The American Problem is writ large in the small print of the latest Gallup poll: 

Twice as many Republicans as Democrats trust the police. Twice as many Democrats as Republicans trust the public schools. Twice as many Republicans as Democrats trust organized religion. Twice as many Democrats as Republicans trust organized labor.

These figures, from the annual confidence measurements taken for decades by Gallup, underline perhaps the gravest crisis in contemporary American life, captured by a bracing headline in the respected Tablet website last week: “Americans Hate Each Other.”

And what is more, Americans no longer respect important, established American institutions. Two trends in the survey are mutually reinforcing – and mutually disturbing. The first: the trust gap on police, public schools, religion and labor. The second: the more general erosion of trust in the sustaining institutions of civic society. Average trust in 14 essential elements of our civilization, already low before the pandemic, dropped another 3 percentage points in the COVID year of 2020. And the least respected institution of them all? Easy question. Congress, by far. Fewer than one in eight of us respects the lawmakers who were elected to represent us. 

Historians, political scientists and commentators counsel us that division always has defined us. To apply that Tablet “Hate Each Other” rubric to our history, we know that the Hamiltonians hated the Jeffersonians, the abolitionists hated the slaveholders, the progressives hated the Gilded Age businessmen, the interventionists hated the America Firsters, the Goldwaterites hated the Great Society architects. Our national anthem might as well be Tom Lehrer’s “National Brotherhood Week” song from 1965, with a line that might summarize our history: “All of my folks hate all of your folks/It’s American as apple pie.”

“The decades of American cohesion experienced mainly between 1920 and 1960 were an anomaly,” B. Duncan Moench, a lecturer at Arizona State University’s School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership, wrote in that Tablet piece, explaining that “the success of Franklin Roosevelt, the New Deal, and the ‘liberal consensus’ that followed briefly afterward were the result merely of Roosevelt’s unique political genius and the tail winds of winning two world wars while most of Eurasia was reduced to rubble.”

Moench argued that this cohesion was consolidated during the Cold War. There were divisions then, to be sure, some of which emerged during the civil rights period, when two currents collided: the effort to preserve the racial divide and the drive for a new cohesion of opportunity by closing the racial divide. It’s a good starting point for understanding our current conundrum.

Our polarization today remains over race; some 56% of white adults told the Gallup survey that they trusted the police, while only 27% of Black adults did. 

But our divisions are over other questions as well. 

“We are seeing levels of polarization that we are just not used to,” said Kenneth D. Wald, a University of Florida political scientist. “Jan. 6 is an example of the way the two parties live in different worlds. They inhabit different information networks. The Republicans live in Fox News, and they don’t trust newspapers. Democrats have different information and listen to MSNBC. The magnitude of all of our divisions has increased because of the number of information sources. There’s reason to be very worried.”

I thought I saw a silver lining under the white dome of the Capitol on the afternoon of Jan. 6, when lawmakers from both parties – “two households, both alike in dignity,” as Shakespeare put it in “Romeo and Juliet” – huddled together as insurrectionists pierced the walls and disrupted the counting of the Electoral College votes. No longer separated by the literal partisan aisle, united in their fear and peril, might they have found common ground, if not always common cause? 

Instead, in the weeks that followed, we witnessed “ancient grudge break to new mutiny.”

And yet, efforts continue. Democratic Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia and Republican Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio continue to work to find a bipartisan path to a massive infrastructure bill. In some years, Warner has played host on his farm to a pig roast, an incongruous gesture for political figures practiced in pork barrel legislation perhaps, but a productive initiative nonetheless. Last year, lawmakers negotiating the COVID relief package repaired to the home of GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.

But more is necessary, and not only among politicians.

This year, David McCullough III selected a dozen and a half young people from widely divergent backgrounds, outlooks and hometowns, threw them together and basically dared them to learn about each other, to understand each other, and ultimately to like each other.

It was a big idea with big potential consequences, but then again, McCullough comes from a family that has understood the broad sweep of American life and the potential for sweeping away preconceptions and misperceptions; his grandfather, the historian David McCullough, singlehandedly retrieved the reputations of two American presidents from the dustbin of history, winning Pulitzers for his biographies of Harry Truman (1992) and John Adams (2001). 

The younger McCullough arranged for students from places as divergent as the Boston suburbs of Wellesley and Concord and the Texas communities of Kilgore and Cotulla to meet each other, visit with each other, and learn from each other this summer. That learning has taken place over encounters with alligators in Louisiana and with Red Sox relief pitching in Fenway Park.

“These kids couldn’t be more different,” said McCullough. 

The result of their interchange is inspiring. 

“It has confirmed completely that we need to get more involved in each other’s lives – and meet one another,” McCullough said. “We need to reduce the stereotypes we define each other by, because those stereotypes are getting in the way of creating an optimistic vision for our country. We can reduce polarization by getting into contact with each other.” 

That’s not so easy in a country where the divisions are reinforced by distance. Residents of coastal states differ substantially in their cultural and political views from those who live inland. Rural areas generally voted for Donald J. Trump, urban areas for Joe Biden. 

Perhaps we could embrace this notion, from Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards’ eulogy this month for one of the great rogues of American politics, his predecessor Edwin Edwards: “When it comes to political issues, he had ‘opposition,’ not enemies.”

David M. Shribman is the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Follow him on Twitter at ShribmanPG.