When the Republic Fights Itself: The Domestic Security Crisis America Must Confront — Part 3
The Discipline of Repair
Preface: This essay concludes a three-part series examining the Minneapolis ICE operations and what they reveal about the condition of our republic. Part One explored the emotional and moral rupture of this moment; Part Two unpacked the national security implications; and Part Three offers a path forward — not in the form of easy solutions, but through a set of commitments necessary for democratic repair. If you haven’t read the earlier installments, I encourage you to start there.
Having read this far, you now know what I think about Minneapolis and why I believe ICE operations there have triggered a national security crisis. I don’t have a ten-point plan for how to fix this. I wish I did. But after sitting with my grief and the outrage — and after walking through the national security implications in Part 2 — I’ve come to see this final installment not as an answer, but as an invitation.
What happened in Minneapolis is not just a policy failure or a tragic overreach. It is a rupture in the trust that allows a republic to function. And ruptures are not repaired by wishful thinking or by anger alone. They are repaired by citizens who discipline themselves to insist that power be accountable, that government be worthy of its authority, and that the bonds between us — frayed as they are — remain stronger than the forces pulling them apart.
If there is anything I can offer right now, it’s not a program. It’s a set of commitments — five of them — that I believe we must take seriously if we intend to rebuild what has been broken. They aren’t abstract principles. Each one emerged from watching what unfolded in Minneapolis and asking: What will it take to make sure this cannot happen again?
The Work Ahead: Five Commitments for a Republic Under Strain
1. Rebuild Constitutional Guardrails Around Coercive Power
I keep returning to the killing of Alex Pretti. A Minneapolis ICU nurse. A U.S. citizen whose legally owned firearm had already been confiscated before nine ICE agents opened fire. That was not only a tragedy — it was a case study in how quickly trust evaporates when armed agents of the state act without regard for constitutional norms.
Power without legitimacy is not strength. It’s a threat. And once a government normalizes the unchecked use of force, deterrence no longer flows from law — it flows from intimidation. In a democracy, that’s untenable.
To repair this rupture, we must insist on transparency, reassert public oversight, and make clear that state power must never outrun the consent that grants it. This is not an anti-enforcement position. I’ve said throughout this series that we need border enforcement. What we don’t need — what no republic can survive — is an enforcement apparatus that operates beyond the reach of the Constitution it was created to uphold and the people it’s meant to serve and protect.
2. Re-anchor Public Trust Through Transparency and Accountability
In the days after Pretti’s death, residents of Minneapolis struggled to understand who was acting under legitimate authority and who wasn’t. Local police were sidelined. City officials were kept in the dark. Rumors metastasized into panic.
No constitutional democracy can tolerate a security posture where citizens cannot distinguish lawful operations from rogue ones. When the government acts in shadow and then defends its actions with demonstrable falsehoods, it doesn’t just fail the test of transparency. It poisons the well of public trust — the same well it will need to draw from the next time it asks citizens to cooperate, comply, or sacrifice.
Accountability — public hearings and briefings, documented authorities, and independent review — is not a burden on security agencies. It is a stabilizer. Agencies that resist accountability are not protecting national security. They are undermining it.
3. Reaffirm That Domestic Security Is a Human-Centered Enterprise
Security professionals understand something that too often gets lost in the politics of enforcement: once you label a community an “operational zone,” you’ve already lost the very terrain — human trust — that makes security possible.
Minneapolis residents didn’t experience ICE’s operations as a precision enforcement action. They experienced it as an intrusion — heavily armed agents moving through their streets with no apparent connection to the community or accountability to it. A “targeted enforcement operation” became a citywide trauma because it treated neighborhoods as battlefields and neighbors as collateral damage.
Rebuilding begins with this recognition: strategy cannot be divorced from humanity. Security decisions must begin with people, not procedures. The mother calculating whether it’s safe to walk her child to school, the small business owner watching revenues plummet, the healthcare worker wondering if showing up to a protest could make her a target — these are not secondary considerations. They are the primary data points any legitimate security framework must account for.
4. Reestablish Shared Civic Literacy About Power, Rights, and Responsibility
Here’s something that troubled me deeply as I followed the Minneapolis crisis: Americans didn’t know what federal agencies were authorized to do. They didn’t know where federal jurisdiction ended and municipal authority began. They didn’t know what rights they retained when the government itself became the threat.
That confusion wasn’t incidental. It was a force multiplier for panic. And it’s not a failure of the public. It’s a failure of the civic infrastructure that’s supposed to equip citizens to navigate exactly these moments.
This is why I built Reconnecting the Republic around the idea of strategic literacy — the capacity to understand how decisions about power, security, and governance connect to consequences. Strategic literacy is not optional civic enrichment. It is the civic technology of democratic resilience. A republic is only as secure as the citizens who understand how power is meant to work — and who can recognize when it isn’t working as intended.
5. Recommit to Strategic Citizenship as a Long-Term Practice
The most hopeful thing I witnessed in Minneapolis was not what state and local government did. It was what people did. Neighbors checked on each other. Journalists refused to look away. Local leaders demanded answers. Community organizations documented federal activity in real time because they understood that when official accountability fails, citizens must create their own.
These acts were democratic muscle memory — the instinct of people raised in a republic who understand, even under duress, that citizenship carries obligations.
But muscle memory alone is not enough. What emerged in Minneapolis was scattered and reactive — a reflex, not a strategy. For this republic to survive what is being done to it, civic courage must become an intentional, long-term practice. Not the kind of citizenship that shows up only for elections or erupts only in crisis, but the steady, disciplined work of people who refuse to surrender their republic to intimidation or despair.
