[ESSAYS] On Politics
It never ceases to amaze me how lucky I am in life. Lucky because, from a very young age, I have possessed the ability to distinguish right from wrong with a degree of clarity that has frequently made me wonder why everyone else appears to be struggling so much. This is, of course, the highly flattering version of my intellectual history, and like most flattering versions of anything, it contains enough truth to remain convincing while leaving out several details that would make it considerably less impressive.
I have made wrong decisions, defended ideas I was not entirely convinced of, and continued arguments after realizing I might not be right, mostly because admitting uncertainty is considerably less satisfying than acting certain. I have also believed things that later proved to be incomplete, misguided, or simply wrong, and although I have usually managed to correct those beliefs when correction became unavoidable, the process has injured my ego on more than one occasion, naturally.
Recently, however, I began noticing something strange about the way I discussed politics, or more accurately, the way I had gradually stopped discussing it. I found myself withdrawing from political conversations even with my friends, although especially with my friends, since the possibility of being misunderstood by a stranger carries far less emotional weight than being misunderstood by someone whose opinion of you has become part of the relationship.
This retreat was not caused by particularly extreme beliefs, nor by any dramatic difference between my political views and those of the people around me. For the most part, our values overlap, our moral concerns are similar, and we would probably vote in the same direction more often than not. Even so, I found myself measuring my words, reconsidering my tone, and withholding observations I would have expressed freely in almost any other context, because I feared saying the wrong thing in the wrong way and being transformed, within the space of a single conversation, from a person they knew into a symbol of everything they opposed.
It was the possibility of being misunderstood, morally categorized, and socially punished by people whose values were largely similar to my own that held me back, which did not seem particularly logical. If my beliefs were mostly aligned with theirs, what exactly was I afraid of, and why did a small difference in emphasis feel capable of rearranging an entire friendship? I eventually concluded that the problem was not necessarily what I believed, but the way I believed it.
I have always considered myself an enthusiast of balance, proportion, and basic human respect, although describing oneself this way carries roughly the same credibility as announcing that one is unusually humble. Even so, I have become increasingly uncomfortable with a political culture that interprets restraint as indifference, hesitation as cowardice, and any attempt to understand an opposing position as evidence that one has not committed to the correct side with sufficient enthusiasm.
Supporting the correct ideas no longer seems sufficient, because one must support them loudly enough, aggressively enough, and with the appropriate degree of contempt for everyone who does not. Anything less risks the suspicion that one is not fully committed to the cause or, even worse, secretly sympathetic to the enemy. Somewhere along the way, politics stopped being only a disagreement about how society should function and became, once again, a method of determining whose fear matters, whose suffering counts, and who deserves to be regarded as fully human.
There is something comforting about having a side, although most of us prefer to believe that our political identities developed after years of careful observation, independent reasoning, and heroic resistance to every influence that shaped everyone else. I doubt that most people form their political beliefs by evaluating every policy in isolation and then constructing a worldview from scratch. More often, we inherit a way of understanding the world long before we possess enough information to question where it came from, and by the time we begin calling our conclusions independent, the assumptions beneath them have already become difficult to see.
Political identity gives us more than a collection of opinions. It gives us a social position, a group of people with whom we are expected to agree, and another group whose motives we are encouraged to regard with varying degrees of suspicion. It teaches us which problems are urgent, which suffering deserves our immediate attention, which institutions can be trusted, which historical events matter most, and who should be blamed when reality fails to behave the way we were promised it would.
There is also a strange relief in believing that a political label tells us who another person is, because the label saves us from the inconvenience of discovering that they may be far more complicated than the category permits. Once someone has been politically classified, we begin making assumptions about their intelligence, their background, their moral priorities, the people they trust, the information they consume, and the degree to which their compassion should be taken seriously. A few opinions become enough to reconstruct an entire personality, and the reconstruction is usually much easier to condemn than the person themselves would have been, since complexity requires patience and patience is difficult to extend toward someone who has already been assigned a role in the story.
