The Anatomy of Division
The Anatomy of Division
By Troy Winterrowd
Have you ever called someone an asshole?
No doubt most of us have. At the time, they did something—one thing—that rubbed us the wrong way, and in that moment we defined them. We sealed them in a box labeled asshole and left them there, sometimes forever, unless we step back and broaden our view.
But every human being is a constellation of contradictions. Just because one part of them might be selfish or cruel doesn’t mean another part isn’t kind, generous, or wise. Just because one part of them might be an asshole doesn’t mean another part isn’t a mensch—someone decent, thoughtful, and deeply human. Between those two poles lies a whole assortment of traits that make a person who they are: flawed, evolving, and complex.
In another essay, I called this living with contradictions—the art of holding two truths at once without having to destroy either one. That capacity, both personal and cultural, may be our most endangered instinct.
Now take that same impulse and apply it to something bigger—an entire country.
After the 1979 Revolution, much of the Western world came to equate Iran with Islamic extremism, reducing an ancient and intricate culture to the image of angry clerics and burning flags. But that perception misses the truth. Iran is a country of poets, artists, filmmakers, and reformers—a place where young people quote Rumi as easily as they scroll Instagram, and where women have led waves of protest for personal and political freedom. Beneath the rule of a small theocratic elite lies a population that has repeatedly risked imprisonment, exile, and death to demand change. The government’s power may dominate headlines, but it does not define the heart of the nation. To mistake the regime for the people is to miss the mosaic of Iranian identity—a mosaic threaded with beauty, dissent, humor, and an enduring desire for liberty.
Now, turn the mirror back on ourselves.
Here in the United States, we’ve fallen into the same trap. We casually label half the country as one extreme or another—radicals, fascists, snowflakes, socialists. But is that really who we are? Or are we just doing to our fellow citizens what we do when we call someone an asshole—collapsing their whole complexity into a single, distorted story?
I was reminded of this not long ago during a phone call with a relative who said, almost offhandedly, “I hate Democrats.” It wasn’t angry—more weary, as if half the country had blurred into one unredeemable kind of person. The comment caught me off guard, and I didn’t have the grace or curiosity in that moment to ask why. It was a reminder that politics had managed to build a wall inside the same house, and yet the foundation still held. The human part of us hadn’t disappeared. After all, I am a Democrat—but I’m also a dozen other things they’ve loved all along.
That’s the real anatomy of division: the shrinking of the complex into the cartoon.
And yet, as I wrote in Living with Contradictions, “it’s within the tension of opposites that our wholeness begins.” That wholeness—national and personal—is the space between labels where empathy still lives.
The Two Faces of Polarization
Political scientists call it polarization, but there are really two kinds.
Ideological polarization is about what we believe—taxes, guns, abortion, healthcare.
Affective polarization is about how we feel toward one another—the rising sense that people on the other side aren’t just wrong but immoral, dangerous, even less human.
Over the last three decades, the emotional kind has exploded. Pew Research and the Carnegie Endowment have shown that Americans now express record levels of distrust and hostility toward the opposite party. Yet, paradoxically, the policy gaps between us aren’t nearly as wide as we think. Majorities across party lines agree on background checks for guns, fair elections, and affordable healthcare. We’re not two alien species; we’re one species with a distorted reflection.
It reminds me of the personal kind of opposition we live with every day: how someone can be both cautious and brave, selfish and selfless. When we lose sight of that duality in ourselves, it’s easy to lose sight of it in others.
The Shrinking but Not Silent Middle
Since the early 1990s, Gallup has tracked a steady decline in Americans who call themselves “moderate.” In 1992, 43% of us identified that way; by 2024, it’s about one-third. But that doesn’t mean the middle disappeared—it just got quieter.
The truth is, most people hold mixed views: liberal on some issues, conservative on others, pragmatic on most. The so-called “middle” isn’t a bland mush of indecision—it’s a mosaic of nuance. But moderation doesn’t make for good television, and ambivalence doesn’t trend on social media. So the middle vanishes from sight, even though it still anchors the nation.
That tension—the invisible balancing act between competing truths—is the same one we live within personally. In Living with Contradictions, I wrote about the “gold between opposites,” the creative energy that comes when we stop fighting to be one thing and allow ourselves to be many. America, too, is an alloy of contradictions: pragmatic yet idealistic, self-reliant yet communal, restless yet rooted.
