America isn’t politically divided

The old man at the café in Bangkok was from New Jersey too. His birthplace in Newark was on the far side of the state from my home in Cape May, but I told him that Newark was still significant to me because it was the last bit of U.S. soil I touched. I told him that we’d fled the U.S. on the day the airport’s ATC went haywire. He hadn’t heard about that. He hadn’t heard about the plane crash in D.C. in January either. He hadn’t heard about a lot of things. But he was happy to listen.

He was 70. He walked with a cane and used the ASL “I love you” sign to say hello and goodbye. For 18 years he’d been living almost as far as possible from home. He was, in his own words, a mystic; he spent hours each day in deep meditation, learning about the outside world only from chance encounters. His main source of information was another American expatriate, who’d often invite him over for dinner and regale him with the day’s news from Fox. He found the stories interesting, but knew they represented but one narrative. He got some news from videos that came across his YouTube feed, but had been burned enough by AI fake news as to not fully trust anything. He’d never heard of Wikipedia.

I invited him to sit down across from me, and we spoke for an hour about the earthly world he’d left behind. He made clear his own perspective: He bore no ill will to anyone and saw a beauty in everyone’s experience of this world in which he merely superficially resided. He was moved but not surprised by my assessment that the U.S. as we knew it was in its final years. But when I tried to explain why, a funny thing happened: I found I couldn’t explain what anyone was fighting about.

A lot of my time every day is spent watching people argue about American politics. Less of it since I left, but my media consumption still skews American, most of my friends and family are still in America, and as a Wikipedia administrator I choose to, for whatever reason, spend a lot of my allotted hobby time intervening in disputes among people with very strong opinions on American politics. But talking to someone with only limited exposure to American politics since the G.W. Bush administration, how was I to explain the political polarization so ever-present that civil war is increasingly seen as likely?¹

In much of the world, bitter political divides are about starkly different visions for a country. Capitalist or socialist? Monarchical or republican? Secular or religious law? Aligned with one great power or with another? As I tried to explain American politics to the mystic, I was struck by how little of that kind of division there was. Most Americans believe in a federalist representative republican democracy with an individualist and moderately libertarian attitude toward private life, a capitalist economy, a strong sense of national identity and patriotism, and (even if many wouldn’t describe it this way) culturally Christian values. America has had the same constitutional structure for almost a quarter-millennium, and almost everyone likes it that way. There are, to be sure, those who favor more radical change, and these groups do influence the broader movements they are a part of, but they are nonetheless relatively niche.

The political issues that actually get fought over in Congress and the state legislatures are almost always questions of degree, not kind: The military should be powerful, but how powerful? Drugs should be illegal, but how illegal? Crimes should be punished with draconian prison sentences, but how draconian? The government should provide a moderate amount of social safety nets, but to whom and under what conditions? In a vacuum, none of these debates sound like those of a heavily divided body politic. These sound like implementation details for fairly strong national consensuses.

The exception are what broadly get categorized as “social issues”, especially immigration, abortion, and LGBTQ rights. But when Americans approach these with a political mindset, there’s not as much division as you’d expect. Most Americans think abortion should sometimes be allowed and sometimes not. Most Americans dislike it when illegal immigrants commit crimes but like it when they do cheap labor that citizens wouldn’t want to do. Most Americans generally favor being decent to queer people, while rejecting more ideological aspects of modern queer thought. There is more division on these issues than on, say, drug policy, but still not as much as you’d think from the degree of rancor associated with them.

The catch is that most people do not in fact approach these issues with a political mindset. The labels are what matter. A 2018 Gallup survey showed that people are significantly more likely to support first-trimester abortion than identify as pro-choice, and significantly more likely to oppose second-trimester abortion than identify as pro-life. But those labels matter more than a specific set of opinions on the nuances of abortion policy. They and other social-issue labels represent cultural camps, ones only orthogonal to any particular political views.

---

That America is caught in a culture war is not exactly a novel take. But what I came to realize, talking to the old mystic, was that there is little to American politics beyond culture war. Scott Alexander pioneered the idea a decade ago of the Reds and the Blues, two warring tribes in America who somewhat map onto Republican/conservative and Democrat/liberal respectively, but are united by culture, not politics.

The Red Tribe is most classically typified by conservative political beliefs, strong evangelical religious beliefs, creationism, opposing gay marriage, owning guns, eating steak, drinking Coca-Cola, driving SUVs, watching lots of TV, enjoying American football, getting conspicuously upset about terrorists and commies, marrying early, divorcing early, shouting “USA IS NUMBER ONE!!!”, and listening to country music.

The Blue Tribe is most classically typified by liberal political beliefs, vague agnosticism, supporting gay rights, thinking guns are barbaric, eating arugula, drinking fancy bottled water, driving Priuses, reading lots of books, being highly educated, mocking American football, feeling vaguely like they should like soccer but never really being able to get into it, getting conspicuously upset about sexists and bigots, marrying later, constantly pointing out how much more civilized European countries are than America, and listening to “everything except country”.