Political scientists use the term affective polarization to distinguish disagreement over policy from something more personal, which is the tendency to feel warmth toward one’s own political group and hostility toward the opposing one. Under those conditions, the problem is no longer limited to believing that another person is wrong, because the political category begins to contaminate our judgment of the person carrying it, until disagreement becomes evidence of stupidity, corruption, selfishness, or moral failure.[1]
The brain is exceptionally skilled at this kind of classification, although not because it contains a particular region devoted to identifying Republicans, Democrats, socialists, conservatives, or whichever political species currently irritates us most. Political information does not enter a separate political system in the brain, but is interpreted through distributed networks that also contribute to memory, identity, valuation, emotion, and social understanding.[2]
The medial prefrontal cortex contributes to the way we think about ourselves and interpret the intentions and character of other people, while the hippocampus supplies memory and context, ensuring that no political statement enters the mind untouched by everything we have previously learned, feared, admired, resented, or associated with it. A person may hear a policy proposal, but the brain encounters more than the literal content of the sentence, because it also encounters the faces, institutions, family conversations, social groups, historical narratives, and emotional meanings the proposal has accumulated over time.
This is why political information is rarely received as detached data. We do not hear an idea in isolation and then calmly determine whether it is correct. We hear what the idea represents to us, whom we associate it with, what accepting it might imply about our identity, and whether the people we respect would interpret agreement as a sign of intelligence, betrayal, compassion, cowardice, or moral failure. By the time conscious reasoning begins presenting its argument, the information has already entered a crowded room.
Dan Kahan calls one version of this process identity-protective cognition, which describes the tendency to selectively credit or dismiss evidence in ways that preserve the beliefs associated with our group. The unsettling part is not that people become less intelligent whenever politics appears, but that intelligence can become useful to the defense, supplying more evidence, more sophisticated objections, and more convincing explanations for conclusions whose social value was established before their factual value was seriously examined.[3]
Belonging to a political group simplifies the crowded room by providing familiar explanations, predictable reactions, and a community that reassures us that our interpretation is not only reasonable, but shared. Political identity can therefore function as both a worldview and a social contract, offering acceptance on the condition that we continue recognizing the same heroes, the same threats, and the same version of reality. It tells us not only what to believe, but what disagreement is allowed to cost.
I was comfortable believing that other people had inherited their politics because I believed I had inherited something more sophisticated, which was the ability to think beyond inheritance altogether. Once I began examining political conditioning, my own became difficult to ignore, particularly the part I had mistaken for evidence that conditioning had somehow failed to reach me.
I grew up in a centrist family with little appetite for ideological extremes, and although I argued with my father during family dinners about progressive issues, particularly LGBTQ+ rights and abortion, we could usually find enough common ground to continue eating without anyone being disowned before dessert. Something I have always admired about my father is his ability to think for himself and resist following any party or political leader blindly, which I grew up believing he had passed on to me.
For most of my life, I considered this trait evidence that I had escaped the intellectual dependency I saw in other people, until I recognized how strange that belief actually was. The trait I considered proof of my independent thought had itself been inherited, because my father had taught me to distrust conformity, question ideological packaging, and take pride in forming my own conclusions, which meant that even the identity I had built around thinking for myself was partly given to me by someone else.
Had I been raised by a different father, I might have been handed a different worldview with the same confidence, and I would probably feel just as certain that I had reached it through my own superior judgment. The most difficult political inheritance to recognize is the belief that we have not inherited one, because it suggests that the part of us we trust to examine our conditioning was also shaped by that conditioning. I had not escaped inheritance, since I had inherited the belief that I was the kind of person who escaped inheritance.
