American Politics and Polarization

Half the country is sure America is sliding toward socialism/communism; the other half is sure it’s sliding toward authoritarianism. The evidence says the nation is moving in both directions at once and that the feeling of a clean ideological slide itself is the thing most worth explaining. I do admit to using a high-end AI program to find many of the sources necessary to do an article like this, but I do hope you will enjoy it as we finish our 250^th Year as a Free Nation Still Under God.

It is one of the most widely held convictions in American life: that the country is being pulled steadily leftward, toward socialism, by some hidden hand immigrants, teachers, the media, take your pick. The conviction is sincere and the worry is real. But when you line up the popular causes against the data, a stranger picture emerges. The leftward signals are real. So are the right-ward ones. And the single best-supported explanation for why it feels like a one-way slide has little to do with any of the usual suspects.

Start with what almost everyone gets right: the country is polarized, and the sense of two irreconcilable camps is not imagined. Where the popular story goes wrong is in assuming that the heat reflects an equally large gap in what Americans actually want. Political scientists have spent two decades documenting that much of the modern divide is affective emotional dislike of the other side—rather than a deep split over policy. The dominant finding is that mass polarization is driven more by people liking their own party and loathing the other than by genuine ideological extremism in the public. (1)

The first thing to separate is feeling from fact: Americans feel further apart than their actual policy preferences are and the institutions that profit from political attention have every incentive to keep that gap feeling wide. Much of what reads as “the country is splitting into socialists and patriots” is the temperature of the argument, not the distance between the positions. Any honest search for a cause must begin by asking how much of the trend is real movement and how much is amplified emotion.

Both directions at once: Is the country actually moving left? The signals genuinely point both ways, and an honest accounting must hold them together rather than pick the convenient half.

On the left side of the ledger, the energy is real and concentrated among the young. In the 2025 New York City mayoral race, a self-described democratic socialist won the largest city in America, and exit polling found that roughly a quarter of city voters and about 40% of those under 30 identified as democratic socialists. (2) That is a striking number, and it tracks a real generational lean toward redistribution. But the right side of the ledger is just as populated. Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016 and again in 2024, the second time with the popular vote. Young men moved toward him even as young women moved away, opening a gender chasm within the same generation. (4) Latino and immigrant voters long assumed to be a Democratic bloc shifted toward Trump in 2024. (5) And the marquee Democratic winners of 2025 were not socialists: Virginia’s and New Jersey’s new governors ran and have largely governed as fiscal moderates. Sherrill’s first budget proposed roughly $2 billion in cuts and no individual income-tax hike, (7) while Spanberger’s office pushed back on tax-hike claims by noting she had not signed the tax bills her own party’s legislators floated. (6)

The above information is compiled from the reporting and research cited throughout this article.

Read the two columns together and the “steady slide to socialism” framing struggles. The same recent years that produced a socialist mayor of New York also produced two Trump presidencies and a rightward drift among young men and immigrant voters. That is not a country moving in one direction; it is a country pulling apart along new lines.

The Takeaway is: There is no clean national trend toward socialism. The leftward energy is real but concentrated young, urban, renting while the same period delivered major victories to the right and pulled young men and immigrant voters toward it. The country is polarizing along age, sex, and density more than it is sliding along a single left-right track.

Theory one: immigration legal and illegal: The strongest version of the immigration theory is not frivolous. Immigrants have leaned Democratic for generations, the unauthorized population reached a record a record 14 million in 2023 (8) and because the census counts all residents, immigration shifts congressional seats toward high-immigration, often Democratic-leaning states regardless of how immigrants vote.

But the theory runs into its own evidence. The most direct test is how immigrants actually voted, and in 2024 they moved (5) toward Trump, not away. A demographic cannot be the engine of socialism in one election and the engine of a populist-right surge in the next; what changed was the issue environment, not the voters’ ethnicity. And the supposed showcase Mamdani’s win in immigrant-dense New York cuts the other way upon inspection. In the June primary he actually lost heavily in Black neighborhoods and had to win them over later;(9) his earliest base was young, educated progressives in gentrifying districts. Among the young, support was lopsided across every race young Latino and Black voters backed him at higher rates than white youth which points to generation, not immigration, as the dividing line. (10)

Theory two: Public Education: The school theory has real facts under it, and they deserve to be stated plainly rather than dismissed. School-sponsored prayer was removed by the Supreme Court in the 1960s; civics and history have been deprioritized; and the teaching corps does lean left, sharply so at elite institutions. One review of faculty studies found liberal-to-conservative ratios ranging from two-to-one to as high as eighty-two-to-one, depending on field. (11)

