You Are Being Shown the Worst of Us

/ Common Ground / By

Our first essay showed that Americans agree on far more than we think — including in the reddest districts and the bluest.

So why does it feel like we are at war with each other? Here are four reasons:

  • A small group of people with extreme views is shaping what we hear and see on the news.
  • An outrage industry, forty years in the making, sells us a false picture of our neighbors.
  • Politicians have made cruelty ordinary, and given the rest of us permission.
  • The money that funds our politics comes from people with extreme views.

Below is the evidence for each.

1. Fourteen out of a hundred

In 2018, the research group More in Common surveyed 8,000 Americans and sorted them by what they actually believe rather than by party.

Two groups sat at the extreme ends and refused to budge on anything. Progressive Activists: 8% of Americans. Devoted Conservatives: 6%.

Fourteen percent in total. That is the complete cast of the shouting match you watch every night on the news.

The largest group was one nobody talks about — about two-thirds of Americans, whom the researchers named the Exhausted Majority. People who are sick of the fighting, flexible rather than rigid, and almost completely absent from the public argument.

Two-thirds of us. You would never guess it from an hour of cable news, because the people in that two-thirds are not the ones who get booked.

If your own views have never fit either team’s script, that is not a defect in you. It is the majority position. It just does not have a channel on your TV.

2. The outrage business has been evolving for years

We are shown the output of that 14% because conflict sells. And this did not start recently with social media.

Partisan hostility began climbing in the 1980s, with talk radio and cable news. When economists at Stanford and Brown tested the “the internet did it” theory, they found the opposite of what everyone assumes: polarization has grown fastest among Americans over 65 — the group least likely to be online and most likely to have a television running. Every screen in the house sells the same product. The one in the living room has been selling it the longest.

What it sells is a perception gap: the distance between what the other side actually believes and what you think they believe. Researchers measure it by asking people both questions and comparing the answers. The gaps are enormous.

Take the fight over teaching American history — one of the ugliest culture-war battles in the country right now.

  • 93% of Republicans say Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks should be taught as Americans who fought for equality. Democrats guess fewer than half of Republicans feel that way.
  • 92% of Democrats say students should learn how the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution advanced freedom and equality. Republicans guess 45%.

Nine out of ten on each side. Guessed at four or five out of ten by the other. The screaming school board meetings, and the arrests, happen over a question where both parties were standing in nearly the same place and could not see it.

Two more findings are also surprising.

The more news you follow, the worse your picture gets. Americans who follow the news most of the time have perception gaps roughly three times larger than people who follow it now and then. The people most confident they understand this country have, on average, the most distorted view of it. That includes some of us. It certainly includes the person on television explaining your neighbors to you.

And only about a quarter of Americans post political content online — the same people whose perception gaps run about 50% wider than everyone else’s. The political opinion you meet on your feed comes, disproportionately, from the Americans who understand the other side least well.

3. Cruelty from a podium is a choice

Calling fellow citizens vermin, traitors, or animals is a choice. Lying about what the other side believes, when the real polling is one click away, is a choice. Teaching Americans to fear their neighbors by faith, by skin color, by accent, or by where they were born is a choice. Doing any of it from a podium, where it carries the weight of office, is the worst version of it — because it tells every American watching that this is how we talk now.

None of that is a policy position. You cannot vote on it, budget for it, or take it to court. It exists to make you afraid, because frightened people are easier to lead.

Americans see it and do not want it. In a 2025 national survey, 78% said elected officials should avoid heated or aggressive language because of what it can provoke — including 75% of Republicans and Republican leaners, up from 56% a year earlier. Two-thirds say leaders who fail to condemn violent rhetoric from their own side are contributing to real violence.

Nobody gets a pass. Gallup found 69% say Republicans and their supporters have gone too far with inflammatory language, and 60% say Democrats and their supporters have. Both numbers are worse than the last time Gallup asked. And when Marquette asked independents who was to blame, 87% said left and right are equally a problem.

The conduct is worse in some quarters than others, but it is present in all of them. The standard has to be one standard, or it is not a standard.

4. Follow the money

In the 2024 election cycle, donations under $200 — the kind ordinary people make — were about 16% of all money raised. The other 84% came from somewhere else.

That somewhere else is a very small list. Roughly half of one percent of American adults give more than $200 to federal candidates, parties, PACs, and outside groups. That sliver supplies about three-quarters of all the money in our politics.

And political scientists have found, repeatedly, that donors in both parties hold more extreme positions than non-donors — more extreme than the general public, and more extreme even than wealthy people who do not give.

So: candidates need money. The money comes from a slice of the country more extreme than the country. Candidates listen to the people who fund them. Then they go on television and tell you your neighbor is the enemy.

Fourteen percent picks the fights. Half of one percent pays for them. All of us live with the result.

Some thoughts in closing

Americans differ honestly about topics such as abortion, guns, immigration, faith, and family. Those disagreements are real, they are held by sincere and well-meaning people, and nothing here asks you to change your view on any of them.

But ask what any of them has to do with whether a member of Congress should trade stocks while writing laws that move markets. Nothing, of course. 87% of Republicans and 88% of Democrats want the same thing — an end to stock trading by members of Congress — and nothing happens.

Because we fight bitterly over a handful of genuinely hard questions, we have been trained to assume we are fighting about everything. The distance between us has been sold to us, at a markup, by people who profit from the sale. Let’s stop buying it and move in a new direction.

Sources and methodology
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