WILL THAULT: Can Ranch dressing cool our differences?

Recently, a World Cup fan and tourist from Japan posted on X, “USA. There is a white sauce here that the people pour on everything, with the devotion of a sacred rite. I have become a believer.”

A Swedish fan posted, “EUROPE WE NEED RANCH ASAP …”

 And so it goes. It’s become such a thing that TSA found the need to issue an official reminder to travelers that ranch dressing must go in checked bags, not carry-ons. UPS launched a “Ship and Dip” promotion. And now, Kraft has announced a TSA-compliant
version of the dressing.

Only in America.

And that’s just the beginning. A German tourist driving through Georgia marveled at our landscape, discovering Waffle House and Buc-ee’s for the first time, posting, “I know some people will say I’m too positive, but these places are crazy.” 

Another Japanese tourist photographed a Tennessee street and wrote, “It’s a view so stunning it feels like a lie.”

A Scottish fan told reporters that Americans are “very positive, enthusiastic” – more open than people back home.

To us, such enthusiasm coming from international tourists seeing America for the first time can seem both funny and sweet. What we take for granted as unremarkable or routine may surprise and even prompt us to take a second look at our remarkable nation through fresh eyes.

Familiarity, as the old saying goes, breeds contempt. What these tourists are experiencing first-hand is the America we’ve stopped seeing. The abundance. The openness. The staggering variety of a country where a Georgia landscape looks like a painting and a gas station draws the same awe as Stonehenge.

They came for soccer, but found something else entirely.

With this in mind: Do we Americans still know who we are?  Recent findings from two major polls put this question to task. A Fox News survey found two-thirds of voters describe our country in negative terms: “failing,” “divided,” “struggling,” “corrupt.”

AnNBC News poll found just 33% say they are extremely proud to be Americans – a record low, down from 70% after Sept. 11 . Fifty-eight percent – identical across Trump states, Harris states, and swing states – say the nation’s best years are behind it.

The Fox poll’s most telling line: Commitment to the nation is becoming “less automatic and more conditional.” Conditional in what way? In a word — politics. When our patriotism hinges on whether or not one’s party holds power over another or wins elections, that’s not patriotism. That’s fan loyalty.

At the age of 28, Abraham Lincoln foresaw the danger of a fractured nation years before the American Civil War, “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”

At the ripe old age of 250, we’re not in danger because our enemies are stronger.
Instead – slowly, daily, almost without noticing – we’re tearing ourselves apart from
within.

Social scientist Arthur Brooks, in his book “Love Your Enemies,” attempts to explain the root cause of this self-inflicted wound. Not to sound too wonky, he calls it “motive attribution asymmetry” – the conviction that our side acts from love while the other side acts from hate. The result isn’t anger, but contempt translated as, “You disgust me. You are beneath caring about.”

Brooks goes on to say contempt “… seeks to exile. It attempts to mock, shame and permanently exclude from relationships by belittling, humiliating, and ignoring.” You can negotiate with someone you hate, but you can’t govern effectively alongside someone you hold in contempt.

This isn’t the America those tourists are falling in love with. The Declaration that we celebrate on July 4 insists that all men are created equal – not just in a political sense, but a moral one. It’s an “unalienable right” that no government can grant or none revoke. If we reserve that dignity only for those who vote as we do, that promise not only goes unfulfilled, it becomes meaningless.

Those polls did offer a silver lining however – one of hope. Fifty-four percent of Americans still believe most of us share the same core values, even when we disagree sharply about policies. Eight-five percent say national unity and shared values are important. The NBC pollster observed “a clear desire for Americans to come together at the individual level and a willingness to do so, even when they strongly disagree
politically.”

The American people aren’t the problem. The condition we find ourselves in is the
problem. And conditions can change.

The men who signed the Declaration 250 years ago were not party hacks. They were
founders – and they knew the risks of opposing factions. John Adams wrote a few
years later that there was nothing he dreaded more than “a division of the republic into
two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in
opposition to each other.” He called it “the greatest political evil under our Constitution.”

They were betting on the idea that ordinary people, without a king, could govern themselves justly and well. Today we’ve become what Adams feared most by allowing politics to rule over people.

Let’s put our politics on pause for now and celebrate a remarkable milestone in the Great American Experiment, remembering this summer that millions of visitors arriving at our airports are discovering, with genuine wonder, what we have forgotten to notice: a Georgia sunset, a stranger’s smile at a Waffle House, our Southern hospitality and free spirit that’s so infectious.

Perhaps we can at least come to terms with the Japanese tourist’s new foodie obsession: “So tell me, America. You call it Ranch. A condiment. A thing on the side. I call it the one sauce a whole nation agreed to love together – and I dip, with all of you. Gladly.”

That sauce these tourists love to dip in isn’t Ranch – it’s the taste of freedom.

Will Thault is a retired businessman.