Cheer Up, America, We’re Not as Divided as We Think

“Most U.S. adults see no end in sight for country’s political divisions.”

—Recent Pew Poll Headline

Americans feel down about our political divide, and there is no sign that we’re going to feel better anytime soon.

A 2024 Marist poll showed that 82% of Americans believe our divisions are a threat to our democracy. A 2025 Pew poll revealed that 80% of Americans believe Republicans and Democrats cannot agree on basic facts. A more recent Pew poll showed that a majority of Americans see our divisions getting worse in the future. If all you read were these polls, you would think American society is in a polarization death spiral from which we cannot recover.

To be clear, there really are deep divisions in American society. Those divisions will partially have to be worked out at the voting booth or at the dinner table. However, I believe there is an even deeper danger here. That danger starts with a fact clearly demonstrated in my own field of psychology: Americans believe their enemies disagree with them more than they actually do.

Conservatives and Liberals Are Not as Different as Rumor Makes Them

For quite some time, data has shown that American liberals and conservatives wildly underestimate how much they agree with the other side. In 2012, prominent researchers Jesse Graham, Brian Nosek, and Jonathan Haidt showed that liberals and conservatives generally share a lot more moral values than they think they do. A 2022 Northwestern University study showed that this kind of agreement underestimation occurs in part because people imagine extreme (and non-representative) examples of the other party. Even apparent differences often mask underlying similarities. For example, it seems like conservatives and liberals radically differ on DEI. But years ago, a study compared how conservatives and liberals felt about the precursor to DEI, affirmative action. And it turns out that conservatives and liberals did differ on affirmative action, but underlying this apparent disagreement was a striking level of consensus about the importance of merit: Both groups preferred affirmative action when they believed it was tied to rewarding excellence (and supported it less when it wasn’t).

The gap between perception and reality is likely getting worse over time. After the 2024 election, I pointed out that while in our data both Republicans and Democrats agreed that Nazis were terrible, they both believed the other side endorsed Nazism more than they actually do. We collected data this summer similarly revealing that whereas both liberal and conservative Americans agree that authoritarianism is bad, both sides believe the other side is far more authoritarian than they actually are.

Falsely Perceived Division is Dangerous…

This exaggerated sense of division is potentially dangerous: The false perception of a threatening enemy might ultimately create real division out of people that largely agreed in the beginning. Recent research from our own lab shows that perceived threat is a consistent predictor of authoritarianism across every geographic region in the world—for both left-wing and right-wing people. While these data are correlational, they nonetheless suggest that the perception of (even false) threat can cause a real authoritarian response in the long run. Republicans shouting that Democrats support stolen elections or Democrats shouting that Republicans support dictatorships may in one sense be standard political fare worthy of an eye roll from the average citizen. On the other hand, to the degree that such language causes people to misperceive the intentions and beliefs of the other side, it might eventually drive us to the edge of a cliff that we cannot come back from.

…But We’re Still OK

We’re not close to that cliff edge yet.

The constant talk of doom and gloom has to be placed against a historical background. It’s worth remembering that we’ve actually been through much worse. We survived Andrew Jackson using the post office to censor his enemies. We survived a civil war. We survived the riots and unrest of the 1960s. And while we cannot take anything for granted, the odds are, we will survive this too.

We are, by far, the world’s longest standing democracy. None of our European neighbors even come close. In fact, in the time we’ve been a democracy, almost all of our European allies have had dictatorial forms of government at one point or another, some of them not that long ago in historical terms. Europe had barely scratched the surface of a stable representative democracy when we were born as one. Europe has gone through countless dictators since then. And yet here we remain. Still standing.

This isn’t by accident. Our system, more than any system in history, is set up to absorb the kind of serious division that can throw societies into an authoritarian lurch. Our Founding Fathers truly were political geniuses. They created, both in spirit and in practice, a system designed to overcome the fatal flaw in democracy: That one side can win an election and force everyone to agree with them by fiat. Our system thus purposefully divides power across many avenues in order to protect the people who lost the vote from the people who won it.

So, cheer up, America! Despite all the negativity that often surrounds media narratives these days, despite all the mudslinging our politicians engage in, America is still objectively an awesome place to live in. World Values Survey data consistently show that Americans are among the most racially and religiously tolerant people in the world. We are also one of the most generous countries in the world. America still ranks among the world leaders in economic freedom. And despite all our differences, 86% of Americans say they are grateful to live here.

Americans, we woke up today in the longest-running democracy in history. Let’s not throw it away because we imagine monsters under our bed from the other side of the political aisle.

At least talk to them over dinner first.