The Heart of America Still Beats for Connection 66%
By Dr. Gail C. Christopher86%
7/22/2026, 9:00:00 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 35 faulty reasoning types, including Ambiguity (Equivocation), Negativity Bias, and Framing Effect, with Hasty Generalization as the most egregious example at 18.4% saturation with 214 hits. Analysis detected 2,509 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,161 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 60.4% and a BS Rank of 66% (6,998 of 20,462 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 65.80% of the article peer group.
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.
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 shape 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.
Speakers
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Analysis
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