Americans aren't as divided as we appear. Credit: Sean Rayford/Getty Images
In the story America tells about 9/11, the attack was a tragedy, but a tragedy that united the nation. “We were able to come together as a country at that terrible time; we put aside differences,” said Hillary Clinton on Sunday, the 21st anniversary. “I wish we could find ways of doing that again.”
Like the rest of America’s ruling class, Clinton fears we are hopelessly divided, possibly forever. The media tends to agree. Books and op-eds are churned out, hyping everything from the “polarisation spiral” to predictions of a coming civil war. We are past the point of no return, pundits warn. Apparently even scholars of polarisation are polarised, according to the New York Times. As Tiffany Cross put it on her MSNBC show a few weeks ago: “People keep saying a civil war is coming. I would say a civil war is here. And I don’t mean to be hyperbolic.”
The trouble it is, it is hyperbolic. It’s true that our political and media elites, and those who run corporations and Big Tech companies, are increasingly partisan. But that’s because they have a lot to gain — in terms of money and power — from making Americans hate each other. Nevertheless, despite the billions and billions of dollars being spent trying to divide us, polarisation remains an elite phenomenon. When it comes to the fundamental values this nation was founded on, Americans are much more united than they are divided.
The evidence is everywhere. Last week, for instance, Gallup reported the latest approval rating for interracial marriage between black and white people. The polling company first started asking Americans about their feelings on the subject in 1958, when approval was an abysmal 4%. As of 2022, it stands at 94%, and there is almost no difference between white and non-white respondents. The regional difference has also evaporated. Southern Americans now approve of interracial marriage at the same rate as their eastern, Midwestern, and western neighbours. As recently as 1991, approval for interracial marriage in the south was at just 33%, compared to 54% in the east and 60% in the west. Today, those figures are 93%, 94%, and 97% respectively.
You could argue that people haven’t become less racist, but simply less willing to admit their racism to pollsters. But even that is a huge leap forward. 93% of Southern Americans want pollsters, and presumably also their neighbours, to believe that they have the same views as the liberals they probably mocked just 20 years ago. Racism has become socially taboo.
Something similar has happened with gay marriage. Approval among Republicans has absolutely soared in recent years — from 16% in 1995 to 55% last year, including 61% of young Republicans. Many believe that at least ten Senate Republicans will join the Democrats in enshrining the right to gay marriage into law. At a time of intense polarisation — when even baby formula divides the house — this is a major feat.
And then there’s abortion, an issue that the media and our politicians assume is hugely divisive. In fact, the vast majority of Americans agree on the major points. They oppose abortion bans and want it to be generally legal in the first trimester, and in cases of rape, incest or where the mother’s health is threatened. On criminal justice, too, there is no longer a partisan divide. In recent years, Republicans have been at the forefront of criminal justice reform. Red states like Oklahoma, Georgia and Idaho have been quietly releasing prisoners and reforming their justice systems for the better part of a decade. Supreme Court justice Neil Gorsuch has consistently sided with liberal judges in criminal justice cases. And President Trump’s First Step Act released 5,000 black men from prison, although those men seem to be the only ones who took any notice.
Even when it comes to police brutality, Republicans have been becoming more vocal. In the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020, the South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham announced he was seeking proposals to improve policing and combat “racial discrimination regarding the use of force”. Soon after, Senator Tim Scott, the only black Republican senator, introduced a police reform bill — which was later killed by Democrats.
Scott and Graham were joined by none other than the then-leader of the Republican Senate majority, Mitch McConnell, who told reporters in the wake of Floyd’s murder: “We are still wrestling with America’s original sin. It is perfectly clear we are a long way from the finish line.” And at a lunch for Republican senators, Tom Cotton of Arkansas stood up and said: “Young Black men have a very different experience with law enforcement in this nation than white people, and that’s their impression and experience, and we need to be sensitive to that and do all we can to change it.”
