How America Became So Divided
This essay is adapted from the 2017 Theodore H. White Lecture, sponsored by the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard on November 15.
I’m honored to deliver a lecture named for one of my heroes.
I came to see campaigns and candidates differently after reading Teddy White’s dispatches. He inspected the American presidency as an outsider, who had lived and learned outside the country, seen the emergence of nations that were not democracies; it was the opposite of living and reporting from the Bubble.
Those of us who operate in a Bubble, whether journalistic or academic or ideological, can easily forget that bubbles don’t conceal reality but they distort it, and it is so very easy to imagine they aren’t there.
Bubbles can be delightful and diverting, except in times like these, when they can become dangerous.
For reasons cultural, economic, demographic, psychographic, we are divided as a country perhaps not more, but differently than ever before. What were once unifying institutions are declining—Rotary Clubs, churches, even malls. Unifying values, around speech and civility, freedom and fairness are shredded by rising tribal furies and passions. We have a president for whom division is not just a strategy, it’s a skill.
We face enemies intent on dividing us more.
Faster than we can master their meaning, we embrace technologies making that easier.
Seven in ten Americans say we have reached a dangerous new low point, and are at least as divided as we were during the Vietnam war.
Every day, we learn something new about the ways we are doing this to ourselves, through the choices we make, the media we consume, the immensely powerful platforms we rely on whose impact we just barely understand.
And every day we learn more about the ways our adversaries are weaponizing information and markets and new technologies, in ways that strengthen authoritarian systems and weaken democratic ones.
Power looks less like a fist, more like a fingertip.
So I want to use my time tonight exploring how we got here and what it means, because as far as I can see, where we are going, there are no maps.
Just How Divided Are We?
For years I used to argue that America is much more purple than it seems on cable news or talk radio. Yes, we are a fractious federation full of regional tastes and cultural contrasts and eternal disputes over the proper balance between individual freedom and the common good.
But I believed that the first society in history to be forged more by thought and faith than threat and force was uniquely able to adapt to change. That the core American ideas, enshrined in our Bill of Rights, written in the blood of patriots, embraced by generations of restless immigrants, honored by servants and statesmen, tried and tested by hucksters and zealots, were more powerful than any of the forces primed to divide us.
I’m no longer so sure. I still believe in those ideals and their cohering power; but we have entered a period of category five disruption, so I take nothing for granted any more.
Let’s take as our baseline roughly 1990 onward—a single generation in which we’ve seen the end of the Cold War and rise of non-state threats; the dawn of the Information age and the deposit, into our hands, of hyperconnecting supercomputers; the decoding of the human genome, the approach of a majority-minority society, the explosion of wealth among the already wealthy, and of course, the swift and brutal deconsolidation of media.
Consider just a few trends that Bridgewater founder Ray Dalio, sees driving what he calls “the two economies.”
— For the lower 60%, real incomes are flat to down since 1980, to the point that the average person in the top 40% has ten times the wealth of the average in the lower 60, two thirds of whom have no savings.
–The lower 60% spend 1/4 as much on education, which sets their children up to fall further behind. Families of those who have not gone to college are breaking up nearly twice the rate of those who have gone to college.
–Premature deaths are up by about 20% just since 2000, driven mainly by drugs and suicides, which sets America apart from nearly all industrialized countries. Nothing about current trends suggests this will change.
So what defines us? Our Age? Race? Gender? Education? None of the above. It’s our enemies. According to polling that Pew Research Center has been doing since 1994, on ten different issues like immigration and poverty and the environment, we are now far more divided by our partisan identity than any other factor.
Geography is destiny
The divide reflects more than how you vote or whether you own a gun or passport or a collection of Cat Stevens LPs. In the past generation we have sorted ourselves into actual comfort zones. Almost two thirds (65%) of Republicans and right leaning independents prefer to live someplace where houses are bigger and further apart, and where schools and shopping are not nearby. Meanwhile six in ten Democrats (61%) prefer smaller houses in places where they can walk to schools and stores.
If the adage is true that You can’t hate someone whose story you know, then it’s a problem that a growing number of Americans can look around the coffee shop or playing field or congregation or PTA meeting and see mainly people who think and vote like them, and seldom encounter, much less hear the story, of those who see the world differently.
Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight calculated after the 2016 election that of the nation’s 3,113 counties, not even one in ten were actual battlegrounds, decided by less than 10 percent; in 1992 there were more than 1,000. Meanwhile the blowout counties decided by more than 50 points — went from 93 to 1,196. The share of voters living in extreme landslide counties has quintupled.
All politics has never been so local.
That’s the literal geography. Now consider the Virtual.
My generation grew up at a time when the “press” was our portal to political understanding. Whether we got our news from TIME or Newsweek, Walter Cronkite or Harry Reasoner, the Times or the Journal, these were not existential choices. They represented different gates to the common ground, and how we entered mattered less than where we landed.
Now the gatekeepers face competition from all the outlets that would usher us into a different reality. We see what the algorithms think we want to see, or will want to click on. And here I am going to pause and offer a qualified defense of Kellyanne Conway. She used the phrase alternative facts on Meet the Press when discussing Sean Spicer’s provably false assessment of the inaugural crowd size. So it became a sly synonym for bald faced lies.
But she later offered a different example: “Partly cloudy, partly sunny. Glass half full, glass half empty.” Those could also be called alternative facts– and this is where her insight is relevant. This is not just about information. It’s about interpretation. About what weight and value we assign to different events.
So on one day Fox News says the allegation that the Clintons played a role in a Uranium deal seven years ago is the most important story of the day; MSNBC says it is Senator Bob Corker warning about the instability of the president. Axios finds that 83% of Democrats think Russia’s exploitation of social media is a serious issue; 25% of Republicans agree.
Social platforms have made polarization easier, but they get a lot of help. Activist groups have a financial interest in outrage, in portraying some policy or politician as a threat to civilization; Yale law professor Dan Kahan calls them “conflict entrepreneurs” intent on pathologizing our politics.
Likewise journalists are all too willing treat politics as sport. Covering polls is way easier than covering people, but you very quickly lapse into who’s up, who’s down, like it’s a zero sum proposition. That’s a harmless way to view football: Either the Patriots win this weekend, or the Raiders. Less so when covering democracy. Because it ignores even the possibility of an outcome in which, through conscious compromise, everyone wins. Where is the sport in that?
Finally, in a period of mesmerizing change, it is human nature to seek the stories, the storytellers, the shaman who affirm rather than confront, who offer a simple, soothing explanation for events we can’t quite fathom. But this too has an actual effect on our ability to make smart policy. It’s not enough to educate the public, give people better information.
Cultural cognition research finds that people tend to be tribal when it comes to certain topics, like immigration or guns or climate change. “What people ‘believe’ about global warming doesn’t reflect what they know,” explains Professor Dan Kahan. “It expresseswho they are.” To conduct an informed public debate, he says, “you have to change the meaning of the climate change. You have to disentangle positions on it from opposing cultural identities.”
Likewise any debate over regulating guns has to acknowledge, as a southern Democratic Senator once put it, that the gun debate is “about values” “about who you are and who you aren’t.”
In other words, we stand little chance of addressing these questions wisely and well if we are circled around our separate campfires. Progress on crucial, complex issues will only come when people don’t have to choose between freely appraising the evidence vs. being loyal to their tribe.