The Age of Trump is a symptom of much deeper and older problems in American society and life. Specifically, how there is a deep brokenness and division in this country, one that has been nurtured and grown over the last few decades by a range of actors and societal forces.
The American people do not communicate with one another across the political divide. They do not consume the same news sources and are increasingly stuck in their own personally curated media echo chambers and subjective realities. These echo chambers are made much worse by the algorithm and “technofeudalism”, where private corporations (and wildly wealthy individuals) profit from causing conflict and exasperating some of the worst human behavior.
America’s communities and neighborhoods are also politically and culturally segregated, with values and ways of living that correlate with income and education. Anti-intellectualism, hostility to expertise and science and an embrace of conspiracism have become a defining feature of the American right-wing and “conservatives” in the Age of Trump and the country’s democracy crisis. By comparison, liberals, progressives, centrists and traditional small “c” conservatives still respect expert knowledge and science.
Religion is also highly politicized as well. To that point, research by PRRI shows that White Christianity is now largely the domain of MAGA and authoritarianism. The spaces in civil society and associational life such as unions, bowling leagues and other community activities and “third spaces” have been greatly diminished by gangster capitalism, technological change and a general atrophying of the country’s civic life and social democracy.
In increasing numbers, Americans are not dating, marrying, or generally socializing with members of the other political tribe. The result is a cycle of alienation if not dehumanization of those with whom we disagree about politics.
Political scientists and other experts have long focused on how it was the elites who were polarized and that the average person was much closer to one another in their political values and beliefs ("ideologically innocent"). In the Age of Trump and the years and decades that birthed the democracy crisis, elite polarization has trickled down to the average American. Even more worrisome is how politics and political polarization now mark almost every area of life, which includes such superficially apolitical activities as sports, music, food, fashion and popular culture more broadly.
Americans no longer disagree with one another about politics while still finding areas of broad agreement. The country’s politics are now beset by the phenomenon known as negative partisanship (or affective polarization) where those people on the other side of a given issue are not just wrong but instead are viewed as evil and an existential threat. In such a polarized and divided society, violence as a way of getting and keeping power is viewed as necessary if not inevitable.
With the historic 2024 election, a slim majority of voters chose Donald Trump to be the country’s first elected authoritarian. Whatever their individual motivations or reasoning, the sum result will be massive harm, both structurally and personally, to their fellow Americans. Those Americans who chose to not vote also tacitly gave their consent to such an outcome and the end of multiracial pluralistic democracy.
Thus the ominous question(s) that looms over so much of the Age of Trump and Trump’s promise and threat to be a dictator on “day one”: Have the day-to-day relationships and shared sense of community, norms, reality and meaning that make a healthy society and democracy possible been broken beyond repair? Or are these divides greatly exaggerated and there is much more that ties the American people together than divides them and in the end that may be their salvation?
In an attempt to gain some perspective on these questions and a divided America, I recently spoke with Dr. Kurt Gray. He is a Professor in Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he directs the Deepest Beliefs Lab and the Center for the Science of Moral Understanding. Gray is the co-author of the book “The Mind Club: Who Thinks, What Feels and Why it Matters.” His new book is “Outraged: Why We Fight About Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground.”
In this conversation, Gray cautions that while the American people are very divided there are many areas of agreement that need to be emphasized and nurtured for the good of the country’s social and political life. He explains what the research shows about the tensions between nature and nurture and group dynamics and how it informs political tribalism and polarization. Gray also explains why partisanship distorts our perceptions of our political opponents and the role that fear and survival instincts play in our political decision-making and reality.
How are you feeling about the results of the election? With Trump’s imminent return and his promise to be a dictator on “day one” who will purge the “enemy within,” many Americans are terrified — as they should be. We are truly in unprecedented territory as a country.
Promises of revenge and dictatorships are scary, especially when I — like so many other Americans — care deeply about democracy. It’s okay to feel upset by these promises, although I take some solace knowing that many people who voted for Trump — who also care about democracy — do not believe in these promises.
What are you doing to manage your emotions in the aftermath of what has been described as “the anxiety election”?
I’m a psychologist and so the way I manage any negative feelings is to intellectualize: I think about the causes and context of a situation. Here, that might include thinking about the thoughts and feelings behind the many people who voted differently than most people I know. It also includes thinking about the power of partisanship to shape our perceptions.
What do we know from the research about how partisanship impacts our judgment of others, especially those deemed to be our political enemies and the opposition?
Partisanship distorts our judgments of others. Once we learn that someone is on the “other side” our perceptions of them get vastly more negative. We think of people on the other side as both very stupid — voting against their own self-interest — and very evil, intentionally trying to harm others.
For example, work led by Daniela Goya-Tocchetto demonstrates how people’s minds misrepresent partisan policy trade-offs, like the tension between environmental protections versus blue-collar jobs when it comes to the fossil fuel industry. The data show that Democrats prefer increasing environmental protection at the risk of cutting blue-collar jobs and they regret cutting those jobs. Likewise, Republicans prefer creating blue-collar jobs but regret harming the environment.
