reality bytes
America is badly divided in many critical ways. We evaluate how this division occurred through psychology, human nature, turning back the clock, and an interview with a QAnon survivor.
For Kansas City-based entrepreneur Ceally Smith, getting into the QAnon political movement was not part of the plan.
“It didn’t seem like a logical thing to put my time and energy into, but I knew for [my ex-boyfriend] it was important, so, I would do my best to try to act interested,” Smith said.
At the time, Smith was apolitical and didn’t vote in the 2016 presidential election. Initially, she couldn’t buy into what QAnon was discussing.
But then came the death of Jeffrey Epstein, a former financier, billionaire, and sex offender, while in police custody. For Smith, a mother of two, QAnon’s theories suddenly made sense.
Smith’s previously established beliefs and identity as a mother dedicated to protecting her children pulled her into the QAnon echo chamber. Her experience with the QAnon political movement illustrates the effects of echo chambers in American society.
Scholars have long agreed that Americans are currently more divided than at any time since the Civil War, according to the Pew Research Center. Over the past century, the education system, government officials, social media companies, and media outlets have stoked the “us versus them” mentality in American political discourse to gain power, influence, and money, according to The Brookings Institution. This slow-burning process throughout history, using manipulations of human nature and psychology, has led to a polarized electorate.
Events such as the Supreme Court's overturning of Roe v. Wade in June 2022 have demonstrated the stark division in American political discourse.
So what happened to make America so divided?
While critical thinking is an essential skill, it is one that does not take prescedence in our education system.
Although critical thinking is essential in navigating information and ideas, it is not a skill that comes naturally. It requires education, practice, and the ability to question one’s beliefs and biases, said Sharon McMahon, a Jefferson Award-winning former high school government and law teacher in Minnesota.
“Critical thinking is a challenge in America right now, especially for people who did not grow up in the digital age, where it is very easy to be fooled,” said McMahon. “The human mind, of course, likes to be comfortable. It wants to believe what it already believes. It wants to keep believing what it already believes because change is uncomfortable.”
Critics have criticized social media companies for lacking transparency regarding the algorithms and mechanisms determining what content the platforms show users. This lack of transparency has created echo chambers, reinforcing pre-existing beliefs and discouraging critical thinking. While the internet provides access to a wealth of information, it also contains misinformation and falsehoods, which can have serious consequences.
Social media algorithms have led to the escalation of echo chambers that reinforce an "us versus them" mentality.
“When we live in closed information environments, it’s easy for misinformation to spread,” said Todd Washburn, a professor at the Harvard Extension School.
Washburn said much of the electorate now sees their political beliefs as a form of personal identity and sorts accordingly.
“The mere fact of that sorting has pushed the parties further apart ideologically,” said Washburn, “the Democratic Party is now comprised primarily of people who consider themselves liberal and even more so. The Republican Party is comprised primarily of people who consider themselves conservative. So there’s not a lot of overlap in the ideological beliefs of the members of the parties.”
For example, Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene representing Georgia’s 14th district, criticized fellow Republican Gabriel Sterling, a Georgia state election official, who opposed Greene’s baseless claims that Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election.
“Gabe, I do not consider you an expert on this issue. As a matter of fact, I consider you a major problem,” Greene said during a Mar. 2 House meeting about election integrity.
Such divisive rhetoric on both sides of the aisle, a member of one political party attacking another for not holding as extreme views, further contributes to the political polarization and hostility that permeate American society today.
But beyond politics, similar ideas are separated among the general populace and are made worse by social media. To grow and maintain an audience, social media companies intentionally engineer their platforms in a process known as “brain-hacking,” using classic conditioning techniques such as notifications to keep people attached and altering brain chemistry. These alterations affect crucial functions in thinking, including reading ability and sleep.
“Social media use is messing with kids’ sleep, it’s messing with the quality, how much they’re getting,” said Kara Fox, a Doctoral candidate at the University of North Carolina, “and that is, that can cause or exacerbate a whole host of other problems.”