Meanwhile, the most vocal Democrats on the subject are those who support progressive prosecutors and bail reform efforts — policies often billed as divisive. But they are not divisive; they are just wildly unpopular — like Republican efforts to ban abortion in all cases. Democrat and Republican Americans alike oppose these measures, especially now, amid a crime wave. Our elites want us to believe these issues divide Americans, but they simply don’t.
The Pew Research Center recently released a study that they claimed showed signs of “partisan hostility” growing. “Growing shares of both Republicans and Democrats say members of the other party are more immoral, dishonest, closed-minded than other Americans,” the study claimed to find. But the questions they asked respondents weren’t about members of the other party as much as they were about the parties themselves, or politicians: “Do you have a favourable or unfavourable opinion of the Republican Party, or the Democratic Party?”; “How well do each of the following phrases describe the Republican or Democrat Party?”; “How much do you like or dislike Republican or Democrat political leaders who…” People aren’t turning on their fellow Americans so much as they are on political parties and leaders.
And it’s not just this study that suggests so; a 2019 study by James Druckman and Matthew Levendusky in Public Opinion Quarterly found that “when answering questions about the other party, individuals think about elites more than voters”. When the elites of the party were separated out from average Americans, the researchers found that on every measure, “respondents are more negative toward the elites of the other party than they are toward voters”. And Anthony Fowler, a professor of Public Policy at the University of Chicago, has done numerous studies that fly in the face of the polarisation narrative, finding that voters are more moderate, more informed by policy, and more willing to change their views than many in power would have you to believe. “To be sure, there are real policy disagreements among Americans,” writes Fowler. “But for every extreme liberal or conservative who agrees with their party on most issues, there are far more people in the middle who think that Nancy Pelosi is too far to the Left and that Mitch McConnell is too far to the Right.”
Every week, I talk to working-class Americans across the country who work with people who disagree with them on politics. They tell me the same thing over and over: we don’t have the luxury of hating co-workers who vote for the other party. We rely on them too much. Party politics just doesn’t matter as much as having a good working relationship. It’s our elites who want us to believe that we are divided, simply because it benefits them.
It’s clear how this works in politics: if you can convince you constituents that the person you’re running against is a fascist — or a groomer — then the race is over. Because if the choice is you or Hitler, you pretty much have it in the bag. And if you can also convince people that your opponents’ supporters and voters are fascists and deplorables, who cling to their guns and their Bibles and their bigotries, well, who wants to be in that category? Divisiveness in politics is a shortcut — a workaround to actually having to deliver the promises you make your constituents.
Something similar has happened to the mainstream media. With the collapse of the local newspaper industry, a new business model has emerged that is diametrically opposed to the goal of getting the widest circulation. The business incentives of digital media see success in terms of engagement rather than circulation or ad revenue, and the tools of digital media make it possible to target content to specific audiences based on income and zip code. Online publishing software tells you exactly what these audiences are clicking on, how often, and for how long — so you can give readers more and more and more of it. Of course, the most engaged readers online are always the most extreme, which means that our news outlets gain most by catering to them.
Social media companies work in a similar way. The currency there is attention, and the stronger you feel about something, the longer you stay on a page dedicated to it, and the more likely you are to click on an ad. Every time you hate a stranger on the internet, someone makes money.
At a time when the death of Elizabeth II is uniting her nation in grief, it’s hard to watch our own head of state fall into this trap. President Biden — who campaigned on unifying the country, and promised to represent not only those who voted for him but also those who did not — has made a habit of casting his political opponents as extremists. Recently, for instance, he has smeared MAGA Republicans as “semi-fascists” and a threat to democracy. Not exactly the behaviour of a unifier.
The thing that was miraculous about the response to 9/11 was not that Americans united, because we were not divided. It’s that our leaders did: they showed the grace that ordinary Americans show every single day, working alongside each other in nursing homes in Florida and factories in Iowa and construction sites in Minnesota. For once, our leaders were worthy of our support. For once, they were representing us. Today, by contrast, they simply demand that we defend them — to the extend that it means indulging in meaningless fantasies about a looming civil war.
