Where America Is First: A Conflict Crisis

We are exhausted.

Not just tired-from-work exhausted. Soul-tired. Bone-tired. The kind of exhausted that comes from years of scanning every room for who might disagree with us, every headline for the next outrage, every conversation for a potential ambush. From deciding who is friend and foe.

We are worn out from the constant search for who is right and who is wrong. And that search is making us sicker.

I say that not as political commentary. I say it as someone who spent decades as a critical care nurse watching what unmanaged stress does to a human body and who has spent the years since watching what unmanaged conflict does to families, teams, communities, and yes, entire nations.

A new Pew Research Center study released just yesterday confirms what many of us feel in our bones. An American conflict crisis where - out of 25 surveyed across the globe - the majority of adults view their fellow citizens as morally bad. Fifty-three percent of Americans rate the ethics and morality of the people around them negatively. Canada: 8%. Sweden: 12%. Even countries navigating profound political instability rate their fellow citizens more charitably than we rate ours.

Read the full Pew Research report here: In 25-Country Survey, Americans Especially Likely To View Fellow Citizens as Morally Bad

We are, by this measure, first in the world in judgment, suspicion, and contempt for our own neighbors.

America is First. In moral condemnation of the people standing next to us in line. In distrust of the person sitting across the table. In our certainty that those who see things differently are not just wrong, but bad.

That is not a distinction anyone should want. And it is not who we have to be.

When We Decide Everyone Else Is the Problem

There is a core truth in conflict resolution: the story you tell about the other person shapes every choice you make in relation to them. When your story is "that person is fundamentally bad," you stop looking for solutions. You stop listening. You stop believing that anything they say could possibly be worth hearing. And then the relationship falls apart in exactly the way you feared it would.

We are doing this. As a nation. As neighbors. As colleagues. As family members sitting around tables that used to feel safe.

Researchers have documented this pattern carefully. Studies from the More in Common research organization found that Americans believe their political opponents hold far more extreme views than they actually do, in many cases overestimating by nearly double. A September 2025 Carnegie Corporation survey found that 89% of local officials believe polarization is negatively affecting the United States - the highest figure recorded in their three-part tracking series.

Researchers describe the U.S. as having been more severely and persistently polarized than any other established democracy.

This is not a partisan problem. It belongs to all of us. And it is landing in the places we can least afford it.

Who Benefits When We Are Divided?

Before we talk about consequences, I want to ask a question that does not get asked often enough.

Who benefits from this?

Division this deep, this sustained, and this widely distributed does not happen entirely on its own. Algorithms are designed to serve content that provokes outrage, because outrage keeps us scrolling. Media outlets across the spectrum have learned that fear and contempt generate more engagement than complexity. Political messaging on every side is crafted to convince us that the people who disagree with us are not just wrong, but dangerous.

None of that is accidental. And all of it profits from us staying angry, staying frightened, and staying focused on each other rather than on the systems and forces shaping our lives.

I am not suggesting a conspiracy. I am suggesting we ask, with clear eyes, who gains when we cannot talk to each other. Who gains when families fracture. When communities splinter. When workplaces become ideological minefields where honest conversation feels too risky to attempt.

A divided people is a weakened people. That is not an opinion - it is a pattern visible throughout history, in families, in organizations, and in nations. When we are turned against each other, we lose our capacity to turn our collective attention toward anything else. It is easier for us as humans, and momentarily more satisfying, to be "against" rather than "for." That is a biological fact being strategically leveraged. Yet we can be "for" something and some people without being "against" others. It is possible. We just need to be aware.

Our differences do not require us to be against one another. They require us to acknowledge that we are different people - with different histories, different fears, different experiences of what this country is and what it could be. That is not a threat. That is the reality of a complex society. The question is whether we have the skills to navigate it.

We have always been stronger together. In families. In workplaces. In communities. In crisis. Every time this country has faced something genuinely hard, the response that worked was not deeper division. It was people deciding that what they shared mattered more than what separated them. Right now, it does not matter whose side of the boat is sinking. We are all in the water. And the question is whether we are willing to start paddling.

What Division Is Doing to Our Families

Political and ideological division does not stay on the screen. It comes home.

