I live in Canada, our politics suck so bad that I find myself very much interested in US politics (obviously for the show)

It the US really as divided as it seems?

Are you, as an American, worried about the future democracy of the US?

46 comments

  1. No. What makes a more interesting story? People generally getting along or being so divided that we are the brink of a civil war?

  2. I think there’s a divide today that wasn’t as noticeable a few decades ago. (Pre-internet)

    However, the people who appear to be separating love to boast “HaLF tHE CouNTry” when really, they’re maybe a tenth at best.

    Like, if shit goes down, you’re going to see real quick how (not) divided we are.

  4. We have a few unbalanced nutters and the media loves following them around because “on this day in nowheresville Oklahoma, nothing happened” doesn’t titillate and get views. On the whole people are just going about their day to day lives.

  5. Yes, but I don’t think a lot of people see it because so much is bubble-ized and people mostly interact with people from their group.

    I literally don’t know any Republicans, and I don’t even know how I would meet them without going out of my way.

  6. I really do think it is. It used to be debates and arguments at thanksgiving dinner. By the time pie was served, everyone forgot what they were so angry about. Now families get ripped apart by political disagreements

  7. Yes, it really is, both at the levels of politicians(as far as I can tell) and at the public level.

    It is beyond the possibility of a civil discussion among many people. There’s an us vs them mentality, and ppl generally don’t bring up politics unless they wanna argue, or they know the other person agrees with them.

    It’s really sad

  8. As an American now living in Canada, I can confidently say that the US is significantly more politically divided than Canada. Depending on your sources of information, the division in the US may be less severe than what the media makes it out to be. But regardless, it is way more divided than Canada.

  9. I’d say it depends on how much you pay attention to politics. There’s certainly a large part of the country that I can say with conviction that I have nothing in common with, and have no desire to be united with. I think last election, around 40% didn’t vote.

  10. On the ground floor, no. In the media yes. The media likes to cover the craziest and most extreme politicians and tries to sensationalize issues that most people don’t really care about. If you go anywhere in the country and go to a local bar and try and talk about that stuff everyone will want you to shut up because nobody cares.

  11. Yes and no. Do we disagree about stuff, yes. But for the most part in real life, we coexist and get along. A lot of the attacking and rude comments towards one another is typically an internet thing

  12. As someone over 50 I will say absolutely. It permeates virtually every aspect of life.

  13. We have overwhelmingly divisive media from both sides. If you leave the house and interact with people face to face, you’ll find more common ground. If you’re sitting at home on the internet or watching the “news” on tv, you’ll feel more division.

  14. There is a divide but one thing I noticed is that when I watched the news and was more involved with politics I noticed a massive divide, but now that I don’t watch the news and I’m not involved with politics I realized most ppl aren’t radical leftist or rightists. The media enflames the divide

  16. I’m dual American/Canadian. Politics is part of why I’m seriously considering moving back to Canada, even though I have no memory of ever living there, only of visiting.

  18. The far left and the far right are that divided.

    Everyone else just wants to live their lives.

  19. Day to day interactions with people, no, not at all.

    The only way you’re aware of the hysteria is if you watch TV news & go on social media. It’s very manufactured. But at the same time, people are much more on edge now. For a small fraction of people, this means they’re hyper-into politics and very loud about it. For most people, it just means they’re privately super stressed and just trying to live their lives the best they can.

  20. I’m pretty far left, but I work in a job related to construction (sorta) and so work with a lot of people on the other side of the political spectrum. We do believe wildly different things, but at the end of the day they’re all about the same problems and are just different approaches to it. As the other comments said we might appear very divided, but when it really comes down to it many people accept that we’re really not that different. I think it also helps that a lot of these guys are what you might call “union republicans” so they’re a bit more traditional conservatives and not as much conspiratorial Trumpists.

    That being said I’m pretty young so I feel like I can’t comment on how it has changed. Politics are definitely a huge part of life and a common topic of conversation with my coworkers, but I hear older people say how it didn’t used to be like that so idk.

  21. There’s a not insignificant number of Americans who saw a President try to defy the results of an election and remain in power and shrug and say “Well at least he’s not a democrat…” and continue to support him. Yes, we are very divided.

  22. I thought Canadians all thought we are batshit crazy as was mentioned on the ask/canadian

  23. Here’s the thing. People act like it’s “half and half” half the country is like raging Christian fundamentalists who think dinosaurs and people lived at the same time and the other half are liberal vegan atheists who major in gender studies.

