I’ve posted political jabs online that felt sharp in the moment – and embarrassed me an hour later. They land exactly the way you expect: likes, agreement, a small rush of validation. And then they curdle. Read back an hour later, they feel thin and cheap. Not just because they flatten a complicated issue, but because they reduce the people on the other side of it.
I’ve shared things I didn’t really fact-check, leaned on statistics that made my point cleaner than it deserved to be, and said things about people I disagreed with that I wouldn’t say to their face. None of it felt very extreme at the time.
What unsettles me more is how familiar this has become. I’ve watched myself and people in my own political camp accuse their opponents of hypocrisy, then do something remarkably similar when it suits them. The justifications come easily. The standards shift depending on who’s speaking. After a while, it’s hard not to notice that the outrage is often less about the behavior than about who’s doing it.
Something has changed in how we talk to each other. The same people who show up in a crisis – who lend tools, check in on neighbors, offer help without being asked – can sound unrecognizable in political spaces. Not worse. Just narrower, as if the environment rewards a thinner version of who they are.
Blaming individuals is easy, but the incentives do a lot of the work. Social media amplifies outrage and speed. Political discourse rewards clarity over accuracy, confidence over reflection. Once that tone takes hold, it becomes easier to perform allegiance than to question the frame itself.
You can see it in serious debates. Take climate change: Urgency about reducing carbon emissions sits alongside real concerns about cost, reliability and economic disruption. Both are legitimate. Yet in polarized spaces, they’re treated less as problems to solve than as positions to defeat. The result isn’t clarity – it’s stalemate. Each side grows more certain of its moral ground and less curious.
That tension is part of what has pushed me toward a more centrist posture. Not as a way to float above the fray, but as a refusal to let political identity do all the thinking. It’s an attempt to stay untethered enough to follow an argument where it leads, even when it’s inconvenient or uncomfortable. I value disagreement – it exposes blind spots and tests assumptions. Without it, systems don’t become harmonious; they become brittle.
In practice, it means catching the impulse to post something just because it scores a point. Noticing when I’m holding others to standards I quietly relax on my own side. Resisting the urge to treat disagreement as evidence of bad faith.
I’m not fully consistent in this. I still feel the pull of certainty, the satisfaction of being on the “right” side. But I’ve started to see the cost – how quickly that mindset turns into something smug and dismissive. When every issue becomes a test of loyalty, there’s less room to think, to revise, to take someone else’s concern seriously without feeling like you’re conceding something essential.
The goal isn’t neutrality. It’s proportion – the ability to hold convictions without turning other people into enemies.
What’s getting lost in the divide isn’t disagreement. It’s the willingness to see the person on the other side – just as convinced and just as passionate as you are – as someone still worth understanding.
Once that disappears, conversation stops being a genuine exchange and becomes performance. And when we perform instead of engage, everyone loses.
Susan Atkinson of Durango volunteers with the Durango Chapter of Citizens’ Climate Lobby.