Political and Cultural Calcification

In my last post, I wrote about our cultural and political divide through the lens of gender - the distance between people who are exploring their gender and sexual identity and the people who feel threatened by that exploration. I still believe a lot of what I wrote. But the longer I've sat with it, the more I've realized that framing is only one way of looking at how far apart we've drifted, and maybe not the most important one. So in this post, I want to push back on my own argument a little, and offer some other explanations for why our politics and our society have hardened the way they have. I don't think there is a single cause. I think there are several, and they feed each other.

We stopped sharing the same world

The first explanation is the internet. Not long ago, most people watched the same handful of television shows, listened to the same local radio stations, and leaned on their local communities in ways they simply had to. That shared world has been thinning out for a long time. More than 200 U.S. counties now have no local news source at all, and some 50 million Americans have limited or no access to local news.[1] Trust in the media that remains has collapsed too: when Gallup first asked in the 1970s, about seven in ten Americans trusted the press; in 2025 that number hit a record low of 28 percent.[2]

Globalization is part of this story, but mobile computing accelerated it. Only about a third of American adults owned a smartphone in 2011; today it's 91 percent.[3] The feed in our pocket is personal, endless, and built for us alone. I want to be careful here, though, because the evidence is more complicated than "phones did it." One well-known study found that polarization grew fastest among older Americans - the people least likely to be online - which suggests the internet amplifies a divide that has deeper roots rather than creating it from scratch.[4] I think that's right, and it's part of why I don't want to stop at technology.

What worries me is what our economy has started to lean on alongside it: disposable technology, constant consumption, hyper-personalized content, and a growing menu of small, habit-forming escapes. Legal sports betting went from about $4.9 billion in annual wagers in 2017 to nearly $167 billion in 2025.[5] Daily or near-daily cannabis use now outpaces daily drinking in the United States, a shift decades in the making.[6] Add in the energy drinks and the coffee that keep us scrolling, and I'm not sure any of it is sustainable. None of these things is a villain on its own. But together, they seem to sit right alongside declining public trust, an ongoing mental health crisis, and a widening gap between the people who are doing well and everyone else.

Housing and the generational divide

The internet isn't the only reason, and neither is globalization. The economy - and the housing market especially - has quietly planted seeds of resentment between generations. Nearly half of all renter households in the U.S., a record 22.7 million, now spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing.[7] The typical first-time homebuyer is now 40 years old, the oldest on record, and first-time buyers make up the smallest share of the market ever measured.[8] Meanwhile, investors bought roughly one in five single-family homes sold in early 2026, up from six to eight percent in the early 2000s.[9]

I remember when I was a teenager, it felt like everyone wanted to own a few properties and rent them out. Financing an apartment, becoming a landlord, and letting the property "work for you" was considered a smart, even responsible, path - and a lot of the people who talked that way called themselves liberals. What I find interesting now is how much that has shifted. Adults under 35 now view socialism more favorably than capitalism.[10] A socialist lens would reject the idea that a property works for itself at all - a building doesn't produce anything without people maintaining it - and would treat shelter as a basic human right, something the Universal Declaration of Human Rights already names as part of an adequate standard of living.[11] You don't have to agree with that conclusion to see why it resonates with a generation that may never own a home.

Politics as content

Another result of the internet is celebrity politics. It used to be that most members of Congress were known mostly in their home states. Now, many politicians use the internet's content machine to gather enormous amounts of attention, and that attention brings power, influence, fundraising, and an entirely new playbook for building a campaign around a "relatable" or "electable" candidate. Two of the clearest examples come from opposite ends of the spectrum: former Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, both of whom built national followings online and turned that reach into real political power.[12] Ocasio-Cortez, for her part, helped pioneer the casual Instagram livestream as a way to bring followers into the legislative process.[13]

The trouble is what the algorithm tends to reward. A study of more than 2.7 million posts from news outlets and members of Congress found that posts about the opposing political side were shared about twice as often as posts about one's own side - and that language attacking the out-group was the single strongest predictor of engagement.[14] Content that is slower, more careful, and more factual simply has a harder time competing.