    -71% of Americans support same sex marriage

    -61% of Americans believe abortion should be legal

    -67% of Americans believe not enough is being done about climate change

    -68% of Americans are fully vaccinated for Covid

    -57% of Americans think gun control should be stricter

    -69% of Americans think it’s very important those who participated in the capital riot are prosecuted.

    Most of America is perfectly sane. Even most Christian’s in America are perfectly sane and not religious extremists. Even plenty of gun owners support more gun control. The problem is a small group of people (ultra right wing republicans) have gerrymandered the country in a way where they can not only control it, but also make others feel like they are outnumbered by them. Plenty of red states aren’t actually full of super conservative republicans and are very diverse (Texas for example). So America is divided, but much less than you think. Most Americans are just normal people.

  24. No.

    We live and interact with people all over the political spectrum daily.

    It just doesn’t play well for news when people just get along.

  25. One thing I always have to remind foreigners about is that, unlike most other countries, the US does not have state-funded media.

    State-funded media (CBC, BBC, etc) is incentivized to be neutral and pro-establishment so they tend to downplay domestic issues.

    Since virtually all of our media is funded by ads and donations, it is incentivized to be as polarized, sensationalist, and alarmist as possible to get clicks and views. Therefore, it dramatically plays up domestic issues.

    The closest you can get to more neutral outlets in the US is PBS, and to a lesser extent, NPR, or AP. If you look up PBS news coverage, you’ll notice the marked difference in tone.

    This is kind of like asking about the trucker protests in Canada. Do you remember how the international media covered that vs the actual situation on the ground? Yeah…

    Now, extrapolate that to coverage of the US.

  26. I think the majority of people are not as different as we are led to believe. But in the land of politicians it is quite something different. There are some politicians who are actively trying to subvert democracy by changing laws so that partisan lawmakers can change the results of elections. That is a fairly new development and I find that extremely troubling.

  27. I’m really fascinated by the people who are saying “no” and saying that it’s blown out of proportion in the media. I realize that anecdote is not data, but this is my personal experience:

    I’m an upper-middle-class, 54 year old woman, living in a purpleish North Atlanta, GA, suburb. Now, keep in mind that Georgia is a battleground state that turned blue (ish) last election by both going for Biden and electing 2 Dem Senators. Then again we’re also the home of Marjorie Taylor Greene about 10 miles from my house. Make of that what you will.

    I have a simple, plain Biden/Harris bumper sticker on my car. In the roughly 2 years I’ve had the sticker on my car I’ve had people honk at me, flip me off, scream obscenities at me. I’ve had other average looking middle aged women in the grocery store parking lot tell me I should be “ashamed” of myself (randomly as I’m loading groceries into my car) or that I needed to remove the sticker because it’s “anti American”. A while back I was in the drive through line at the pharmacy and some guy drove past me and screamed “fucking commie liberal” at me.

    Last year when I wore a Black Lives Matter t-shirt to the grocery store I had a random guy (middle aged guy with his roughly 10 year old son with him) confronted me (in the bottled water aisle) about being “Antifa”. When I ignored him, he called me a “fucking cunt” and told his son I was what was wrong with America. In front of his 10 year old child!!

    My brother and his wife who are die hard Trump supporters stopped talking to me after the 2016 election. My own brother told me that by supporting trans-rights I was supporting letting “perverts” rape his daughter (my niece). Ever since then, the birthday and Christmas cards I send her get sent back to me unopened.

    I am not a loudmouth about my political views. I don’t shove them in people’s faces. Other than the bumper sticker and a few tshirts, I don’t go around broadcasting who I voted for. But where I am, letting people find out that you are liberal leaning or vote Dem can be fraught and even potentially dangerous. So most of the people I know just don’t say anything.

    So yes, from my perspective, America is THAT divided. My own family is THAT divided. It’s painful and sad and scary, from my perspective.

  28. I can speak from the perspective of someone that grew up in a traditional “conservative” Southern Democrat family (this meant pro-God, pro-Guns, anti-Abortion, but also generally pro-social welfare, pro-Labor etc), I kind of “bucked” my family and became a Republican in 2003, when I turned 18–and voted Republican in most Presidential elections up through 2012.

