Marjorie Taylor Greene has been called many things, but she has never been called a moderate squish.

Until now.

The U.S. representative from Georgia was apparently kicked out of the House Freedom Caucus, the hard-right group famous for bedeviling Republican House speakers, in a vote last month, Politico first reported. Representative Andy Harris, a board member, told several outlets about the outcome. The HFC says it does not comment on membership, and Greene released a statement that did not specifically address the expulsion but said, “In Congress, I serve Northwest Georgia first, and serve no group in Washington.”

[Read: Why is Marjorie Taylor Greene like this?]

Greene was not ejected for subscribing to QAnon beliefs, or for encouraging violence against colleagues, or for blaming wildfires on Jewish space lasers, or for supporting Vladimir Putin. Instead, Harris said, Greene was punished for tangling with her fellow HFC member Lauren Boebert of Colorado and daring to take a minimal step toward governance by aligning herself with Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a conservative Republican. The vote shows just how radical the MAGA fringe in Congress is today—a wild-eyed clique implacably opposed to governance.

When Greene entered Congress in 2021, she was viewed, correctly, as wacky and toxic. In February of that year, Democrats moved to kick her out of her formal committee assignments after McCarthy hesitated to punish her for offensive remarks. But Greene used the ensuing two years to build her power within the party. She forged an alliance with McCarthy: It saved her from pariahdom and made her a major face of the party, and it gave him credibility (or at least cover) with right-wing members. When his bid for the speakership nearly faltered in January 2023, she was a crucial backer. And when McCarthy needed votes for the debt deal he struck with President Joe Biden in May, Greene was there.

But the closeness to McCarthy, whom the right views as an unreliable and moderate speaker, and support for the debt deal was too much for her HFC colleagues to bear, according to Politico’s reporting. The fury over the debt deal is silly. McCarthy never had much leverage to bring against Biden, and he managed to extract more from the White House than many Democrats would have liked. The alternative to the deal he struck wasn’t a better deal—it was a catastrophic national default. Greene’s sin, to HFC members, was insufficient nihilism.

[David A. Graham: Marjorie Taylor Greene is just a symptom of what ails the GOP]

The idea that Greene has become some sort of moderate is belied by the other reason she was kicked out. Last month on the House floor, she called Boebert “a little bitch”—amid a disagreement over competing resolutions to impeach Biden. (A typically unrepentant Greene defended her word choice to Semafor, explaining, “She has genuinely been a nasty little bitch to me.” Boebert, for her part, said that she had defended Greene’s comments on free-speech grounds ahead of the caucus vote.)

Greene is as extreme as she ever has been, but she became prominent not just for her “loony lies and conspiracy theories”—to use Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s phrase—but for her savvy wielding of those views in the press to get attention. But some of the remaining members of the Freedom Caucus, although not so well known, have terrifying views of their own.

The chair, Scott Perry, a Pennsylvanian, was a key plotter of Donald Trump’s attempted paperwork coup to steal the 2020 election, and has been swept up in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation. Jim Jordan of Ohio, the chief inquisitor of the House majority, is the vice chair. Andy Biggs of Arizona responded to Donald Trump’s federal indictment in June by tweeting, “We have now reached a war phase. Eye for an eye.” His colleague Clay Higgins of Louisiana outdid him with a mélange of militia vernacular incomprehensible to the average citizen. Mary Miller of Illinois first reached national attention in 2021 when she told rally attendees, “Hitler was right on one thing: He said, ‘Whoever has the youth has the future.’” She may not have intended to praise Hitler; the same cannot safely be assumed about Paul Gosar of Arizona, who is deeply entwined with neo-Nazis and white supremacists. Matt Gaetz of Florida is, well, Matt Gaetz.

[Jeff Sharlet: The congressman telling Trump supporters to “buckle up”]

When Greene was kicked off her committees back in 2021, I argued that the GOP was disingenuously treating her as one lone, unhinged figure who could be ignored. The problem for Republican leaders was that they couldn’t very well punish her for views that the party had tolerated and fostered.

A little more than two years later, the center of the House congressional caucus has moved so far that Greene is no longer a fringe member—in fact, the fringe members view her as an avatar of compromise and weakness. That’s no longer just a problem for Republican leaders. It’s a problem for the entire country.