… I think these “tribes” will turn out to be even stronger categories than politics. Harvard might skew 80-20 in terms of Democrats vs. Republicans, 90-10 in terms of liberals vs. conservatives, but maybe 99-1 in terms of Blues vs. Reds.

Alexander, Scott (2014). “I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup”. Slate Star Codex.

What Alexander only partly saw in the naïve days of the second Obama administration, though, was the degree to which these tribes’ identities were built around opposing each other. It comes through somewhat in the mention of country music. There is nothing inherently conservative about the country/Western genre. Some songs, especially newer ones, have explicitly conservative lyrics, but that’s far from the norm, and the genre’s historical focus on the downtrodden working man would, if these things were rational, make it a Blue-coded genre. But that’s not how it works. The Reds like country, so the Blues must hate country.

When the Red singer-songwriter Oliver Anthony put together a scathing indictment of political elites, the Blues and the Reds were quickly united in determining he meant Democrats, never mind his loud protestations that the song applied to Republicans just as much. When the Red musician Luke Combs covered the Blue heroine Tracy Chapman’s iconic “Fast Car”, Blues spent months debating this act of supposed appropriation, never mind that it had Chapman’s full blessing. And never mind that “Fast Car” is a song about imperfectly overcoming systemic inequality, homelessness, and familial addiction, a woke message of economic justice that liberals ought to want catching on in Red circles. It didn’t matter. Reds liked Combs’ cover, so Blues had to hate it.

The Blues’ tendency to vilify even the most benign Red-coded culture is easy to pick on because it’s so transparently stupid. The corresponding Red tendency, however, is much more dangerous. Blues’ sometimes-preachy “woke” beliefs begat an entirely reactionary “anti-woke” Red movement, in which Blues thinking something is good for minorities is reason enough to oppose it. This leads to positions even more nonsensical than the Blues’ disavowal of the rural working man. As someone who often feels more culturally aligned with the Reds than the Blues, the dissonance of their gender politics in the past decade sticks out to me particularly. In a system that prizes traditional masculinity and often casts “betas” as not real men,² you would expect Reds to welcome the advent of less masculine men ceasing to identify as such. This was a fairly popular conservative view historically, and in one-on-one conversations I find many Reds remain amenable to it. But collectively their fixation on labeling people as men who they would in any other context insist are not worthy of that title—perverting one of the greatest compliments in a proudly patriarchal culture into an insult out of mere spite—shows how the culture war has overtaken the culture: Blues like trans rights, and so Reds, in the 2010s, had to pivot from decades of moderate support for that cause and now strongly oppose it. Like a sports team rivalry, the other side losing matters as much or more as your side winning.

---

Alexander sidesteps what exactly causes these tribal patterns. “Typified by conservative/liberal beliefs” is a bit of a cop-out; it’s not intuitively obvious that these tribes should track with political beliefs, so why do they?

I think it comes down to two warring paradigms:

• Red: It is important to be seen as pure.
• Blue: It is important to be seen as kind.

I’ll be honest about my bias from the outset here: I think these are both corrupt motivations by which to lead a life, although in relative terms the latter is less harmful. Doing what is actually right, not what signals virtue to one’s peers, is what should matter. But here we get to the thing that’s been most obvious to me since leaving the U.S., and that’s how much everything, on the deepest of levels, is colored by Protestant philosophy. Right, left, religious, secular, theistic, atheistic—basically all Americans approach questions from a Protestant framework. American arguments for atheism often rely on Protestant views of sola scriptura and Biblical literalism. American arguments for trans rights often rely on a notion of a true internal nature, as distinct from appearance, that recalls the Christian view of “essence”, as seen in the doctrine of transubstantiation. American criminal law and American popular culture alike have come to revolve around determining whether people privately want to do bad things, in line with the Christian notion of evil thoughts defiling a person, in order to determine who is fundamentally good and who is fundamentally evil, in line with Christian views on salvation.

All of these phenomena, one must note, are much less common outside of the Christian world. To Americans, these things all seem like the default, and so having them characterized as associated with a particular religion—one practiced at this point by only a modest majority of Americans—will likely sound strange. But the more I see of the world the more I realize how distinctly American these ideas are, and how the missing ingredient in every problem unique to America is Protestant Christianity.

One of the most unusual features of Protestantism is sola fide, the idea that salvation comes solely from faith in Jesus as messiah. Across major world religions, as far as I know the only denomination that comes close to a similar belief is Maturidi Sunni Islam. Other Christian and Muslim denominations generally believe that good deeds are required for salvation. So do the Dharmic religions and Judaism, to the extent that their cosmologies can be compared to Christian doctrine.³

While naïvely one might expect Protestants’ sola fide beliefs to make them completely indifferent to ethics, in practice the opposite seems to happen. The idea that all faithful Christians will go to Heaven creates an incentive toward performatively demonstrating that one is worthy of that salvation. Methodists make this explicit, viewing good works as proof of a holy life and thus of impending salvation through faith. Evangelicals, on the other hand, focus on the personal relationship with Christ, signaling their faith through overt communication with G-d.

