If your feelings about our politics nowadays range from exhausted to frightened, or if you wonder which candidates from either party you can vote for in good conscience, please keep reading. This essay is for you.
Congratulations. You are part of a suffering, silent majority we call the American middle.
Like us, you are among the millions upon millions of Americans who see nuance in hard political questions. You wonder when and why the notion of compromise became synonymous with treason. You think grandstanding and name-calling on social media are signals of bad taste that are unfit for American leaders. You can’t understand why people spend hour after hour hypnotized by cable news. It worries you that people you care for have become obsessed with politics, how they have become angry and isolated, how it is controlling their lives and hurting their relationships.
You want it to stop, but it seems so far gone that there is no choice but to believe this is what American life is now and what it will be until it manifests in the way such division has historically manifested, in violence and destruction.
You aren’t alone. A lot of us feel that way. But it doesn’t have to be this way, and there is hope we can change it. And that is what we are writing about here.
In this editorial, and in a series of editorials and commentaries that we will publish in coming months under the title The American Middle, we are going to examine the causes of our polarization. We will look at political, social, technological and media structures that exacerbate our divisions, often to the profit and power of others. We will look at the ways polarization is distorting our communities and hurting our democracy. And we will look at the way elected officials are either exploiting our division or finding opportunities to bridge differences and build up our commonalities.
We will also dig into something that is crucially important for people in the middle to understand — that, in reality, most people believe we can find areas of agreement even on the most difficult political topics we face.
We live in a system of structures now that rewards those who would capitalize on polarization. They would divide us into the narrowest groups of belief and identity. They would convince us to see our differences not as disagreements that can be overcome through consideration and compromise but as moral chasms of “right” and “wrong” or “good” and “evil” that cannot be bridged.
Yes, there are times in history when moral and political questions become so urgent that a hard line must be drawn in the name of human freedom. But that is not the American reality today. That is not the nation we live in.
We can resolve our political differences. But we might not be able to resolve them until we reform, diminish or remove the structures that are elevating polarization.
Identifying the problem
There is nothing wrong with taking part in politics, or being interested in political questions. People have opinions, and they should vote those opinions.
We are political animals, as Aristotle concluded in his Politics. The word idiot comes from ancient Greek and referred to eligible citizens who failed to take part in the communal work of politics.
American democracy is a vast improvement on the oppressive Athenian version, but American political life increasingly reflects the animal part of political animal.
Appeals to emotion are far more common than appeals to reason. And the sort of groupthink and identity-speak all around us echo tribalism rather than elevate a pluralistic democracy.
The noise can be deafening. It is amplified and repeated constantly from politicians, from celebrities, from social media, on cable news, through activists. Escaping it is hard to do in modern life.
But the messages in the noise don’t reflect how most of us really think. Most of us don’t wholly buy what the major political parties are selling, nor do our sex, race, religion or other identifying characteristics easily define our thinking as individuals.
Meanwhile, this is a fact: On many issues of major political division, we are often more aligned than we are divided, even if the way we are governed does not reflect that alignment.
What the numbers show
We wanted to understand this more deeply, so we asked the Pew Research Center to share their findings with us across a host of issues that we are told over and over again are tearing this country apart. We included immigration, abortion, guns, climate change and voting, among others. We wanted to know what most Americans, the American middle, think about these issues and how that aligns with the way these issues are reflected in our politics, in social media and in partisan cable news.
The answer is that, yes, people have serious political differences. But what isn’t honestly reflected in our politics or on cable news or social media is the depth and nuance that most Americans bring to hard political questions.
It’s often hard to vote, because it’s increasingly hard to find candidates who reflect our own sense of the complexity of issues before us. And it’s increasingly hard to find media sources that don’t toe the line for a political party or harden identity narratives that define people as like-minded groups rather than as independently minded individuals.
With that, let’s look at what the numbers really tell us about who we are.
Abortion
There are few issues so divisive as abortion. Or so we are told. In fact, Americans see a great deal of middle ground on the issue. A majority, 61%, believe abortion, at some stage of pregnancy, should be legal. But their views vary on when and how it should be restricted. An even stronger majority, some 63%, think there should be some restrictions on abortion rights.
Republican legislators around the country have raced in recent years to place ever greater restrictions on abortion in anticipation of the revocation of federal abortion rights. Then, they were surprised when rock-red Kansas rejected a constitutional amendment that effectively would have led to a ban on all abortion in the state.
That isn’t because Kansans aren’t conservative. They demonstrate they are in election after election. But the polarization that Republican elected officials increasingly embraced did not reflect the individual views of a majority of voters.
