Bridge Builders. Nathan Bomey
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furious tweets day after day, among innumerable other polarizing actions and statements.
After Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s defeat of Trump in the November 2020 election, we can certainly hope that political polarization will ease a bit, in part because of the former vice president’s pledge to pursue bipartisanship and the perception that he could serve as the “healer-in-chief” following Trump’s intensely polarizing reign.7 But Biden’s win was far from the sweeping victory that might’ve signaled a national repudiation of Trump’s style of political vengeance and intransigence. Rather, although Biden received the most votes of any presidential candidate in US history while campaigning on a platform to unify the country – more than 75 million people backed him – Trump got more votes than any previous sitting president.8 Despite all the polarizing things he was responsible for, Trump still won the support of more than 72 million Americans on election day.9
And even though he outperformed expectations, Trump baselessly labeled the election results as fraudulent.10 His own Department of Homeland Security reported that the election was “the most secure in American history,”11 yet Trump repeatedly refused to concede. In doing so, he injected further animus into the American political environment, threatening to erode voters’ confidence in future elections and further solidifying the fissures that plague our democracy.
As the election showed us, the things that divide us are deeply embedded in the American psyche. They cannot be swept away with a particular electoral outcome or erased by an inspiring politician. Among Democrats, 61 percent view Republicans as racist, bigoted, and sexist, while 54 percent of Republicans view Democrats as spiteful and 49 percent view them as ignorant, according to a poll conducted in late 2019 for digital news outlet Axios. About one-fifth of Democrats and onefifth of Republicans view the other side as “evil.”12
Yes, that’s the same adjective we would typically use to characterize Maleficent from Sleeping Beauty or Scar from The Lion King – as in, the same way we would describe a maniacal sorcerer or a murderous tyrant from an animated movie. But there’s nothing cinematic or fictitious about our situation. No one is here to sing “Hakuna Matata” and explain how we’re all part of the circle of life.
Among both Democrats and Republicans, only 2–3 percent view the other side as kind, while no more than 4 percent view the other side as thoughtful, according to the Axios survey. The poll had a margin of error of three points, meaning the percentage of Democrats and Republicans who view each other as kind could be as low as zero.13 Think about that for a second.
The tendency of people of difference to loathe one another on a deeply personal level is what political scientists call “affective polarization” – and it’s coursing through America’s veins. “When polarization started emerging, it looked like disagreement about issues,” said Jonathan Rauch, a US political scholar at the Brookings Institution. “Affective polarization is different because it means you have an actual emotional dislike of the other side. It’s often not even issue based. It’s based on the sense that the other side is dangerous, evil, wants to endanger people like me – a threat.”
In lawmaking, affective polarization throttles legislative progress because politicians don’t have an incentive to work together if their constituents actively or passively support their obstinacy. That’s obvious to anyone acquainted with the unending stasis on Capitol Hill.
Our democratic principles are at risk of crumbling if we can’t have difficult conversations with people of difference, tackle challenging issues together, confront our personal biases, and see the world through each other’s eyes. As conservative scholar and author Arthur C. Brooks wrote in his 2019 book, Love Your Enemies, affective polarization is breeding a culture of contempt. It is undermining entire communities, interpersonal relationships, and institutional stability.
In the workplace, we have an actual financial incentive to get along, yet affective polarization is still prominent. Personal contempt is leading employees to spurn others who don’t share their political views. According to a study by research and advisory group Gartner, 36 percent of employees avoided talking to or collaborating with a coworker during the 2020 presidential primary season because of that colleague’s political views. Nearly one-third reported that they had “witnessed at least one instance of unacceptable treatment of a coworker because of their political beliefs, including being called offensive names, being avoided by colleagues, or being treated unfairly.”14
Before the pandemic had even begun, pervasive divisiveness had afflicted the personal lives of about one-third of Americans, of whom about four in ten had experienced depression, anxiety, or sadness because of it, according to a poll conducted in late 2019 by the nonpartisan research group Public Agenda for USA Today’s Hidden Common Ground project.15
If nothing else, COVID-19 has shown us that affective polarization can even be deadly. When we make lifestyle decisions based on tribalistic politics rather than science, we are putting the lives of the people around us at risk of contracting the virus. Yet, ironically, even if there were a vaccine to treat polarization, many Americans would refuse it. Just as a misguided slice of Americans – including a cross-section of those on both the left and the right – won’t listen to the science that vaccines are safe and necessary to preserve public health,16 many of us won’t listen to the facts on other issues if those facts contradict our preconceived notions about each other and the world around us.17
As a newspaper journalist, I’ve devoted my life to seeking out the truth. So it pains me to admit that publishing the facts through old-fashioned media isn’t enough to get people on the same page. The decline of traditional news media has frayed the relationship between Americans and professional journalists, whose collective bond of civic trust has been further ravaged by false accusations of “fake news” leveled at journalists from the likes of Trump and his hyperpartisan media supporters. Amid my industry’s financial implosion – which has led to massive layoffs, publication shutdowns, and so-called “news deserts”18 – social media platforms have become the new gatekeepers for the information that many people see about the world. These technology giants are enabling misinformation to flourish and profiting from it.19
Consequently, Americans have been largely left to fend for themselves on an information superhighway riddled with potholes of falsehoods that further divide our society. Owing to the classic psychological condition of confirmation bias, many of us believe and actively spread the lies. As falsehoods flourish, our emotions become supercharged, and our crisis of polarization worsens. And there’s no reason to believe our increasingly cacophonous public discourse will suddenly become symphonic, absent a new orchestration specifically composed to achieve harmony.
William Galston – who cofounded No Labels and The New Center, groups that work to bolster the political center in America – began studying American polarization at the Brookings Institution during the second Iraq War. Polarization “seemed very serious back then,” he said. “It’s clear in retrospect we hadn’t seen anything yet. Every year I say to myself, ‘It can’t get worse than this.’ And every year it gets worse.”
Ensconced in our political echo chambers, we are constantly fed the premise that the other side is crazy. Talking heads say it. Social media says it. Politicians say it. Even journalists say it. And Americans have bought into it: 87 percent of Democrats and 84 percent of Republicans say the other side is hateful, while 88 percent of Democrats and 88 percent of Republicans say the other side is brainwashed, according to a June 2019 survey by the nonpartisan group More in Common for its Hidden Tribes of America project.20
But are we truly as far apart as we feel? More in Common, which studies political tribalism in an attempt to bridge ideological divides, examined “second-order beliefs” – that is, what people believe others believe. It turns out that we may not be as polarized as we think we are.
The study concluded that “Democrats and Republicans imagine that almost twice as many people on the other side hold extreme views than really do.” For example, Democrats underestimate