What Coffee Shop Talks Have Taught Me About Our Political Division
On a relaxing summer morning, I was eagerly catching up with an old high school friend in a small, dimly lit Bay Area diner. As we were discussing our respective college experiences, I was completely caught off guard by his deep anger with the political climate on campus. He felt ostracized as a conservative amongst “liberal snowflakes who had never worked hard for anything in their life'' who had taken over his campus.
A few months before that, I was grabbing breakfast with a childhood friend at a tasty chicken and waffles restaurant in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I sat across from her, listening as she furiously described the torture she had endured living amongst her “ignorant, racist, Republican community who needed to get their heads out of their asses — who couldn’t understand that this country had changed, and they needed to change with it.”
Despite both friends living in two very different areas and having almost polar opposite political views, they had two things in common: a serious sense of discomfort and exclusion amongst their communities, and a striking desire to complain to me about all of this as I tried to enjoy my coffee.
These are not isolated incidents. These experiences and feelings mirror a country that has reached unprecedented levels of polarization. As a 2020 Pew research poll finds, 89% of Trump supporters and 90% of Biden supporters were very concerned about the other candidate winning the election and believed their victory would cause lasting harm to the country. Likewise, during the election, Trump and Biden supporters had stark differences in views on the economy, health care, foreign policy, and dealing with the coronavirus outbreak.
The American public has been sold the idea for decades that despite the differences in culture, ideology, housing, and race, amongst many other things, we can all set aside our differences. We should be able to work, live, and love each other in the never-ending cliche of the American melting pot. However, if you've traveled much throughout the United States in the past few years, you have surely realized how deep the political divide truly is. As someone who has lived in multiple states with friends and family scattered across this country, I can’t help but question whether this romanticized notion reflects our current reality.
We don’t want to live together anymore
Our divisions aren’t just pushing each side farther away from the center politically: it’s pushing us farther away from each other physically. In the 80’s and 90’s, it was quite common to see many large city neighborhoods and businesses jointly owned by Republicans and Democrats, with store windows decorated with two contrasting bumper stickers and front lawns flocked with picket signs for two different candidates right next to each other. This is not the case in modern America. Both of my friends shared a serious disdain for the respective communities they’ve lived in for decades.
I was shocked when my Republican comrade explained: “I just don't want to live here anymore. It's too exhausting and these people don’t understand me.” This friend was born and raised in the heart of Silicon Valley. Despite never living in any other city or state, he had an intense desire to leave the state of California. He planned to move to Texas, a place he had never visited and had no connections in, merely to be surrounded by those who are like-minded.
While it is easy to write this off as a Republican problem due to the mass exodus that has recently occurred in California, my socialist, Bernie-loving friend in New Mexico echoed this same exact sentiment. Throughout our conversation, she never missed an opportunity to tell me how much she envied me for living in California.
Two state natives who knew no other life outside the communities they were raised in were actively looking to leave these same communities due to their perceived ostracization and exclusion from those communities. Likewise, this deep sense of ostracization from both friends has only made them feel stronger and more adamant about their political beliefs, which makes it far harder for them to compromise or see the other side's point of view. This is a circumstance that is most commonly seen in politically unstable countries. Either amidst or on the brink of civil war, these ethnic, religious, or political minorities feel that they have no option other than to leave the communities they have always lived in, in order to find refuge in places with like-minded individuals.
We aren’t there yet, but we sure as hell should act like we are
Before all the centrist academics and analysts write me off for gaslighting, I am not claiming that the United States is on the brink of collapse or civil war. The reality of the situation is that Americans who decide to leave their communities are doing so for different reasons than those embroiled in political chaos: they are unhappy due to feelings of discomfort, not because they are physically threatened or attacked for their views as a political minority. However, these differences do not mean we can be complacent and act as if everything is normal because the sky hasn’t fallen yet.
We are reaching levels of polarization that we have never experienced before. Americans are beginning to segregate themselves on ideological lines, leading to partisan bubbles rather than politically diverse neighborhoods. This political segregation is only going to make the situation worse as the conversations, debate, and conflict between Democrats and Republicans disappear entirely. If you think it’s hard to understand and sympathize with Republicans or Democrats, just wait until everyone around you thinks the same way you do.
If left unchecked, this can push this country to serious violence. Our political leaders will continue to tell us that the other party is the problem, and it needs to be dealt with in order for us to save the country. Tensions between conservatives and liberals continue to rise at alarming rates, and American civilians like Heather Heyer, the 32-year-old woman who was killed in a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville in 2017, are paying the price. In modern America, any single individual has the potential to cause serious damage to others at the push of a button, a pull of a trigger, or the stomp of a gas pedal. The damage of a large-scale national conflict would be unimaginably grim if worst comes to worst. Americans got simply a taste of what corrosive polarization can do to our country on January 6th, 2021, with only a few hundred extremists attacking the country’s established institutions in a way we had never seen before. But if we let this divide continue, January 6th will neither be the most democracy-threatening event — nor the most dangerous.
So…is it too late?
Despite all of this, a hopeless and cynical view of political division in this country is unwarranted and inaccurate. Because we talk about our problems, America seems more rife with conflict than it actually is. Unlike authoritarian countries, our conflicts and problems are not swept under the rug: rather, they are dealt with directly. To eradicate the hostilities in our current political climate, we need to talk to one another across ideological lines and have conversations en masse. More importantly, we need to not only talk, but listen to the policy concerns of our political opposites. Oftentimes, they are motivated out of genuine personal struggles — but we only see a distorted, partisan framing of their viewpoints.
And how exactly do we talk to each other?
The means to fix this problem is actually part of its source: social media. The public’s trust in mainstream media continues to decline, and as a result, the American reliance on social media continues to increase. Social media has been used in recent years to foster extremist ideologies, and it has often served as an ideological battleground for fanatics and stubborn party supporters. Despite its deep-rooted flaws, it still has potential to spark useful and important dialogue. At its worst, social media can be a catalyst in inciting genocide like in Myanmar. Nevertheless, at its best it can garner support for sexual harassment survivors or change the American conversation on race — like with the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020. The beacon of hope with social media is that it is still politically decentralized, ideologically diverse, and open to everyone. We must realize that attacking people instead of their arguments only leads to a divisive and polarized political future. Once we accomplish this, we will reach two key developments that truly make the world a better place:
We will be able to realize that as a collective, liberal farmers, engineers, and college students are far closer as people — in terms of our values, struggles, and frustrations — to Republican farmers, engineers, and college students than we are to Joe Biden or Donald Trump.
I will be able to enjoy my damn coffee in peace.