Political analyst John Heilemann is right: this fight will take years. The civil rights movement took years. Vietnam War protests took years. And this struggle — to reclaim constitutional governance from those who are systematically dismantling it — will take years, too. We are at the beginning, not the end. And citizenship, in this context, is not a moment. It is a commitment.
How We Carry This Forward
When I try to understand what this moment demands of us, I keep returning to two insights from people who have studied our fractures and our capacity for repair.
David Brooks, in How to Know a Person, draws on the work of psychologist Stephen Joseph to make a distinction that has stayed with me. He argues that people who face trauma respond in one of two ways. Some “assimilate” — they absorb what happened and try to keep chugging, fitting the experience into their existing understanding of the world. Others “accommodate” — they allow the experience to change them, to reshape their models of who they are and what matters.
The difference is between someone who says, “I survived this, and I’m going back to normal,” and someone who says, “No. This changes who I am. This changes how I want to spend my days.”
I think that distinction applies to America right now. Minneapolis is not something we can assimilate — not if we’re honest. We cannot absorb what happened and return to the assumptions we held before. The assumption that federal agents would not kill citizens on camera and lie about it. The assumption that constitutional protections would hold under pressure. The assumption that someone else — some institution, some leader, some court — would step in before things went too far.
Those assumptions are broken. And the question Brooks poses — “In what ways is the world safe and unsafe? Who am I? What is my place in the world? What’s my story? Where do I really want to go?” — is now a question for all of us. Not as individuals processing private grief, but as citizens of a republic confronting a collective trauma that demands we remake our understanding of what this country is and what it requires of us.
Brooks also invokes the 16th-century philosopher Michel de Montaigne, who observed that “you can be knowledgeable with other men’s knowledge, but you can’t be wise with other men’s wisdom.” We’ve all watched Minneapolis unfold — angry, horrified, heartbroken. But watching is not enough. Standing in solidarity is not enough. Our rage, however justified, is not enough.
We must accompany our fellow Americans through what comes next, and that accompaniment demands more than sympathy. It demands action. It demands showing up — not just when cameras are rolling, but in the long, unglamorous stretches of democratic work that follow.
This is where Michelle Obama’s redefinition of “going high” becomes essential. In a recent conversation with Stephen Colbert, she pushed back against the notion that “going high” means suppressing anger or retreating into saintly calm. “Going high,” she said, “is not losing the urgency or the passion or the rage, especially when you are justified in it. Going high means finding the purpose in your rage.”
That hit home for me — hard. Because I’ve spent weeks navigating the tension between rage and strategic patience. I wrote about it in Part 1. I felt it pulling at me as I wrote Part 2. And Michelle Obama names the resolution I’ve been searching for: the problem is not rage. The problem is rage without direction. “Rage without reason, without a plan, without direction is just more rage,” she said. And we’ve been living in a lot of rage.
She’s right. The impulse to go low — to lash out and react, to throw your hurt out there — is what she calls “emotional junk food.” It feels good in the moment, but it doesn’t fix anything over the long term. Hurt people, hurt people. That way of being, she argues, is unsustainable.
Both ideas land squarely in Minneapolis. This crisis showed us what happens when a government forgets to respect its people — and what happens when citizens, in their fury, nevertheless insist on moral clarity over chaos, only to be deeply disappointed.
The task ahead is not to extinguish our anger. It is to refine it — into purpose, into discipline, into stamina for the long fight.
We rebuild by insisting on truth, by choosing accountability over apathy, and by practicing a citizenship anchored in steadiness rather than spectacle. A republic reconnects itself not through hope alone, but through a people who refuse to look away, refuse to be intimidated, and refuse to surrender their agency.
Yes. We are tired. We are grieving. We are furious. But we are not powerless. But if we commit — truly commit — to the work of strategic citizenship, then what was broken in Minneapolis does not have to be the story of our nation.
A Closing Reflection
When I began writing this series, I expressed serious doubt that it’s even possible to reconnect the republic — the animating idea behind this platform. My doubt wasn’t performative flexing. I felt it in my bones, and I suspect many of you did too.
But by sharing with you how I’ve struggled to process this crisis — by writing through the grief, the fury, and the fear — I’ve come to a place I didn’t expect. Not optimism, exactly. Not resolution. Something more like conviction. The American republic can still be reconnected. The fracture is real, but so is our capacity for repair.
What happened in Minneapolis has changed me. It should change all of us. And that change — if we have the courage to accommodate it rather than assimilate it, to let it remake our models rather than retreat to the old ones — is where the rebuilding begins.
So, I’ll ask the question David Brooks poses, and I’ll make it ours: Where do we really want to go? And what can we do together to see us through this time of troubles? What will you do?
Be Intrepid — Tony Johnson
Reconnecting the Republic
February 2026
Author’s Note:
This three-part series represents my honest attempt to bear witness to what is happening on American streets in early 2026, to connect those events to the strategic stakes that Reconnecting the Republic is built to illuminate, and to chart a path forward grounded in conviction rather than wishful thinking. I have navigated the same tension many of you feel — between moral clarity and strategic patience, between rage and hope. If this series has resonated — whether you agree with me or hold another point of view — I invite you to continue the conversation. Strategic citizenship is not a solo endeavor. It is the work we do together.
A note on sources: In the closing section, I reference David Brooks’ How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen (Random House, 2023) and Michelle Obama’s conversation with Stephen Colbert, February 2026. Brooks draws on the work of psychologist Stephen Joseph (What Doesn’t Kill Us: The New Psychology of Posttraumatic Growth) and the philosophy of Michel de Montaigne.