There's one thing that Americans still have in common: A shared sense that we're more divided than ever before.
Just how deep that schism runs can be seen in the differing reactions to the Covid-19 pandemic at a time when the simple call to wear a mask to contain a viral spread is now seen as a partisan act. That's a glaring contrast to World War II, when a majority of Americans bought in to the calls from President Franklin Roosevelt's Office of Price Administration to ration rubber, gas, meat, butter and sugar for the national war effort. Sacrificing for the greater good is a lot easier when almost everyone can agree on that greater good. That consensus, however, is increasingly a concept for the history books.
It's not just politics as usual — or at least what was once usual.
A 2019 poll by the Pew Research Group found that 61 percent of Republicans said Democrats do not share many of their other values and goals outside of politics, while 54 percent of Democrats said the same about Republicans. And that discernible divide across most issues has been growing for the 25 years that Pew has been measuring partisanship.
"The pandemic is a good example," Carroll Doherty, director of political research at Pew, said. "At the outset, there was some common sentiment. The partisanship we normally see was set aside a bit in the early days of the coronavirus.
"But since then, as has become typical on issues, you see growing partisanship in perceptions of how serious the disease is and perceptions of how Donald Trump is handling it. You can see where the country is facing this serious crisis and the parties are not coming together — and, in fact if you look at it over time, they’re moving further apart."
Some blame for the depth of that schism during a national crisis can be traced to the Oval Office.
"It’s not necessarily that national cooperation couldn’t have happened, it would have taken a leader that would have framed the issue around (a shared) national identity," said Jay Van Bavel, an associate professor of psychology and neural science at New York University, who studies national identity.
"That clearly didn’t happen."
"But Trump rose to power in part because of pre-existing historically high levels of polarization, and he’s stayed in power because of it, but on the other hand he foments and creates and cultivates and exacerbates and amplifies that polarization. So he’s both a symptom and a cause."
Van Bevel is quick to add that the growing divide started long before the 2016 election, and can be traced to other factors, including the bifurcation of news sources along partisan lines, the competitive nature of congressional elections which disincentivizes cooperation, and the growth of social media.
"Now, it’s really easy to tunnel into a world of conspiracy theory and fake news and hyperpartisan rhetoric," Van Bevel said of social media algorithms that reinforce personal views, "and the reward structure seems to be one in which people can get a lot of followers and likes and clicks when you post something that’s loaded with a lot of moral emotions.
"As it gets retweeted more, you get a lot of positive reinforcement from ideologically like-minded people."
Trump has also inspired many people to cross the ideological divide — in opposition to him. The Lincoln Project, an organization made up mostly of Republicans and dedicated to voting out the president in a repudiation of their own party, is a prominent example.
"We're an American organization standing for the ideas and ideals of the country, that the country is more important than loyalty to a political party," said Steve Schmidt, co-founder of the Lincoln Project and a veteran Republican strategist who worked on the campaigns of California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and former President George W. Bush. "That something has gone completely off the rails when a political party exists for no other purpose than being loyal and obedient to its leader."
There has been a major demographic shift over the years that also accounts for these divisions. The Census Bureau reported last year that nonwhites and Hispanics became a majority of people under the age of 16 in 2019 for the first time in the nation's history.
"Democrats and Republicans had more in common demographically 20 or 25 years ago," Doherty said. "The nation itself was less racially and ethnically diverse back then, but the growing diversity has most largely occurred among Democrats. So, right now, you have Democrats who are more and more racially and ethnically diverse, while Republicans look pretty much the same as they did 25 years ago — overwhelmingly white."
Those demographics are mirrored in the varied opinions over the Black Lives Matter protests in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, which Trump has made a major issue in his re-election campaign.
There have been other changes over time: The erosion in idealism surrounding the mystique of the American dream and American exceptionalism, Kim Coates, director of the American Culture Studies program at Bowling Green State University, said.
"The grand narratives that have informed the American cultural imaginary for so long are things like the "American dream," "American exceptionalism," and the notion of the American individual as a self-made man," Coates said. "But those kind of grand myths have always been based on not paying attention to the people that they don't include."
The ideal of the American dream, though popularized by the historian James Truslow Adams in his 1931 book "The Epic of America," can be traced back to Thomas Jefferson's ideal of "life, liberty and pursuit of happiness" in the Declaration of Independence a century and a half earlier.
But the shifting global economy and the shrinking of many traditional American industries has made attaining that dream increasingly less realistic for many Americans, something Bernie Sanders and Trump supporters can agree on, even if they're far apart on the potential solutions.
"The truth of the matter is that the nuclear family has broken down, religion attendance has decreased, families have moved from communal locations in towns, spread across the country, and social media has pushed dissenting views away from people as audiences and information have become more and more customized and segregated," Schmidt said. "People hear more and more from people like them.
"The net effect is that the world gets smaller for people. It becomes cocooned."
Van Bevel, himself a Canadian, said Americans share more in common than they may realize.
"Americans have a set of values that take for granted but that are distinctive, that other countries see and recognize as American," he said. "And a lot of them are based around freedom and market based solutions to problems, that’s an American idea."
There may even be some shared values left: An overwhelming majority (85 percent) of Americans say it is very important that rights and freedoms of all people are respected, according to a Pew poll released earlier this month.
We also share a popular culture, rooting for the same Olympic athletes and the same movie superheroes.
Americans can also be galvanized in great numbers around shared national achievement, such as the space race that resulted in American astronauts reaching the moon in 1969. It's just a lot less common these days.
"The idea that because we’re so profoundly divided, we don’t share history and culture and interests just strikes me as wrong," Schmidt said. "Both can be true. We are in fact Americans, all 330 million of us, we are in it together.
"And the chaos of Covid should make that point — though when you look at the politicization of that issue, it’s obviously not a point that’s understood by everybody."