there are no monoliths in american politics

thoughts on false polarization and the role of the artist-citizen

My new album, Heirloom, featuring a piano concerto I wrote for my father, is now available. I’m also on tour this fall; my tour dates are here.

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In Iowa City, where slate skies and plunging temperatures augur the arrival of winter, students clutch the collars of their coats, weighed down by backpacks and cell phones and the anxiety that seems to haunt so many young people these days. (Okay, not just young people.) I’m in residence this week at the university here, and a few days ago, I had an opportunity to visit three sections of a class called Performing Power, which is concerned with the intersection of art and social justice. These conversations with students were illuminating, offering a window into what it’s like for young adults to come of age in an era of perpetual crisis and chaos. But they also had questions of their own, and one that came up several times was this: what, they wanted to know, do I believe to be the responsibility of the artist/activist in a time like ours?

When we talk about art and politics, we often think of works that carry an ideological message. Some are subtle; others are polemical broadsides. A healthy artistic ecosystem will contain all of these and more: an ecology of diverse aesthetic and strategic approaches to the political. But since making a polemic of my own back in 2018—the oratorio emergency shelter intake form, which (loudly) confronts economic inequality through the lens of housing crises—I’ve come to embrace a different tack on political art, one which centers social relations.

More specifically, I’ve been thinking about the extent to which love, and more specifically, Christian love, or agape, was a disciplining force in the civil rights movement of the 1960s. In the face of bombings, beatings, and garden variety dehumanization, movement leaders of that era resisted giving into hatred, for they knew that to do so was to demean themselves. This wasn’t easy work, and Dr. King writes about moments in which he failed to live up to the standard he’d set for himself: to love his neighbor-enemy the way that God loves man. I’ve written several times this year about Dr. King’s commitment to agape, observing that contemporary politics seems comparatively devoid of an ethic of love, that it is driven instead, for the most part, by contempt, resentment, grievance, and tribalism. While many readers seem to have appreciated this call to “love one’s enemies” as Dr. King advocated, others were skeptical.

Some of the skeptics long to embrace King’s philosophy of the Beloved Community, but consider it naive given this year’s calamitous descent, here in the United States, into authoritarianism, with its assaults on the press and freedom of speech; the weaponization of the (so-called) Justice Department; and ICE’s extrajudicial kidnappings of immigrants, which, conducted in broad daylight, have terrorized communities throughout the United States. How, they ask, can we love our enemies when our neighbors are being snatched from street corners? Others reject the premise entirely. They believe that half the country has embraced, passively or actively, a white nationalist politics, and that those people are not worthy of our grace, curiosity, forgiveness, humility, or love. On the surface, this seems reasonable. But I think it’s misguided, and symptomatic of what the Duke University sociologist Chris Bail and others call “false polarization.”

Bail has spent much of his career studying why it is that people come to hate each other. At Duke, he founded the Polarization Lab, where he conducts research related to—you guessed it—political polarization. In his book Breaking the Social Media Prism, Bail describes a number of studies that he and his colleagues have led in an effort to better understand the role that our digital paradigm plays in fueling polarization. One of his team’s most crucial findings is that social media does not polarize so much as it increases our perception of polarization. Broadly speaking, the most prominent voices on social media are the most ideologically extreme, while those with more nuanced views are either crowded out by algorithms, or simply don’t get involved. (Bail’s research suggests that those with more nuanced views tend to remain silent on social media because they fear being attacked by those on the extreme ends of the political spectrum.) The more time we spend on social media, he concludes, the more likely we are to perceive the country as being more polarized than it actually is. On most major policy issues, he argues, Americans’ beliefs have not shifted much in decades.

I find the concept of false polarization oddly heartening. If we’re less polarized than social media would have us believe, then it stands to reason that powering down our devices and simply talking to people face to face may be a more significant political act than we might otherwise have thought. But it’s not just about talking to people with whom we might disagree. It’s also about shifting our approach to those conversations, and recognizing that the “message” of social media, to borrow Marshall McLuhan’s framework, is one of conflict. Tech oligarchs are driven by the profit motive, and conflict has been shown to keep people locked into their feeds, furiously typing ripostes in the flame war du jour; more time spent arguing on social media platforms means more money flowing into Silicon Valley’s coffers.

When we recognize this tendency — that the default mode of social media discourse is one that centers conflict and division, and that this orientation has metastasized beyond the internet — we can make a concerted effort to approach our interactions on and offline from a different place: one in which we begin from a stance of curiosity, humility, compassion, and a desire to identify shared values. All of this requires a willingness to listen.

