I ran into an old coworker recently.

I used to work maintenance at a church. “Andy” was one of my coworkers there. I hadn’t seen him face-to-face since I left the job a few years ago. I’d seen him on Facebook and Instagram, though. Boy, had I seen him on Facebook and Instagram.

You see, “Andy” is on the Trump Train. For the first few years of us following each other on social media, this mostly manifested as the occasional “Share if you’re proud of President Trump” type of post. But the right-wing talking points went up to eleven once the US started closing down because of COVID, and up to twelve once the Black Lives Matter protests started. After one too many posts about faked COVID death numbers and airing George Floyd’s holding a pregnant woman hostage (which never happened) to the world, I unfollowed him on Facebook, keeping us friends but removing his posts from my feed. The last time we spoke was over Instagram, where we had a short debate about the voter ID laws that have been popping up all over the US, fueled by “Stop the Steal” rhetoric.

And yet, I enjoyed the encounter.

“Andy’s” face lit up when he saw me. Our conversation was short, him being on his way out and me being on my way in, but we updated each other on where we were in life and he told me he’d be on the lookout for jobs when I said I was looking for work. We fist-bumped and went our separate ways.

It was…civil. Enjoyable, even. And it made me realize something: I had started to consider “Andy” my enemy.

Now, in order for this post to not sound too tinfoil hat-y, I gotta say a couple of things.

First off, I do not and will never approve of the “bipartisan” rhetoric that’s been touted by the likes of President Biden, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. Maybe some lawmakers truly want a more unified Congress, but in practice, “bipartisanship” means watering down of legislation that would help the American people and obstructing that which you can’t water down.

Second, I am not a centrist. I certainly used to be, but those days are done, and my disdain for people who “cAn’T sEe a DiFfEreNcE” between those fighting for affordable healthcare and more social safety nets and those fighting to take people’s rights away and maintain an unequal society is deep.

Third, I’ll be providing evidence for what I’m saying for a reason. I’m referring to this post’s takeaway as “tinfoil hat-y” because the ideas I’ll be talking about are the basis of multiple conspiracy theories, many of which dress up antisemitism and racism in the guise of “just asking questions.” I do not and will never endorse any of these fairy tales, and unequivocally condemn anyone who does.

Fourth and finally, conservatives aren’t blank slates. Even though the key to the conservative establishment’s playbook is conditioning, at the end of the day, conservatives choose to be multiple types of -ist and -phobic and/or give their support and votes to politicians who are. They have agency, and many of them use it to be awful to people who don’t look, vote or think like them.

Now that I can make trading cards from how many disclaimers I’ve made, let’s get to the meat of it.

If you don’t know the term “chronically online,” you should. The Internet has done a lot of great things: made information more accessible than ever, given people the ability to stay connected no matter where they go, changed work life for the better via work from home and online businesses, etc. However, with these changes for the better has come a change for the worse: echo chambers. With the Internet, you can tailor your life, surrounding yourself with people who think like you, share all of the same opinions as you, obsess over something as fervently as you do, etc.

(Get ready to hear this refrain a lot) This is not inherently a bad thing. In fact, it’s natural: if you’re on Facebook, you’re there to find people you know. If you join a forum focused on a hobby like weightlifting, archery or Dungeons and Dragons, you’ll be surrounded by other weightlifters, archers, and D&D players. The problem is, these spaces can become closed circles. A handful of opinions are taken as gospel, and any naysayers or dissident voices are swiftly excommunicated. Those in the closed circle then feed on one another in a sense, distancing themselves further and further from reality with no one there to say, “Hey, guys, maybe we should look at this differently.”

Some examples.

“Incels” are the new punching bag of the Internet, with good reason. They’re misogynistic, hypocritical, and several mass shootings and terrorist attacks have been motivated by incel rhetoric. So what if I told you the first incel was a woman? Yep, the first incel was a Canadian woman who made a website for lonely single people to find community. “Alana” eventually left the forum, confident it could continue without her. As all the blue words a few lines up show, it didn’t, at least not in the way she envisioned.

