religion

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.

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