It shows up at holiday tables where invitations quietly stop being extended. It lives in the silence between parents and adult children who used to talk every Sunday. It drives the slow erosion of marriages where two people who once chose each other now feel like they are living in parallel realities. It results in the current epidemic of family estrangement.

Clinical experts note that political differences between family members are now creating measurable psychological harm, with children becoming distressed when they sense tension between the adults in their lives, and couples struggling to maintain closeness when disagreements feel less like differences of opinion and more like rejections of identity.

This tracks with what I see in family mediation. People do not come to me because they disagree. They come because the disagreement has calcified into distance and contempt, and no one knows how to find their way back. The conversation never happened, or it happened badly, and now the relationship carries a wound that has been quietly infected for years.

Bill Eddy, founder of the High Conflict Institute, describes this pattern precisely: polarized thinking is emotional, not logical. It is driven by all-or-nothing thinking, unmanaged intense emotions, and the impulse toward extreme positions. Once it takes hold in a family system, it spreads - drawing in extended relatives, old friends, even children who absorb the conflict they were never directly part of. It is literally the definition of how conflict escalates.

And yet here is what I also know from this work: families are remarkably resilient when they get the right support. The families that find their way through are not the ones who avoided the hard conversation. They are the ones who found a way to have it - with enough skill and enough structure that something new could emerge. Strength in families has never come from agreement on everything. It has always come from the willingness to stay in relationship through the hard things.

What Division Is Doing to Our Workplaces

Polarization follows us to work.

Research published in 2025 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that growing political division is actively shaping how Americans perceive each other in workplace settings, fueling hostility, straining professional relationships, and impairing the collective problem-solving that organizations depend on to function.

A 2025 academic forum on political polarization and organizational communication documented what this looks like on the ground: colleagues who avoid each other. Meetings where no one says what they actually think. Talented people who leave not because of pay or workload, but because the emotional cost of navigating the tension became too high. Leaders so conflict-averse that dysfunction is allowed to fester until it becomes a crisis.

I work with organizations navigating exactly this. The presenting issue is often a specific incident - a blowup, a complaint, a resignation. But the root cause is almost always a pattern of avoided conversations that created an environment where people stopped believing they could speak honestly without consequence.

Here is what the research also shows, and it matters: workplaces carry structural advantages when it comes to reducing division. When people share a common goal and work toward it together, they naturally begin to bridge gaps that seemed fixed. The colleague you had written off becomes someone you actually respect. Research confirms that shared purpose and real collaboration are among the most reliable antidotes to the "us vs. them" dynamic. That common goal does not have to be against something. It can be toward building something better.

But this does not happen without intention. It requires leaders who model something better than avoidance, and organizations willing to build the communication skills that make honest, productive disagreement possible. Strong teams have never been conflict-free. Strong teams have always been the ones who learned how to work through it.

What Division Is Doing to Our Communities

Here is a finding worth sitting with: the same Carnegie Corporation survey that found 89% of local officials believe polarization is hurting the nation also found that only 30% said it was significantly hurting their local communities.

That gap is not a contradiction. It is a signal.

When we are face-to-face with the actual people in our lives, whether our neighbors, our local officials, the other parents on the sideline - we tend to do better than the national temperature suggests. Research from More in Common consistently finds that the distorted picture we hold of people we disagree with shrinks dramatically when we are in actual relationship with each other. We find more common ground than we expected. We discover that the person across the political divide is also worried about their kids, their parents, their neighborhood.

Community is where our strength has always been most visible. Neighbors helping after floods. Congregations feeding people they have never met. Local volunteers showing up for causes larger than themselves. None of that depends on political agreement. All of it depends on the willingness to be in relationship.

But community life is also where division does its quietest damage. Local disputes over school decisions, neighborhood resources, and city priorities now escalate faster because they carry the freight of national tensions. What used to be a disagreement about a local policy becomes a proxy war for everything each side believes the other represents. That weight does not belong in conversations that could otherwise find common ground.

The People Paying the Highest Price: Service Workers, Healthcare, and the Helpers

There is a group of people absorbing a disproportionate share of this national stress, and we do not talk about it nearly enough.

The people trying to help us.