The feedback loop

There is a feedback loop at the center of this, and Instagram is a useful example. Meta earns substantially all of its revenue from advertising - about $196 billion of its roughly $201 billion in 2025.[15] That revenue funds research into what keeps people engaged, because Meta has promised its shareholders growth and needs advertisers to keep buying. The better the targeting, the more valuable the ads, for the advertiser and for Meta alike. And the data that powers that targeting comes not only from what you do in the app and the permissions you've granted, but from far beyond it.

To be fair, Meta says it doesn't sell user data in the simple sense. But a 2024 Federal Trade Commission staff report on the largest social media and streaming companies found that they tracked users across the internet, combined that information with data gathered from an opaque ecosystem of third parties, retained it indefinitely, and shared it widely - so widely that no company could provide a full list of who had received it.[16] The paid services that promise to scrub your data don't solve this either. In a Consumer Reports study, removal services cleared only about 35 percent of volunteers' personal information from people-search sites after four months.[17]

Meanwhile, the industry has invested heavily in shaping the rules it operates under. Meta spent a record $26.3 million on federal lobbying in 2025, more than it had in any year since it first hired lobbyists.[18] The United States still has no comprehensive federal privacy law, which leaves a lot of room to operate with less transparency and fewer protections for users - and to keep building apps designed to be hard to put down. I don't think the CEO or the shareholders are uniquely evil here. They're the human part of a system that keeps reinforcing itself.

The results are easy to see. "Rage bait" - content deliberately designed to provoke anger in order to drive engagement - was Oxford's 2025 Word of the Year.[19] "Slop," meaning low-quality content mass-produced by AI, was Merriam-Webster's.[20] Generative AI is making inflammatory content cheaper to produce and making it harder to tell what's real, on platforms that are, at their core, engines for engagement that don't account for what that engagement does to us.

Revisiting gender

This is where I want to revisit my last post most directly. For most of modern American history, the distinction between sex and gender wasn't something most people thought about; to many, there was no difference at all. In the decade since same-sex marriage became the law of the land in 2015, gay and queer people became far more visible, and trans and nonbinary people's push for equal rights reached a tipping point of its own. Public opinion has split sharply along party lines in that same period: Republican support for legal same-sex marriage fell from 55 percent in 2021 and 2022 to 37 percent in 2026, while Democratic support held steady near 87 percent.[21] Views on gender identity show an even wider gap.[22]

I think part of the reason is that traditional conservatism has long rested on a clear dichotomy - man and woman, masculine and feminine, protector and protected. Sexuality and family life beyond heterosexual monogamy don't fit neatly into that picture (and honestly, heterosexual monogamy doesn't always fit it either, though it's been culturally packaged together with traditionalism for a long time). The nuclear family carries a kind of promise: follow the script, stay faithful, raise children, and you'll be rewarded with a full and meaningful life. There is nothing wrong with a nuclear family. But it's worth remembering that the isolated two-parent household as the ideal is a fairly recent arrangement; for most of human history, people lived in larger, extended, and even chosen kinship networks.[23] There have always been other ways to make a family, and other ways to be a man or a woman.

So here is where I'd push back on myself. I don't think society's growing understanding of the difference between sex and gender is what's driving our political divide. I think it's happening on the same timeline as that divide, which makes it easy to blame. At the same time, a small number of extraordinarily wealthy people now have enormous reach into our politics and our media - Elon Musk alone spent more than $290 million on the 2024 election[24] - and culture-war conflict, much of it playing out online, does a very good job of keeping working people focused on each other instead of on shared problems.

What people actually care about

As we approach the 2026 midterms, with President Trump's approval at 30 percent - close to the lowest of either of his terms[25] - it has become clearer to me that people care about a wide range of concrete, pressing issues, and not always the familiar culture-war standbys. Data centers are a striking example. Seven in ten Americans oppose building an AI data center in their area, and majorities of every party group agree.[26] Fourteen states have considered or are considering moratoriums on new projects.[27] And the conditions I'd want to see before more get built are pretty reasonable: stop the pollution, give something real back to the community in jobs or revenue, and build and run these facilities with fair, ideally union, labor.

