Currents

I live in a remarkably diverse neighborhood in Florida. Diverse not in terms of class (it’s definitely a pretty pond and manicured trees kind of place), but in terms of race, ethnicity, and religion. We’re white, black, Latino, East Asian, and also South Asian, bolstered by a nearby Hindu temple. We’re also politically mixed. Every election season, both Republican and Democratic yard signs spring up across the neighborhood — and, of course, many of us just want to get it all over with so we can go back to barbecues and hobbies. For such a varied group of people, we mostly get along. Our most heated arguments are over whether street parking should be allowed or not. Yet, to hear political pundits, the press, and social media, my neighborhood should be absolutely seething with vitriolic political partisanship and the tension of “oppressors” and the “oppressed.”

The United States, we are told, is poised to tear itself in two. Indeed, the movie, Civil War (2024), which is playing in theaters as I type these words, taps into this existential dread. But are Americans really all that politically divided? Is the US truly cleaved down the middle into two irreconcilably hostile factions? Or are we distracted mainly by the spectacle of horseshoe-theory conflicts between authoritarians on the far left and right who don’t speak for the majority of the public?

Part of the problem is that it’s not just politicians and journalists, but also social scientists who lean into narratives of division. There’s a general argument in statistics that it’s unwise to take complicated dimensional information and reduce it to simple binaries, but that’s exactly what happens with political views. Thus we see statistical analyses that misrepresent public opinion by framing it along areas of disagreement, rather than areas of common ground. Take, for example, the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group, a project that began in 2016, which has collaborated with USA Today and UCLA, and has been covered or cited in mainstream institutions ranging from New York Magazine to Pew Research. Their 2016 study, which has since been updated, and which continues to be shared around social media to this day, divides people along left- and right-wing dimensions on social/cultural issues and economic issues. When we take a look at this study and its methodology, however, we can see in microcosm the game being played when thought leaders portray society as a fracturing hellscape on the verge of civil war.

The Voter Study Group studied approximately 8,600 voters in 2016. These voters were a subgroup from a 2011–2012 survey, allowing researchers the opportunity to see how voters changed over time. The survey queried participants on a host of political and social issues, ranging from the economy to immigration, to examine how these attitudes track with voting across 2012 and 2016. Their findings are not a psychological deep dive (indeed, the authors caution against attributing psychological causes), but nevertheless interesting information to chart.

The main report itself notes that Americans tend to disagree on two broad dimensions: economics and identity politics. It also identifies a number of issues of bipartisan consensus. For instance, similar proportions of voters on both sides of the aisle agree on the need for Social Security and Medicare, believe in women’s rights, and are skeptical of trade policy. Yet despite these (and other) significant commonalities, the Voter Group Study focuses mainly on points of difference where they occur, such as views on immigration and economic inequality. Such is their right, but the fixation on division, in this study as in news coverage and public discourse, has a way of drowning out our many commonalities.

If we take only the dimensions upon which we differ, it’s possible to produce scatter plots that make Americans appear hopelessly polarized, as the Voter Study Group did. Whether or not that was their deliberate intent, it fits neatly within a pervasive pattern seen throughout discourse and our knowledge-generating institutions. Although it’s important to analyze where we differ, what gets lost in the shuffle is a larger truth: most Americans agree more often than not and share core values such as freedom of expression, civil liberties, civil rights, LGBT rights, equality before the law, and the equality of opportunity.

Consider trans medicine, widely seen as one of the most contentious issues in modern politics. Hardliners at the fringes may be passionate about allowing all trans-identified kids to be put on puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones with little gatekeeping, or conversely, insist that all trans medicine should be banned, irrespective of age, circumstance, and medical oversight. If we define people by their relative allegiance to these extreme poles, it’s easy to cast everyone as being on one side or the other of a clear dividing line. In reality, the vast majority of people have mixed or nuanced views, as is appropriate for such complicated issues around which the science is still underdeveloped. According to a 2024 YouGov poll, a majority of Americans support protecting trans people from hate crimes or discrimination in employment and housing. There is also a broad consensus in favor of restricting trans women from participating in women’s sports or being placed in female prisons. By contrast, issues surrounding youth gender medicine are more divided and fluctuate based on how the question is asked. Over 50% oppose policies allowing puberty blockers or hormone treatment for minors, but less than 50% oppose banning such policies. Welcome to the marvels of public opinion.

