What If the US Had Never Become So Divided?

Picture a living room in September 2024. Ken Burns is on screen talking about a new documentary, saying he wants to put the “us” back in the United States. Half the people watching nod along. The other half are already arguing in the group chat.

America has always had arguments. What feels new is how many people doubt there is still an “us” at all. That makes a simple question surprisingly sharp: what if the United States had taken a different path and ended up less divided than it is today?

This is a counterfactual story, but it is not fantasy. The point is not to imagine a utopia. The point is to ask, within real limits of money, politics, and human stubbornness, where the country could have made different choices that kept disagreement from hardening into permanent fracture.

Political polarization is not inevitable. It is the result of specific decisions about law, media, money, and memory. Change those inputs and you change how much “us” there is in the United States.

How Reconstruction could have built a stronger “us” (1865–1900)

Start at the end of the Civil War, when the United States had a rare chance to rebuild the idea of the nation from the ground up.

In 1865, four years of war had killed an estimated 620,000 to 750,000 people. The Confederacy was defeated. Four million enslaved people were free. The federal government suddenly had more authority than it had ever exercised before. The question was what to do with that power.

In our timeline, Reconstruction was brief and bitter. Congress passed the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. Federal troops occupied the South. Black men voted and held office. Then white Southern resistance, Northern fatigue, and a contested election in 1876 produced the Compromise of 1877. Federal troops left. White supremacist governments took over. Jim Crow hardened. The country stitched itself back together on paper while accepting a racial caste system in practice.

That choice carved a permanent fault line into American life. It told Black Americans that the federal government would not reliably protect their rights. It told Southern whites that violence and obstruction could beat back national authority. It taught both sides that the word “union” did not necessarily mean shared citizenship.

So what if Reconstruction had gone differently, within real political limits?

Scenario one: the federal government commits to a long occupation of the South, something like 25 to 40 years, backed by clear rules. Congress ties readmission and representation to measurable conditions: protection of Black voting rights, equal access to courts, and public schooling for all children. Federal courts, not local sheriffs, handle civil rights cases. The Army stays in enough force to matter.

This was not impossible. The United States kept troops in the South into the 1870s already. It kept troops in the Philippines after 1898 and on the Mexican border for years. The obstacle was not logistics. It was political will and white Northern racism.

Scenario two: land reform. The famous promise of “forty acres and a mule” was never widely carried out. Instead, most freedpeople ended up as sharecroppers on white-owned land. That locked them into debt and dependence, which made it easier to strip away their political rights.

Imagine Congress, under Radical Republican leadership, passing a limited land redistribution bill in the late 1860s. Confiscated Confederate estates above a certain size are broken up. Some land goes to freedpeople, some to poor white Unionists. The government offers small, long-term loans. The aim is not equality overnight. It is to create a class of small landowners with a stake in the new order.

There were legal and political hurdles. Property rights were sacred in American law. Many Northerners had no interest in giving land to Black Southerners. But confiscation of rebel property was already on the table during the war. The choice not to push it further was a choice, not a law of nature.

If you combine a longer occupation with modest land reform and serious investment in public schools, you get a South that is still racist, still poor, but less able to turn racism into a stable one-party system. Black voters remain a force. Poor whites have more to lose from political violence. Federal courts build a record of actually enforcing the 14th Amendment.

That does not erase white supremacy, but it changes its shape. Instead of nearly a century of Jim Crow, lynching, and one-party rule, you might get a more contested, more plural South. The Civil Rights Movement still happens, but it is building on institutions that never entirely disappeared, instead of resurrecting rights buried since 1877.

A Reconstruction that really reconstructed the South would have made the idea of national citizenship feel more real to more people, which would have given the “us” in United States deeper roots.

What if the media and parties never sorted into two echo chambers?

Fast forward to the late 20th century. By the 1970s, the United States had something unusual in its history: a relatively low level of partisan hatred.

Republican President Richard Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency. Democrat Lyndon Johnson worked with Republican Everett Dirksen on civil rights. There were conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans. The parties were messy coalitions, not clean ideological camps.

Two things then happened in parallel: the parties sorted, and the media splintered.

After the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, white Southern conservatives slowly moved into the Republican Party. Northern liberals consolidated in the Democratic Party. By the 1990s, party labels lined up more neatly with ideology, race, religion, and region.

At the same time, the old broadcast rules that had kept television news relatively bland began to fade. The Fairness Doctrine, which had required broadcasters to present controversial issues in a balanced way, was ended in 1987. Cable television expanded. Talk radio exploded. Fox News launched in 1996. Social media arrived in the 2000s.

Polarization is not just about disagreement. It is about sorting. When people who think alike cluster together, they become more extreme. When media outlets compete for attention, outrage is cheap fuel.

So what if the United States had taken a different regulatory path on media, and the parties had remained more ideologically mixed?

Scenario one: the Fairness Doctrine, or something like it, survives in a narrower form. The Supreme Court in the 1980s could have taken a different view of broadcast regulation. Congress could have written new rules tailored to cable and, later, to large digital platforms. The goal would not be to police opinions, but to require basic transparency and some exposure to competing views for outlets that reach a certain audience size.

There are First Amendment limits here. The government cannot decide which ideas are acceptable. But it can regulate ownership concentration, require disclosure of funding, and set standards for labeling opinion versus news. The United States already did versions of this for decades. It chose to step back.

Scenario two: the parties resist perfect sorting. This is harder, because it cuts against basic political incentives. Politicians like clear brands. Activists like purity. But there were moments when party leaders could have made different moves.

After the 1960s, Republicans did not have to double down on a Southern strategy that appealed to white resentment. They could have tried harder to build on their earlier, more multiracial appeal in the North and West. Democrats, in turn, could have kept more space for culturally conservative but economically populist voters, especially in rural areas.

