The election is over. The division is not.
Tuesday’s midterm settled who will hold the gavel in Washington. Democrats will take control of both the House and the Senate, and the President said he would accept the results and work with the new majorities. That is how it is supposed to work, and we should be grateful it did.
What the election did not settle is the harder thing: the way we have been treating one another. Exit polling found that roughly three out of four voters described themselves as angry or dissatisfied with the direction of the country, and that anger did not belong to one party. Something like eleven billion dollars was spent on political advertising this cycle, and much of it was designed to make you fear or despise your neighbor. Whoever won on Tuesday, the advertising worked.
I am a physician, not a political scientist. But 40 years of medicine have taught me one thing that applies here: you cannot heal a patient by treating symptoms alone. A fever tells you something is wrong. It does not tell you what. Our national fever is the shouting, the contempt, the growing sense that half the country is the enemy. The disease underneath is older and quieter, and it does not care which party is in power.
Historians and political scientists who study how societies anywhere in the world slide into “us versus them” politics, where ethnicity, religion, or culture gets turned into a weapon, find that the pattern is remarkably consistent. So are the conditions that make a people resistant to it. Below are five of those conditions. None of them is partisan. Each one is something a healthy country tends to, like a healthy body tending its own terrain, long before the crisis arrives.
1. Strengthen inclusive governance and the rule of law
When a government fails to provide security, justice, or basic resources, people do not simply go without. They retreat into whatever network will protect them: a tribe, an ethnic group, a congregation, a party. That retreat is natural, and it is exactly what a demagogue needs. Weaponized identity thrives in unstable soil. Three things keep the soil stable.
Equal protection under the law. A legal framework that protects every citizen the same way, regardless of religion, ethnicity, or culture, quietly dismantles the “us versus them” story before it can be told. You cannot convince a man that the system is rigged against his people if his people are visibly treated the same as everyone else. The reverse is also true. Every exception, every case where the rules seem to bend for one group and not another, becomes a recruiting poster.
Identity kept separate from state power. The courts, the military, and the police must belong to no faction. The moment one group believes those institutions are being pointed at it, the story writes itself, and it writes itself on both sides. Neutral institutions are not a weakness. They let the losing side accept a loss, go home, and come back to try again two years later. That ordinary act of acceptance is the miracle of a peaceful election, and it happens only when people trust the referee.
Transparent institutions and fair distribution. Corruption does two kinds of damage. It diverts resources and gives opportunistic leaders a ready-made excuse. When people feel cheated and cannot see why, someone will always step forward to name a scapegoat, and the scapegoat is nearly always a minority. Transparency removes the excuse. If a community can see where the money went, nobody can blame the neighbors across town for taking it.
2. Enhance economic security and opportunity
Poverty, long stretches without work, and the feeling that effort no longer moves you forward are not only economic problems. They are fertile ground for radicalization and manipulation. It is no accident that the cost of living sat at the top of voters’ worries this year, or that the loudest voices on every side promised to name who was to blame.
Reduce precarity. A person with a steady job, a roof that is not in doubt, and a plausible future has something to lose. That person has a tangible stake in keeping the peace and will think twice before tearing anything down. A person with nothing to lose can be talked into risking everything, and there is always someone willing to do the talking. Stability is not a reward for good behavior; it is a precondition for it. This is one of the few places where left and right have historically agreed on the goal and disagreed only on the method, which makes it a good place to start.
Develop every region, not just the favored ones. When whole communities are left behind economically (a rural county, a shuttered mill town, a city neighborhood the investment never reaches), the grievance is real. Real grievances are the easiest kind to weaponize, because the person weaponizing them does not have to lie about the pain, only about the cause. A country that ensures no region or group is written off removes the raw material before it can be shaped into resentment.
3. Promote media literacy and information resilience
Modern weaponization does not need an army. It needs a feed. Disinformation, propaganda, and algorithm-built echo chambers can dehumanize a rival group faster than any pamphlet ever could, and they do it one phone at a time, in the privacy of your own hand. Much of this year’s record campaign advertising was built with the same tools.