    After 2012 I had decided the GOP didn’t represent my values, I moved towards being a Democrat-leaning, centrist, independent. I no longer vote for Republican candidates, even in races where I think the Democrat is not a good option because I think the GOP needs reform and the only thing that will drive that is going to be losing elections.

    Oddly around the time this went down, my traditionally Democratic family started moving into far right Republican conservatism, largely based on what I would call “cultural grievances.”

    I have a few cousins and an uncle that I was never that close with in real life, but we had exchanged emails in a family email thread for many years, often discussing politics pretty politely. We had some testy exchanges in the Trump years and I decided eventually to sever ties with them because they started turning the discussion into personal attacks and were parroting really extremist rhetoric.

    My core family, we mostly have remained close. We’re a little politically divergent, but we don’t discuss politics much in person. Most of my close friends and coworkers are the same way, some of them I do not know their politics, some I do know their politics but it doesn’t come up much.

    I would say for most people, in ordinary life, things don’t feel that divisive. I do think there are “fracture points”, and I think a segment of the population (my theory) has replaced traditional community organizations like the formal Churches and etc with support for a political “team”, I think it fills a hole in their lives because unless you’re part of a Church, there are few civic organizations in America for people to socialize in. There used to be lots of private clubs and other groups people would be part of and socialize in, but those famously started to die off in the 1980s (read the famous book: Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, by Robert Putnam), I do think for the people who have replaced traditional community socialization with membership in a political party, it has become dangerously part of an “us vs them” team mindset. That is definitely something that has gotten worse in the last 10 years. I do not think it is as common or as pervasive as it is made out to be, though.

  29. Yes, but the division is not as big as it looks. The biggest visible division are the MAGA folks and everyone else. 74 million people voted for Trump in 2020, and not all of them are MAGA people. The die hard extremists who you see probably make up about 30 million, and of those the people who are doing the Jan 6 style stuff are an even smaller minority. But that 74 million figure means that 256 million didn’t vote for Trump. That is like 75-80% of the population.

    The MAGA radicals are outnumbered 10 to 1 one. With the other 10 being moderate conservatives, Democrats, and fairly Apolitical people. While this ratio is higher among certain areas, its easy to bundle in the various different type of Republicans all as being part of one single faction when this is not the case. The Republicans historically understood that their party is naturally fractured and that without a forced unity they will pretty much take a loss on every election. Milton Friedman and Jerry Falwell were both Republicans but had absolutely nothing to do with each other in ideology. Democrats (at least the commentators and media people) do not understand this natural division and forced unity of the GOP and assume that everyone within the organization are best buds who all agree with each other on every issue. The Christian Nationalists only make up about 30 million people.

    ​

    The “Radical left” or “Antifa” is even smaller. Likely only in the hundreds of thousands or low millions. But they make an incredibly amount of noise. The folks on the far right will claim anyone that tolerates gay people or wants to reduce college tuition is a “Radical leftist” but in reality few people are actually radical leftists.

    Our divisions in the US are real, but they are not going to bring an end to the country. They will cause pain, but we will prevail. We are living in an extremely disruptive period of history, and its probably going to get much worse over the next decade. People react to disruption in very strange ways.

  31. When children stop talking to parents based on casting vote, it is a divide. I personally know someone who got into it.

  32. Absolutely. Half the country is cool with being associated with a party that took away the most important human right, bodily autonomy.

    Add to that a blatant disregard of a legitimate election, book banning, homophobia, racism, classism. Purposefully underfunding and ruining public schools.

    It’s a shithole divided country and Trump drew out all the sleeper cells of purposefully undereducated incels to stoke the fire to burn it all down.

    I’m a dual and just moved to Ontario. Doug Ford sucks too, but Canada has more of its ish figured out.

  33. We’re very divided along class lines…. However, cultural divisions are fomented to distract from this. These cultural divisions are what most Americans think of when this topic is brought up.

  34. I live in Atlanta, in my experience no one’s fighting in the streets but I did know people who cut friends/family off around the 2016 election. Also in my experience, despite what people claim Democrats tend not to have too many Republican friends and vice versa.

  35. Yes and no. Yes, really that divided on specific topics. However, day-to-day life isn’t laser focused on those topics, so no. There is a worrying number of people who try to turn every conversation to those topics though. I notice it most with Trump morons, but in some places, it may be people who always want to frame everything in terms of the repressive patriarchy. But they’re less common than Trump morons.

