Mending the Nation

A bold message of political hope in a time of cynicism and despair, Mending the Nation uses lessons from the past to chart a new way forward.

The United States is as divided as ever, torn apart by deeply held stories that separate a righteous “us” from an evil and corrupt “them”—often along partisan, religious, and racial lines. Many point to populist rhetoric as a major source of the current animosity. For Michael J. Illuzzi, however, an alternative, optimistic version of populism can be the solution; a populist narrative that seeks to mend division and bring people together across political and social lines. These “mending stories,” he argues, offer a way to restore and reclaim the promise contained in the words: “We the People.”

In response to Trumpism, many scholars have drawn on political theories of democracy and cosmopolitanism to provide the intellectual basis for left-wing responses to the political right. But Illuzzi argues that people who reject MAGA do not need a new theory of opposition so much as a better story of what binds people together. To tell this story, Illuzzi turns to heroes of political healing, activism, and organizing in US history: Abraham Lincoln, social gospel mayor Samuel Jones, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Fred Hampton’s Rainbow Coalition, Black Lives Matter and the Movement for Black Lives, and the new Poor People’s Campaign under Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis and Rev. Dr. William Barber II. This tradition uses “mending stories of prophetic peoplehood” to bring people together, highlighting the way religious rhetoric often serves as a binding force for social reform.

In a period of declining trust in our political institutions, charismatic authoritarian leaders use stories of their despised enemies to enrage people and convince them to accept increasingly violent and illegal exercises of power. The question is whether mending stories that refuse the superiority of the “we” and the dehumanization of the “them” can offer an attractive alternative capable of changing our political future.

Mending the Nation shows that such stories have worked in the past—and maybe they can work again.