Practicing E Pluribus Unum
Written and illustrated by one Ralph Losey, assisted by many AI.
Knowing that Americans have more common ground than they sometimes realize is useful. Knowing is not enough.
Political polarization has no single cause and no simple cure. It involves voters, political leaders, election systems, media businesses, social-media platforms, community institutions, and ordinary human psychology.
That is one reason to be skeptical of easy solutions.
A major 2025 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences examined 77 attempts from 25 published studies to reduce partisan hostility. The average improvement was modest, and much of it faded quickly. Repeating the treatments did not produce much stronger or more lasting effects. The researchers concluded that individual exercises alone are unlikely to solve polarization across an entire society. Holliday, Lelkes & Westwood, “Why Depolarization Is Hard”.
That does not mean citizens are helpless. It means we should think in terms of civic practices, not miracle cures.Age of Diversity Here are four.
Practice 1: Improve the Incentives for Public Leadership
People respond to incentives.
A student studies what will be on the test. A business pays attention to what customers buy. Political leaders pay attention to what helps them gain office, stay in office, attract attention, raise money, and satisfy the voters most likely to reward or punish them.
If outrage receives more attention than problem-solving, outrage becomes valuable.
Research on American polarization shows that politicians have become highly divided along ideological lines and that political institutions can reward conflict. A 2025 PNAS study concluded that lasting improvement will probably require attention not only to citizens’ attitudes but also to “elite behaviors and structural incentives” that encourage partisan conflict. PNAS, “Why Depolarization Is Hard”.
That does not tell us that one particular election reform is the answer.
Ideas such as open primaries, ranked-choice voting, independent redistricting, campaign reforms, and changes in legislative procedure all have supporters and critics. Their effects can vary depending on how and where they are used. They should be studied on evidence rather than adopted as slogans.
The broader principle is simpler:
If citizens want leaders to cooperate when cooperation is appropriate, tell the truth, respect constitutional rules, and solve problems, the political system should not consistently punish those behaviors.
For an ordinary citizen, this begins with paying attention not just to what a candidate promises, but how that candidate behaves. Does the person explain facts accurately? Correct mistakes? Work with people who disagree? Respect lawful outcomes? Or does the person gain attention mainly by making fellow Americans hate and fear one another?
Those are civic questions, not party questions.
Practice 2: See One Another More Accurately
The second practice may be the easiest to understand and one of the hardest to maintain:
Do not confuse the loudest member of a group with the whole group.
Research on the perception gap shows that Americans frequently overestimate how extreme people in the other political party are. The 2026 Pew Political Typology adds another warning against easy stereotypes: American politics contains at least nine major combinations of values and attitudes in Pew’s analysis, not merely two uniform camps. Pew Research Center, 2026 Political Typology.
Correcting these mistaken impressions can matter.
A 2024 Science study involving more than 32,000 Americans tested 25 different approaches to reducing partisan hostility and antidemocratic attitudes. Some of the most successful approaches corrected mistaken beliefs about people in the other party or showed participants relatable people who held different political views. Different methods worked on different problems, which is another reason not to expect one universal solution. Stanford, “Megastudy Testing 25 Treatments”.
The practical habit is straightforward.
Before repeating an astonishing claim about what “Republicans believe” or “Democrats want,” ask: How do I know?
Was it a representative survey? A statement by one politician? A television clip? A viral post selected precisely because it was outrageous?
Seeing people accurately does not mean excusing bad conduct. It means directing criticism at the people, ideas, and actions that deserve it instead of casually transferring that criticism to tens of millions of strangers.
Accuracy is a form of civic discipline.
Practice 3: Lower the Threat Temperature
Political arguments become dangerous when every dispute is described as a final battle for survival.
Researchers sometimes call this an existential threat, meaning a threat believed to endanger the continued existence of something fundamental: democracy, freedom, one’s community, one’s way of life, or the country itself.