When a culture becomes saturated with suspicion, blame, and contempt, that energy does not stay abstract. It lands on the people closest to us when we are already overwhelmed - the nurse taking our blood pressure, the teacher calling about our child, the restaurant server, the retail worker, the first responder arriving at 2 a.m.

The data is striking. SHRM research found that U.S. workers collectively experience 223 million acts of incivility per day - costing organizations an estimated $2 billion daily in reduced productivity and absenteeism. Two-thirds of American workers have personally experienced or witnessed workplace incivility in the past month. The Bureau of Labor Statistics documented a 17% increase in violent incidents in retail in 2024. A 2025 Service Workers Safety Coalition report found that 20% of frontline workers faced physical intimidation from customers in the past year.

In healthcare, the numbers are worse. Healthcare workers account for the majority of all nonfatal workplace violence injuries in the United States. The World Health Organization estimates that between 8% and 38% of health workers experience physical violence at some point in their careers - and that figure does not begin to capture the daily volume of verbal aggression and contempt that has become routine in clinical settings. We are hurting the very people upon whom our lives depend. That is quite the paradox.

I worked in those settings. I know what it feels like to try to care for someone who is treating you as an outlet for rage that has nothing to do with you. It takes a toll. And when that toll accumulates across an entire profession, the consequences are not just personal - they are systemic. Burned-out nurses leave. Exhausted teachers quit. Demoralized social workers become less able to show up fully for the people who need them most. The people who were trying to help us become less able to do so, and the people who needed help most get less of it.

This is what happens when contempt becomes a cultural habit. It does not stay contained to people we disagree with politically. It spreads to everyone around us - and poisons the relationships and systems we all depend on.

I say this not to shame anyone. I say it because I have sat with enough conflict to know that when we are most scared, most overwhelmed, most depleted, we are most likely to externalize that feeling onto whoever is nearest. That is human. But it is also a pattern we can interrupt if we understand where it comes from.

What the Experts Are Saying About Where This Leads

The research is not subtle about what happens if this pattern continues.

Chronic exposure to a politically hostile environment leads to measurable psychological harm. Studies have found that people who perceive high levels of polarization face up to 57% higher odds of developing anxiety and depressive disorders. A 2024 American Psychological Association survey found that nearly 8 in 10 Americans report that the future of the nation is a significant source of major stress. A Harvard Youth Poll from late 2025 found that only 13% of young Americans believe the country is headed in the right direction, and that trust in institutions, in leaders, and in each other, is eroding across generations.

Research also identifies what experts call "moral injury" - the emotional distress caused by repeated exposure to conditions that feel like violations of our core values. This is not ordinary stress. It is the kind of accumulated strain that changes how we see the world, how we relate to others, and how capable we feel of doing anything about any of it.

Political division that stays at the level of national argument is uncomfortable. Political division that moves into our families, our workplaces, and our communities becomes something with real human cost - in relationships broken, in talent lost, in problems that never get solved because the people who could have worked on them together stopped being willing to sit in the same room.

That is the trajectory if nothing changes. And that is why something has to.

The Part We Can Control: Personal Responsibility

I am going to say something that may not be comfortable, and I am going to say it because I believe it is true and because I have witnessed over and over that our best outcomes come from our radical honesty.

The path out of this does not begin at the national level. It begins with each of us asking honestly: what am I contributing?

Where am I seeking confirmation of what I already believe rather than genuine understanding? When did I last have a real conversation with someone whose experience of this country is genuinely different from mine - not to persuade them, but to actually understand them? How often do I reach for contempt when curiosity would serve me better? When have I put politics aside and just connected person to person? What am I contributing, through my own comments and actions, that is adding to the rift?

These are not comfortable questions. But they are the beginning of something different.

Researchers at Syracuse University describe what happens when people are placed in actual conversation across difference: it is uncomfortable at first. But when both parties are genuinely open to understanding what underlies the other's perspective, the animosity decreases. People discover they have more in common than their assumptions led them to believe. That discovery does not require agreement. It requires presence. Sometimes it requires help. It also requires a commitment to value relationship over feeling right.