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SubscribeAnd will she be handing back the money she made the from globalist, neo-liberal Goldman Sachs etc? Will the Clinton Foundation be compensating the families of the tens of thousands of Americans who died from opioids at least partly due to NAFTA.
I thought not. The Clintons make Trump look like Mother Theresa. And having got rid of him they are copying his policies. By God these people are evil.
Sounds like a rip off of Trumps America First agenda to me. America has given their power and influence away to China in less than 30 years. I dont see it coming back any time soon.
Yes they seem to be lurching from one policy to the next, first cancelling the pipeline and creating a lot of unemployment , then stating they must put America first. I don’t know how Hilary Clinton fits into this new regime as I thought she had lost fairly conclusively in 2016? I suppose she is younger than Biden-perhaps there might be a Trump v Clinton 2024 run for President?
This sad yet evil woman so desperately wants to remain relevant.
With no mention of her own involvement in the China policy of the past 30 years Were you really expecting self-awareness from Herself? China represents a vision of the fantasy US that she and other leftist control freaks have always wanted.
The economic logic of re-shoring would seem to hurt the Democrat’s middle class voting base. However, I suspect they’ll mitigate its impacts, by turning a blind eye to illegal immigration and using government money to pump up asset prices, for the asset owning classes, who vote for them.
It will sow the seeds of a future crash but will win elections, so they don’t care.
The economic logic of re-shoring would seem to hurt the Democrat’s middle class voting base.
The Dems have no use for such a voting group, as those people tend to have jobs and are not dependent on govt handouts. They’re not victims, they don’t go around breaking things and screaming.
You have a strange notion of who votes for Democrat candidates. For example, over 81 million Americans voted for Biden — is it your claim that they are all victims that go around breaking things and screaming?
I’ll answer this. Yes, because those who are breaking things and screaming are acting in what is held by the Bidens of this world (and their supporters) to be a ‘noble cause’, that is, of erasing the individual and his ‘rights’ and replacing them with duties towards the ‘collective’.
And what would the appalling Hillary Clinton, who has never done a day’s useful work in her life, know about ‘the means of production’? Of course, given her involvement in Libya and other similar ventures she knows quite a lot about ‘the means of destruction’. Will these people ever go away?
H Clinton lacks the moral gyroscope without which it is not possible to become a woman worthy of respect, let alone President of the USA. The fact that she failed, twice to become President. says much for the democratic system. I would not pay attention to, let alone follow, one word from this woman.
I’d have thought a lack of moral gyroscope would make one almost over-qualified for high office.
She is like a flag in the wind. Where is the humility? She can say – we got it wrong . I made a mistake. I could listen to that. But this pure plagiarism of Trump policy.
I don’t even like Trump, I like her even less.
Hello, welcome to just that choice that most Americans made in that election.
“Maybe some unintended consequence of war down the road.”
Clinton makes it sound so trivial.
Given Clinton is likely heavily involved in giving orders to Biden and well connected in Globalist circles, this is very important. I thought it was just me, but as others have said this is practically Trumpian.
Beggars belief that the only recent Clinton reference on publically funded BBC News is her exortation to throw more good money and American children at Afghanistan in the name of Who Knows What. As a preference to saying “We Screwed Up”, perhaps.
(As an aside, I agree with Clinton’s concerns about “many thousands of Afghans” who had worked with the US and Nato during the conflict and short of her proposal for “a large visa programme should be set up to provide for any refugees” – please God she means just the USA – I’ve no solution).
Anyway, well done Unherd in picking this one up.
I very much hope that Biden pays no attention to HC, and that the Clintons are not allowed anywhere near the White House.
Is she basically saying Trump was right?
Somebody earlier made a not unreasonable point that there is not much love being shown to Clinton in the comments.
My question to those that view her positively (and so follow her speeches more closely) is this – how do you square what she has said here, with your understanding of her position up to this point?