Being seen as kind, and being seen as pure. The mainline and evangelical paradigms. The Blue and the Red paradigms. Neither about politics. Both about signaling virtue. Both rooted in Protestant thought, and yet entirely capable of surviving in a secular context. Both selfish.

---

The Blues and the Reds will not stop fighting about politics, because neither side is fighting about politics. They are fighting to show their own side that they are worthy of salvation, or of its secular humanist equivalent, reverence in the eyes of their peers. This is what makes America so well-suited to succumb to tyranny. Tyrants don’t care about politics. Tyrants want to control. The boot must stomp down on the face forever. The stomping of the boot is what matters, not why. The people who watch it stomp, who watch the Two Minutes Hate and the public executions and embrace their place beneath the boot, are what matters.

Either side winning the culture war would have been quite bad. Either, I suspect, would eventually have led to the downfall of America.⁴ The Reds winning, however, mean a faster end and a bloodier one. And I have no solution to offer. Political conflicts can be resolved through negotiation on the issues. Tribal conflicts cannot. The only solution to this sort of conflict is radical understanding. But who wants to radically understand their enemy just as things are heating up?

Thrice this past week, I had tea⁵ with a young woman who just finished a three-year stint as a combat soldier in the Israeli army. Over a combined six hours or so, we talked a lot about the state of the world. Israel, America, Russia and Ukraine, China and Taiwan, our shared sense that a proper world war looms, and what we will do if it happens. I told her that I feel sympathy for all sides in every conflict—my lesser cousin to the mystic’s more radical indifference. I told her that I see why she’s taken the course she’s taken in life, and I see why people join Hamas, and I see why people join any fighting force you can think of—not because I agree with the decisions in every case or even most of them,⁶ but because I understand people make imperfect decisions based on their inherently flawed understandings of the world. She agreed with me to a point, but not about Hamas. Not about the people she’d actually fought, and will likely resume fighting once she returns home.

And I understand that too. It’s easy to be zen and see the humanity in everyone when you’re an observer. It’s harder when you’re a participant. Most Blues and Reds don’t want to think about the very human, non-evil things that make the other side want the world they want, any more than Israelis and Palestinians want to think about that. I can stomach thinking that way for now, but maybe I’ll lose my appetite too once things get worse.

---

As when I wrote about leaving America, I don’t have a happy ending here. Things are bad and getting worse. I can only offer this: When I was 16, I had the honor of meeting the 90-year-old Sonia Gibbons, a veteran of the French Resistance.⁷ Mme. Gibbons rescued downed Allied pilots and saw infantry combat against Nazis as part of a guerrilla unit, of which she was the sole survivor. She received a citation from de Gaulle for her rescue work, and was very proud of that, but when I asked her what she was proudest of from her time in the war, her answer was clear: She’d had her young nephew with her the whole time, and she’d kept him safe. That was what mattered, above all else.

When the world gets big and scary, that’s the time to focus on small things. You, reading this, are not going to solve the world’s problems. But you might be able to solve your own problems, and those of some people around you. And maybe when you’re 90 you can talk to high-schoolers and tell them what you’ve learned. Maybe if humanity says “never again” enough times, eventually it’ll stick.

---

This is a Fediverse-enabled WordPress instance. Posts can be boosted or followed by searching this URL in your Fediverse client.

1. I don’t actually think civil war is that likely, but only because I’m skeptical the American left is willing to engage in widespread violent conflict even in the event of a full-blown autocratic takeover. A future like Russia’s seems much more likely. ↩︎
2. See generally: Collins, Chet, et al. (writers); Falbo, Tyler (director) (2023). “when you bring seltzers to the pregame“. Almost Friday TV. ↩︎
3. Many Americans don’t realize this, and assume that all religions teach they are the sole path to Heaven. Yet at the same time, many personally are uncomfortable with the idea. While I’m not aware of polling on causes of salvation, the converse question has been posed, showing that a third of American Protestants believe that non-Christians and even non-theists can go to Heaven. ↩︎
4. My wife inquires why I think a decisive Blue victory would have led to the downfall of America. Blues’ willingness to completely forsake groups who rationally deserve liberals’ protection but are themselves Reds, such as poor rural whites, coupled with their tendency to see minorities’ support as an entitlement regardless of how much or little they’ve done to advocate for those groups, would inevitably lead to mass disaffection, and eventually civil unrest. One could argue that the Reds’ victory in the culture war is itself a result of this almost happening. ↩︎
5. Specifically yuzu matcha. I highly recommend it. Yes it’s just a mix of two super trendy ingredients but it’s soooo good. ↩︎
6. I am opposed to the existence of organized militaries in general. ↩︎
7. Apparently Mme. Gibbons published a memoir shortly before her death, which includes a chapter on her service in World War II. I haven’t read it, so can’t quite recommend it, but am including a link for anyone curious to know more about her story. ↩︎