A side thought: I was a critical care nurse who witnessed a lot of people dying. I never heard someone say that their life was great because they won the arguments or cut ties with people. What I did see was a ton of regret for broken relationships. We are hard-wired for relationships. We can grow when we disagree. We get stretched and have to re-make ourselves and we can actually find we become someone we like more than the old version. I know this because these differences stretched my family, too. None of us are unscathed.

And the skill to stay present in discomfort - to listen when you want to defend, to ask when you want to argue, to stay at the table when you want to walk away - is something that can be taught. This matters, because the problem is not that Americans are broken. The problem is that most of us were never taught how to navigate high-stakes conversations when there is so much at stake.

We were not taught to listen in a way that lets someone feel genuinely heard. We were not taught to separate understanding from endorsing. We were not taught that staying in a hard conversation is itself a form of strength.

These are skills gaps, not character flaws. And skills can be learned.

What Reversing This Actually Looks Like

Researchers and conflict professionals point toward several things that actually move the needle in families, workplaces, and communities.

Correcting the story we are telling. The perception gap is real, and it is fixable. When people are shown evidence of shared, moderate views among those they assumed to be extreme, animosity reliably decreases. This means intentionally seeking out information that complicates your picture of the people you disagree with - not to capitulate, but to be accurate about who they actually are.

Paying attention to what we are feeding ourselves. I raised my children knowing that we become what we put into our brains. That just makes sense, right? Maybe we should really, really start paying attention to what we put into our brains.

Having the conversations we are avoiding. Avoidance does not protect relationships. It slowly starves them. The families, teams, and communities that find their way through hard times are the ones that built the capacity to talk about hard things, with skill, care, and support when they need it.

Building real relationships across difference. Face-to-face relationships with people we see as different from us is one of the most reliable ways to reduce dehumanization. This is documented, not aspirational. Your community, your workplace, your neighborhood are places where this can happen today.

Investing in actual skill-building. As Jason Lee, founder of Jubilee Media - a company that brings people with opposing views into direct dialogue - writes: the remedy is teachable. We need spaces in schools, workplaces, and communities where disagreement is expected and people are guided to listen and engage with curiosity rather than avoidance.

Getting skilled support when the conversation is beyond your current tools. There is no shame in this. I spent years learning how to help people through difficult conversations effectively - it is a craft. When the stakes are high and the relationship matters, working with someone trained in conflict management is not a weakness. It is a decision to take the outcome seriously.

What Fear Does and What Helps

Here is something I understood in critical care before I ever studied conflict management professionally: fear kept active for too long stops being protective and starts being destructive. And we do not make our best decisions when we make them from a place of fear.

Our brain is hard-wired to protect us. When danger is present, our brain sharpens focus, floods the body with energy, and prepares us to respond to danger. But when the fear response is triggered constantly - by headlines, by social media, by the sense that everyone around us is a threat - the same system that was designed to save us starts to break us down. Chronic fear impairs the brain's ability to regulate emotion, read other people accurately, reflect before acting, and make good decisions. We become, neurologically, worse at the very things we need most in conflict. Our brain often sees danger where none exists. We need to ask ourselves: is the danger real?

Because here is what the research says about what actually helps - what actually makes people feel better, function better, and treat each other better.

Not winning. Not being right. Not dominating.

Connection. Generosity. Presence.

The 2025 World Happiness Report, drawing on data from across the globe, found that human happiness is driven above all else by our relationships with others. Investing in positive social connections and engaging in acts of generosity are both directly linked to greater wellbeing - not as a side effect, but as a cause. Researchers found that generous behaviors across cultures, age groups, and economic circumstances consistently produce increased wellbeing in the person being generous. Not just the recipient. The giver.

The same report found that the number of Americans eating meals alone has increased 53% over the past two decades. We are more isolated, more defended, and more convinced that the people around us cannot be trusted. And we are less happy, less healthy, and less capable of the conversations we most need to have.

The antidote to contempt is not argument. It is not winning. The antidote to contempt is contact - real, human, face-to-face contact with the actual people around us, including the ones we have decided we already understand.

Being mean does not make us feel good. It makes us feel justified for a moment, and then emptier than before. What makes us feel good, what the research consistently shows, is connection. Generosity. The experience of being known and knowing someone else. We are, as the researchers put it, a profoundly social species. We were not built for this level of sustained contempt. It is costing us our health, our relationships, and our ability to find our way forward together.