In some cases, pundits or even scholars can feed polarizing narratives in misleading or even outright unscrupulous ways. After the 2016 election, for example, some political scientists bitterly proclaimed that racism motivated most Trump voters, a narrative eagerly picked up by news media. Unfortunately, these studies typically didn’t define “racism” the way normal people do (explicit hate toward other racial groups), but rather as opposition to progressive political policies on race such as open-border style immigration policies, affirmative action, or simply disagreeing that racism is widespread in the US. In effect, these studies use variants of “symbolic” or “modern” racism to misidentify disagreement with specifically left-wing policies as “wrong” and therefore “racist.” They don’t measure truly racist attitudes in any meaningful way. Rather, they fuel simplistic and divisive narratives. Similarly, after the 2020 election, widespread claims of voter fraud were spread by Trump and his supporters, backed by flimsy reports that haven’t held up to scrutiny, and which clash with the 63% of American adults who are confident in US election integrity.

Of course, sometimes people do differ on critical topics. But by focusing so exclusively on our differences and magnifying them to the point that these are not merely reasonable differences of opinion but moral failures (always by the “other side” of course), we contribute to an unconstructive doom loop and make compromises and progress more rather than less difficult. In reality, people, whatever their political affiliations or labels, likely share more values than they disagree on, even on previously controversial issues. Racist attitudes in the United States are at historic lows, not just for the US, but likely for all of human history worldwide. There is a cross-political consensus that judging people by the color of their skin is bad and that reforms are needed to improve policing, but also that the police should very much not be defunded or abolished.

Similarly, 71% of society, including a plurality of Republicans, agree that bisexual, gay, and lesbian people should be free to marry whomever they want. Although some people claim to want extreme forms of economic policy, such as communism or socialism, most folks across the political spectrum remain more positive about capitalism than they are about socialism. Indeed, many purported advocates of socialism seem not to understand what the concept even means, often mistaking robust but nevertheless capitalist welfare states like Denmark or Sweden for socialist countries while avoiding any mention of places like Venezuela or North Korea. At the same time, 66% of Americans also favor significant economic reforms to the current system.

The message that the country is divided into good guys (“us”) and bad guys (“them”) might be a lucrative business model for the media and an effective strategy for politicians, but it has warped our view of reality. Most Americans, after being bombarded with messages about polarization over and over, now understandably perceive sky-high levels of sectarian discord, even if, like me, they otherwise seem to get along with their neighbors just fine. We are being gaslit into disbelieving our own lying eyes, which see daily evidence of what Andrew Sullivan aptly describes as “the largest, freest, most successful multiracial democracy in human history.”

Some scholars argue social media is to blame, and while it has certainly played its part in fueling division, I also think blaming everything on social media has become a convenient cop-out. No one politician, or political party, or industry, or technology, or event, or movement is solely responsible. There is no one weird trick to fix these misperceptions, but that doesn’t mean we must necessarily remain locked into some kind of partisan doom loop.

Part of the solution falls on academics to introduce more balance and perspective into their examinations and to not hyperfocus on differences to the exclusion of commonalities. When researchers take this more holistic approach, it produces studies such as the 2018 Hidden Tribes report, the 2019 Perception Gap report, or the 2021 Hidden Common Ground survey which document and analyze just how much we have in common with one another. Journalists, too, have not just a responsibility to call out misleading social science that misrepresents society, but a growing incentive to do so as well. The old news mantra, “If it bleeds it leads”, isn’t going away any time soon, however, the proliferation of independent journalism suggests a sizable market for coverage that cuts against inaccurate mainstream narratives. We can fill that void with nuance, or abandon it to conspiracy.

The far left and far right, according to both Hidden Tribes and Pew Research, combine for just 14% to 16% of society. Those of us in the wide center are the majority. Gallup polls show that 43% of voters — a plurality — identify as “independent”, with Democrats and Republicans at 27% a piece. We can also be part of the answer by simply speaking up more. Our silence only amplifies extreme voices and makes them harder to ignore. We should follow the lead of organizations like Braver Angels and Heterodox Academy, and activists like Chloe Valdary and Irshad Manji to find ways to dialogue across our artificial divides. Our educational, business, and media institutions can help by adopting University of Chicago-style free-speech and neutrality statements.

It’s time for a vibe shift. It’s time to integrate the common ground we live and breathe in our everyday lives into the ways in which we understand and behave in the political sphere. Most of all, it’s time to commend the people who reach across the aisle to find consensus, instead of branding them as traitors. The false narrative that American society is fracturing leads to the false belief, highlighted in the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group, that “politics is a rigged game.” There is an illusion all around us, and a profound truth hiding in plain sight. If there is anything we should be “woke” to or “red-pilled” about, it’s the reality that we are all a lot more alike than we think. Imagine what we could do together if we only realized that.

Published May 24, 2024
Updated May 29, 2024