Nostalgia is usually an unproductive emotion. Our memories can deceive us, especially as we get older. But every so often, nostalgia can remind us of something important. As we celebrate another Fourth of July, I find myself wistful about the patriotism that was once common in America—and keenly aware of how much I miss it.

This realization struck me unexpectedly as I was driving to the beach near my home. I am a New Englander to my bones. I was born and raised near the Berkshires, and educated in Boston. I have lived in Vermont and New Hampshire, and now I have settled in Rhode Island, on the shores of the Atlantic. Despite a career that took me to New York and Washington, D.C., I am, I admit, a living stereotype of regional loyalty—and, perhaps, of more than a little provincialism.

I was awash in thoughts of lobster rolls and salt water as I neared the dunes. And then that damn tearjerker of a John Denver song about West Virginia came on my car radio.

The song isn’t even really about the Mountain State; it was inspired by locales in Maryland and Massachusetts. But I have been to West Virginia, and I know that it is a beautiful place. I have never wanted to live anywhere but New England, yet every time I hear “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” I understand, even if only for a few minutes, why no one would ever want to live anywhere but West Virginia, too

That’s when I experienced the jolt of a feeling we used to think of as patriotism: the joyful love of country. Patriotism, unlike its ugly half brother, nationalism, is rooted in optimism and confidence; nationalism is a sour inferiority complex, a sullen attachment to blood-and-soil fantasies that is always looking abroad with insecurity and even hatred. Instead, I was taking in the New England shoreline but seeing in my mind the Blue Ridge Mountains, and I felt moved with wonder—and gratitude—for the miracle that is the United States.

[David Waldstreicher: The Fourth of July has always been political]

How I miss that feeling. Because usually when I think of West Virginia these days, my first thought tends to be: red state. I now see many voters there, and in other states, as my civic opponents. I know that many of them likely hear “Boston” and they, too, think of a place filled with their blue-state enemies. I feel that I’m at a great distance from so many of my fellow citizens, as do they, I’m sure, from people like me. And I hate it.

Later, as I headed home to prepare for the holiday weekend, my mind kept returning to another summer, 40 years ago, in a different America and a different world.

I spent the summer of 1983, right after college graduation, in the Soviet Union studying Russian. I was in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), a beautiful city shrouded in a palpable sense of evil. KGB goons were everywhere. (They weren’t hard to spot, because they wanted visiting Americans like me, and the Soviet citizens who might speak with us, to see them.) I saw firsthand what oppression looks like, when people are afraid to speak in public, to associate, to move about, and to worship as they wish. I saw, as well, the power of propaganda: So many times, I was asked by Soviet citizens why the United States was determined to embark on a nuclear war, as if the smell of gunpowder was in the air and it was only a matter of time until Armageddon.

I was with a group of American students, and we were eager to meet Soviet people. The city is so far north that in the summer the sun never truly sets, and we had many warm conversations with young Leningraders—glares from the KGB notwithstanding—along the banks of the Neva River during the strange, half-lit gloom of these “White Nights.” Among ourselves, of course, our relations were as one might expect of college kids: Some friendships formed, some conflicts simmered, some romances bloomed, and some frostiness settled in among cliques.

If, however, we ran into anyone else from the United States, perhaps during a tour or in the hotel, most of us reacted as if we were all long-lost friends. The distances in the U.S. shrank to nothing. Boston and Jackson, Chicago and Dallas, Sacramento and Charlotte—all of us at that point were next-door neighbors meeting in a harsh and hostile land. It is difficult today to explain to a globalized and mobile generation the sense of fellowship evoked by encountering Americans overseas in the days when international travel was a rarer luxury than it is now. But to meet other Americans in a place such as the Soviet Union was often like a family reunion despite all of us being complete strangers.

[Read: What if America had lost the revolutionary war?]

Some years later, I returned to a more liberalized U.S.S.R. under the then–Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. I was part of an American delegation to a workshop on arms control with members of the Soviet diplomatic and military establishments. We all stayed together on a riverboat, where we also held our meetings. (A sad note: The boat traveled the Dnipro River in what was still Soviet Ukraine, and I walked through towns and cities, including Zaporizhzhya, that have since been reduced to rubble.) One day, our Soviet hosts woke us by piping the song “The City of New Orleans” to our staterooms, with its refrain of Good morning, America. How are ya? It was like a warm call from home, even if I’d never been to any of the locations (New Orleans, Memphis … Kankakee?) mentioned in the lyrics.

