The message from Texas voters: We’re neighbours, not enemies

One of the biggest political lessons I learned covering the Middle East for four-plus decades is that there is only one good thing about extremists: They don’t know when to stop. As a result, they eventually go too far and drive themselves over a cliff.
That lesson came to my mind when I was reading about how a Texas Democrat, Taylor Rehmet, trounced his Republican opponent in a state legislative special election on Saturday, prevailing in a historically conservative district around Fort Worth, which President Donald Trump won by more than 17 percentage points in 2024.
What struck me most was this paragraph in the Times story by our Texas bureau chief, J David Goodman, about the result: Rehmet, “a machinist at a Lockheed Martin fighter jet plant in Fort Worth, said in an interview with The New York Times during the campaign that he did not like party labels and believed that voters were ‘really tired of the partisanship.’ He made his support for public education, including vocational programmes, central to his campaign.” I think many Americans are growing both exhausted and frightened by Trump’s scorched-earth, hyperpartisan, fire-ready-aim approach to the presidency, in which he’s been treating Democrats not as political opponents but as “traitors,” wiping out Democrats from previously bipartisan boards, slapping his name on the Kennedy Center ahead of JFK’s and lately even accusing president Barack Obama of “treason” — to name just a few of his inflammatory, divisive actions.
I think a lot of Americans are tired of being pitted against their neighbours and hunger to be brought together for a common purpose; they want common-sense solutions and to preserve our most cherished public institutions.
When I got there, I participated in a roundtable with students, an interview with campus and local journalists and a dinner with donors and faculty, and then I gave a talk, “An Examination of American Life.” The students were great, hungry to learn, and the audience — Trump won the county 62% to 37% — could not have been more welcoming. After I finished my formal lecture, I was interviewed onstage by Prof Chris Childers, the dean of the university’s College of Arts and Sciences.
During the Q&A with Childers, he asked me a question — I don’t remember exactly what it was, but I do remember my answer, and the audience’s reaction. My answer was, to the best of my recollection: “President Trump says his favourite word is ‘tariffs.’ My favourite word is ‘public’ — public schools, public service, public parks, public universities, public libraries, public health, public transportation, public places. ...” Of all the things that I said that night, that line got the loudest applause.
And that is why I was not at all surprised at what happened in that special election in Fort Worth. I believe the most underappreciated political aspiration in America today is the hunger of many Americans — not all, but many — to be pulled together and not pulled apart.
I still believe that many Americans want to strengthen the public institutions and shared common interests that bind us, not to rename them all “Trump.” They want to see one another as neighbours again, not the enemy next door.
But — attention — progressive Democrats and the universities they dominate need to heed that message, too. They have not been blameless in generating our divides. As the Brown University economist Glenn Loury wisely observed in a recent essay: “For years, identity politics was treated — rightly — as a pathology of the left. It displaced the individual as the bearer of moral and political claims, and instead proposed group membership, defined by race and gender, as the proper grounds for justice.” Well, guess what happened, Loury added: The “Right’s response to progressive identity politics has not chiefly taken the form of repudiation. It has taken the form of adoption... What we are witnessing is not merely a backlash. It’s a convergence.” We no longer debate whether identity should be the battlefield,, only which identities deserve protection or priority. We never talk about how our “shared citizenship could survive our grievances and differences.” This is our collective race to the bottom. It is our collective race away from our national project — of making, out of many, one — and into a zero-sum national brawl over “Whose country is this, anyway?” And it is taking our great nation over a cliff. I am convinced that many Americans of all races, creeds and colours want it stopped before it really does tip into civil war.
You know where I go for relief? Ever since I covered the Marines in Beirut in 1982, whenever I’ve gotten depressed about America’s fate and future, I try to take a trip with the US military. It’s an incredibly diverse organisation, but everyone answers to — and embraces — just one identity: “American.” There is some secret sauce there that needs to be shared with the rest of the country.
I know where it starts. Whatever policies Democrats and Republicans choose to run on in the midterms — affordability, lower taxes, abundance or free buses — both parties would do the country a huge favour if they adopted the last words that Renee Good said to the ICE agents before one of them shot and killed the Minneapolis mom as she hastily tried to leave a protest scene: “I’m not mad at you.”

Thomas L Friedman The writer is reporter, author and NYT columnist