As I entered adulthood, I became friends with and dated people much further to the left than my father, who began to seem almost conservative by comparison. One afternoon, I sat in a café with a friend I hold very close to my heart, drinking coffee and discussing Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s campaign for a freeze on rent-stabilized leases, a policy the Rent Guidelines Board would later adopt at zero percent for both one-year and two-year leases beginning October 1, 2026.[4]
My friend and I both supported Mamdani, and I still do, but I was not convinced that the freeze was necessarily the best long-term answer to the housing crisis. Rent regulation can protect current tenants from displacement, which is not a trivial benefit, but evidence from an expansion of rent control in San Francisco also found that affected landlords reduced the amount of rental housing they supplied, often by converting or selling controlled properties. The study cannot determine what will happen in New York, where the laws, housing stock, and political conditions are different, but it demonstrates that concern about supply, maintenance, and long-term affordability is not automatically a betrayal of tenants.[5]
I wanted to say something simple, which was that I supported the mayor without feeling obligated to treat every promise he made as beyond question, and that a policy could be compassionate in its intention while producing consequences that deserved serious examination. Instead, I began calculating how the thought would sound before I had even expressed it, wondering whether concern about long-term effects would be heard as concern for landlords over tenants, whether questioning the policy would be taken as evidence that my support had never been sincere, and whether the conversation would shift from what the freeze might do to what kind of person would dare to doubt it.
My friend did not insult me or threaten me, and nothing about the café itself had changed, yet my chest tightened, my attention narrowed, and I began editing my response before they had finished speaking. I considered which words would sound too harsh, which questions might be interpreted as judgment, and which parts of my actual reaction needed to remain unspoken if I wanted the relationship to remain unchanged. There was no claim I felt compelled to defeat so much as a bond I was afraid of damaging, because I was not primarily afraid of being wrong, but of being recast, in the space of a single sentence, from someone my friend trusted into someone they needed to regard with suspicion.
Political disagreement is not experienced only as abstract thought, because the brain does not divide identity, emotion, and reasoning into separate departments that wait politely for one another to finish. The amygdala contributes to detecting emotionally significant and potentially threatening information, while the anterior insula helps represent the internal state of the body and the discomfort that accompanies emotionally charged situations. The anterior cingulate cortex contributes to detecting conflict and competing information, particularly when what we are hearing collides with what we already believe or with the response we think our social environment expects from us.
Together with broader autonomic systems, these networks can produce genuine physiological arousal, changing breathing, tightening muscles, narrowing attention, and preparing the body for some form of defense even when the person sitting across from us has done nothing more physically dangerous than express an opinion over coffee. This does not mean that every disagreement is mistaken for a mortal threat, nor that political discomfort is neurologically identical to physical danger, but social rejection, humiliation, exclusion from a valued group, and the possibility of being regarded as morally corrupt can still matter deeply to a nervous system shaped by dependence on other human beings.
A neuroimaging study of forty strongly liberal participants found that challenges to political beliefs engaged systems associated with self-representation, while participants who changed their minds more showed less activity in the insula and amygdala. The study offers an intriguing picture of how emotion, identity, and bodily salience may participate in resistance to political counterarguments, although its small and politically narrow sample, along with the authors’ acknowledgment that some of the counterarguments contained exaggerations or distortions, means the findings should be treated as exploratory rather than as proof of a universal political mechanism.[6]
Another study found that people with liberal and conservative attitudes showed increasingly divergent neural responses while watching the same political videos, particularly in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, a region involved in interpreting narrative meaning. This suggests that two people can encounter the same material while constructing different understandings of what they have seen, although it does not mean that liberals and conservatives possess two fundamentally different types of brain.[7]
In that café, the question was no longer simply whether the rent freeze was likely to work, because another question had taken control of the conversation before I had fully recognized it. What would disagreeing mean about me, about my friend, about our shared support for the mayor, and about the moral structure through which we had learned to recognize one another? The policy remained the subject, but belonging had become the stake.
