How America Can Still Come Together

Former TIME editor-in-chief Nancy Gibbs writes that Americans are largely in agreement on key issues and need unity in the face of violence.

A country born by breaking with a king inherits dissent as a birthright. Generation after generation faces its test of conflict management: crafting the Constitution itself, with all its convictions and compromises; balancing local vs. federal power centers; a Civil War exposing fissures in democracy’s bedrock; and on and on, battles over rights and responsibilities, suffrage, prohibition, isolation vs. intervention, and then the serial upheavals over justice for multiple marginalized groups—Black, female, gay, trans. Each era is tasked with not only choosing its fights but also deciding how to fight them.

Our current crisis of division, once again manifest as violence, feels shocking but not sudden; the dread has been deepening for years, a defining quality of this century that began with an election that ended in a tie. As our information streams fill with acid, it eats at grace and trust. Americans have always disagreed, exercised muscles of reason and passion to press for progress and a vision for the common good that we don’t necessarily hold in common. Do we care more about freedom or equality? Privacy or security? Being a leader in the world or tucked in safely at home with oceans to buffer us? Figuring that out was the heart of the democratic challenge, but the information technologies allegedly designed to connect the world conspire to dismantle the values that process depends on.

The tragedy, but maybe also the opportunity, of this moment is that relative to past brawls, Americans are largely united on key issues—even if you would never know it from the temperature of the debate. “Red states” from Arkansas to Missouri to Florida pass minimum-wage referendums by fat majorities; Kansas votes to protect access to abortion. Two-thirds of Democrats agree that the situation at the border is a problem; more than 60% of people think it’s too easy to get a gun, and about 80% worry about the solvency of Social Security and Medicare.

And in one last flicker of unity, 4 out of 5 people told Georgetown University pollsters that they fear that democracy is under threat. This was echoed in an Ipsos poll of 2024 voters that found that while economy, immigration, crime, and climate ranked high on the list of concerns, “political extremism or threats to democracy” topped them.

But this is where shared purpose runs into the shredder of profit and power. People disagree profoundly about the source of the threat to democracy, with voters on the left and right viewing each other as uniquely, historically dangerous—immoral, dishonest, and closed-minded. In that dark vision, gaining and holding onto power, and denying it to the opposition, is more important than any single issue.

And now comes the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, instantly cast by his most bare-knuckled allies as the culmination of the Democrats’ campaign to stop him at all costs. Ignorance about the shooter or his motive did not deter reckless speculation; it inflamed it. “Well of course they tried to keep him off the ballot, they tried to put him in jail, and now you see this…” campaign manager Chris LaCivita tweeted and then deleted. “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs,” wrote Trump’s vice-presidential nominee J.D. Vance. “That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.” Naturally Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene went further: “The Democrat party is flat out evil, and yesterday they tried to murder President Trump.”

Read More: What We Know—and Don’t Know—So Far About the Trump Rally Gunman

You can call this working the refs, trying to pre-emptively silence criticism, hypocrisy from the partisans who menace their rivals while mocking violence aimed at them. But because X is a reliably squalid place, some Democrats dove into the “Blue-Anon” fever swamps as well: “The last thing America needed was sympathy for the devil but here we are,” Colorado state representative Steven Woodrow tweeted, then deleted. Even as calls came in from across the spectrum for calm, prayers, perspective, peace, the furies channeled by the platforms’ amoral algorithms ensured that poisonous rumors would find a million minds to infect. It was all #staged; the Secret Service was complicit; it was a false-flag operation, just the latest effort of shadowy forces to ensure Trump’s re-election by any means necessary.

According to the Pew Research Center, 8 in 10 Americans think people get different facts depending on where they get their news. This all but guarantees that crises and conspiracies travel in packs. We watched the shooting but didn’t know what we were seeing, so in the face of novel facts we relied on familiar frames. People who already distrust the media, or the Deep State, or law enforcement, were primed to see in the drama of Butler, Pa., a confirmation of their deepest suspicions. The act of “collective sense-making,” as University of Washington professor Kate Starbird explains, is how people interpret events in a shared social exercise—and a way that partisan players can twist an event to suit their agendas. The target himself seized the moment: “Fear Not. I Am Donald Trump And I Will Make America Great Again,” read the fundraising appeal.

But here too is a possible path to safer, higher ground. Our discourse amplifies the most radical voices and alienates the rest. Actual news avoidance is at all-time highs, not just in the U.S. but in other deeply polarized countries, as people want nothing to do with the vitriol that they associate with political engagement. According to Pew, 70% of adult social media users say they rarely or never post about political or social issues. So we are left looking in a fun-house mirror, as misunderstanding about actual beliefs drives us further apart. The nonprofit group Starts With Us found that 9 out of 10 Americans agree on core principles—a government accountable to the people, respect and compassion across difference, the rule of law applied fairly to all people—but only around 1 in 3 Democrats and Republicans thinks the other side cares about these values.

Social media companies must be accountable for the harms they create, the addictions they feed, and the lies they promote as they dismantle their trust and safety teams just when they are needed most. This is not a call for censorship; no amount of content moderation can police the posts of a billion users in real time. But like other forms of media, they should be responsible for the content they intentionally choose to amplify and monetize.

And we are each free agents of understanding. We can seek out reliable information sources, ones that try to get at the truth and hold themselves accountable if they fail—or we can choose to soak in the comfort of confirmation. Even as overall trust in the media reaches all-time lows, people tend to trust their own news sources. So I urge my students to be intentional about their media diets; omnivorous curiosity is a civic duty. Watch the networks you normally avoid, read writers you disagree with, seek out the perspectives you instinctively reject. The goal is not to change your mind; it is to widen the lens. “Understanding is a two-way street,” Eleanor Roosevelt observed, and when we don’t see and hear the truth of our fellow citizens, we stand little chance of appreciating all that we actually hold in common, even now.