OPINION:
“We must all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.” — Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin offered this admonition to his fellow delegates in Philadelphia in 1776. Delivered with characteristic wit, it carried deadly seriousness. Thirteen colonies had just declared independence from the strongest empire on earth. Disunity among the Colonies or their leaders would have meant defeat, disgrace and the gallows.
Franklin understood human nature. He knew the egos, rivalries and resentments that could fracture a fragile coalition. The signers of the Declaration of Independence were hardly uniform in background or political philosophy. Their unity was strained and imperfect. Yet when it held, it made survival possible. When it faltered, it nearly cost them everything.
They prevailed not because they agreed on everything but because they understood the stakes and accepted unity as a necessary discipline. Unity grounded in principle was not optional when the system itself was under strain.
The United States is undergoing profound political, economic and cultural stress. Core assumptions of the constitutional order — limited government, individual liberty, family autonomy, religious freedom and national sovereignty — are no longer broadly shared. A state-centric, collectivist ideology has moved beyond academia into bureaucracies, cultural institutions, corporate governance and education, placing sustained pressure on the conditions that make self-government possible.
At precisely this moment, conservatism is splintering.
Asymmetry
Modern American politics is asymmetric. The political left functions less as a coherent philosophy than a loose confederation of interests. Its factions often pursue contradictory goals, but those tensions are managed through a shared willingness to use centralized power to impose outcomes. Unity on the left is transactional.
Historically, the right has been different. Its strength has rested on an integrated set of principles: limited government, ordered liberty, personal responsibility and respect for inherited institutions. These ideas allow diverse interests to coexist without constant renegotiation of first principles. That coherence has been a strategic advantage.
The danger arises when that advantage erodes. When conservatives abandon principle-based cohesion in favor of narrow, interest-driven politics, fragmentation produces not resilience but vulnerability. The left retains an advantage by promising incompatible outcomes in pursuit of power, trusting institutional control to manage contradictions. Fragmentation on the right yields only weakness.
As Abraham Lincoln warned, self-government is inherently delicate. It depends on restraint, shared assumptions and allegiance to institutions that outlast any single generation.
The conservative civil war
Much of today’s conflict within conservatism arises from genuine concern: Liberal policies have undermined the conditions necessary for building a good life and sustaining self-government. Family formation has become more difficult, meaningful work has become less accessible, and cultural norms have become less supportive of stability and responsibility. Rising housing costs, stagnant real wages and a pervasive sense of futility have taken a toll.
Where conservatives increasingly diverge is not over diagnosis but remedy.
A growing faction argues that the traditional alliance between social conservatism and market-oriented economics was a Faustian bargain. Markets, they contend, have subordinated family, culture and civic life to efficiency and status competition.
These concerns are not frivolous. Markets can corrode community, and prosperity alone is not sufficient for human flourishing, but allowing these disagreements to harden into bitter, personal conflict is self-defeating.
The cost of fracture
Recent controversies reveal a troubling pattern. Influential conservative institutions have faced sustained public attacks from within the movement itself. Whatever one’s view of particular decisions, the impulse to delegitimize core institutions in public weakens the movement’s capacity to resist liberal institutional dominance.
Similarly, high-profile conservative gatherings increasingly reveal a movement inclined to treat internal disagreements as moral betrayals rather than strategic debates.
Disagreement is inevitable in a broad movement, but when critique becomes delegitimization, the result is not renewal but disarmament.
Unity without uniformity
The task before conservatives is not to impose utopia through centralized power. It is to unwind policies that distort incentives and suppress civil society while recommitting to constitutional processes that allow a free people to adapt over time.
Conservatism is not a catalog of policy answers; it is a framework of principles. Those principles provide guideposts, not scripts. Unity, therefore, requires good-faith disagreement among allies, proportional criticism of trusted institutions, and restraint in moralizing internal disputes. Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts has argued that unity must be rooted in shared love for “the permanent things.”
History teaches that societies organized around a single utopian vision cannot remain free. The Constitution is a framework for process, not a blueprint for outcomes. By restraining power rather than prescribing a final arrangement, the Founders preserved space for experimentation, failure and renewal.
Franklin’s admonition was not a plea for uniformity. It was a recognition that disunity in the face of existential challenge is self-defeating.
The stakes today are no less than they were in 1776.
• Paul Coyer serves as a research professor at The Institute of World Politics.
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