The most uncomfortable part of this realization was that I knew exactly what it felt like to fear being reduced to a political category because I had already done the same thing to other people. During the 2024 presidential election, social media filled with declarations that anyone supporting Donald Trump was anti-human, morally bankrupt, or undeserving of serious consideration, and instead of resisting that collapse of millions of people into a single moral diagnosis, I participated in it.
I unfollowed people after seeing them express support for Trump or the Republican Party, and I did not always do it because they had said something personally cruel, threatening, or dishonest. Sometimes the category itself was enough, because I treated political affiliation as a confession that revealed everything else I needed to know about their intelligence, their compassion, and their worth. I felt satisfaction when Trump supporters were humiliated in debates, and because I believed the position being defeated was harmful, I allowed myself to confuse the pleasure of watching an opponent be embarrassed with the satisfaction of watching truth prevail.
I still believe Trump is a terrible person, and I believe many of his actions and positions deserve forceful opposition, but that judgment does not make every person who voted for him identical in motive, character, knowledge, or moral capacity. Some supported him for reasons I consider indefensible, some accepted claims that were false, some prioritized economic or institutional concerns I would weigh differently, and some were responding to fears, loyalties, resentments, and experiences that I had made no effort to understand before deciding that the label had explained the person.
What I was practicing has a name: affective polarization, in which opposition to a political group becomes dislike or contempt for the people associated with it. Social media did not force me to participate, but it provided an environment in which contempt could travel efficiently. In a large observational study of posts from American political figures and news organizations, references to the political out-group were associated with more engagement than several other features, including negative emotional and moral-emotional wording.[8] Contempt was socially efficient, publicly legible, and capable of generating the approval of people whose judgment mattered to me.
I had spent years criticizing the habit of reducing human beings to ideological categories, yet I had done exactly that whenever the category offended me enough. In the café, I was afraid of becoming a symbol in someone else’s mind, while during the election I had transformed strangers, acquaintances, and sometimes people I had once liked into symbols in mine. The symmetry was not flattering, but it was real.
Recognizing the same psychological process across political groups does not mean that every conclusion is equally true, equally ethical, or equally consequential. Some beliefs are better supported than others, some policies cause greater harm than others, and psychological symmetry does not create moral equivalence any more than confidence creates truth. The point is not that judgment should disappear, because judgment is necessary, but that condemning a position and erasing the complexity of every person associated with it are not the same moral act.
The instinctive response to all of this, one I have heard offered sincerely and have offered sincerely myself, is that the solution is simply to listen more. We are told to assume good faith, sit across from the people we disagree with, hear them out fully, and trust that understanding will accomplish what argument cannot. I believe in this advice, and I have watched it work between people willing to grant one another enough patience to remain human for the duration of an evening.
Listening matters, but listening alone cannot remove the social and emotional meaning attached to a belief, because belief rarely comes to us as pure content. It comes attached to memory, belonging, dignity, fear, and the specific people who taught us what safety and danger look like. Better listening can help us understand what is being exchanged, but it cannot make the exchange emotionally neutral or erase what accepting or rejecting the belief may cost within a relationship.
There is also a subtler problem, one that implicates the very position from which I have been writing. Throughout this essay, I have repeatedly cast myself as the person who notices the trap, values balance, and resists the pull of certainty on either side, which means I have also presented myself as someone who stands outside political tribalism long enough to observe what it does to everyone else.
That position is also a place to stand, and it has a tribe of its own, populated by people who take pride in their reasonableness, admire their tolerance for ambiguity, and suspect that everyone else has surrendered to ideological passion. Balance can become an identity just as easily as allegiance can, and the belief that one has avoided the trap can become the most effective trap of all. There were moments when what I called balance was principle, but there were also moments when it protected me from the discomfort of choosing a side, accepting the consequences of that choice, and admitting that neutrality can preserve an unjust situation as efficiently as open support.