  36. Well, Trump already nearly had a successful coup on January 6th. If legislators had been killed and stopped the certification of the election he could have declared martial law, he’d already stacked government institutions and had high level political support to subvert democracy.

    I don’t think other people in this thread saying “it’s just a minority” are seriously underestimating how quickly that was about to spiral out of control. Maybe they just aren’t paying attention though either. Most people don’t closely follow what’s going on and I think the same people wouldn’t put up much resistance to regime change and fall of democracy, with the MAGA crowd cheering as it falls because it was *their guy* who becomes the authoritarian ruler. They already deny the reality of his loss or wrongdoings and want to reelect him despite everything he has done.

    So, yes, I am extremely concerned about democracy surviving here.

  37. This sub tends to downplay issues in the USA, especially to outsiders, and I wouldn’t really say its a good place to get a real solid opinion on this.

    Yes, polarization in the US is extremely bad, and anyone denying that probably is the type to never talk about politics in general with other people outside of their bubble. I travel for my job, and it’s gotten markedly worse over the past 10 years.

  38. Well – you got the Trumpers, annnnddd everyone else.

    And those two groups despise each other.

  39. Not as bad as the news makes it seem. Being divided isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s inevitable in any democracy with diverse ideas so long as we are civil which most people are

  40. I haven’t spoken to my best friend of over 25 years for more than 18 months because he insists that “my party” is using CRT to teach white children (he has kids; I don’t) to hate themselves and their parents. Anything I say other than agreement with this and commitment to stop it by any means is a lie, to him.

    He’s not a bumpkin. He’s a college graduate and a veteran. Smarter than I am, in a lot of ways. And he has completely bought into far-right propaganda that Democrats are “leftists” out to destroy America, when they’re just center-right corporatists who have the sense God gave sane politicians to realize you can only steal so much from people before they break out the knives and come for you.

    IDK if it’s going to lead to a sudden & dramatic “downfall”, but we are definitely in bad shape. IN fact I need to call & check on my mail ballot request this week, because I simply cannot trust that I will actually receive it, since I’m registered as the “wrong” party in a Red state (which I have to do, or I can’t vote in primaries).

  41. I live in Illinois as a registered Democrat. And if it weren’t for Chicago, we’d be a red state.

    That being said, yes, I believe that this country is not only divided, but the ones who divided it have gone down such a deep rabbit hole that they’re not ever coming back to normalcy. Or at least any semblance of normal.

    The scary part is, they’re allowed to vote.

  42. I’m worried but lots of people are registering to vote and are upset with the political climate there’s a possibility of it changing. But I’m a pessimist by nature so it’s all burning down any minute now.

  44. I do not openly sport my politics, wear hats, tshirts, or slogans, and I haven’t gone a single week since Trump started running without someone spouting fox news inspired stuff at me in real life. I assume thinking they’ve found someone to agree with them.
    COVID made it all so much worse.

    It is that bad. They are so full of hate for the commie libs coming for their guns and grooming their children and making up that masks provide protection which apparently is brand new to the human race and nobody ever suggested masks must be disease prevention in the history of the world.

  45. Most commenters are going to circle the wagons and claim it’s all exaggeration but they is plenty of survey evidence showing that the number of people feeling that their political opponents are fundamentally evil (not just wrong about this or that) has grown a great deal recently, as had respondents saying that political violence isn’t always bad.

    This is really **not** a good trend at all. We’ve had people literally shoot at Congress members playing baseball and plot to kidnap a governor.

    The idea of a civil war seems absurd. Between who? A period of 60s or 70s style radicalism and terrorism? Possible.

  46. On an individual person to person level? No.

    Overall? Yes.

    The US is suffering from a sort of creeping anti-democracy. The US is a democratic republic, but you wouldn’t know it based on how republicans talk. Right now they’re pushing the “independent state legislature” theory. That’s the theory that the state legislatures have unchecked power over elections. This comes from an obtuse reading of the constitution to mean something it has never been interpreted to mean, and flies in the face of what the states did immediately after ratification. Republicans WILL use this to override the will of the people to lock the Democratic Party out of any power. And what are their voters doing? Not a damn thing. Just winging about “wokeness” and “CRT” culture war bullshit. They’re perfectly fine abandoning democracy over their boogeyman issues. It’s not a both sides issue. Until Republicans accept that others don’t agree with them this country will continue to become more polarized.

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