What the facts do not establish is the causal leap. The effect of college on student ideology is far weaker than the indoctrination story assumes: a natural experiment using randomly assigned roommates found students drifting toward peers, not their professors, and the authors concluded the data was inconsistent with the claim that college itself makes students liberal. (12) The shift that does occur is social, not economic as graduates are if anything slightly more conservative on economics, the opposite of what a socialism factory would produce. (13)

The cleanest test of the school theory is built into the data: the same classrooms produced opposite results by sex. Young men and young women sit under the same left-leaning faculty, the same removed prayer, the same curricula and moved in opposite political directions. If schooling were the master variable, it could not generate a leftward shift in one half of a cohort and a rightward shift in the other. Whatever is doing the sorting is mostly operating outside the classroom and the pattern shows up across Western democracies whose school systems look nothing like America’s.

Theory three: the media social and traditional: This is the theory with the most genuine research behind it the information environment really is one of the drivers the polarization literature names and one of its premises is solidly true: surveys of journalists have for decades found newsrooms leaning left, with one count putting Republicans at just 7% of journalists. (14) But the direction of the strongest documented effect is the reverse of the popular theory.

The most rigorous studies of media actually moving voters are about Fox News and they find it moves them right. A landmark study estimated Fox increased Republican vote share, with the effect growing as its slant sharpened; (15) an earlier study found it convinced between 3 and 8 percent of non-Republican viewers to vote Republican. (16) The conservative side of the ecosystem is also more concentrated and arguably a more powerful: conservatives cluster tightly around Fox while liberals disperse across many outlets and talk radio and the podcast sphere lean right. (17) Add that media mostly reinforces existing views rather than converting opponents, and that the most consequential recent platform shift Musk’s purchase of X pushed rightward, and “left-wing media is socializing the country” becomes hard to sustain.

Social media: the government’s influence: Two narrower claims deserve their own treatment, because both contain real truth that is often overstated. The first is that social media spreads misinformation which it demonstrably does. But spreading is not the same as persuading. The best on-platform experiment, run during the 2020 election, found that amplification through reshares boosted exposure to political and untrustworthy content produced no detectable change in users’ beliefs or polarization. (18) Misinformation reach is also concentrated and, by one measure, declining between 2016 and 2020 with older adults, not the young, which are most vulnerable. (19)

The second claim that the government leaned on platforms over content is true and serious, and worth getting exactly right. In Murthy v. Missouri, a trial court found that federal agencies had pressured platforms, but the Supreme Court in June 2024 ruled 6–3 that the plaintiffs lacked standing never reaching whether the conduct was unconstitutional. (20) Mark Zuckerberg later confirmed part of the record, telling Congress the administration repeatedly pressured Meta to remove COVID-19 content, including humor and satire. (22) That is a genuine free-speech concern. But note its shape: it is government pressure to suppress content, which is the opposite of the government “pushing” falsehoods and it is a censorship grievance, raised chiefly against a Democratic administration, not evidence of a campaign to convert the public to socialism.

What’s actually underneath the hood: Strip away the three suspects and a quieter explanation is left standing, and it fits the data better than any of them. The leftward lean is concentrated among the young, and the young have a material reason for it: they own less, owe more, and face higher housing and education costs than prior generations did at the same age. That is why the New York race the supposed proof of socialist ascendance was decided overwhelmingly on affordability, among renters and the cost-burdened, rather than on ideology for its own sake. (3) What looks like a march toward socialism is, in large part, a generation facing an affordability crisis and reaching for government solutions to it.

The label matters: The redistributive, bigger-government sentiment showing up among the young rent relief, public transit, childcare, debt relief is social democracy in the mold of Western European welfare states and the Sanders wing of the Democratic Party. It is not communism, and it is not the abolition of private markets. Conflating “more government” with “socialism” with “communism” collapses three very different things into one alarm, and the collapse does real damage to clear thinking about what young voters are actually asking for.

What the evidence shows: Every popular cause immigration, schooling, media—shares the same flaw: it predicts a one-directional national slide that the evidence does not support. The pattern that recurs underneath all of them is generational and economic. A group that cannot afford housing and carries heavy debt gravitates toward redistribution, while an outrage-driven information environment makes the resulting divide feel wider than the underlying policy gap is. The cause people reach for is usually an institution; the cause the data keeps returning to is a balance sheet plus an emotional climate.

None of this means the worry is foolish: A generation drawn to redistribution, a socialist mayor in the nation’s largest city, and a media culture that rewards the loudest voices are all real and worth watching. The argument here is narrower and, hopefully, more useful: that the trend is two-directional, the leftward part is concentrated and economic in origin, and the feeling of an unstoppable slide is partly an artifact of how Americans now consume politics. This suggests that the most productive response is not to hunt for a villain but to ask what is making redistribution attractive to people in their twenties and whether the answer runs through wages, rent, and tuition more than through any classroom or newsroom.

