The Guise of Our Divide
Americans see one another in a strikingly different way than in any other country, the Pew Research Center recently reported.
Finding the Priorities Americans Still Share
Americans see one another in a strikingly different way than in any other country, the Pew Research Center recently reported. In a 25-country study, they asked participants to judge the behaviors of their fellow citizens as either moral, immoral, or not a moral issue. 53% of Americans said their fellow citizens had bad morals and ethics, the only country to produce a majority verdict of moral failure.
More than half of the country, in other words, looks out at the rest and sees moral deficiency, not disagreement or difference.
Many Americans would likely believe such an existential divide exists across the nation – at least politically. National polarization has been actively studied, documented and discussed for over three decades. The Pew survey suggests that division now extends beyond politics, as well.
But there’s an important distinction between ideological differences versus the differences we feel about one another.
Ideological divides are real and an inherent byproduct of large, healthy societies. Emotional differences are real, too, but not always natural – rather they are often symptoms of a society deeply in decay. Researchers call the latter “affective polarization.”
Pew’s survey illustrates affective polarization. People organize their lives around moral commitments and it’s an important factor in societal wellbeing. But moral judgement relies on perception. Pew did not measure whether Americans actually have different moral values. If they did, the results could have been much different. Instead, they asked respondents to assess their fellow citizens based on how they perceive the morality of their behaviors – and that perception forms a narrative of its own.
Affective polarization is more common in contemporary political life than ideological division. Voters argue over political candidates rather than issues. We become symbiotic with who we’re voting for, not what we’re voting on. Debate is substituted for outrage and genuine policy differences become obscured.
We feel we are divided, but that doesn’t mean we actually are.
People are hardwired with certain priorities across cultures – financial stability, job opportunity, health for themselves and their loved ones, etc. These are the baseline expectations for a functioning society and the starting point for determining policy. The way we achieve these priorities is where real disagreements arise.
Our personal perceptions would seem to matter less in the face of these priorities – unless what we prioritize gets rewired.
Outrage is easy to generate and lucrative. Entire industries exist by converting ordinary differences into outrage. A wide array of media, economic and political actors cultivate these differences for their benefit and the system’s design rewards amplifying that division. American academic Arthur Brooks calls this the “Outrage Industrial Complex.”
Meanwhile, families still struggle to afford healthcare, worry about energy costs, taxes and their children’s schools, and wonder if Congress will solve these problems.
When people feel the system has left them behind, division is easy to amplify. We can’t pay attention to the foundations of national life crumbling around us when we’re constantly locked into our mutual contempt for one another. Many Americans lack faith even in their own political party’s ability to solve their problems, let alone the other side.
Without a way to champion our interests, outrage becomes our only agency and our realities become altered without us even realizing it.
But resentment loses its potency when an alternative seems possible.
In the latest YouGov poll published by the Grand Bargain Project, voters were asked if the framework’s seven aspirations were the right issues to focus on. Those aspirations are:
Greater economic opportunity and growth
Schools that enable kids to reach their potential
Effective and affordable healthcare
Curbing the national debt
Clean and reliable energy
A fairer tax system
A Congress organized to resolve our differences
73% of Americans answered “YES.”
That doesn’t mean universal agreement, but it does indicate that most Americans agree on the outcomes they want for themselves – and are willing to embrace a roadmap for realistically achieving them.
That consensus is what should be amplified. Instead it’s being buried and the outrage continues.
Americans’ hostility toward one another is real. But the conditions producing and rewarding that hostility are being manufactured in order to distract us from the underlying problems that continue to remain unsolved.
Pew’s survey alone is not egregious, but it demonstrates how affective polarization thrives: emphasizing perception over genuine differences of opinion, thereby altering how we engage with one another.
When the system itself reinforces that type of thinking, we become manipulable to those in power. History proves how dangerous that level of influence is over a society – it’s a slippery slope that becomes fatal over time. We are already seeing that societal decline.
Demanding that we like each other more won’t solve that, and nor will forced unity or calls for civility.
Instead, we have to change the structural incentives that reward weaponizing our problems rather than solving them.
That requires a national roadmap that a majority of Americans can support – and real, authentic leaders who are bold enough to stand up and champion that plan.
We are not inexorably divided and that shouldn’t be the takeaway from Pew’s survey. Most Americans still want a country that works but we’ve been conditioned to believe that a shared way forward is not possible. Unless we universally reject that conditioning, remove the mechanisms generating it, and remember the priorities that we still share, it won’t be. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2026/03/05/in-25-country-survey-americans-especially-likely-to-view-fellow-citizens-as-morally-bad/
https://www.grandbargainproject.org/
