. Pollsters, news anchors and newspaper columnists say America is polarized. The left has caused much progressive damage
, The day before the 2024 presidential election, The New Yorker released an article titled “The Americans Prepping for a Second Civil War,” which seemed to anticipate that a nation-shattering conflict would erupt no matter who won. During President Joe Biden’s term, a 2022 FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos survey found that Americans ranked “political extremism or polarization” as one of their biggest concerns, which was an unusual finding compared with previous poll results.
Earlier polls that had asked the same questions about Americans’ top priorities usually found that the economy and foreign conflicts occupied the top spots. Yes, another election is always around the corner for Americans, and voting tallies remind us of electoral divides. In 2012, Barack Obama beat Mitt Romney by less than 4 percentage points in the popular vote. In 2016, Hillary Clinton finished just over 2 points ahead of Donald Trump, who nevertheless won the Electoral College. In 2020, the difference was near 4 points again. In 2024 it was less than 2 points. You get the idea.
Some choose to describe the period spanning these elections, especially the most recent elections, only from the perspective that we are a polarized populace. “The United States feels roiled by polarization,” researcher Rachel Kleinfeld wrote for the Carnegie Endowment in 2023. “Some scholars claim that Americans are so polarized they are on the brink of civil war.”
Headlines from NBC (“Here’s What’s Driving American’s Increasing Political Polarization”), The Atlantic (“The Doom Spiral of Pernicious Polarization”) and The New Yorker (“How Politics Got So Polarized”), among others, have claimed our nation is starkly divided. Social-media platforms such as Facebook and X (formerly known as Twitter) and cable news programs seem designed for people to argue. Conflict sells advertising and makes for good ratings, but if you watch the evening news or practice “doom scrolling” through social-media feeds before going to bed, you would think Americans have little to nothing in common.