Today, many Americans regard one another as foreigners in their own country. Montgomery and Burlington? Charleston and Seattle? We might as well be measuring interstellar distances. We talk about “blue” and “red,” and we call one another communists and fascists, tossing off facile labels that once, among more serious people, were fighting words.

I am not going to both-sides this: I have no patience with people who casually refer to anyone with whom they disagree as “fascists,” but such people are a small and annoying minority. The reality is that the Americans who have taught us all to hate one another instantly at the sight of a license plate or at the first intonation of a regional accent are the vanguard of the new American right, and they have found fame and money in promoting division and even sedition.

These are the people, on our radios and televisions and even in the halls of Congress, who encourage us to fly Gadsden and Confederate flags and to deface our cars with obscene and stupid bumper stickers; they subject us to inane prattle about national divorce as they watch the purchases and ratings and donations roll in. Such people have made it hard for any of us to be patriotic; they pollute the incense of patriotism with the stink of nationalism so that they can issue their shrill call to arms for Americans to oppose Americans.

[Tom Nichols: Gorbachev’s fatal trap]

Their appeals demean every voter, even those of us who resist their propaganda, because all of us who hear them find ourselves drawing lines and taking sides. When I think of Ohio, for example, I no longer think (as I did for most of my life) of a heartland state and the birthplace of presidents. Instead, I wonder how my fellow American citizens there could have sent to Congress such disgraceful poltroons as Jim Jordan and J. D. Vance—men, in my view, whose fidelity to the Constitution takes a back seat to personal ambition, and whose love of country I will, without reservation, call into question. Likewise, when I think of Florida, I envision a natural wonderland turned into a political wasteland by some of the most ridiculous and reprehensible characters in American politics.

I struggle, especially, with the shocking fact that many of my fellow Americans, led by cynical right-wing-media charlatans, are now supporting Russia while Moscow conducts a criminal war. These voters have been taught to fear their own government—and other Americans who disagree with them—more than a foreign regime that seeks the destruction of their nation. I remember the old leftists of the Cold War era: Some of them were very bad indeed, but few of them were this bad, and their half-baked anti-Americanism found little support among the broad mass of the American public. Now, thanks to the new rightists, an even worse and more enduring anti-Americanism has become the foundational belief of millions of American citizens.

I know that such thoughts make me part of the problem. And yes, I will always believe that voting for someone such as Jordan (or, for that matter, Donald Trump) is, on some level, a moral failing. But that has nothing to do with whether Ohio and Florida are part of the America I love, a nation full of good people whose politics are less important than their shared citizenship with me in this republic. I might hate the way most Floridians vote, but I would defend every square inch of the state from anyone who would want to take it from us and subjugate any of its people.

When I returned from that first Soviet excursion back in 1983, we landed at JFK on July 4—the finest day there could be to return to America after a grim sojourn in the Land of the Soviets. By the time my short connecting hop to Hartford took off, it was dark. We flew low across Long Island and Connecticut, and I could see the Fourth of July fireworks in towns below us. I was a young man and so, naturally, I was too tough to cry, but I felt my eyes welling as I watched town after town celebrate our national holiday. I was exhausted, not only from the trip but from a summer in an imprisoned nation. I was so glad to be home, to be free, to be safe again among other Americans.

[Conor Friedersdorf: Independence Day in a divided America]

I want us all to experience that feeling. And so, for one day, on this Fourth, I am going to think of my fellow citizens as if I’d just met them in Soviet Leningrad. Just for the day, I won’t care where their votes went in the past few elections—or if they voted at all. I won’t care where they stand on Roe v. Wade or student-debt forgiveness. I won’t care if any of them think America is a capitalist hellhole. I won’t bother about their loves and hates. They’re Americans, and like it or not, we are bound to one another in one of the greatest and most noble experiments in human history. Our destiny together, stand or fall, is inescapable.

Tomorrow, we can go back to bickering. But just for this Fourth, I hope we can all try, with an open spirit, to think of our fellow Americans as friends and family, brothers and sisters, and people whose hands we would gratefully clasp if we met in a faraway and dangerous place.