The idea of “vocal minorities” in fandoms is another such example. Most fans of [insert thing here] don’t scream at fast-food workers, make a habit of sending death threats when they don’t like writing decisions, or demand that the actors of a couple on TV get together in real life, harassing their real-life partners to expedite the process. Those fans with a healthy enjoyment for [insert thing here] naturally want nothing to do with the crazies, and leave them to fester in their own toxicity. And fester they do, lying in wait for the next actor to harass on social media or the next news article comment section to type inflammatory comments in.

So how does this pertain to the socio-political state of today?

Multiple studies from multiple organizations have found that we’re living through one of the most ideologically divided times in US History. (And before some smart aleck leaves a comment about the Civil War, we didn’t have Pew Research Center handing out surveys during the Battle of Bull Run, now didn’t we?) And, like misogynists slowly poisoning the incel community into a hate group or “fans” giving fandom a bad name via online harassment, that polarization is caused by a minority.

The problem is, in the political landscape, the minority is at the top of the totem pole.

Lee Atwater was a strategist for the Republican Party who spelled out what I’m talking about in an infamous interview where he laid out the reasoning for the so-called “Southern strategy” (trigger warning for racial epithets):

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger”. By 1968, you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this”, is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger”. So, any way you look at it, race is coming on the back-burner.

Lee Atwater

That quote comes from an interview in 1981, when the Civil Rights Act was less than 20 years old. Atwater acknowledged that who the Southern strategy was for–racist whites–were a minority. If they weren’t a minority, Atwater and his cohorts wouldn’t have needed to keep their racism on the down low.

And that’s it in a nutshell.

“Establishment” has become a popular word in politics, i.e. “The Democratic establishment elected Joe Biden as a presidential candidate. The people wanted Bernie Sanders!” And it’s from there we can see the problem: the elites of our society–the politicians, the rich, heck, anyone with a sufficient amount of power–want our nation to go one way, while the populace wants it to go another. And that’s where the polarization comes in.

It’s a matter of divide and conquer. A nation divided is a nation less likely to impeach, trust-bust, unionize, tax and decommodify. That won’t do for the powerful, so they put a lot of legwork in making people stand against their own interests.

They do it through religion. Christian nationalism is a hot topic. Christian nationalists wrap right-wing talking points up in Bible verses and sermons. They have since the days of the Moral Majority, the Jerry Falwell-founded political organization who founded the Religious Right. Christian nationalists pervert Scripture, simplifying a complex religious text that’s an instruction manual for a good life, a history book, and a snapshot of ancient Jewish society down to banning abortion and gay marriage. Christians who hear these messages are groomed to think that to vote a certain way is sinful, and these Christians in turn raise their children with such poisonous theology.

They do it through conditioning. The manipulation doesn’t stop in the four walls of the church. Studies have found that regular viewers of Fox News are worse informed about societal and scientific issues than those who don’t watch news at all. That’s not an accident. Neither are the regular attacks on education, from cutting funding to busting teachers’ unions to claiming curriculum is full of “CRT” or is “grooming” children. On both sides of the partisan divide, a whole intellectual ecosystem has informed. Some outlets/figures/organizations seek to inform. Many…don’t, for a reason. An uninformed populace is a population that’s easily swayed.

And once the masses are under their sway, the powerful target. They point to someone–immigrants, LGBTQ+ people, people of color, the poor–and tell their followers, “They did it! Get them!” then sit back and wait to reap the benefits.

And the crazy thing? It’s not that difficult to get polarized people on the same page.

It’s become something of a trend on TikTok to present left-wing ideas to conservatives, in purposely neutral words. And lots of times, the listener agrees, and only backpedals when the cameraman reveals the idea’s left-wing.

I’m fortunate.

In 23 years of living, only one person I’ve met has proved themselves so despicable that I would consider them an enemy.

I’m looking to keep it that way.

There’s a saying that feels relevant to my conclusion: “You are closer to being homeless than being a billionaire.” Meaning that the people on the other side of the ideological divide have more in common than you than whoever’s pulling the puppet strings.

“Andy” is not my enemy.

Neither are people who think or vote like him.

I’ll never vote for the people they vote for, listen to the pundits they listen to, or join the movements they join.

But that doesn’t mean they’re irredeemable.