The rural infrastructure gap

Finally, I think a lack of investment in rural infrastructure plays a major role in our divide. About 40 percent of rural residents live somewhere with no public transit option at all.[28] That means getting to work requires a car - a depreciating asset that costs nearly $12,900 a year to own and operate on average, before you even account for how insurance rates vary.[29] Libraries, which could be hubs for makerspaces, computer access, and lifelong learning, are an easy target for budget cuts in the internet age; the 2025 effort to dismantle the Institute of Museum and Library Services hit small and rural libraries hardest.[30] Teachers earn about 25 percent less than comparable college graduates in other professions.[31] When transit is nonexistent or struggling, housing is expensive, and a car is a necessity, it's very hard to dig yourself out of poverty when you're barely making rent, let alone groceries.

Education may be the most important piece of all. Between 2017 and 2023, the share of American adults scoring at the lowest level of literacy rose from 19 percent to 28 percent.[32] If you can't engage with and digest the arguments other people make - and compare and reflect on them against your own - it's very hard to evolve in your views or find middle ground. That, more than anything, is what I mean by calcification.

Where this leaves me

In my last post, I said I wanted a world where everyone gets the equal rights and respect they deserve, and I still do. What I've come to understand is that getting there requires more than winning an argument about gender. It means rebuilding the shared spaces we lost, making housing something people can actually afford, rethinking business models that profit from our anger, and investing in the communities that have been left to fend for themselves. I don't have all of it figured out. But I think the road ahead is less about choosing a side and more about fixing the things that pushed us apart in the first place.

Notes

1."News Deserts Hit New High and 50 Million Have Limited Access to Local News, Study Finds," Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University, 2025, https://www.medill.northwestern.edu/news/2025/news-deserts-hit-new-high-and-50-million-have-limited-access-to-local-news-study-finds.html.

2."Trust in Media at New Low of 28% in U.S.," Gallup, accessed October 10, 2026, https://news.gallup.com/poll/695762/trust-media-new-low.aspx.

3."Mobile Fact Sheet," Pew Research Center, November 20, 2025, https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/mobile/.

4.Levi Boxell, Matthew Gentzkow, and Jesse M. Shapiro, "Is the Internet Causing Political Polarization? Evidence from Demographics," NBER Working Paper 23258 (National Bureau of Economic Research, March 2017), https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23258/w23258.pdf.

5."Prediction Markets," Congressional Research Service, IF12761, accessed October 10, 2026, https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/IF/HTML/IF12761.html.

6."Daily Marijuana Use Outpaces Daily Drinking in the US, a New Study Says," Associated Press, May 22, 2024, https://apnews.com/article/marijuana-cannabis-alcohol-drinking-daily-use-b91c2c5957fdb2d48e6616c3baa14c13.

7.Press release for The State of the Nation's Housing 2026, Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University, June 17, 2026, https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/interactive-item/files/Harvard_JCHS_State_of_the_Nations_Housing_2026_Press_Release.pdf.

8."First-Time Home Buyer Share Falls to Historic Low of 21%, Median Age Rises to 40," National Association of REALTORS®, November 4, 2025, https://www.nar.realtor/press-releases/first-time-home-buyer-share-falls-to-historic-low-of-21-median-age-rises-to-40.

9."Institutional Investors and Single-Family Housing: In Brief," Congressional Research Service, R49015, accessed October 10, 2026, https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R49015.

10."Socialism's Positive Rating Tops 40% for First Time," Gallup, accessed October 10, 2026, https://news.gallup.com/poll/714653/socialism-positive-rating-tops-first-time.aspx.

11.United Nations, "Universal Declaration of Human Rights," art. 25, accessed October 10, 2026, https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights.

12."Politicians, the New Social Media Influencers," Deseret News, April 25, 2021, https://www.deseret.com/2021/4/25/22382769/how-social-media-and-attention-economy-politics-redefining-power-pelosi-marjorie-taylor-greene-aoc/.

13."How Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Is Bringing Her Instagram Followers Into the Political Process," New York Times, November 16, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/16/us/politics/ocasio-cortez-instagram-congress.html.