The Mirror of Media
In the attention economy, outrage is currency. The media—both traditional and digital—rewards conflict because conflict keeps us watching. Algorithms learn quickly that anger fuels engagement, and engagement fuels profit. So they feed us more of what provokes us.
As a result, a tiny fringe can look like half the country. We overestimate how radical our neighbors are because we’re watching their most extreme representatives. The result is a distorted mirror: a funhouse reflection where everything appears more divided, more dangerous, more hopeless than it really is.
But outside that mirror, most people are still living ordinary, intertwined lives. They’re coaching Little League, volunteering at shelters, raising kids, and paying bills—often alongside people who vote differently. Everyday coexistence doesn’t trend, but it’s the quiet baseline of our shared life.
The Quiet Majority and the Human Middle
The “silent middle” doesn’t get much attention, yet it may hold the country’s survival in its hands. These are the people who still say, “I see both sides.” Who roll their eyes at cable news. Who want solutions, not slogans. They’re not apolitical—they’re exhausted. They’ve grown tired of being told they have to pick a team when what they really want is a future.
This is the America that rarely makes the news—the America that, like the people we misjudge, contains both the asshole and the mensch, both the fear and the grace, both the selfish impulse and the flicker of empathy. To see this complexity is to see our country as it truly is: human.
Real Fault Lines, Real Risks
None of this means the danger is imaginary. Polarization can curdle into something poisonous. The January 6th attack on the Capitol showed how easily anger can ignite into violence. Trust in institutions—Congress, courts, media—has cratered to historic lows. Gerrymandering, disinformation, and echo chambers have hardened the lines between us.
But even now, the vast majority of Americans reject violence. They may be disillusioned, but they still believe in democracy, fairness, and freedom—they just don’t see those values reflected in the noise. The real risk isn’t that we’ll fight a civil war; it’s that we’ll surrender to cynicism and stop showing up for one another.
The Work Ahead
Maybe the work ahead isn’t found in Washington or on cable news. Maybe it starts closer to home—around dinner tables, in classrooms, in local communities like Asheville, where people still bump into one another at farmers markets and trailheads.
Despite the headlines, most Americans aren’t at war. A 2023 Pew survey found that 80% of Americans are tired of political conflict and want leaders who work across party lines. Gallup reports that two-thirds of Americans describe their beliefs as moderate or mixed, not rigidly partisan. The partisan firestorm we see online doesn’t reflect the lived experience of most people—it’s the amplified edge of our collective story.
We’ve already seen what reconnection looks like, even here at home. In the days after Hurricane Helene swept through Western North Carolina, flooding streets and tearing down power lines, neighbors showed up—not as Democrats or Republicans, but as people with shovels, flashlights, and casseroles. Volunteers from every background cleared debris in West Asheville, delivered food in Haw Creek, and checked on elderly residents in Candler. No one stopped to ask who someone voted for before hauling a branch off their fence. Crisis reminded us what politics too often makes us forget: our instinct to care runs deeper than our divisions.
That same spirit lives across the country. Programs like Braver Angels and Living Room Conversations are quietly pairing conservatives and progressives in dialogue. Studies show that even a single structured hour spent listening to someone from the “other side” significantly reduces mutual hostility. In small-town libraries and church basements, those conversations are slowly reweaving the social fabric.
The facts tell a hopeful story: seven in ten Americans still say they want democracy to endure and believe compromise is a strength, not a weakness. Those numbers—and the neighbors who show up in a storm—remind us that our shared decency hasn’t disappeared. It’s just been drowned out by the noise.
So maybe the real work ahead is this: see people whole again. Not as headlines or hashtags, but as layered, contradictory humans—part asshole, part mensch, part everything in between. The same way we hope to be seen ourselves.
Because democracy isn’t a shield that protects us from one another; it’s a shared agreement to keep showing up—to keep helping dig mud from a neighbor’s home, to keep talking even when we disagree, to stay in the same room long enough to remember that we still belong to the same story.
The work ahead isn’t abstract. It’s daily. It’s right here—in the mountains, in our neighborhoods, in the small acts of care that rebuild what politics alone cannot.
