Opinion Vamsee Juluri writes on Donald Trump’s arrest: iGen and the story of the divided American family

In the longer run though, what it might mean poses a bigger question: If Americans cannot agree on the deepening divides in their country, what further escapes will they, or their leaders, pursue in place of that inevitable duty towards the truth that every sane person might demand from the world?

Will their deferral tactic be more wars? More shootings? More racism and xenophobia? More denunciations and greater suspicion of one another?

American politics since Trump cannot be understood without confronting the issue of polarisation. Americans, it is said, have become divided not just about a politician or political party but about reality itself. To some, Trump is a fugitive from everything decent about humanity, who is, at last, being brought to justice in some satisfying way. To others, Trump is a symbol of every injustice, untruth and slight they have had to endure from an indifferent and greedy elite class, a martyr at the very least, or maybe, as he might prefer to think of himself, a phoenix.

Americans are watching two completely different movies around the same events unfolding before their eyes, and it will perhaps be to neither audience’s satisfaction to attempt a perspective that is not beholden to tribal compulsions. Yet, it must be said. There is a bigger story, perhaps even a somewhat common, or shared one, that precedes this divided moment.

Even the extreme polarisation of today has a specific beginning, and perhaps, if Americans can be heard by each other again, an end in the near future.

For now, though, the signs are disheartening.

The most instructive examples of polarisation in the United States today can be found not in the study of politics but of generational change. Psychologist Jean Twenge’s series of data-based books on generational perceptions and behaviour offer a deeper insight into what is unfolding in the minds — and one might say “belief systems” — of young Americans on a sweeping scale.

In her book iGen, a study of Americans born between 1995-2010, a generation defined by being the first cohort to grow up in the age of the smartphone, Twenge offers useful clues into the nature of isolation and polarisation today. At a fundamental level, the divisions are not even political but physical, and social, to start with. The iGen speaks a lot less face-to-face and texts a lot more, so much so that it is better at reading emojis than facial or vocal cues. It is nobly progressive and condemns bigotry, racism, and the sort. But it also views even verbal dissension to established norms as a form of grave harm. It has great potential to shape the future of the country, with 74 million members, but it is living downstream of one of the largest (in my view) shifts in political and social worldviews in recent times.

The most telling example of polarisation that Twenge offers is of changes in attitudes to family members’ marriage choices. On the good side, opposition to interracial marriages has vastly reduced, from about 54 per cent being opposed in the 1990s to only about 10 per cent by the 2010s. On another front, though, and one of direct relevance to the Trump-Clinton landscape, is a shift in political tolerance. In 1960, she writes, just 5 per cent of Republicans and 4 per cent of Democrats said on surveys that they would be upset if their child married a supporter of the other party. In 2010, that number was 49 per cent of Republicans and 33 per cent of Democrats.

One has to wonder how much of a role the nature of social media as a ubiquitous, addictive, exhibitionistic communication technology has played in exacerbating this divide. A private inner life of the sort one had before Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp came along, perhaps allowed people the luxury of assuming their friends were not hosts to whatever thought or belief or opinion was deemed horrific and unthinkable by the norms of the day. But with the technological invitation to engage constantly, now everyone knows, or thinks they know everything, and worse, everyone.

Presumption rules, hand in hand with narcissism.

Whether there is a way beyond the current reality divide in America depends a lot on the retrieval not just of open communication platforms but more collectively of multigenerational memory as well.

The iGen is one that has no memory of the biggest terrorist attack on America in 2001, and is possibly persuaded by the claim that the Capitol storming of January 6, 2021, was actually that.

Older generations too perhaps have no understanding of how they might ease the existential, economic and ecological fears that their children or grandchildren have, from climate change to recessions.

There is, or was, perhaps, a cultural obligation elders had to explain to their offspring why they were here, and what was expected of them. That role, once played by “religion” (or “ancestral tradition” as we may call it in some contexts), is now occupied by powerful mega-institutions – state, corporation, school, foundation.

The generations have no stories for each other, and meanwhile, the divisions grow.

One memory that might be relevant for Americans cheering or denouncing Trump’s travails today actually goes back to a political moment not too long ago, reflected vividly in a protest-rock anthem of the time.

Before the 2000 election, the group Rage Against the Machine put out a sci-fi-inspired music video for their song “Testify” which suggested that Bush and Gore were two faces of the same alien entity. Independent candidate Ralph Nader was celebrated as the voice of hope for a country where the two parties offered very little choice in reality. It was a critique, perhaps, more of the Democratic party than the Republicans, for becoming more pro-corporate, pro-war, and so on, in the Clinton years.

That sense seems to have become faint, really even absent completely now, in mainstream US pop culture.

A family divided is perhaps the most obvious sign that the enemies of that family are, actually, still quite united in spite of it all.

The writer is professor of media studies at the University of San Francisco