However, people neglect these feelings of regret on the other side, believing that our political opponents want to cause harm. Rather than seeing voters and state legislators as well-meaning people trying to navigate thorny trade-offs, we see our opponents as malicious, as trying to burn it all down, like evil superheroes. I call this the “destruction narrative” because the story we tell ourselves is that the millions and millions of voters on the other side are trying to destroy America.
But this isn’t true — each of us is trying our best to protect ourselves and our family. Our actions are better described by the “protection narrative.”
We all learn that humans evolved as apex predators. In museums, there are dioramas with cave people hunting mammoths with spears and movies are filled with examples of aggressive ancestors. But although we sit at the top of the food chain today and our very recent ancestors could hunt many animals with stone tips and spears, for millions of years we were more prey than predator.
Our hominid ancestors were much smaller than we were and were easily preyed upon by big cats and big birds. It wasn’t unusual for a hominid child to be picked up and carried away by a harpy eagle or a sabertoothed cat to creep up on a sleeping family, grab an infant and disappear into the night. It’s likely why humans — and especially kids — are terrified of the dark. It’s prey animals who most fear the threat of the unknown.
More obvious evidence of humans as prey: look at our claws — soft fingernails — and look at the claws of a real predator like a lion. No comparison. But the real evidence that we were preyed upon comes from the anthropological record, which finds ample evidence of predation (much more than scientists once considered) on our historical ancestors (e.g., Australopithecus africanus) and our contemporary primate cousins (e.g., chimpanzees).
It’s because we are more prey than predator that the “protection narrative” makes sense. We are not out there trying to burn down the world; we are sitting huddled at home, worried about the threats that surround us, hoping that someone will protect us from them.
The research and conventional wisdom suggest that the American people are extremely divided and polarized against one another. This applies to a range of political, cultural and social issues — to the degree they can even be disentangled. Add some nuance here if you can.
One thing that is true: we are more separate from the other side than ever before. Our neighborhoods and schools are politically segregated, which means that we rarely have meaningful, positive and repeated contact with people on the other side. And we know from much research in social psychology that meaningful, positive and repeated contact is essential for humanizing the “other side.”
When we only hear about our political opponents on social media or on cable news, it becomes very easy to demonize them and we see them as fundamentally different, with different concerns. Rather than well-meaning, thoughtful people trying to protect themselves, we see them as foolish or evil.
There is a report from the organization More in Common that I really love and it surveys the American electorate and finds that most people are not politically rabid and not bent on the destruction of the other side. Instead, 65% of Americans are part of “the exhausted majority”. They are tired of all the rhetoric and the anger and just want a government that helps them live their lives — and helps them feel safe.
What is the role of “nature vs nurture” in our understanding of political identity, values and feelings of community? And who we define as a member of our "tribe” and someone who is the Other and a potential threat? As we have repeatedly seen, these divisions are easily exploitable for purposes of power and influence.
It is our nature to worry about protecting ourselves, but nurture — our communities — teach us what threats we should most fear. Because we are no longer afraid of the obvious threat of wild animals coming to eat us, our fears are more flexible, shaped into whatever threats are most popular in our social media bubbles. Politicians and the media also capitalize on the long-standing human fear of outgroups — the "Other" — people who seem different from your tribe and who threaten your way of life. For example, during the election, Vance famously — and wrongly — argued that immigrants in Springfield were eating people’s pets.
This rhetoric works because it taps into our primal fear of harm to the innocent and vulnerable — our feelings of being prey, of being threatened by outsiders, allow culture wars to explode. Issues that are ultimately complex questions of policy and tradeoffs — like taxes and tariffs — become stark us-versus-them competitions, where people fear exploitation if the other side wins. Issues involving children are especially supercharged because kids are obviously vulnerable to harm, pushing our harm-focused moral minds to maximum outrage. For example, panic about elementary-school books.
Group dynamics are central to properly understanding politics — especially in a supposed populist moment. What do we know about how cues and permission from a leader impact the behavior of his or her followers? In this case, when Trump and MAGA are “winning” how will that impact their collective psychology and view of the Other, the outgroup? What about the group dynamics of the Democrats, liberals, progressives and the so-called Resistance collectively? We know many of them are tired, exhausted and already disengaging from politics to go into survival mode?
Groups inevitably take cues from their leaders and the psychology of "winning" versus "losing" is interesting. Winners can feel emboldened to make big changes, like conservative judges overturning Roe, or Biden pushing through a giant infrastructure program. Winners also feel less threatened (they just won!) and this can make them calmer and less aggressive. On the other side, losing can spur resistance — both peaceful and violent — but can also be demoralizing, encouraging disconnection and apathy. Moral outrage is something we feel most when we're confident in the righteousness of our groups and although Democrats largely feel righteously opposed to Trump, they are surprised at how many Americans did not share their indignation.
This misperception of consensus has left progressives unbalanced: they thought more people agreed with their perceptions of harm and their assessments of threat and now wonder whether MAGA is mainstream. I study how to make sense of moral disagreement, but many are opposed to trying to understand the other side, especially now on the left, where people feel so threatened. But causing change requires building coalitions and creating allies and that requires understanding people beyond your tribe and also helping them understand you.
