This is one of the biggest problems with our current state of polarization: we’re quick to box people into a binary; either “red” or “blue,” “left” or “right.”

Real people rarely fit neatly into those categories. When you take the time to actually map out someone’s beliefs, experiences, and values, what you find almost never looks like a solid block of one color. Instead, it’s more like a mosaic: someone might lean conservative on economic issues, progressive on social ones, independent when it comes to foreign policy, and undecided on others.

Reducing all of that complexity down to a single partisan label is not only misleading, it also fuels division. It makes it harder to have real conversations, because instead of engaging with the full person (their reasoning, contradictions, and growth), we engage with a caricature. Recognizing that most people carry a mix of beliefs forces us to slow down, listen, and resist the urge to collapse identities into overly simple categories.

The challenge is that this feels counterintuitive, especially for people who haven’t examined why they hold the views they do. It’s easier, and often more comforting, to inherit an identity or adopt a team than it is to wrestle with contradictions and gray areas. But when we refuse that deeper work, we not only misunderstand others, we also misunderstand ourselves.

In other words, the messiness is the point. People are complicated, and when we acknowledge that, we create more space for dialogue, empathy, and genuine understanding; the very things that binary polarization squeezes out.

Edit:

If you’re interested in seeing how this plays out in practice, the New York Times put together a quiz a few years back that illustrates the point really well:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/09/08/opinion/republicans-democrats-parties.html