A journey through the US reveals a divided nation with much in common

As we start the year under another polarized U.S. Congress, I have been plagued by the question: Is America too big to govern? 

A road trip from Boston to Chicago via Pennsylvania and Kentucky provided the perfect opportunity to put my question to the public — a fascinating experience that certainly enlivened my journey.

While I can’t claim that my sample size would meet scientific standards of proof, the random collection of individuals I met in parks, bars and on the sidewalks of towns I visited, made it difficult to see unity across states.

What did bring people together was a shared desire to live somewhere that aligned with their values — a firm distinction supposedly separating liberal from conservative places. But when I was told that those in the South are “cut from different cloth” from people in the North, I questioned whether I could ever find common values that could keep the country together.

Everyone I met was frustrated with the state of the country’s decline. 

In West Virginia, a loss of values clarification was seen as the cause of much disintegration, through the absence of Christian teachings in schools. In Kentucky, a young man extolled that society’s decline owed more to race than religion. 

Although these perspectives didn’t feature in conversations in Connecticut, visions there of the American dream featured moving to New York City and climbing the corporate ladder rather than “having a herd of goats that they could feed every day.” While some exemplified Thomas Jefferson’s vision that “cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens,” others I met searched for value in a green dollar bill. 

No matter from where people came or how different were the values they expressed, my new friends were first and foremost Americans rather than citizens of an individual state. And as firmly as they expressed their national identity, most were adamant that they preferred state to federal representation; for politicians far away in Washington could never understand their lives or perspectives, as they were not seen as part of the communities they served.

Confused with such inconsistency in thinking, I turned to social psychologist Keith Payne, whose new book “Good Reasonable People: The Psychology Behind America’s Dangerous Divide”, helped unpack some of the fallacies evident. 

Despite people ardently believing themselves to be liberal or conservative, Payne highlighted that studies show that not only can very few Americans correctly define liberal or conservative ideologies but, when tested against their supposed political affiliation, their views were wildly inconsistent. As such Payne believes “it makes no sense to call most people liberals or conservatives.” 

Furthermore, he explains that what people do possess are “group loyalties and the desire for their groups to dominate other groups. … Once people identify as part of a group, their psychological immune systems kick in to ensure that no matter what happens, they can see themselves and their groups as good and reasonable people.” 

This certainly rang true, when I pushed people for what membership of the United States “group” offered — “our big size helps warn off foreign enemies.” The threat that many felt posed from abroad was an erosion of collected freedoms, even if people couldn’t agree upon which freedoms were important to protect. 

Perhaps with so much talk about what divides us, people have forgotten what unites this unique assortment of states. 

As I traveled it was perhaps the voice of a young part-time bartender in Versailles, Kentucky who offered the most interesting note. While she hadn’t voted, for fear of castigation by her friends in the city should she have voted Republican, she remarked that “it was a privilege to be able to be concerned with social privileges.” 

While holding that many of these social issues are crucial to some Americans, her greater concern was whether or not she could “crack open a can of food and put something on the table.”

Piercing through the miasma of rhetoric, the purity of her argument hit home. As much as we seek to modernize and evolve, if we aren’t meeting the basic needs of people, how can we expect them to be concerned about the rest? 

Exploring this in further detail, I found that in January 2021 the U.S. Census Bureau calculated that the poverty threshold for a family of four is $27,740 and that 38 million Americans were living at or below this level. Furthermore, in data compiled in 2022 by Statista, America had the second highest poverty rate of any Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development country. 

Far from being able to be seen as the greatest country in the world, I realized that America must first turn back to the fundamental needs of its people to ensure it can repair the damage done in order to bring people back together.

Propagating views that people in Kentucky are alien from those in Massachusetts detracts from the inalienable rights that once defined this country: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Unity can only be achieved if we are prepared to listen to each other and learn, before stepping up to do the job that needs to be done. 

As Pope Francis urged back in 2019 “May we not wait for our neighbors to be good, before we do good to them.”

My travels reminded me that we need a big society more than a big country — one that recognizes that when our world moves away from us, we stand back up to move those in our world and find a new unity through our voices and actions. Otherwise, we risk becoming, as writer Rudyard Kipling noted, “islands shouting lies to each other across seas of misunderstanding.”

James Coltella is a British freelance writer living in the U.S.