Politics exists because human beings do not reliably agree about what they owe one another, which freedoms should be protected, which harms should be prevented, who should bear the cost of maintaining a society, and how much power any institution should possess in attempting to answer those questions. We build political systems because individual preference is not enough to coordinate millions of conflicting lives, and then we begin treating our preferred distribution of freedom, obligation, protection, and sacrifice as though it were the natural arrangement any rational person would choose.
Almost nobody experiences their own political vision as one option among many, because each side tends to believe it possesses the most accurate description of the good society, while competing visions are treated as misguided, corrupted, or insufficiently compassionate. Even my own ideal arrangement, if fully enacted, would not make everyone happy, since it would make people who share my values more comfortable while asking other people to live under rules they did not choose. That is not a universal solution, but my preference disguised as something universal.
The question that follows is harder than the one with which I began. If no political arrangement can satisfy everyone, does that mean no side is truly right, and that we are all defending sincere but partial visions while calling the conflict moral because morality makes the struggle feel less arbitrary? Or does it mean that some visions remain more defensible than others because they include more people, distribute costs more honestly, and preserve dignity more consistently, even while failing to produce anything resembling universal agreement?
I find that I believe some version of both, depending on the day, which is not a comfortable position from which to write. Stripped of any label, I am drawn to individual freedom, but I do not believe freedom alone can produce dignity, fairness, or protection from exploitation. I believe some structure is necessary while remaining deeply suspicious of the people and institutions entrusted to impose it, because I want people to be free and I want them to be treated as fully human, yet I have not discovered a political arrangement capable of guaranteeing both without creating new forms of power, coercion, and exclusion.
I do not know what to do with that, and I am suspicious of anyone, including an earlier version of myself, who claims to have solved it. I do not think the answer is to stop believing things, treat every conviction as equally arbitrary, or retreat into a studied neutrality that becomes its own form of cowardice. Some beliefs are better supported than others, some policies produce better outcomes than others, and some systems deserve opposition rather than patient contemplation.
What remains, at least for me, is something smaller and less satisfying than a resolution, which is the discipline of holding a belief while remaining genuinely unsure how much of my certainty is judgment and how much is inheritance wearing judgment’s clothes. Most days, I cannot fully tell the difference, and I am not sure anyone can from inside their own mind, particularly when the identity doing the examination is one of the things that examination would need to question.
Perhaps that is the only honest place to end up, not with a method for escaping the trap, since I am no longer confident one exists, but with a willingness to keep noticing when I am inside it. I want to keep asking, in the moment when a friend says something I disagree with and my chest tightens before my mind has completed its response, what exactly I am afraid of losing, while also asking what I am allowing myself to take from another person when their political category makes contempt feel deserved.
Sometimes the answer will be the friendship, while at other times it will be something closer to the version of myself around which I have built my identity, the one who thinks for herself, refuses to follow blindly, and remains above all of this. That version, too, was given to me by someone, and I did not invent her either.
***
Notes and Sources
1. Political scientists use the term affective polarization to describe hostility and distrust directed toward opposing political groups beyond disagreement over policy. Shanto Iyengar, Gaurav Sood, and Yphtach Lelkes developed a social-identity account of this phenomenon in “Affect, Not Ideology: A Social Identity Perspective on Polarization,” Public Opinion Quarterly 76, no. 3 (2012): 405–431. For a broader review of its origins and consequences, see Shanto Iyengar, Yphtach Lelkes, Matthew Levendusky, Neil Malhotra, and Sean J. Westwood, “The Origins and Consequences of Affective Polarization in the United States,” Annual Review of Political Science 22 (2019): 129–146.
