Imaginary Enemies

When I look around, I see evidence of this toggle switch everywhere. Notice how easily people who are normally compassionate drop that compassion when thinking and talking about members of a political party they hate—the “Them” political party? How these people are all about forgiveness with people they see as part of “Us” but are fine with permane... See more

Both the physical and the electronic isolation from people we disagree with allow the forces of confirmation bias, groupthink, and tribalism to push us still further apart

Destructive cherry-picking spreads fear and pessimism, and over the past 20 years, it’s been steadily on the rise.25 In political media, this can have especially dangerous consequences. Geographic sorting means many people barely spend time with anyone on the other political side, so the only information they have on what those people are like come

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These two extreme groups are similar in surprising ways. They are the whitest and richest of the seven groups, which suggests that America is being torn apart by a battle between two subsets of the elite who are not representative of the broader society. What’s more, they are the two groups that show the greatest homogeneity in their moral and poli... See more