The Seattle Seahawks trampled the New England Patriots in Super Bowl LX, but the postgame chatter barely touched football. Fans and pundits argued about anthems, halftime, commercials, and what the whole spectacle “said” about America.

For better or worse, the Super Bowl serves as the premier civic liturgy of the American empire, a night when strangers share the same screens and offices share the same small talk. When that ritual becomes another front in the culture war, the country loses one more place to breathe.

Americans once used the game to share food, laugh at ads, and pretend for a night that they still belonged to one people. This year, the country used the game to rehearse separation.

Families fight. Politics intrudes. Resentments pile up. Holidays still force a pause. Thanksgiving and Christmas push people back to the same table, reminding them that the argument cannot become the relationship.

When even the ritual itself turns into the argument — when Thanksgiving and Christmas are no longer about gratitude or celebrating the birth of Christ but rather who can win a political debate — the family slides from conflict toward rupture. A nation works the same way. Shared ceremonies do not solve deep disagreements, but they keep disagreement from becoming total separation.

From national pastime to litmus test

Americans rarely stop living their separate lives to watch the same thing at the same time. Streaming splinters audiences. Social media isolates communities. Even big films and best-selling books now fall into ideological silos.

The Super Bowl remains one of the few national events that still compels common attention. People who hate sports tune in for the ads so they can follow the conversation at work the next day. A shared celebration, however frivolous, still binds people who otherwise share little else in common.

This year’s Super Bowl looked like a country at war with itself.

The broadcast opened with two national anthems: the familiar Francis Scott Key standard and the newer “black national anthem” that appears at more NFL events each season. The league has leaned hard into woke activism, from corporate rituals to social campaigns, and it rarely hides the moral it wants viewers to absorb. Two anthems signal two constituencies. Two constituencies begin to behave like two nations.

A cultural sorting mechanism

The halftime show sharpened that divide. The NFL chose Bad Bunny, a Puerto Rican artist who performs almost entirely in Spanish, and the set centered on Hispanic identity. The stage recreated a bodega, complete with an “EBT welcome” neon sign. The performance leaned into sexual provocation, with dancers simulating sex acts and same-sex grinding played for shock and applause. The show ended with performers hoisting foreign flags, a tableau that read less like cultural flair and more like a victory lap.

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Photo by Kevin Sabitus/Getty Images

A large portion of the audience did not buy what the league sold. Ratings suggested many viewers tuned out during the set. Some did so out of prudishness, others out of irritation at the message, others out of confusion. Either way, the halftime show did not function as a shared moment. It became a sorting mechanism.

Turning Point USA offered a competing halftime program featuring country artists singing about America and Jesus Christ. The stream broke records and reportedly became YouTube’s largest live broadcast. The accomplishment deserves credit. The need for it should worry anyone who wants a coherent nation. Instead of one shared celebration, Americans built parallel ceremonies, then congratulated themselves for avoiding each other.

Who is the customer here?

The commercials followed the same pattern. One spot from a mortgage lender portrayed a family of color moving into a mostly white neighborhood and encountering casual racism until they instructed the residents on diversity and inclusion. The ad did not wink. It preached.

Another strange commercial, backed by Patriots owner Robert Kraft, aimed to address rising anti-Semitism. It showed a Jewish student harassed in a school hallway as classmates mocked him and stuck a note reading “dirty Jew” to his backpack. The boy reached his locker, where a black student offered solidarity based on shared experience with hatred from whites. The ad then unveiled a “blue square” social media campaign modeled on the "black square" campaign that followed George Floyd’s death in 2020.

NFL owners did not back away from the woke script. They turned the dial higher.

Two different worlds

The next day I went to my barber, and he described the shift in real time. Small talk drives that job. For most of his life, the Monday after the Super Bowl brought lively chatter about the best plays and the funniest ads. This year, customers wanted to talk politics. They complained about the anthems, the halftime, the messaging, the moral scolding. The game itself barely came up. Friendly banter about the MVP and next season’s prospects gave way to arguments about what kind of country this still is.

That exchange captured the larger problem. Conservatives and liberals increasingly inhabit different worlds. They share geography, but they do not share premises. They do not share authorities. They do not share the same media diet, the same moral language, or the same sense of what counts as a fact. When they occupy the same room, they talk past each other. When they can avoid the room, they do.

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Photo by Taurat Hossain/Anadolu via Getty Images

The old American civic fracture ran along a map. The new fracture runs through families, workplaces, churches, and neighborhoods. The country did not divide into North and South. It divided into competing moral nations layered on top of the same territory. Each tribe builds its own institutions, its own entertainers, its own narratives, and, increasingly, its own rituals.

No stable regime can endure that kind of division indefinitely. One side will eventually impose cultural dominance on the other, with power used to punish dissent and enforce conformity. Or the country will choose some form of national divorce, formal or informal, with communities separating as much as law and logistics allow.

The Super Bowl did not create this crisis. It revealed it. A shared civic ritual lets people practice unity without requiring uniformity. Americans once used the game as a harmless excuse to share food, laugh at ads, and pretend for a night that they still belonged to one people. This year, the country used the game to rehearse separation.

A nation that cannot share a football game cannot share much else for long.