“Division” has got to be the jaded intellectual’s favorite word, and for good reason. It is conveniently nonspecific, pleasantly — perhaps relievingly — reductive, consumes just three syllables of one’s time, and rings familiar to anyone who has endured at least three years of elementary school math.
It’s no wonder then that division has become the focal point of academic and political discourse among inhabitants of ivory towers and middle class suburbs across America. At institutions of higher education, course after course is dedicated to the study and counteraction of polarization. Keynote speakers proclaim the threats of division to democracy, liberty, and goodwill. Scholars and publics alike allege that “we are more divided than ever.” On the silver screens of millions of Americans, news broadcasts hold a microscope to the schisms that ostensibly dominate our national psyche. Organizations composed of political elites make countering toxic partisanship their mandate, funneling millions into the war chests of legislators who vow to bring the aisles together. Put simply: Privileged people dislike division but love to talk about it — and many think they can fix it.
Why might this be? Are we obsessive, more concerned with discussing division than dampening it? Are we civic masochists, intent on deriving entertainment from the inflammation that defines our politics? Are we bandwagoners, quick to latch onto the latest dialectic trend, turning society into a broken record in the process? Or are we truly just afraid, expressing that fear in the only way we know how — by giving it increasingly more media attention and consumption value. While there may be a grain of truth to each of these explanations, none of them account for the optimistic conviction that somehow with enough will, talk, coverage, and information we might make the jump from discord to communion. Really, we are captivated by division because we are even more captivated by the ideal of unity.
I certainly was. For a long time, I was enthralled by the theory of “evidence-based” solutions to policy issues, impassioned by the hope of bipartisanship, energized by the notion that, ahead of every social or global problem, was a common sense antidote that our divisive climate was merely obscuring. All we needed to do was come together.
My prior self is not alone. Our society as a whole often idolizes the golden days of a unified American past, one without political parties, or one whose parties were substantively indistinguishable, or one where everyone watched the same news and agreed on the same sets of facts.
In pursuit of this ideal, people take action. No Labels, for instance, a political organization dedicated to promoting cross-aisle collaboration, is making waves following the announcement of its 2024 presidential “Unity Ticket,” which, if run, will feature a Democrat and a Republican who will give Americans “better choices” than those presently offered. Dozens of universities host workshops and fellowships on the importance of dialogue across difference, with the ultimate goal of finding “common ground” and identifying “pragmatic solutions” to the world’s problems.
The Achilles heel of these tactics, though, is that they acknowledge division but then force overlap into areas of fierce polarity, assuming that a consensus outcome, however half-baked or rash, is better than the divided alternative. But what if a presidential ticket leveraging members of both parties that have already disenchanted voters for the better part of a decade isn’t any better than the single-party tickets that are currently leveling the field? What if there is no common ground, and we leave discursive opportunities feeling dejected and resentful and having learned nothing? What if our attempts at finding pragmatic solutions prove futile and discouraging? What if trying to plop unity on top of division makes things worse? What if, before we get to unity, we have to get to understanding?
There’s evidence highlighting the poor outcomes that result from pursuing unity as the sole objective of policy practice. In the U.S. House, moderate members of the Problem Solvers Caucus, a bipartisan cohort of Democrats and Republicans sponsored by No Labels (the Unity Ticket’s patron), make it easy to mistake centrism for problem-solving, often holding up critical legislation in the name of cross-party collaboration. A few months ago, the same caucus was on the brink of dissolution amid partisan battles over replacing former speaker Kevin McCarthy: When the chips are down, the sudden reemergence of fissures that were never really mended causes unified facades to collapse. Beyond the machinations of legislators and closer to the agency of most everyday people, there are also ways to, crudely put, do dialogue wrong and exacerbate the rifts that make conversing across conflict so difficult to begin. Harvard’s recent attempts at hasty peace following the exposure of its own deep-seated divides in the wake of the Israel-Hamas war is a prime example.
So, if division is omnipresent and unity is a faulty goal, what is the path forward? First, we must acknowledge what fuels the unity myth: privilege and ignorance. It is easy to assume that commonsense solutions exist when you yourself are not facing or responsible for solving the problem. The prevalence of unity-orientation in academic, educated, and upper middle class spaces, as discussed previously, exemplifies this. It is easy to assume that divided people can work together if you are not fully aware of their reasons for division and if you are not party to the obstacle. Indeed, surveys corroborate the oft-circulated fact that true political independents tend to be less engaged and less informed.
Next, we must abandon the objective of dissolving disagreement. Consensus is often an alluring goal, but just as often, it is a mirage played on our brains while in the desert of misunderstanding. In a nation of tremendous diversity, real consensus is likely impossible — and that’s precisely how it should be. James Madison puts it well in Federalist 10, noting that to eliminate division would require “destroying the liberty which is essential to its existence.” Instead, while the market of ideas is a competitive one, fueled by disagreement, it is also one that encourages us all to think better, more compassionately, and with more awareness of the broader context in which we live. That is why some of the most successful endeavors at civic dialogue do not aim for agreement as an end or even a means. It feels tense and unresolved, but sometimes good political discussion really is as simple as “agreeing to disagree.”
So what, then, should be the goal? I mentioned earlier the idea of “understanding” before unifying, but I want to offer a more active conclusion: We have to seek to understand those with whom we disagree, but we have to then apply that understanding. What is applied understanding? It is empathy that motivates our political decisions and our civic behavior. It is the kind of policy practice that furthers negotiations in international diplomacy, the kind of dialogue that has led to some of the most influential legislation in American history, the kind of conversation that transforms neighborhood rivalries into friendships, and the kind of exercise that shows us: We don’t have to manufacture unity where it doesn’t exist; we are alike in more ways than our foci on division and oneness would have us believe.
For example, in mid-November 2023, Harvard Undergraduates for Bipartisan Solutions and the Institute of Politics co-sponsored a student discussion on abortion. The panel featured two pro-choice students and two pro-life students seated adjacent to each other on either side of a classroom in Sever Hall. After an hour and a half of conversation, no one’s mind was changed, full agreement was probably no closer than it had been at the start, and both the panelists and attendees were likely still quite divided.
So what did we gain from the event? Respect for our opponents, the revelation that, in many ways, our principles weren’t too far off from one another, and the revival of hope that, while we might not be able to reach a consensus, the potential for compromise remains. Evidence-based solutions can exist, and applied understanding gives us the eyes to see them and allows us to challenge the confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, and insularity that often color our worldview.
Many Americans believe division is the United States’ biggest problem. But here’s a hot take: It’s not a problem that America has grown more divided — the problem is that America has grown worse at respecting why division exists and better at naively hoping for agreement without defining a procedure for nourishing its precursors: understanding, empathy, and humility. If we want to see our communities move forward, then, maybe we should stop worshiping at the altar of shallow harmony and start looking at division with excitement rather than dread. By leaving the cult of unity, maybe we can find real faith — faith in our differences and faith in each other.
