When I asked Michele Margolis, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of the 2018 book From Politics to the Pews, how much of an effect impeachment would have on the country’s polarization, she didn’t hesitate: “Huge!” American democracy functions only when each side is able to recognize the other as legitimate and accept the outcome when it loses. Over the past two decades in particular, that mutual respect has been significantly undermined, in part because Americans have so thoroughly sorted themselves into their respective political camps. “We’re now in a world where we really don’t have to talk to people who don’t think and look like us politically,” she said. But “it’s important to interact with people who don’t look like you [and] don’t think like you. That’s how we recognize the other side as people, and tolerate them and their political views.”

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America’s great self-sorting is partly responsible for the two divergent narratives that have emerged on impeachment. Democrats can’t believe Republicans are willing to give President Donald Trump a pass for basically anything, including asking a foreign leader to investigate the family of one of his political opponents. Republicans, on the other hand, see the latest phase of the impeachment inquiry as a deceitful, partisan ploy from Democrats desperate to get Trump out of office. These are not just two ways of interpreting the same set of facts, with a gentleman’s agreement to disagree. They’re totally separate understandings of reality, based on the assumption of the other side’s bad faith. “If you truly believe that this is a witch hunt, and the Democrats have nothing on President Trump,” Margolis said, “it’s easier to have anger toward [the other side]. It’s easier to have hostility toward them.”

According to research from two scholars at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Marc Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler, Americans’ assumptions about their political opponents’ bad faith is rooted in something deeper than partisan affiliation. People on opposite sides of the political spectrum actually have non-overlapping worldviews, which makes it hard for them to see anything legitimate in their political opponents’ views. The archetypes Hetherington and Weiler draw in their 2018 book, Prius or Pickup?, are intuitively recognizable: Americans with a more conservative, or “fixed,” orientation value obedience in their children and strength in their leaders. They often fear the world around them, and prize stability and tradition over experimentation and change. By comparison, Americans with a more liberal, or “fluid,” worldview strive to raise independent, curious children and see empathy and tolerance as the most noble qualities a leader can embody. They believe in questioning authority and abhor performative shows of toughness.