LAFAYETTE, La. — Legal proceedings continue as President Donald Trump refuses to concede to Joe Biden. Whether you voted red or blue, there's one thing that is hard to deny: tensions remain on both sides of the aisle.
Whether it's Joe Biden or Donald Trump inaugurated in January, it's clear that whomever takes the White House will oversee an increasingly divided country.
And while the recount or court challenges to the election continue, there is plenty of discussion about what the presidential race revealed about America.
In fact, one of the things KATC’s political analyst Pearson Cross pointed out is the ever-growing ideological divide between United States citizens.
“That’s one of the things people are talking more and more about,” explains Cross. “People are talking about how political allegiances are a ‘tribal’ thing; ‘I am a Republican’ or ‘I am a Democrat’, and ‘that’s the tribe I belong to.'
“’People speak my language; we have the same concerns, we have the same world view,’ and so on,” adds Cross.
Asked if the Trump Presidency fostered this ideological evolution in our country, he said, “I think Donald Trump helped that progress, but that’s been developing for a while.”
“We’re separating into our separate neighborhoods," Cross continues. "We associate with people who believe like we do. We join Facebook groups with the same echo-chamber, and we watch different news channels who think differently from us politically. We’re even starting not to marry people who are different from us politically, so we are self-segregating into two tribes.”
And is this "self-segregation" a good thing for the United States? Not at all, says Cross.
“And I think that’s sad, a sad development in America because it hasn’t been like that in the past," he said. "But I don’t know what we can do about it.”
So, it’s the same, yet different, and ever-increasingly so. But, there’s still hope that these disparities can also bring about some healing, too.
Those are the two-cents of an eternal optimist.
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