Two friends sit across a kitchen table with the news muted on a television in the corner. One believes the country is being torn apart by identifiable enemies working against it. The other believes the tearing is real, but the enemies are not what his friend thinks they are.
My friend, I don't know how you stay so calm about all this. The politicians are lying to us, the preachers on the other side have turned faith into a weapon, the media distorts everything, the professors are indoctrinating our kids, and the elites running all of it don't care what happens to people like us. It's us against them, and it has been for a while now.
That's a lot of enemies for one sentence. Which politicians, which preachers, which professors? And who exactly is "us," and who exactly is "them"?
You know who I mean. The other side. Whichever party you don't vote for, whichever channel you don't watch, whichever pulpit says the opposite of what your pulpit says.
So "them" isn't a specific group with a specific claim you can point to. It's whoever disagrees with you, defined entirely by the disagreement itself.
Don't twist it. I'm not making it up. Politicians lie constantly, and you know it.
Some do, plenty of times, on both sides of the aisle. I'm not disputing that politicians lie. I'm asking whether "politicians lie" is the same claim as "the other party's politicians are trying to destroy the country," because those are very different statements, and only one of them is usually true.
Fine. But the preachers on the other side have turned God into a campaign mascot. They tell their congregations that voting the wrong way is a sin.
Some do. I've criticized that on this site before, from preachers on more than one side of the aisle. But be honest with me. Have you ever heard a sermon on your own side that treated a political opponent as evil rather than simply wrong?
That's different. When our side does it, there's usually a real moral issue underneath it.
That is exactly what the other side says about their own preachers. Everyone believes their tribe's contempt is principled and the other tribe's contempt is propaganda. That belief is not evidence. It's just what tribalism feels like from the inside.
You sound like you're defending them.
I'm not defending anyone. I'm asking you to apply the same standard to your own side that you apply to the other one. That isn't defense. That's consistency.
What about the media, then? You can't tell me the media is fair.
I've written plenty about slanted headlines and misleading framing, from outlets on more than one side. But "the media" isn't one thing. It's thousands of separate outlets and reporters with different incentives, different owners and different audiences. Which specific outlet, which specific story, are you actually upset about right now?
All of it. It's all designed to make us angrier at each other.
On that much, I actually agree with you, though maybe not the way you mean it. Outrage keeps people watching. A calm, accurate story about a policy disagreement gets a fraction of the attention that a story framed as one side trying to destroy the other gets. That's not a conspiracy run by a handful of elites in a back room. It's an incentive structure that rewards whoever can make you angriest, and both political tribes have media outlets happy to supply it.
So you admit there's an elite manipulating us.
I admit there's a business model, and business models don't require a conspiracy, just an audience willing to reward the behavior. That's a different claim than "a small elite secretly controls the discourse." One is an argument about incentives you can actually test. The other is a floating accusation that can be pointed at literally anyone, which usually means it isn't really about evidence at all.
Fine, but academia is a real problem. Professors are openly hostile to half the country and they're shaping how kids think.
I teach college students for a living, so I'll take that one seriously rather than wave it off. There is real, documented ideological imbalance in parts of higher education, and I've said so elsewhere. But "some departments lean heavily one direction" is a specific, testable claim. "Academia is indoctrinating our children" is a much bigger claim, and it treats millions of instructors, most of whom never discuss politics in a chemistry or nursing or engineering classroom, as a single hostile bloc. Which is it that you're actually arguing?
I'm arguing that my kid came home last semester talking like a different person.
That might be a real problem worth examining specifically, in that classroom, with that professor and that assignment. It is not evidence about "academia" as a monolith any more than one bad contractor is evidence that all construction companies are frauds. Specific claims can be investigated. Sweeping claims about entire categories of people mostly just feel satisfying to say out loud.
You keep asking me to be specific. Why does that matter so much to you?
Because specificity is the only thing that can be argued with. If I say Senator so-and-so voted for this specific bill and here's why I think that vote was wrong, you can check the vote, read the bill and tell me I'm wrong with your own evidence. If I say "the politicians" are destroying the country, there's nothing you can check. There's nothing I can be wrong about. It isn't an argument anymore. It's a mood, dressed up as an argument.
A claim you cannot check is a claim you were never actually invited to disagree with. It was only ever asking you to feel the same way, not to think it through.
You think I just want to feel angry?
I think anger is one of the most rewarding emotions a tribe can offer someone, and I don't exempt myself from that pull either. It feels good to know exactly who is to blame and exactly which side you belong to. It's simpler than sitting with the fact that both parties have liars and honest people in them, that both religious traditions have hateful preachers and decent ones, that most professors just want to teach their subject and go home, and that most of "the elite," whoever you mean by that, are just people with more money or status than us who mostly aren't thinking about us at all.
