What If We Aren’t As Divided As They Tell Us We Are?

Someone is benefitting from polarization, and it’s not us.

“Do you think we are headed towards civil war?” The question is jarring, but not absurd.

It was two weeks before the 2020 elections and I was sitting in my living room on a Zoom call when it was asked. I glanced over at my child, who was reading on the floor next to me to gauge how much he was listening. He was absorbed in his book.

I knew there were groups such as the Boogaloos who fetishize the idea of civil war. I knew, too, that there were serious threats to our electoral system — that’s what the Zoom meeting was about. Things felt upsetting, dire.

But my answer to this question was still a clear-eyed “no.” As hard as the year had been, as dangerous as the extremists had become, and, yes, as horrible as many of us had behaved during a year spent too exclusively online, I believed that our common needs and common ground tie us together. I still do.

Yet, the conventional wisdom is that we are more divided than ever. One can see why: When it comes to our values and beliefs, 70% of both Democrats and Republicans think that our country is “greatly divided” (Monmouth, 2019). A month before the 2020 elections, eight in ten voters said that our differences were…