Meanwhile, progressives, including leading Democrats, have treated abortion as an absolute right, without regard to broadly held moral views that abortion should either be illegal or carefully restricted after the first trimester.
The polarizing views are treated as a binary choice in our divided politics. If the complex views of most Americans got greater consideration, a legal resolution to this issue would be more achievable.
Guns
Sen. John Cornyn, a stalwart conservative, was booed at his own party’s state convention this year because he had the courage to push forward a very modest expansion of gun safety regulations after the slaughter of 19 children and two teachers in Uvalde.
While his party’s base treated him with disdain, most Americans, in fact, agree that the law Cornyn helped pass was the right thing for the country. Pew research indicates some 64% of Americans approved of the law, with 32% strongly approving. Even among those who identified as Republicans, more approved of the law than disapproved. More than 6 in 10 people, meanwhile, would like to see stronger gun legislation from Congress.
Yes, there are serious divisions on guns. In a poll taken prior to the Uvalde shooting, about 53% of Americans thought gun laws should be stricter, while 47% disagreed. But views are malleable and they change when specifics are put on the table and as mass shootings increase.
Immigration
Americans have complex views on immigration that aren’t reflected in the totally permissive policies of the progressive left or the “build the wall” rhetoric of the far right.
Polling from 2019 shows that while more than 60% of Americans think people who came here illegally and are already living here should have a path to remain in the U.S. legally, even more than that, 68%, think the nation must increase security along the U.S. Mexico border.
Meanwhile, a 2021 poll showed that 84% of Americans believe “it is very or somewhat important to increase available staff both to patrol and police the border and to quickly process unaccompanied minors.”
What that tells us is something most of us already understand: It is possible to believe we can treat people humanely, expand legal migration and secure the border. The choice isn’t binary. There is space for serious reform, but that reform is hard to achieve because political leaders, the party machines that support them and the polarized media that profits from division are unwilling to accept any deal that could be interpreted as offering the other side a quid pro quo.
A serious approach to immigration policy would embrace these majority perspectives, leading to stronger enforcement and humane treatment of migrants, with greater opportunities to come here legally.
Climate change
If you only tune in to partisan media, climate change is either the most pressing crisis facing humanity or a nonfactor.
In reality, most Americans, including Republicans, believe that climate change is a factor in extreme weather. Some 84% of Americans believe extreme weather is changing their communities in some way. More than 70% believe climate change is playing at least some role.
There are differences between Republicans and Democrats on how much climate change contributes to that weather, and there are strong differences in what the response should be.
But the recognition of the impact of extreme weather alone as a starting point of agreement may help explain why President Joe Biden’s climate-focused Inflation Reduction Act got the support it needed to pass from Democratic senators in Republican-leaning states. And it suggests there are areas of policy agreement that we can work toward, including expansion of renewable energy.
Voting
Most Americans want it to be easier to vote, from automatic registration to making Election Day a national holiday. And most Americans want people to have to show a government-issued ID before they vote.
It seems like it should be simple to think those two things can be true at the same time. But in the zero-sum political world we live in, to embrace one is to reject the other.
Meanwhile, false claims about voter fraud from Republican leaders are eating at the broad support for expanded early and absentee voting. At the same time, progressive Democrats treat voter ID as if it is a major imposition on the right to vote, when it plainly isn’t.
Rejecting the phony fraud narrative while accepting that basic protections like ID are reasonable is something the American middle can gather around. But it’s ever harder to do because so much false information is spread and because it is rewarded in primaries.
Where do we go from here?
Pulling our nation away from the destructive cycle it is in will not be easy. While the polling we reviewed is an encouraging reminder that people do have areas of common ground, it is also true that polarization is spreading. When you look at these same issues from a political party or identity lens, division becomes more apparent. And those identity differences are frequently exploited by those who would gather power. They are also used constantly in the media as the frame to tell the American story.
Political primaries, meanwhile, are becoming races to the far left and the far right. Gerrymandering has shrunk competition between the major parties to a few select House districts around the country. Social media has given radicalism and falsehoods powerful platforms to undermine facts and comity. Cable news has largely abandoned journalism for polemicism.
Meanwhile, local newspapers that were long committed to offering a balance of perspectives are struggling to find a sustainable financial model. Network news that hewed to standards of balance and telling the facts of the day has lost footing to dubious but constant streams of opinion.
These problems are real. It would be a terrible mistake, though, to fall into the false narrative that is promoted all around us that would have us believe that our differences define us. That isn’t true.
We are defined by our common humanity and we are engaged in a great project to hear each other as fellow citizens in a plural democracy.
We must look at the ways that truth is being undermined and resolve ourselves to reform.
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