2. The anatomical descriptions in this essay draw from several areas of neuroscience rather than evidence for one unified political circuit. Medial prefrontal involvement in self-referential thought is supported by William Kelley and colleagues, “Finding the Self? An Event-Related fMRI Study,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 14, no. 5 (2002): 785–794, while its role in reasoning about oneself and other people is further examined by Jason Mitchell, Mahzarin Banaji, and C. Neil Macrae, “The Link Between Social Cognition and Self-Referential Thought in the Medial Prefrontal Cortex,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 17, no. 8 (2005): 1306–1315. Hippocampal involvement in associative memory retrieval is examined by Charan Ranganath and colleagues, “Inferior Temporal, Prefrontal, and Hippocampal Contributions to Visual Working Memory Maintenance and Associative Memory Retrieval,” Journal of Neuroscience 24, no. 16 (2004): 3917–3925. Anterior cingulate involvement in conflict monitoring is supported by Matthew Botvinick and colleagues, “Conflict Monitoring Versus Selection-for-Action in Anterior Cingulate Cortex,” Nature 402 (1999): 179–181. Anterior insula involvement in awareness of internal bodily states is supported by Hugo Critchley and colleagues, “Neural Systems Supporting Interoceptive Awareness,” Nature Neuroscience 7 (2004): 189–195.
3. Dan Kahan describes identity-protective cognition as the tendency to selectively credit or dismiss evidence in ways that preserve beliefs connected to one’s group identity. He also argues that greater analytical ability does not necessarily eliminate polarization and may sometimes give people more sophisticated tools for defending identity-consistent conclusions. See Dan M. Kahan, “Misconceptions, Misinformation, and the Logic of Identity-Protective Cognition,” Yale Law School Public Law Research Paper No. 605 (2017), DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.2973067. This is a scholarly working paper rather than a peer-reviewed journal article.
4. Zohran Mamdani became mayor of New York City on January 1, 2026. On June 25, 2026, the New York City Rent Guidelines Board adopted a zero percent increase for both one-year and two-year rent-stabilized renewal leases beginning between October 1, 2026, and September 30, 2027.
5. Rebecca Diamond, Tim McQuade, and Franklin Qian studied an expansion of rent control in San Francisco and found that covered tenants were less likely to move, while landlords whose properties were affected reduced their rental housing supply by approximately 15 percent, often through conversion or sale. The 15 percent figure applies to affected properties rather than the entire citywide rental stock, and the authors estimated a smaller overall reduction in citywide rental supply. See “The Effects of Rent Control Expansion on Tenants, Landlords, and Inequality: Evidence from San Francisco,” American Economic Review 109, no. 9 (2019): 3365–3394, DOI: 10.1257/aer.20181289. The results are evidence about one San Francisco policy and should not be presented as a direct forecast of New York City’s outcome.
6. Jonas Kaplan, Sarah Gimbel, and Sam Harris studied forty participants who identified as strongly liberal and found that challenges to political beliefs engaged systems associated with self-representation. Participants who changed their minds more showed less activity in the insula and amygdala while evaluating counterarguments. The sample was small and politically narrow, and the authors acknowledged that some counterarguments used in the experiment contained exaggerations or distortions intended to make them persuasive. See “Neural Correlates of Maintaining One’s Political Beliefs in the Face of Counterevidence,” Scientific Reports 6 (2016): 39589, DOI: 10.1038/srep39589.
7. Yuan Chang Leong and colleagues found that participants with liberal and conservative attitudes toward immigration showed divergent neural responses while watching the same political videos. The divergence was observed particularly in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex and was associated with differences in narrative interpretation and subsequent attitude change. The findings do not establish that liberals and conservatives possess fixed or fundamentally different brains. See “Conservative and Liberal Attitudes Drive Polarized Neural Responses to Political Content,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 117, no. 44 (2020): 27731–27739, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2008530117.
8. Steve Rathje, Jay J. Van Bavel, and Sander van der Linden analyzed posts from American political figures and news organizations and found that references to political opponents were strongly associated with sharing and engagement. The association was stronger than those observed for negative emotional or moral-emotional wording. Because the research was observational, it demonstrates an association rather than proving that platform algorithms caused political hostility. See “Out-Group Animosity Drives Engagement on Social Media,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118, no. 26 (2021): e2024292118, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2024292118.