One concrete lever: primary rules. The spread of binding primaries in the 1970s and 1980s weakened party bosses and empowered activists. Parties could have kept more closed primaries, more superdelegates, and more smoke-filled rooms. That would have been less democratic in one sense, but it might have produced more candidates who needed cross-faction support instead of pure base enthusiasm.

In this alternate path, you still get cable news and social media, but you also get stronger public broadcasters, tighter rules on media mergers, and parties that are less sorted by race and religion. There are still fights, but fewer Americans see the other party as an existential enemy.

A media and party system that rewarded persuasion more than outrage would have made it easier for Americans to argue without assuming the other side was out to destroy the country.

Could a national service system have created more shared identity?

One of the quiet engines of division in the modern United States is simple: people live, work, and socialize with people like themselves.

College-educated Americans cluster in metro areas. Working-class Americans cluster elsewhere. Racial segregation in housing has softened since the 1960s but has not disappeared. Social media lets people curate their own worlds. Many Americans can go years without having a real conversation with someone who votes differently.

There was a moment when the country flirted with a different idea: national service.

In the 1960s, the Peace Corps and domestic programs like VISTA sent young Americans to work in communities far from home. In the 1970s, after the draft ended, some politicians and thinkers floated the idea of a universal national service requirement. Everyone at 18 would spend a year or two in some mix of military, civil, or community work.

It never happened. The Vietnam War had poisoned the draft. Conservatives distrusted anything that looked like social engineering. Liberals distrusted the military. And the cost looked high.

So what if the United States had actually adopted a universal, or near-universal, national service system in the 1970s or 1980s?

Scenario: Congress passes a law in, say, 1978, creating a two-year service requirement for all citizens and permanent residents at age 18 or 19. About one quarter go into the military, which shrinks its career force and relies more on short-term service. The rest go into civilian programs: infrastructure repair, elder care, education support, disaster response, environmental work.

There are exemptions for disability and hardship, but they are narrow. The program is funded by a mix of payroll taxes and reallocated defense spending as the Cold War winds down. Participants receive modest pay, health coverage, and later education benefits, something like an expanded GI Bill.

The logistics are heavy but not impossible. The United States already processed millions through the draft system during World War II and the early Cold War. It runs large bureaucracies like Social Security and Medicare. The main obstacles are political and cultural, not technical.

What changes?

First, people mix. A kid from rural Alabama spends a year working on a flood control project in Oregon with a kid from Queens and a kid from suburban Phoenix. They might not become best friends. They might argue about everything. But they share a bunkhouse, a supervisor, and a paycheck. They learn each other’s accents and grudges.

Second, the idea of citizenship gets a concrete shape. Voting is one thing. Shared sacrifice is another. When people have all done something for the country, they are more likely to feel they have some claim on it, and on each other.

Third, the military is less of a separate caste. In recent decades, only a small slice of Americans have served. That has made it easier for civilian politicians to praise or attack the military in the abstract. In a service system where many families have some experience with uniform, the gap narrows.

This does not erase racism, class tension, or partisan media. But it gives Americans more shared reference points. Instead of only consuming stories about each other, they have some stories with each other.

A national service tradition would have woven more cross-cutting ties into American life, making it harder for political entrepreneurs to convince people that their fellow citizens were strangers or enemies.

Which path to a less divided America is most plausible?

Looking across these scenarios, some are more realistic than others.

The hardest to imagine, given the actual people in power, is the long, justice-centered Reconstruction. White supremacy was not a fringe view in 1865. It was mainstream in both North and South. Radical Republicans had a window, but it was narrow. Keeping troops in the South for decades and redistributing land would have required a moral and political revolution among Northern whites that simply did not exist at scale.

Still, pieces of that scenario were within reach. A slower withdrawal of troops. Stronger enforcement of the 14th and 15th Amendments. More consistent federal backing for Black officeholders. Those incremental changes alone might have shortened the life of Jim Crow and altered the racial politics that still shape division today.

The media and party scenario is more plausible but still constrained. Technology was going to fragment media even if the Fairness Doctrine had survived. Satellite TV, cheap printing, and then the internet made gatekeeping harder. Parties were going to sort to some extent once civil rights realigned the South.

Where there was real room for choice was in how far the country let money and outrage drive the system. Congress did not have to deregulate media ownership as aggressively in the 1990s. It did not have to make it so easy for anonymous money to flood campaigns. Parties did not have to weaken their own internal filters so thoroughly in the name of democratization.

The most technically feasible, and maybe the most powerful for building an “us,” is national service. The United States has repeatedly shown it can mobilize millions when it wants to. The barrier has been political will and cultural suspicion, not capacity.

Would national service alone have fixed polarization? No. But it is the scenario that requires the fewest heroic assumptions about 19th-century racial attitudes or 21st-century media technology. It asks only that a broad coalition of leaders, after Vietnam and Watergate, decide that the country needs a shared project to rebuild trust.

That coalition never quite materialized. Presidents from both parties flirted with the idea of expanded voluntary service. None spent the political capital to make it universal. The result is the country we have: highly connected online, oddly isolated in real life.

Counterfactuals are not about nostalgia for worlds that never were. They are about seeing that the world we inhabit is the product of choices. When Ken Burns talks about putting the “us” back in the United States, he is pointing at something history makes plain. The “us” was never automatic. It had to be built, protected, and sometimes repaired. Different choices in Reconstruction, media, and civic life could have left more of it intact.

The lesson is not that there was one missed turn that would have made America harmonious. It is that division is not fate. It is policy. That means it can be changed.