How do you handle living in a country where there are two sides who lack any basic consensus on the interpretation of nearly every basic social or policy issue? America is so polarized that it actually consists of two nations inhabiting the same place and locked in civil war. Is this normal? Can it go on forever? Is it just a more extreme version of the divisions that have existed in every society for all of history?
These topics are difficult to discuss because each side tends to describe the other in such dismissive terms and in such bad faith that it becomes difficult to discern why “good people are divided by politics and religion,” to use the title of social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s 2012 book. Answering why this is the case requires a careful investigation, not pithy one-liners.
The purpose of this journal is to investigate the nature of these differences between the people of the most powerful country in the world. It’s best to give others the benefit of the doubt and realize that most people are trapped in their own intellectual and moral bubbles, no matter how intelligent and cultured they may initially seem. There must be reasons why this is the case, and anyone who wants a holistic understanding of where America is today needs to understand these bubbles while remaining outside of them.