You Ask How the American Electorate Could Become So Polarized: It’s Not That Hard

The final weeks of the US presidential campaign has Harris and Trump fighting for who is a true hamburger and fries slinger at McDonalds. A show, but little tell. That’s America, circa October 2024.

On the other hand, duels between Dunkin Donuts* loyalists and Starbuck loyalists does reveal something fundamental about the extreme divide in the current American presidential campaign between Harris and Trump: each human embodies love AND hate.

Some years ago I was researching what Dunkin Donuts loyalists are like and why they prefer the coffee and other offerings there. As part of that work I paid those people committed to Dunkin Donuts to instead go to Starbucks for two weeks and email me daily diaries about their experience. I made a similar request to Starbucks goers to go to Dunkin Donuts.

Wow! Talk about tribalism, it was all there in the extreme. It’s really not that difficult for human beings to slip into hate, to make ‘The Other’ into an It and not a Thou. It’s a kind of pseudo-speciation.

The UNITED States of America. What a crazy – creative – idea…but a difficult one.

The Different Worlds of Dunkin’ Donuts and Starbucks Loyalists

Something as seemingly innocuous as Dunkin’ Donuts (DD) and Starbucks (STRBX) loyalists show different cognitive styles: DDs have a focused and pragmatic goal of task completion; STRBXs have a more diffuse attention and are sensual with their goal of having an “experience.” These two groups have different beliefs about self and the world, use different words (small is tall, skim is non-fat), have different rituals, and exaggerate in-group and out-group distinctions.

DDs consider themselves “old-fashioned” while STRBXs think of themselves as “fashionable.” DDs feel the service they get is “friendly and “good-fast-paced” as opposed to STRBXs feel the service they get as “knowledgeable and relaxed.” DDs have servers, STRBXs have baristas.

Each group’s perception of the other is the opposite from their own self-definition. DDs feel STRBXs are “pretentious”; STRBXs feels DDs are “old, bland and dull.” DDs say STRBX coffee is “too strong” while STRBXs say DD coffee is “too weak.” DDs like the “assembly line efficiency” while STRBXs like how menu items can be “customized.”

STRBXs want to live a more “trendier and upscale lifestyle”, they want to reward themselves and like to try different things depending on their mood at the moment. STRBXs feel “it is important to always feel like an individual.”

DDs see themselves as “regular people” and that “coffee is not an existential moment.” DDs also say they are “down to earth”, don’t worry about appearance and have “no time for idle conversation. They often say things like “I do construction work, I don’t trade futures.” Two tribes exaggerating the differences between them. DDs often say things such as “I’m there for a cup of coffee, just give me whatever you’re making for a regular.” DDs see STRBX as a place for individuals and couples, not families.

STRBXs see DDs as having a “cookie-cutter mentality” and they say things such as “I feel limited at DD, limited menu, limited décor, limited me!”

In America, Belonging is not a Must, it’s a Want

Americans are created equal by political doctrine. Perhaps in that context, the desire to be different gains strength. That can lead to creativity, but it can also lead to feeling one has no ready-made niche to rest one’s head on. Despite all that America has, life can be tough. Especially nowadays with the advent of the internet, a globalized economy and the growing difference between Wall St. and Main St., life seems more fast-paced, increasingly complex and hyper-competitive. Trust in institutions has waned and with that the feeling of feeling safe has likewise become a scarer resource. Safety has also become a more salient issue due to immigration, climate change and perceived inflation.

America is now between mythologies. American myths of normality, freedom and can-do are disappearing. America is not what it once was. Americans are living in the midst of an escalation from uncertainty to unpredictability to undecodability.

Americans are in-between what was and what will be, and they don’t yet know what they will become. Identity transformations are difficult and uncomfortable. Americans feel less sure about how to cope with a changing world they don’t understand and can’t control.

What Do People Want?

More than products, more than a fat wallet, people want to feel four things:

1. Their world is a manageable place.

2. There is a refuge from life’s difficulties.

3. They are okay.

4. Their future is assured.

One strategy at-hand to seemingly make the world more orderly is to secure one’s boundaries by making one’s territory more well-defined, and by implication separating yourself from others’ territory: ME v NOT ME. This can especially be seen when big cultural changes are afoot. During the first years of the 21st century when my research comparing DD and STRBX loyalists occurred was a time that included US invasion of Iraq, 9/11, a Black man becomes President of the United States, Hurricane Katrina, the bursting of the Dot-com Bubble, and a global recession.

What’s Next?

A node in American history is just a few days away. In America’s current presidential campaign, a huge partisan divide has been set in motion by income inequality, racial demographic changes, geographic differences as well as lifestyle differences. Under such a circumstance the primal impulse can be “circle the wagons.” Added to this state of mind, feelings of resentment, vengeance and retribution have taken hold, defined by a disturbingly odd Republican candidate, many whose followers he has seen to it feel not disagreement with the other side, but outright hate.

Kamala Harris says Americans have more in common than what divides them. But that assumes a more philosophical perspective on life and Americans, in general, are more concrete than they are conceptual thinkers.

The American media has the presidential contest as too close to call. But that assumes polls are a good predictor of political outcomes. Will Americans stand true to the country’s founding principles or will the grand, crazy experiment of the UNITED States be diminished? On the surface, the paradox of love and hate seem battling more than seeking a way to find a creative emergence from the contradiction. How will human nature and the nature of mind nudge America backwards or forward? We shall see. Either way, America will learn a lesson.

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• Since my work for Dunkin’ Donuts, the company name has changed to Dunkin’.