How do we weigh the next “America is going socialist” claim:

1. Feeling or fact? Ask whether the evidence offered is about how angry people are (affective) or about what policies they actually support. The two diverge more than the rhetoric admits.
2. Local or national? A result in New York City the most immigrant-dense, Democratic place in America is among the worst places to read a national trend. Check whether the claim generalizes.
3. Which direction does the evidence point? For every leftward signal, look for the rightward one in the same period. Two Trump wins, the young-male shift, and the immigrant shift all belong in the ledger.
4. Cause or correlation? ”Teachers lean left” and “students lean left” can both be true without one causing the other. Ask whether the link survives the obvious confounders sex, economics, and what is happening in other countries.
5. Socialism, or social democracy? Rent relief and free buses are not the abolition of markets. We must insist on the distinction before accepting the word.

Sources for every factual claim above are listed in the references; readers are encouraged to follow them and judge the evidence directly.

Limitations & open questions: This piece argues from the best available evidence, but that evidence has real limits, and intellectual honesty requires naming them. Causation in mass politics is genuinely hard to isolate: the studies cited here are among the strongest in their fields, yet none can fully separate schooling, media, economics, and generational change from one another, and reasonable researchers still disagree about their relative weight. Exit polls and voter surveys carry sampling errors and are revised after the fact. Whether the 2024 rightward shifts among young men and immigrant voters prove durable or temporary is simply not yet known but a few cycles will tell. The constitutional question at the heart of the government-platform dispute remains unresolved, because the Supreme Court decided Murthy on standing rather than the merits, leaving the limits of permissible government pressure undefined. The analysis here is deliberately national; it does not adjudicate every local race or rule out the possibility that the picture looks different at the state or municipal level. Readers who weigh the same sources may reasonably land in a different place which is rather the point of laying the citations out in full.

1. Knowable Magazine. “Latest research: what causes political polarization.” knowablemagazine.org. Cited 1×
2. NBC New York / AP Voter Poll. “How key demographic groups voted in 2025.” nbcnewyork.com. Cited 1×
3. TIME. “The NYC neighborhoods Mamdani won by the most and least.” time.com. Cited 1×
4. CNN. “Young men and women are diverging politically.” cnn.com. Cited 1×
5. Brookings Institution. “America’s immigrant voters and the 2024 presidential election.” brookings.edu. Cited 2×
6. Virginia Mercury. “Spanberger marks first 100 days with focus on affordability.” virginiamercury.com. Cited 1×
7. New Jersey Monitor. “Gov. Sherrill proposes record $60.7B in spending in first budget address.” newjerseymonitor.com. Cited 1×
8. Pew Research Center. “U.S. unauthorized immigrant population reached a record 14 million in 2023.” pewresearch.org. Cited 1×
9. THE CITY. “How Mamdani won, by the numbers.” thecityreporter.nyc. Cited 1×
10. CIRCLE, Tufts University. “Young voters power Mamdani victory, shape key 2025 elections.” circle.tufts.edu. Cited 1×
11. Inside Higher Ed. “A closer look at faculty political diversity.” insidehighered.com. Cited 1×
12. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “College roommates have a modest but significant influence on each other’s ideology.” pnas.org. Cited 1×
13. PsyPost. “The diploma divide is real, but college doesn’t make students as liberal as people think.” psypost.org. Cited 1×
14. AllSides. “Are conservative or liberal media outlets more popular?” allsides.com. Cited 1×
15. Martin, Gregory J., and Ali Yurukoglu. “Bias in Cable News: Persuasion and Polarization.” American Economic Review. aeaweb.org. Cited 1×
16. DellaVigna, Stefano, and Ethan Kaplan. “The Fox News Effect: Media Bias and Voting.” NBER. nber.org. Cited 1×
17. Pew Research Center. “The political gap in Americans’ news sources.” pewresearch.org. Cited 1×
18. Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. “Social media, polarization, and the 2020 presidential election.” spia.princeton.edu. Cited 1×
19. Stanford University. “The 2020 election saw fewer people clicking on misinformation websites.” news.stanford.edu. Cited 1×
20. Supreme Court of the United States. “Murthy v. Missouri, 603 U.S. 43 (2024).” supremecourt.gov. Cited 1×
21. CBS News. “Supreme Court rejects challenge to Biden administration’s contacts with social media companies.” cbsnews.com. Cited 1×
22. Alliance Defending Freedom. “Mark Zuckerberg letter highlights the dangers of government censorship.” adflegal.org. Cited 1×