Win McNamee/Getty Images Soapbox Americans Aren’t As Divided As You Think I spent a year traveling throughout Red America. To my liberal friends, don’t worry: It was just fine.

Ken Stern is president of Palisades Media Ventures, former CEO of NPR and the author of the new book, “Republican Like Me: How I Left the Liberal Bubble and Learned the Right.”

Every day, America is being misled by the political parties, our political leaders and the press. We are told that the other side – whether it’s liberals or conservatives, Democrats or Republicans – are not just wrong on the issues, but full of destructive intent. The other side is full of deplorables or white nationalists or snowflakes or, worse yet, globalists. We are assured that the other side despises American values and is intent on destroying the country as we know it. We believe all these things.

Here’s something to talk about at your Thanksgiving dinner table: None of this is true. I’m a life-long Democrat and have a resume that practically bleeds blue: a couple turns in Democratic politics, almost a decade running NPR, and degrees from Yale Law School and Haverford College. But last year, spurred by a fear that Red and Blue America were drifting irrevocably apart, I decided to venture out from my overwhelmingly Democratic neighborhood and safely Democratic life, and engage Republicans where they live, work and pray. I found an America far different from the one depicted in the press and imagined for us by politicians.


I sat in the pews of tiny evangelical churches in Virginia and mega-churches in Houston and was moved by the passion of many of my fellow congregants to help the poor and those who live in the shadows. It wasn’t just empty Sunday words, but weekday deeds by many of my new co-religionists to support refugees, feed the hungry and house the homeless. I traveled into some of the most economically depressed areas of our country and met coal miners without coal mines and mill workers without mills. It didn’t seem so deplorable that many of them were angry that the economies of their communities and the health of their families were in a three-decade freefall, and were eager to protest a government and a political and media establishment that were willing to accept their pain as a necessary byproduct of free trade or the fight against global warming. Over the course of a year, I traveled from churches to conservative think tanks to NASCAR races and even to tea party meetings, and I was almost always able to find more points of agreement and commonality than I thought possible.

Don’t get me wrong. I met a few less attractive types along the way—people who would openly assure me of the vast global conspiracies that control the White House—and I spent enough time on the Breitbart comment pages to have my faith in humanity weakened a time or two. But these instances were far outnumbered by the many points of commonality I found along the way. As Sam Adams, an openly gay mayor who worked closely with Portland’s evangelical community, told me, we’ve all fallen into a trap: “If we disagree, we must hate each other. If the media portrays us, certain aspects of us or certain individuals hating each other, then that must be true for everybody … There are things we don’t agree on as a liberal Democrat and as an evangelical leader … We can agree to disagree on gay marriage and disagree on abortion but we probably agree on eight of 10 things that are important to society.”

We loathe the other side far more than we used to – polls show that most Americans now believe the other political party threatens the nation’s well-being, and a stunning number of us now disapprove of our children engaging in mixed marriages – not racially mixed, not religiously mixed, but politically mixed. But the odd thing is that while we are far more politically polarized, we are not more issue polarized than in the past. It is counterintuitive in this age of anger, but on the issues, we still tend to be a fairly agreeable and moderate people. As Morris Fiorina, the Stanford political scientist, has observed, “on most issues, attitudes continue to cluster in the middle rather than lump up on the extremes.”

You can see this more closely when you peer into data on a specific matter like abortion, one of the most divisive issues of our day. Gallup has been following abortion opinion closely for more than 40 years, and what is most extraordinary when you look at the numbers is how opinions are both constant and moderate. By far, the largest group of Americans has always been those who think abortion should be legal under some circumstances. That number has never left the incredibly tight range of 48 to 55 percent. And when you start asking Americans about specific abortion-related fact patterns, as Fiorina and his fellow researcher Jon Krosnick once did, even the views of those who described themselves as “always pro-life” or “always pro-choice” begin to converge. The “always pro-life” group weakened considerably when the woman’s life was said to be at stake and the “always pro-choice” crowd thinned significantly when the abortion was because the mother disliked the gender of the child. Even on this supposedly most controversial and polarizing issue, the American impulse is towards moderation and consensus.

You wouldn’t know any of this by listening to the political parties or by looking at their platforms in 2016. The Republican Party trumpeted the most “pro-life, pro-family” platform ever, while the Democrats bragged that its platform went “further than previous Democratic platforms on women’s reproductive rights.” It is disconcerting to see the parties brag about their moves towards the extremes when their voters remain solidly and resolutely in the middle. This is all because the parties are solidly in the hands of activists more interested in furthering their own agendas than reflecting the views of the broader public.

There are many reasons for our increasing polarization, but one reason is that the big bully pulpits in America are now in the hands of people who benefit from anger and conflict. It’s not just the internet trolls and red-faced media, but the political parties and their candidates. The Democratic Party has largely eschewed policy reform in favor of #resistance to President Trump. As for the Republicans, exposing and exploiting division is their most identifiable strategy. Compromise and nuance are lost in this inflammatory age. All of this may make good copy but it’s terrible for democracy and we won’t restore our sense of one country, one nation, one civil society until we stop seeing the other side as “the other side” and start seeing them again as our friends, neighbors and countrymen. That takes a bit of a journey from where we are now, but perhaps it a journey in the spirit of the holidays. As Atticus Finch, a hero of a different age, once said, “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view.”