Then on to your point which is in what way does this materially differ (taking for granted that style and tone are very different) from what Trump has been saying since GE2016?
Free speech forever, sure, but there was no need to rebroadcast anything this appalling woman extruded. Bad judgement, Unherd.
Many days late and even more dollars short. Thanks, neoliberals!
Looks as though Hilary Clinton has few admirers on this site.
From their vehemence I’d be suspicious of how detached or neutral their viewpoint..
So people ignorant of all her years in the public eye should voice their viewpoint? This lady has a very public record to come to anyone’s conclusions about her.
Yes, it’s good not to presume what a person will say, but it is also good to listen to what they say, and what they have said, and to which audience.
Kick China out of the WTO, impose huge sanctions (like happened to South Africa with apartheid) that’s just for starters
One of the rew things I can go along with her on. See Nikki Haley – the first woman destined to be US President! – on PragerU extolling the same point. We minimised trade with Soviet Russia in order to frustrate their world domination attempt, with success. We now need to reverse our trade dependence on China for the same reasons.
In the 90’s Bill Clinton tried to bring them into the fold as did Bush and Obama. That failed. Problems could be big if Biden really does have interests in China. It is a relevant matter for investigation. The US security services need to get back to the day job.
Haley says, “Making America dependent on China for critical supplies didn’t happen by accident. It’s part of a strategic plan.” She then proceeds to insinuate that it’s entirely the fault of the Communist Party of China, when US companies were happy to stop producing these critical supplies, or to produce them in China, whenever they saw it as profitable. These Western companies are as much responsible for China’s edge over the West as the CPC, and they are equally as responsible for this strategic plan.
Not what she said in the vid. But her over riding point is that we need to treat the CCC like we treated the USSR. That means a total reversal of a great deal that has been accepted by all Western Democracies. It has massive implications across the board. And she is right.
If we’re talking about the same PragerU video, China – Friend or Foe, then “Making America dependent on China for critical supplies didn’t happen by accident. It’s part of a strategic plan” is exactly what she said, according to both the subtitles and my ears (01:42-01:50). She may be right about the need for Western disengagement, but her implication that China is solely responsible for this strategic plan is ridiculous. Western companies were not forced to cease production or move to China, and if the West continues to allow these companies free rein to pursue profits regardless of social costs, further problems can be expected.
Was that really Hillary saying that? Does she not know that our country was given to China by absolute power-seeking-regardless-of-cost-globalists? That would include David Rockefeller and every administration from Bush-Reagan until today with but one exception. That exception had his place taken, and I mean taken, by one who bragged about having the most fraudulent voting system in United States history at work for him. Orwell knew.
I would like to have my interview at the Pearly Gates just behind Hillary, just to eavesdrop on the codswallop she would spew. I would be waiting quite the while through her hearing. Ha. Then I would be sent down as well for my mirth and eye rolls, surely.
How naïve of Ronnie Ray-Gun and Tatcher to believe that the consequences of their moronic neoliberalism would be any different. Their governments never played fair in international trade, so expecting the Chinese to do it is downright pathetic.
It would be interesting to compare the economic cost of reestablishing western manufacturing systems to the obscene profits made by the “liberal industrialists” that were set free by Ronnie & Tatcher to sell the whole system overseas.
Even more amusing is the “cover” this ridiculous narrative that trade would liberalize China gave to the Americans who enriched themselves by offshoring industrial production at the expense of their fellow citizens in the working classes. Revolting.
When the facts change, the lady changes her mind. Which is entirely sensible. Well done, Hillary
Unfortunately she is always wrong.
Reshoring supply chains and taking back the means of production are a long way from challenging the economic model of “everything is a market” and things are only valuable if someone can make a profit from them.
Still, perhaps Ms Clinton is “on a journey” as they say. We must allow even those disliked by UnHerd to change.
Change begins by saying “I was wrong,” and you will never hear those three words coming from that evil person.
Unless she changes, perhaps?