That's a very forgiving way to look at people who are actively hurting this country.
It isn't forgiving. It's precise. I am not telling you nobody is doing harm. Some politicians lie for power. Some preachers turn faith into tribal warfare. Some outlets distort facts on purpose. Some professors do let their politics bleed into grading. All of that is real and worth criticizing specifically, by name, with evidence. What I am refusing to do is take all of that and collapse it into one undifferentiated hatred of half the country, because that hatred doesn't actually target the people doing harm. It targets your neighbor, your cousin, the guy at the hardware store who votes differently than you, none of whom wrote the misleading headline or gave the tribal sermon.
So what am I supposed to do, just decide nobody is at fault?
No. Decide specifically who is at fault, for specifically what, and hold them to it. Vote out the politician who actually lied to you. Stop listening to the preacher who actually turned the pulpit into a campaign office. Stop watching the outlet that actually misled you on a story you can name. Push back on the specific professor who actually crossed a line. That takes real effort, because it requires you to look closely instead of reaching for a label. Hating "them" as a category takes no effort at all, and it changes nothing, because the category was never a real target to begin with.
And if I do that, and I still end up disagreeing with most of what the other side believes?
Then you disagree with them, specifically, on the merits, the way adults are supposed to disagree with each other. That's not the same thing as believing they are traitors, heretics or enemies of the country. You can think an argument is wrong without believing the person making it wants to destroy everything you love. Most of the time, they don't. They usually just love the country differently than you do, or are afraid of a different set of things than you're afraid of.
That's a hard thing to sit with, when everyone around me is so certain about who the enemy is.
It is. Certainty is comfortable, and belonging to a tribe that has already decided who to hate is one of the most comfortable feelings there is. But comfort was never the test of whether something is true. Ask yourself what evidence would ever change your mind about "them." If the honest answer is nothing, you're not holding a political position anymore. You're holding a grudge, and you've dressed it up as patriotism.
The television in the corner has moved on to another segment, another outrage, another villain of the hour. Neither man reaches for the remote. For a moment, at least, the argument in the room feels more honest than the one on the screen.
Division Is Somebody's Business Model
The dialogue above is fictional, but the pattern underneath it is not. Political scientist Lilliana Mason has documented how American political identity has increasingly fused with social identity, so that disagreeing with someone's policy views starts to feel like a personal attack on who they are. Pew Research Center has tracked a steady rise in the share of Americans who view members of the opposing party not merely as wrong but as a threat to the nation's well-being. That shift did not happen by accident, and it does not happen evenly. It is fed by specific incentives: outrage draws more attention than nuance, and attention is what politicians, media outlets, preachers with a platform and, yes, plenty of self-styled elites on every side are actually competing for.
Who, specifically, is being accused? What, specifically, did they do? What evidence would prove the accusation wrong? And critically: does the accusation apply the same standard to your own side that it applies to the other one? A claim that fails all four tests isn't really a political argument. It's tribal signaling wearing an argument's clothes.
None of this means every grievance is manufactured, or that politicians never lie, preachers never turn faith into tribalism, outlets never mislead, or academic institutions never develop real ideological blind spots. All of those things happen, and they deserve specific, named criticism when they do. What doesn't hold up is the leap from those specific failures to a blanket verdict against an entire category of people defined only by which side of a disagreement they happen to stand on.
Hating a category costs nothing and changes nothing. Naming a specific failure and holding it accountable is harder, and it's the only version of this fight that has ever actually worked.
Why This Matters
A nation that convinces itself its own citizens are the enemy has done half the work of its actual adversaries for free. Foreign rivals do not need to destabilize American discourse when large numbers of Americans are willing to do it to each other, one blanket accusation at a time. The politicians, preachers, journalists and professors who do genuine harm deserve to be named, specifically, and held to specific account. The neighbors who simply disagree with you do not belong on that list, and every hour spent hating them as a category is an hour not spent holding the people who actually earned the criticism responsible for it.
References
- Mason, L. (2018). Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity. University of Chicago Press.
- Pew Research Center. Political Polarization and Views of the Opposing Party. pewresearch.org. [Rising share of Americans viewing the opposing party as a threat to the nation.]
- Haidt, J. (2012). The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. Pantheon.
Disclaimer: This piece is a fictional dialogue written to illustrate a broader argument about tribalism and political discourse. It does not name or target any specific individual, party, denomination or institution as uniquely responsible for national division. The views expressed are the personal opinions of the author for educational, commentary and public discourse purposes only and do not represent the positions of any institution, employer, organization or affiliated entity with which the author may be associated in any capacity. Political and religious commentary is protected opinion under the First Amendment.