14.Steve Rathje, Jay J. Van Bavel, and Sander van der Linden, "Out-Group Animosity Drives Engagement on Social Media," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118, no. 26 (2021): e2024292118, https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2024292118.

15.Meta Platforms, Inc., Form 10-K for the Fiscal Year Ended December 31, 2025 (U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, 2026), https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000162828026003942/meta-20251231.htm.

16.Federal Trade Commission, A Look Behind the Screens: Examining the Data Practices of Social Media and Video Streaming Services, staff report, September 2024, https://www.ftc.gov/reports/look-behind-screens-examining-data-practices-social-media-video-streaming-services.

17.Consumer Reports, Data Defense: Evaluating People-Search Site Removal Services, 2024, https://innovation.consumerreports.org/Data-Defense_-Evaluating-People-Search-Site-Removal-Services-.pdf.

18."Armies of Lobbyists Helped Big Tech Rack Up Victories During First Year of Trump's Second Term," Issue One, accessed October 10, 2026, https://issueone.org/articles/armies-of-lobbyists-helped-big-tech-rack-up-victories-during-first-year-of-trumps-second-term/.

19."The Oxford Word of the Year 2025 Is Rage Bait," Oxford University Press, December 2025, https://corp.oup.com/news/the-oxford-word-of-the-year-2025-is-rage-bait/.

20."2025 Word of the Year: Slop," Merriam-Webster, accessed October 10, 2026, https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/word-of-the-year.

21."U.S. Support for LGBTQ+ Issues Remains Down From Peak," Gallup, accessed October 10, 2026, https://news.gallup.com/poll/710810/support-lgbtq-issues-remains-down-peak.aspx.

22.Kim Parker, Juliana Menasce Horowitz, and Anna Brown, Americans' Complex Views on Gender Identity and Transgender Issues (Pew Research Center, June 28, 2022), https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2022/06/PSDT_06.28.22_GenderID_fullreport.pdf.

23.David Brooks, "The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake," The Atlantic, March 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/03/the-nuclear-family-was-a-mistake/605536/.

24."Elon Musk Spent More Than $290 Million on the 2024 Election, Year-End FEC Filings Show," CNN, February 1, 2025, https://edition.cnn.com/2025/02/01/politics/elon-musk-2024-election-spending-millions.

25."Trump's Approval Rating Drops as Fewer Americans Are Confident in His Handling of the Economy, Other Issues," Pew Research Center, October 8, 2026, https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2026/10/08/trumps-approval-rating-drops-as-fewer-americans-are-confident-in-his-handling-of-the-economy-other-issues/.

26."Americans Oppose AI Data Centers in Their Area," Gallup, accessed October 10, 2026, https://news.gallup.com/poll/709772/americans-oppose-data-centers-area.aspx.

27."Americans Wary of AI-Driven Data Center Boom, Reuters/Ipsos Poll Shows," Reuters, June 11, 2026, https://www.reuters.com/world/us/americans-wary-ai-driven-data-center-boom-reutersipsos-poll-shows-2026-06-11/.

28.Federal Highway Administration, "Chapter 11: Rural America," in 24th Edition Conditions and Performance Report, accessed October 10, 2026, https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policy/24cpr/pdf/Chapter11.pdf.

29."AAA: New Vehicle Ownership Costs Hit $12,863 Annually," AAA Newsroom, September 2026, https://newsroom.acg.aaa.com/aaa-new-vehicle-ownership-costs-hit-12863-annually/.

30."IMLS Cuts Put America's Public Libraries at Risk," American Library Association, April 2025, https://www.ala.org/news/2025/04/imls-cuts-put-americas-public-libraries-risk.

31.Sylvia Allegretto, The Teacher Pay Penalty Remained High in 2025 (Economic Policy Institute, August 25, 2026), https://www.epi.org/publication/the-teacher-pay-penalty-remained-high-in-2025-teachers-and-students-nationwide-are-still-paying-the-price-of-decades-of-neglect/.

32."Highlights of the 2023 U.S. PIAAC Results," National Center for Education Statistics, December 10, 2024, https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/2023/national_results.asp.

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