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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SubscribeA free market allows suppliers to compete to win business from all of us. We pick the suppliers who do it best. That’s democracy; every. single. day. That’s why the Left hate it. They want to choose for us what our allowance for the day will be, and for us to kiss their back sides in gratitude.
But it doesn’t allow workers to pick which business to work for in aggregate, because there is no public employer of last resort.
People have to get hired to eat. Businesses only need to hire if there is a profit to be had. Which is why we have a systemic shortage of jobs – 3,500,000 without work that want it, and only 500,000 vacancies. That’s a five out of six lack of jobs.
It is this power asymmetry that explains why the ‘free market’ doesn’t really exist. ‘No deal’ isn’t an option. Correct that and businesses will have to compete – for both customers and labour, which then drives forward productivity and automation. Learning to do more with less.
No more bailout for failing businesses because ‘what about the jobs’.
No more cheap labour and suppression of the labour share of output.
We can turn competition up to 11. Those businesses that increase their capital depth and productivity will survive. Those that don’t will die.
If you want a free market, everybody has to be able to walk away from it and come back when there is a better offer on the table.
So let’s create one and transition the furlough scheme to true full employment. Let’s see what a truly free market can achieve. One permanently free of the threat of unemployment.
Well your dream seems to have come true in the US, where millions are refusing to take available jobs because the govt is paying them so much in Covid relief etc.
In March, the US government sent a one-time $1400 stimulus check to 90 million Americans, most of whom have few to no savings while it is notoriously hard to receive unemployment benefits. Hardly a welfare culture.
You’ve been watching too much FOX Murdoch media lies.
I am a huge proponent of universal basic income. A €1000 monthly unconditional allowance would change the lives of most working-class and middle-class people.
Coupled with a very strict migration policy, this would reverse the power relationship between workers and their corporate lords.
Where will the £600bn come from each year?
People who work of course…
Thats about £700 per month. JSA is £75 plus rent/mortgage plus council tax so probably a single unemployed person already gets that amount. The unemployed who lose out are couples who get about £100 per week plus other benefits -so they would do better.
well this aged well
That sounds good on paper but in practice, a free market economy inexorably reverts to some form of feudalism. Thanks to the magic of mergers and acquisitions, every market ends up being dominated by a few mega-corporations which in turn use their dominant position to jack up prices and fleece consumers.
Thanks to their strong lobbying powers, corporate elites are able to capture the State, and public institutions are subverted to serve private profit.
In the name of free markets, corporate elites demand privatization when the economy is doing well, so they can acquire assets, but in hard times, predators cast themselves as too big to fail and use their political power to get protection from the state, even getting the government into debt to ensure their survival.
In other words, socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor
The Free Market mantra has one major flaw, it does not account for our very twisted human nature. Thomas Hobbes considered humans to be naturally vainglorious and so seek to dominate others, hence the need for a strong government able to keep everyone — and especially the powerful — in check.
This is the plague of our age. All across Western Europe, many voters like myself — who are economically progressive but socially conservative — find themselves stuck in political limbo.
I feel exactly the same, Noah.
It’s sort of inevitable that even if political culture changes over time, it won’ t do it all at once, isn’t it?
But there is nothing inherent in conservatism, historically, that says it’s not interested in big projects, or spending, or interventions in the economy. The Conservative Party, and certainly conservatism, did not just begin to exist in 1975.
I think there is a sense of some of that last forty years of fiscal thinking that is no longer taken so much for granted among conservatives throughout the west. Certainly looking at things like protectionism or building up of national capacities and industries is not entirely compatible with the globalist free-marketism of many recent conservatives. Concerns about movement of labour which at the moment are being most heard by conservatives are opposed to the principles of globalist capitalism (though not traditional conservatism going back for a much longer period of time, or leftism for that matter.) I even read an article recently about a program for housing the homeless, in a very conservative North American city, where the mayor said it just made fiscal sense to do this as it ultimately cost the state more to deal with a large homeless population.
I have watched the interview and have to say was very impressed with Houchen. He was very up front about the airport saying if it failed it wouldn’t be saved but added that he’d told the people of Tees Valley that this was the case. With regards to freeports, managing to get a large company such as GE to build a manufacturing site on the freeport was also impressive. What ever his free market sensibilities, Houchen seems to be doing his best to give the people of Tees Valley a better future.
Free Trade Fundamentalism? Really? Free trade has brought more prosperity, more freedom, increased health, education and a better quality of life to billions around the world.
People generally do not want the government telling them how to live their lives, they want to be left alone. Yes, a government should create the conditions for trade to flourish and then generally leave it alone with simple and effective regulation. That is what the Conservatives usually represent. the last year has been different for obvious reasons.
The reasons the Conservatives continue to survive and flourish is that they can change to changing circumstances but the core philosophy remains.
An interesting viewpoint and one more reason I’d like to see Unherd post a few extended essays on how to achieve greater economic equality post-pandemic without bankrupting future generations by printing massive amounts of money. Economics seems to be a topic Unherd avoids except in 500-word ‘idea’ pieces.
Could Ben explain why Labour won the nearby North Tyneside mayoralty election?
Except that Thatcher increased the size of government. True she privatised some stuff but she definitely created bigger government that actually implements policy. The tories like big government probably as much as labour.
Google ‘Teesside regeneration’
No one is being fooled.
Currently the economic consensus is on productivity gains, growth towards net zero and reducing spatial inequalities with the Left favouring State Welfarism in balance with Corporate Welfarism alongside global Wokeism and the Right favouring Corporate Welfarism in balance with State Welfarism alongside national ecological rationality.
Something like that anyway.
However, this consensus needs to be contextualised within reducing surplus carbon energy which is simultaneously in a direct relationship with prosperity and an inverse relationship with carbon emissions within the context of human population growth.
https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/2021/05/16/199-an-american-nightmare/comment-page-1/#comment-24986
It sounds complicated because it is. We are entering an unprecedented period in the history of the human species and grandstanding cultural dogma which discriminates on the basis of race, ethnicity, colour, sex and gender or a nondescript Socialist State that does not take into consideration surplus energy economics is not exactly the best way to prepare ourselves culturally or economically for a crisis ridden future.