Another way social media companies grow their audience is through the institution of an algorithm that perfectly tailors an experience for every single user on their platform. However, algorithms play more into the spread of misinformation than facts. A 2018 MIT study showed that misinformation is pushed by the algorithm six times as much as factual posts. The combination of algorithms and repeated rhetoric by influential individuals results in stark viewpoints on contentious issues, such as abortion, gun rights, climate change, race, and national security. The overall solutions presented often fail to prioritize compromise with the opposing side.
These ideological shifts are not isolated. They are part of a pattern established and grown throughout the last 100 years. The seeds were planted between the 1930s and 1950s when the Democrats dominated the political landscape in the aftermath of the Great Depression and the Second World War.
The seeds of divisions in America are not new. They are symptomatic of issues that have been present for a long time.
“National Democrats made the calculation that to hold their very strange political coalition together, which included a lot of northern liberals, but also included the forces of white supremacy in the South, that they had to keep race off the political agenda,” said Paul Pierson, a political historian at the University of California, Berkeley.
At the time, the ideologies of Republicans and Democrats were closer than today.
“There were conservatives and liberals in both parties, and there was quite a bit of variation across the country in what it meant to be a Republican or what it meant to be a Democrat,” said Pierson.
In 1950, the American Political Science Association (APSA) published a study that stated, “Popular government in a nation of more than 150 million people requires political parties which provide the electorate with a proper range of choice between alternatives of action. In order to keep the parties apart, one must consider the relations between each and public policy.”
The study received critical panning, but with the Democrats evolving into the Party of Civil Rights in the 1960s, it became a reality.
“They made it more and more difficult simply by attracting attention to their cause. And I think the arrival of television was important in this respect as well, that it was possible to, to broadcast what was happening in the Jim Crow South and the, the way in which the Civil Rights Movement was and peaceful demonstrators were being suppressed. All of that created more pressure on the Democratic Party, essentially, to pick a side, to decide whether they were going to support the Civil Rights Movement or not,” said Pierson.
Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, both Democrats, made conscientious efforts toward advancing Civil Rights. However, this shift created severe repercussions for the Solid South Democrats. It sowed the seeds of what would later become a greater ideological separation between the parties.
“It’s clear to voters that there is a racially more liberal party and a racially more conservative party. It makes it easier for voters and for politicians to figure out which party they should be in,” said Pierson.
Republicans, prompted by the 1964 presidential election loss of their candidate, then-Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, would use this platform to target the Solid South, a reliable base for the Democrats for over 36 years and, importantly, anti-integration.
This strategy, known as the Southern Strategy employed by Richard Nixon, blamed the Democrats for all of America’s issues. However, many of these supposed issues were created out of thin air or spun to make it appear that the left caused it, said Pierson.
“Parties decide what kinds of issues that they want to emphasize, how to frame those issues, and, and, you know, Richard Nixon was a master at that,” Pierson said.
The Strategy also allowed the Republicans to go after political enemies and gain influence to push their agendas, as former White House Counsel and Domestic Affairs Advisor John Ehrlichman described in a 1994 interview with Harper’s Magazine writer Dan Baum.
“We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did,” Ehrlichman said.
This strategy would be used repeatedly over the next few decades on various issues by both parties, pushing each party’s agenda in turn and boosting the image of each party. These include the recent Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Tea Party radicalization of the Republicans, the Occupy Movement, and the conflict between the Black Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter movements.
Nearly half a century later, America lives with the consequences. Ceally Smith’s mental state was falling the deeper she got into QAnon.
“I realized when I woke up one morning and I just was really numb to everything that was happening,” Smith said.
She realized during the 2020 presidential election that she needed to make a change if she was going to improve her life.
“I told myself, like, ‘If, if this doesn’t happen, if there is no shift, I need to leave,” said Smith. “I am going to radically let go of everything that I believed to be true within the movement, within the community, the beliefs, or whatever.’”
Smith would leave QAnon, breaking up with her boyfriend and beginning a long road to recovery.
Still, despite her experiences, Smith said she believes her time in QAnon was positive, making her a better person and entrepreneur and encouraging her to help others in similar positions live better.
“If we all could take a moment to just focus on ourselves with every single person in the world, could just say, ‘Am I doing what’s best for me?’ I feel like that would reflect in the world that we have today, we would have a better world because, if we love ourselves, then we can externally love others, and that would make the world a better place,” Smith said.
