Three weeks before the mid-term election my wife pointed out a social media post promoting a multi-county Republican rally in our area. The local Democrat leader who posted it asked her subscribers a question. Would someone go and see what the speakers had to say? She wasn’t picking a fight. She was looking for common ground, some talking points that might help our polarized community work for all voters.

Then came the replies. None of it was flattering, on either side, and since everybody was speaking emotionally, nobody was listening. This us-against-them mentality is divide and rule in action. It also reminds me of the old saying about an eye for an eye. Everybody ends up blind.

What “Divide and Rule” Actually Means

The Latin phrase is divide et impera. The idea is simple. A divided public is easier to manage than a united one as illustrated by the November midterm’s blue tsunami.

Niccolò Machiavelli, an Italian Renaissance political philosopher and statesman, gave a version of this advice in The Art of War. He told commanders to split the enemy’s forces and sow suspicion among the enemy’s own men. That is battlefield strategy.

Here’s the twist. In his Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli argued something quite different about politics at home. He thought the conflict between Rome’s common people and its senate helped keep Rome free. Honest disagreement over real issues is not the problem. It is how a successful republic works.

Welcome to the Feedback Loop

Political scientists call it affective polarization. It means we don’t just disagree with the other party. We see its members as morally rotten or dangerous.

Each side tells a story about the other. Plenty of Republican voices describe Democrats as enemies of the country. Plenty of Democratic voices describe Republicans the same way. Then each side points to the other’s rhetoric as proof.

Hillary Clinton’s 2016 “basket of deplorables” remark is a well-known case. On September 9, 2016, she said half of Trump’s supporters belonged in that basket. The next day she said she regretted saying “half.” She also said the other basket held people desperate for change. Those people, she said, deserved empathy. Her critics heard contempt anyway. She later wrote that the remark hurt her campaign.

The point in these situations is rarely who started it. The point is that the loop feeds itself. Insults produce defensiveness. Defensiveness produces more insults. Social media thrives on rage-porn and makes publishers a ton of money.

The Perception Gap: We Are Wrong About Each Other

Here is the part that should embarrass all of us. A 2019 study by More in Common found something striking. Each party imagines almost twice as many opponents hold “extreme” views as actually do.

The gap gets wider for people who consume more news. It is also wider for people who share political content on social media. So the more time we spend arguing online, the less we know about each other. Shocking, I know.

That includes the comment thread my wife read. The people dismissing the Republican rally had decided what they would hear before anyone went to hear what they had to say. Preconceived anticipation vs an open mind.

Divide and Rule Through History

Karl Marx saw this pattern in 1870. In a letter, he described English workers who hated Irish workers as competitors who drove down wages. He called that hostility the secret of the English working class’s impotence. He said it was how the ruling class kept its power. He also blamed the press and the pulpit for keeping it alive.

Closer to home, Lyndon Johnson reportedly described how racial division worked in the South. According to Bill Moyers, Johnson said this in 1960. Give a poor white man “somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” Keep in mind that this is Moyers’ recollection, published in 1988. No recording or contemporaneous record has turned up. The sentiment fits Johnson’s well-documented political candor, but the exact wording is secondhand.

One more voice deserves a mention, with a caveat. Noam Chomsky made a related point. The smart way to control people, he wrote, is to “strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion.” That is a different trick than dividing people. It narrows the debate. Still, both tricks keep us arguing about the wrong things.

Practical Ways to Rebuild Common Ground

None of this requires giving up your convictions. It requires better thinking habits.

The trouble starts when conflict is aimed at the wrong target. Contempt for our neighbors replaces argument about policy. That is the part worth worrying about.

1. Go and listen. Braver Angels runs “Red/Blue” workshops that put conservatives and liberals in structured conversations. Researchers tested them in a randomized trial at four universities. A week later, participants showed about 22 percent less hostility toward the other party. The participants were college students, so the results may not apply to everyone. Still, it is one of the few depolarization efforts with real experimental evidence.

2. Speak to an individual’s values. In 2015, Matthew Feinberg and Robb Willer ran six studies with 1,322 participants. They found that arguments framed around the listener’s personal moral values were more persuasive. For example, conservatives were far more open to same-sex marriage when it was framed around patriotism. Most of us argue from our own value perspective and that is why we rarely persuade anyone.

3. Start with shared, local problems. Water, roads, health care costs, prices don’t have a party label and I don’t know anyone happy about the price of gas as a result of the war with Iran. Working on them together is a better first step than arguing about national culture issues.

4. Ask before you assume. Before you post the snarky reply, ask yourself a question. Do I actually know what this person believes? The perception gap says the answer is often no.

5. Treat structural reforms as promising, not magic. Ranked-choice voting, open primaries, and independent redistricting are worth debating. Maybe they make a difference, maybe they don’t, but it’s a step in the right direction.

6. Cut back on the outrage diet. Local news and long-form reporting such as “Frontline” on PBS, and “Dateline NBC,” which feature in-depth investigative and narrative journalism. “Vice News Tonight” and “The New Yorker Radio Hour” also specialize in extended, immersive storytelling giving a more accurate picture than a feed built to keep you angry and tech giants fat with cash.

Rage Bait: Time to Cool your Feed

Rage porn (or rage bait) refers to content deliberately designed to provoke anger, outrage, or moral indignation. Because human evolution hard wires us to pay extra attention to threats and social conflict—a phenomenon known as negativity bias—outrage triggers fast, emotive reactions.

Let me tell you something about your social media feed. For years, it was built to make you mad. Angry clicks. Angry comments. Angry shares. Every one of them kept you scrolling, and scrolling made somebody money.

Some folks call it rage porn. Others call it rage bait. Either way, it’s content designed to get a rise out of you. The good news is that things are starting to shift. Platforms, regulators, and mental health experts are all pushing to curb it. Here’s why.

Rage Bait Wears Down Your Mental Health

Constant outrage takes a toll. Content that keeps you angry triggers stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline. Over time, that can leave you exhausted and anxious. It can also trap you in the endless doomscrolling cycle.

Rage bait also plays on your emotions. It leaves you angry, helpless, or on edge. And it almost never offers a solution. You don’t get a useful conversation out of it. You just get a bad mood and a sore thumb.

Rage Bait Pulls Us Apart and Spreads Misinformation

Rage bait thrives on hyperbole and caricature. It also loves a bad-faith argument. Nuanced debate gets tossed out the window. Tribalism and hostility take its place.

Here’s the scary part. Online anger doesn’t always stay online. It can spill over into harassment and doxxing. It can feed political radicalization. In the worst cases, it can lead to real-world violence.

A lot of rage bait isn’t even honest. It leans on sensational headlines and clips taken out of context. Some of it is flat-out staged. The goal is to deceive viewers for financial gain. (Remember Fox News agreed to pay Dominion Voting Systems nearly $800 million to avert a trial in the voting machine company’s lawsuit that would have exposed how the network promoted lies about the 2020 presidential election.) Limiting this stuff helps improve the accuracy of what we see online, remember, rage bait only works if we bite.

Be the Witness

“Change will not come if we wait for some other person, or if we wait for some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.”
― Barack Obama

The local Democrat leader who posted that notice asked for a witness. The right answer to that call was “I’ll go.”

Go. Take notes. Bring back what was actually said, not what you expected to hear. You may find a lot that you disagree with. You may also find a few things you can agree on. Either way, you will know more than the people who stayed home and guessed.