What I Know From This Work

I have sat across from people who were certain they would never speak to each other again. Families. Colleagues. Neighbors. People who had stopped seeing each other as fully human.

And I have watched what happens when someone feels genuinely heard for the first time in a long conflict. The posture changes. The voice changes. Something in the face changes. It does not always lead immediately to resolution - but it almost always leads to a shift. A crack in the certainty. A moment of recognizing that the person across from them is carrying something real, even if it is different from what they are carrying.

That is where solutions become possible. Not before.

The skills that make that possible - listening without immediately defending, staying curious instead of certain, naming what you need instead of attacking what the other person did - are learnable. They are not natural for most of us, because most of us were never taught them. But they can be built. And when they are, everything changes. Not just the immediate conflict. The next one. And the one after that.

There are no people problems. There are skills gaps. And skills can be learned.

What You Can Do

You do not have to fix American polarization. You just have to decide what kind of person you want to be in it, and in the relationships that actually make up your life.

What do you want your relationships with your family, your workplace, your community, your country to look like in five years? What world do you want your children and grandchildren to belong to?

A few places to start:

Have the conversation you have been avoiding. Not recklessly - with preparation, with clarity about what you want to accomplish, and with genuine willingness to listen. Start with easy conversations. Remember having fun? Just connecting? Don't lead with where you disagree, lead with re-learning one another. Not with the places we judge, but with the humanity we share.

Correct your assumptions. Research consistently shows we hold distorted pictures of the people we disagree with. Seek out information that complicates that picture - not to be convinced, but to be accurate.

Make real contact. Algorithms and newsfeeds cannot replace actual relationships. The face-to-face contact that reduces dehumanization has to happen in person. Your community, your workplace, your neighborhood are full of opportunities for it today.

Invest in your skills. The capacity to stay present in a hard conversation, to listen when you want to defend, to ask when you want to argue - these are learnable. They grow with practice. Start now, before the stakes are high.

Get support when you need it. I help people find their best way forward in conversations they cannot navigate alone - whether that is a family at an impasse, a team that has fractured, or an individual preparing for a conversation that matters. That work is available to you.

None of us want to be judged by our worst moment. All of us want the benefit of the doubt. And the research tells us clearly that we are extending it less and less to the people around us.

That is something each of us can check. Not at the national level. Right where we are. What we say at the dinner table. How we describe the people we disagree with. The labels we reach for. The assumptions we make before a conversation even starts.

The More in Common research found that we consistently overestimate how extreme and how different the people around us actually are. We are wrong about each other. Systematically, measurably wrong. And that gap between who people actually are and who we have decided they are is where relationships die and where they can also be saved.

Extend to others what you want extended to you. Not as a moral instruction. As a practical one. Because the data is clear: contempt is making us sicker, lonelier, and less capable of solving the problems we all share. And connection, generosity, and the willingness to see each other as fully human is what actually makes us well.

Maybe we can start there. See what changes.

Kimberly Best, RN, MA is a court-listed mediator in Missouri and Tennessee, FINRA Arbitrator, and founder of Best Conflict Solutions, LLC. She helps families, organizations, and individuals find their best way forward through the conversations they have been avoiding. Learn more at bestconflictsolutions.com.

Ready to build the skills? The Best Conflict Conversation Cards - 50 evidence-based tools for navigating hard conversations - are available at bestconflictsolutions.com.

Download 4 free sample cards and try them this week.

Sources:

• Pew Research Center, In 25-Country Survey, Americans Especially Likely to View Fellow Citizens as Morally Bad, March 2026

• Carnegie Corporation / CivicPulse, Local Democracy in Crisis, September 2025

• SHRM Civility Index, Q1 2025

• World Happiness Report 2025, UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network

• American Psychological Association Stress in America Survey, 2024

• Harvard Youth Poll, Fall 2025

• Bureau of Labor Statistics, Workplace Violence Report, 2024

• World Health Organization, Healthcare Worker Safety Data

• More in Common, The Perception Gap, ongoing research series

• Bill Eddy, High Conflict Institute