Real threats exist. Political violence exists. Corruption exists. Officials can abuse power. Democratic rules can be attacked. Citizens should not respond to genuine dangers by pretending that everything is fine.
The problem arises when every disagreement becomes an emergency and every opponent becomes an enemy.
Research reviewed by Rachel Kleinfeld at the Carnegie Endowment suggests that fears about what the other side might do to democracy can intensify polarization. It also cautions against assuming that simply making people like the other party more will automatically change attitudes toward democratic rules or political violence. The relationships are more complicated. Carnegie Endowment, “Polarization, Democracy, and Political Violence”.
That points toward a useful discipline in public argument:
Be specific.
If a public official lies, identify the lie and the evidence. If a proposal is unconstitutional, explain the constitutional problem. If someone advocates violence, quote the actual statement in context. If evidence is uncertain, say so.
What should be avoided is the leap from:
This person did something dangerous
to:
Everyone who votes like this person is dangerous.
Those statements are not the same.
Lowering the threat temperature does not require false equivalence. Two claims need not be equally true. Two actions need not be equally serious. Civility does not require silence.
It requires proportion, evidence, and refusal to dehumanize fellow citizens.
For young people growing up with social media, there is an additional habit worth learning early: anger is information, but it is not verification. A post that makes you furious may deserve investigation precisely because it made you furious.
Pause. Check. Then decide.
Practice 4: Work Together on Shared Local Problems
Talking with people who disagree can help. But conversation by itself has limits.
Decades of psychological research on intergroup contact, meaning contact between members of different groups, finds that positive contact can reduce prejudice. The effect tends to be stronger when people meet with roughly equal status, cooperate, and work toward a common goal. Pettigrew & Tropp, major meta-analysis of intergroup contact research.
This suggests something more useful than simply putting two political opponents in a room and instructing them to be nice to one another.
Give them something worthwhile to do together.
A neighborhood may need a park cleaned. A school may need tutors. A food bank may need volunteers. A historical society may need records preserved. A community struck by a hurricane may need supplies distributed. Students may want a dangerous intersection improved, a school program created, or an environmental problem investigated.
None of these activities makes political disagreement disappear.
That is not the point.
Working alongside someone creates information that a political label cannot provide. You discover whether the other person keeps promises, works hard, listens, solves problems, tells good jokes, brings terrible snacks, or knows how to repair something you do not.
The person becomes a person rather than a category.
The research also warns us not to romanticize this. Positive contact can help, but bad encounters can make prejudice worse, and short-term interpersonal programs usually cannot overcome large structural forces by themselves. 2024 meta-analysis on positive and negative intergroup contact PNAS review of the limits of depolarization programs
So local cooperation should not replace national reform, journalism, elections, constitutional safeguards, or serious policy debate.
It does something different.
It gives people practice at being citizens together.
What These Four Practices Have in Common
The four practices operate at different levels.
Improve incentives looks at the systems surrounding political leaders.
See one another accurately deals with mistaken beliefs about other citizens.
Lower the threat temperature deals with how disagreement is described and understood.
Work together locally turns civic identity into shared experience.
None asks Americans to abandon their political beliefs.
None requires pretending that all policies are equally wise, all leaders equally responsible, or all claims equally supported by evidence.
And none promises to make politics pleasant.
The more realistic goal is to make disagreement compatible with a functioning republic.
The phrase E Pluribus Unum has survived for more than two centuries because the problem it describes never goes away. A free society continually produces differences: different interests, beliefs, religions, cultures, regions, generations, and political movements.
The question is what we do with those differences.
Do they become reasons to stop recognizing one another as fellow citizens?
Or can Americans argue, vote, protest, persuade, lose elections, win elections, change their minds, refuse to change their minds, and still preserve something larger that they hold in common?
That is the continuing work of Out of Many, One.
There is no final recipe for it.
There is only practice.
Thoughtful comments, disagreement, and additional evidence are welcome.
© 2026 Ralph Losey.
Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-ND 4.0).
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