Teach critical thinking as a survival skill. Media literacy is not a soft elective for middle schoolers. It is how an adult recognizes emotional manipulation, scapegoating, and the standard tactics of a political or religious demagogue. The tells are learnable. A story that makes you furious within seconds. A villain with no evidence attached. A claim that the other side is not merely wrong but evil, so that nothing they say needs to be weighed. Once you can name the trick, it loses most of its power over you, just as knowing how a magician palms the card ruins the illusion.
Keep the media ecosystem diverse. Polarization requires isolation. It cannot survive a reader who regularly encounters the strongest version of the other side’s argument from a source that is not trying to make him angry. Independent local journalism, outlets that publish across the spectrum, and platforms that reward accuracy over outrage are not luxuries. They are the immune system of a free society, and like any immune system, they weaken when they are not fed.
4. Reform education and foster real contact
Prejudice is not something we are born with. It is learned, and the surest way to learn it is to grow up never meeting the people you are taught to fear. Isolation does the teaching; the demagogue only supplies the vocabulary.
Teach honest history. A curriculum that tells the truth about the past, including the uncomfortable parts, is a vaccine. Children who have studied how Rwanda, the Balkans, or our own Civil War came apart, and how ordinary neighbors were talked into seeing one another as enemies, are far harder to recruit with a simplified story later in life. They recognize the script because they have seen how it ends. Objective history is not about assigning guilt to anyone living today. It is about making sure the next generation knows what the warning signs look like.
Put people in the same room. Social science has been consistent on this point since Gordon Allport first described it in the 1950s: meaningful contact between different groups, under conditions of equal footing and a shared goal, breaks down stereotypes and builds empathy. Not a lecture about the other group. Actual contact. A youth sports league with mixed teams. A community theater. A church and a mosque that paint the same school together. A workplace where you eat lunch next to someone who voted the other way and discover he worries about the same things you do. You cannot dehumanize someone whose kids play with yours. That is why the people who profit from division work so hard to keep us apart.
5. Reform from within and tell a better story
Everything above can be legislated, funded, or built. This last one cannot. Top-down change is rarely enough, because the impulse to weaponize identity does not live in Washington. It lives in congregations, clubs, group chats, and family dinners. People who belong there have to challenge it there, or it will not be challenged at all.
Lift up the moderate voices. Every community has pastors, rabbis, imams, coaches, teachers, and plain-spoken neighbors who preach tolerance and pluralism and who get drowned out because tolerance does not trend. Those people need support, an invitation onto the stage, and defense when they are attacked for not being angry enough. The extremist interpretation of any faith or any political creed is always a minority view until the moderates go quiet. When they speak, they offer the most credible counter-argument, because they share the identity of the people they are speaking to and cannot be dismissed as outsiders.
Offer a better framework for who we are. People need an identity. That is not a flaw; it is how we are made. The question is what the identity is built on. Peace, charity, and the dignity of every human being are not weak values, and they are not naïve ones. They are the oldest values most of our traditions hold, and they have one great practical advantage: an identity rooted in them cannot easily justify violence. I was taught, and still believe, that every person bears the image of God. No ballot, no yard sign, and no cable channel changes that. A country that remembers it has a story about itself that is stronger than any story a demagogue can sell.
What you can do this week
None of us controls Congress. All of us control the terrain we live on. If you want a country that is harder to divide, it starts here, and none of it requires waiting for anyone in Washington.
- Have one real conversation with a neighbor who voted differently than you did. Ask what they are worried about. Do not correct them. Just listen.
- Read one serious source from the other side each week, chosen for its honesty rather than its outrage.
- Before you share something that made you angry, ask who benefits from your anger. Then ask whether it is true.
- Join something local where the people are not sorted by party: a food bank, a youth league, a choir, a cleanup crew.
- When your own side dehumanizes the other, say so. Out loud. Especially when it costs you something.
As a physician, I have watched for four decades what happens when we chase symptoms and ignore terrain. The fever comes back, and each time it comes back worse. The five conditions above are the terrain of a healthy country. Tend to them, and the next election, whichever way it goes, will be something we can all survive together.
