chronic anxiety and fear. Anxiety and fear are directly linked to the escalation of chronic illnesses in the country, affecting individuals, families, and communities. When we choose to amplify division, we are literally making ourselves sick. 

Naming the Real Root 

We need to be honest about what people often mean when they talk about “culture wars.” Culture is comprised of a society’s beliefs and behaviors. Our beliefs are shaped by what we experience, and those beliefs influence how we see the world, how we feel, and how we act. 

From the 15th through the 20th century, this country followed a belief system that ranked human worth by race, placing white people atop the social and economic order and assigning others a lower status based on the color of their skin. The phrase “culture wars” can serve as a convenient mask for that underlying ideology. It allows us to sidestep naming what is really at the heart of the conflict. 

The good news is that there has always been resistance to that false belief. Indigenous peoples never accepted that they were inferior, and they fought back. Enslaved and free African Americans never accepted it, and so escaped, rebelled, protested—and achieved. Chinese and Mexican immigrants never accepted it. Women never accepted it. For that matter, the founders who wrote our Constitution refused to accept that they were inferior to a British monarch. 

There is an inner knowing, an innate awareness of our equal value as human beings. America, at its best, has always been the struggle to actualize this value and realize this nation’s founding ideals. 

The Heart of America at Work 

I saw this heart beating in Minneapolis. When immigrant neighbors were being seized, injured, and killed in ICE-related violence, the people of that city did something extraordinary. They stood outside in sub-zero temperatures to protect and stand with their neighbors. They refused to see the perceived other as other. They saw a neighbor. 

That is the Heart of America at work. It is the ability to stand with and for one another despite differences. It stirs in communities across the country, palpable and real.  

The Heart of America survey shows this desire for repair runs far broader than our political rhetoric. Eighty-two percent say promoting diversity in the workplace is important to racial healing, including 74 percent of Republicans, 79 percent of Independents, and 92 percent of Democrats. Eighty percent say reducing racial segregation in housing matters. And 92 percent support teaching the full history of America, including slavery and racism. Support for reparations for enslavement and its aftermath now commands a majority of Americans. It has climbed to 56 percent, up from 46 percent in 2023. 

Americans are not just naming what divides them. They are naming the work required to become whole. 

The Path Forward 

So, what will it take to build the America we want? A democracy standing tall, with greater equity and fairness? 

First, we must tell a truer story. Our beliefs are shaped by the stories we tell and the stories we hear. We must lift new narratives of our shared humanity. The Hero Next Door is one. Countless others are waiting to be told. 

Second, we must educate honestly. For four straight years, more than 80 percent of Americans have told us they want the true history of this country taught in our schools, the history of protest, injustice, and racism, but also the history of progress. When we succeed, we teach our children that America is not a fixed thing to defend, but a promise to work toward. 

Third, we must demand transformational leadership. Americans are yearning for wise, mature, and stable leaders who respond to their specific anxieties about housing, health care, and wages. These leaders lead with love rather than cruelty and see people, not labels. 

Fourth, this must be the work of every sector. Education, public health, media, and technology all shape the stories we absorb and the conditions we live in. Healing must become our shared national project. 

A Moment of Renewal 

The atrocities of war have always sparked yearnings for peace. Reconstruction after the Civil War, the founding of NATO, and treaties banning nuclear weapons all show how extremes help us see the need for something better. Our culture wars and political polarization are giving rise to the same thing: a call for unity and healing. The good news is that the majority is voicing this call. 

We can replace culture war with cultural peace. We can replace the myth of division with the reality that most Americans want civility, solidarity, and fairness. This is the work America’s 250th anniversary calls us to begin. 

If this experiment in a multi-ethnic, multiracial, multireligious democracy is to prevail, and if we are to celebrate a 500th anniversary, we must embrace what our neighbors are telling us. The Heart of America beats for fairness and justice. Most of all, it beats for connection.

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