We Cannot Know Each Other Like This

‍ ‍America cannot govern itself through caricatures of its people.

We have never had more access to one another.

We carry windows into millions of American lives in our pockets. We can see what strangers eat, fear, celebrate, resent, and believe. Yet in my lifetime, Americans have never seemed more fearful of their fellow Americans.

Earlier this year, the Pew Research Center reported that the United States was the only one of 25 countries surveyed where more people described the morals and ethics of their fellow citizens as bad than good. Fifty-three percent of Americans rendered that judgment against the country around them.

Another Pew analysis found that only 34 percent of Americans believe most people can be trusted, down from 46 percent in 1972.

We are not merely divided. We are becoming strangers who have been taught to regard one another as suspects.

Some of that estrangement is physical. An analysis tracking 143 million voters found that partisan segregation has increased from congressional districts all the way down to census blocks. Our work, housing, education, and geography increasingly sort us among people whose lives and politics resemble our own.

More often, the American unlike us arrives through a screen.

Those screens promise something raw and real. A life compressed into 60 seconds. A shaky vertical video, a catchy song, a few lines of subtitles. We are shown an angry parent, an unhinged protester, a frightened immigrant, a cruel official, a smug student, or a furious worker and told that we have met a whole category of people.

The clip may be real. The story constructed from it may still be a lie.

A true moment becomes propaganda when it is selected to stand for millions of lives. We see the most inflammatory examples of one another until the exception begins to feel typical. We learn generations, parties, races, religions, occupations, and zip codes as though they were character diagnoses.

The systems delivering these images do not need to conspire against us. They only need to pursue their incentives. A preregistered audit of Twitter’s ranking system found that its engagement-based algorithm amplified emotionally charged and hostile political content more than a chronological feed, even though users did not prefer the political posts it selected.

The platforms do not even need to hide the other side from us. They can profit by showing it to us at its worst.

Political campaigns, partisan media, influencers, and advertisers complete the translation. Human beings become audiences. Audiences become segments. Segments can be targeted, frightened, flattered, and sold.

A person is more difficult. A person can surprise you.

That lost complexity matters. Recent research involving more than 9,000 participants found that Americans substantially underestimate the range of beliefs within the opposing party. We imagine disciplined enemy blocs where there are actually millions of inconsistent, complicated people.

We argue against composites. We govern through stereotypes. We talk past one another because we are rarely addressing the person who is actually there.

This does not mean our disagreements are imaginary. Some beliefs are cruel. Some interests are irreconcilable. Evil and greed remain alive and well within the human experience. Listening does not make injustice harmless, and understanding someone does not require absolving them.

But judgment should answer to what a person actually believes, says, and does. Not to an avatar assembled for them by people who benefit from our fear.

A self-governing people must be capable of encountering one another in full. That does not require agreement. It requires enough humility to wait our turn, let another person’s words land, and consider them before preparing our reply.

No one can do all things, share all joys, or suffer all pains. Whatever wisdom we possess is limited by the boundaries of the life we have lived. We need one another to see beyond them.

I believe that most people want some measure of security, comfort, dignity, and opportunity. But that is an assumption. Assumptions should be tested in the field.

I am not much of a small-talk person. I favor the large questions and the difficult thoughts. What does America mean to you? What do Americans owe one another? What have you lived that the rest of us might need to understand?

So I have begun sitting down with Americans and asking.

Among Americans is not a representative survey, an argument that we secretly agree, or a promise that conversation will heal every division. It is an attempt to create a place where people can appear as more than the categories assigned to them. I will begin sharing those conversations later this week.

Every friend began as a stranger. Conversation will not redeem everyone, but sometimes it can break the strain of the strange long enough for us to recognize something familiar in one another.

I find that people yell a lot less when speaking is enough to get the message through.