As many have observed, Zohran Mamdani’s first viral campaign video was extraordinary not because of what he said, but because of how little he spoke at all. Instead, that video showed him listening to his fellow New Yorkers as they recounted who they’d voted for in the 2024 election, and why. Whether or not you believe Mamdani is a generational political talent, we can all learn from his gift for listening. (It’s all the more remarkable that he’s such a good listener given that Mamdani also has the gift of the gab.)

When I posted a link to that early campaign video on one of my social media accounts toward the end of 2024, the comments I received were disheartening, yet predictable. Rather than validate the lived experience that led these New Yorkers to vote in the way they did, many commenters were utterly dismissive. They variously insulted the intelligence of these voters, suggested that they deserved whatever befell them under a second Trump presidency, or offered wonky statistical claims about why the Biden presidency had actually benefited these folks, regardless of what they felt.

By contrast, what I took away from that video was a refreshing reminder that there are no monoliths in American politics. This rhymes with recent conversations I’ve had with strangers, none of whom would fit neatly into the ideological boxes we so often use to enclose and flatten our alleged political opponents.

That flattening of the body politic was on display in the now mythic (and amply critiqued) conversation, in the aftermath of the murder of Charlie Kirk, between Ezra Klein and Ta-Nehisi Coates. While I was glad that these two thinkers engaged in debate after Coates had taken Klein to task for allegedly whitewashing Kirk’s legacy, I was frustrated by the conversation itself, and the discourse surrounding it. For those who didn’t listen, its animating question concerned who we ought (or ought not) engage in political debate or persuasion. Where Klein advocated for a bigger tent with fewer ideological purity tests, Coates was resolutely unwilling to put forward any theory of power. But I found that in their framing of the debate, both Klein and Coates were guilty of reducing the body politic to a binary caricature in which the nation has been cleaved neatly in two (false polarization!), with one half on the side of universal human rights, and the other salivating over a platform of white nationalist paleo-conservatism. In this view, Klein was seen as advocating for throwing marginalized constituencies under the bus in order to win elections, while Coates, eschewing strategy, spoke forcefully for the idea that those who stand on the side of dehumanization can’t be reasoned with. (How does he think the 1964 Civil Rights Act got passed?)

But the reality is that people’s beliefs are fluid, and, more than that, they are often rife with contradiction. The problem then, is not whether we subject members of our political coalitions to purity tests, but the notion that any of us is pure, that our beliefs are coherent, or that we don’t have something to learn from our neighbors’ experience of the world. And this brings me back to the question of art and politics, and what the artist-citizen may do at a time of extreme (perceived) polarization.

One of art’s most hallowed roles is its function as an equalizer. It may remind us that we are all mortal bags of water harboring dreams, disappointments, toothaches, unrequited crushes, or irresponsibly large credit card balances. A song can do this when the specific reveals itself to be universal. A song (or a play or a poem or a dance) can also draw us back into the deep core of our emotional selves, and away from the petty concerns and resentments that follow us in our daily lives. But the attention that we bring to the spaces in which we perform, the way we engage an audience, the physical layout of the space, these, too, can also serve to make us aware of each other’s humanity.

Last night, Attacca Quartet and I gave a brief performance for a few hundred donors who support the performing arts series, programmed by the visionary curator Aaron Greenwald, at University of Iowa’s Hancher Auditorium. It’s an enormous hall with 1800 seats, and Aaron began, a few seasons ago, to put the audience on stage for a number of performances, capping crowds at around 200. Not only does this give him the flexibility to feature artists who aren’t box office juggernauts; it also permits him to design a social encounter in the way that the audience sees each other—literally and spiritually—in the course of a performance. For these “Up Close” concerts, bleacher seating is arranged on three sides of the stage, with two groups of audience members facing each other.

It’s one thing to have an emotional response to a piece of music. It’s another to see someone visibly moved sitting across from you, and to witness in their emotional catharsis a part of yourself. If our digital media landscape, in amplifying the most extreme ideological voices in our society, has created a sense of false polarization, then perhaps live performance can and should do the opposite. If you want a spicy polemic, go have a scroll on X or Bluesky. But if you really want to change the world, create an invitation for your neighbor, a stranger, an ideological opponent, to see herself in you, in your work, and in their fellow audience members. When we sit side by side or across from one another, regarding a work of art, we may catch a glimpse of a society in which we recognize and honor the fact that all of our fates are intertwined.

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Tonight, November 20th, I perform with Attacca Quartet in Iowa City. On Sunday and Monday, November 23rd and 24th, I perform with my father in Washington, D.C. Complete tour dates are here. As always, thank you for reading. If you can’t upgrade to a paid subscription, simply clicking like or share helps to grow the audience of this newsletter.