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Scroll through cable news or X and you’d think America is tearing itself apart. The loudest voices dominate our screens, depicting a country split into warring tribes. But the real divide isn’t between millions of radicalized citizens. It’s between a pragmatic, common-sense public and political elites who have sorted themselves into two rigidly uniform parties. Most Americans still hold a mix of views and believe in repair. What’s broken is not the people, but the politics that no longer reflect them.
Kristen Soltis Anderson is right to challenge the popular narrative that the country is hopelessly divided. In her recent New York Times column, she notes that only a small share of voters live at the ideological extremes. This matches decades of survey data showing that the majority of Americans are pragmatic and heterodox, not locked into rigid left-right tribes.
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While Anderson’s focus groups and polling capture this complexity, the story is deeper and more troubling. The phenomenon we’re witnessing isn’t just polarization; it’s sorting.
Sorting is different from polarization. Polarization suggests that everyday Americans are deeply divided and irreconcilable. Sorting, by contrast, means that people who once held a mix of partisan identities now cluster neatly into one party or the other. A generation ago, there were conservative Democrats, liberal Republicans, and many voters whose loyalties crossed party lines. Today, those cross-pressures have largely vanished.
In 1970, a Democrat might have been pro-labor but socially conservative, while a Republican might have favored free markets yet supported environmental regulation. Now, those combinations are nearly extinct. Voters haven’t become dramatically more ideological, but the parties have become purer, louder, and less representative of the public.
This helps explain why our politics feels so bitter, even though public opinion consistently shows broad consensus on many core issues. Surveys from the AEI Survey Center on American Life and the Pew Research Center reveal striking agreement on questions ranging from childcare and housing affordability to immigration reform and institutional repair. What has changed is not what Americans believe, but how our political system translates those beliefs into power.
This mismatch has corrosive effects. Closed primaries reward ideological purists and punish compromise. In many congressional districts, small minorities of voters turn out for primaries, meaning a narrow, highly ideological group effectively picks the winner. Gerrymandered districts shield incumbents from competition, while activists and donors exert outsize influence. Cable news and social media amplify the loudest, angriest voices. These structural forces ensure the extremes are vastly overrepresented while pragmatic voters are sidelined. The sorting of elites has been so complete that it now drowns out the sensible middle.
The result is a distorted picture of American life. Political fights on Twitter are treated as representative of the public mood, when they reflect the incentives of a narrow, mobilized class of professionals and activists. Everyday Americans may express frustration with politics, but they don’t spend their lives online or in ideological echo chambers. They’re too busy raising families, working, and trying to solve problems in their communities.
This dynamic is especially visible among young Americans. College campuses are often portrayed as epicenters of radicalism, but most students are not extremists. They crave dialogue and spaces where disagreement doesn’t lead to exile. Yet they live in environments where a vocal minority of activists and faculty dominate and restrict the discourse. As a result, campuses have become a microcosm of national politics: a quiet majority overshadowed by elites who thrive on division.
Anderson highlights a striking data point: the fastest-growing segment of the electorate is not libertarian-leaning social progressives who favor small government. Instead, voters are socially cautious but economically open to a more active role for government. This group, now roughly one-fifth of Americans, defies conventional party labels. Many younger voters fit this description, embracing government action on mental health or housing while resisting ideological conformity on cultural debates.
Voters are complicated. They take a stance from Column A and another from Column B. Yet our political system insists on binary choices, treating heterodox citizens as anomalies rather than the norm. When people don’t see themselves reflected in either party, cynicism grows. That cynicism is dangerous; not because it makes Americans give up, but because it leaves them vulnerable to simplistic narratives and demagogues who promise to smash a “corrupt system” rather than fix it.
It’s no wonder many independents simultaneously believe that the government is broken and yet express hope that institutions can be repaired. They are not anti-government so much as anti-dysfunction. They want reform, not destruction. The challenge is to create pathways for that hope to translate into real power and lasting change.
The mistake would be to treat Anderson’s “center” as merely descriptive, a cluster of survey responses or a polling artifact. It is, in fact, a vast potential governing coalition. But unlocking its power will require reforms that change how our politics rewards behavior: open primaries, fairer districting, and media that stop amplifying fringe theatrics at the expense of genuine dialogue.
There are models to build on. Civic education initiatives like those at Utah Valley University and Generation Citizen show that when young people are given the tools to deliberate and lead, they rise to the occasion. Local mentorship programs and community organizations can anchor individuals in networks of trust and purpose. These efforts won’t fix dysfunction in Washington overnight, but they strengthen the habits of citizenship that a healthy democracy requires.
A recent Gallup survey found that only 28% of Americans have a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in major institutions, near a historic low dating back to 1979. Yet those numbers have stabilized rather than collapsing further, showing that while trust is deeply shaken, it has not disappeared entirely. Likewise, Pew Research has found that more than 80% of Americans believe confidence in government and one another can be rebuilt. Even amid widespread disillusionment, most citizens still believe in the possibility of repair, a vital signal of resilience and hope.
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The center is not a myth. It has been here all along: quiet, steady, and waiting to be heard. Those who make up this vast middle may need to become better organized, more vocal, and more assertive, but they are very real. The task ahead is not to conjure them into existence but to build a politics worthy of their trust, participation, and voice.
Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a visiting scholar with Sutherland Institute.