What we have in common, it is said, is much more important than that which separates us. It’s a beautiful notion, I think — maybe a tad cliche and overused, granted, perhaps a bit on the gaggy side — but it’s one that most of us would agree with. After all, we humans, as scientists tell us, are 99.9 percent alike, DNA-wise.

That point-1 percent, though, can be a bitch. Call it the politics point.

Nothing separates us as Americans more than politics. That’s always been the case. The American Revolution, which technically happened before we were all Americans, wasn’t just us vs. King George and the redcoats on the other side of the pond. Loyalists and separatists on this side of the Atlantic absolutely hated each other. It got bloody. It’s in all the textbooks.

In the mid-1800s — this is a classic example of our extreme politics — a South Carolina Democrat, incensed over an anti-slavery speech from a Massachusetts Republican, steamed for a day or two, gathered a couple of his colleagues to act as wingmen, walked onto the Senate floor, whipped out his walking cane, and beat the ever-loving tobacco out of the offending Yankee. Beat him unconscious. Five years later, the Civil War began. That — the Civil War, even more than the caning of Charles Sumner — turned out to be about as divisive as a people can get.

Not long after the Civil War, Irish-Americans clashed with the rival nativist Know Nothing Party in New York and with Blacks who they feared would take their jobs. It was true Gangs of New York stuff; fighting in bars and in the streets, violence at the polls, paid-off politicos, gang warfare, brutal murders. It was as ugly as the movie depicted it.

State and local politicians defied the national government on all sorts of occasions — forced bussing in Boston, forced integration in the South … really, the list of American-on-American political crime goes on and on and on, often centered around racial differences. The Zoot Suit Riots in the 1940s, Internment Camps during WWII, the Civil Rights Era, anti-war protesters in the 1960s, the Black Lives Matter marches … the list is long and too often violent.

You’d think we’d be used to it by now.

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These days, as we’re all so painfully aware, it’s mainly Democrats vs. Republicans, with a few Libertarians and your occasional nutjob sounding off from the way far right or left. It is said, by many, that we’ve never been this divided. Which, unless we start throwing down at Gettysburg again or take to bopping each other regularly with walking sticks, is probably overstating it a little.

Still, it feels bad, doesn’t it? Political violence, according to a recent Reuters investigation, is as bad as it’s been since the ’70s, when wild left-wingers were blowing up stuff and robbing banks. Reuters looked at hundreds of violent incidents since January 6, 2021 — a deadly day at the U.S. Capitol that should be on any list of violent political acts, a day that could have ended in the uprooting of a national election, the nullification of millions of legitimate votes, and the tossing out of someone who, legally and every other way the election has been examined, won the presidency — and noted that, since then, 213 incidents met their criteria for political violence (out of more than 600 tracked by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data project). Some were straight-up killings. And — don’t blame me, but stats don’t lie — most of the violence came from one side.

In 18 incidents of what Reuters identified as political violence that ended in a fatality, all since January 6, 13 were perpetrated by right-wing ideologues. One was from the left. Four weren’t tied to U.S. politics.

This isn’t to suggest that the current Make America Great Again army is out for blue-side blood. I don’t believe that’s true, despite Reuters’ findings. Those incidents, despite all the rhetoric and the doomsaying from both sides, remain on the fringe. They truly are the nutjobs.

The point is, we’re clearly divided. The point is, that point-1 is mighty strong. Those kinds of numbers, though, also beg a question, maybe the most important political question of our time:

What is it that so separates us?

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Democrats and Republicans, it should be pretty obvious, simply see each other differently. When you poll a bunch of Americans, which the British research company YouGov often does, and ask them about the two parties … well, things get interesting. According to a YouGov poll:

• Republicans think of themselves (in order of the highest percentage of Republican respondents who associate these terms with their Party) as patriotic, capable, intelligent, and realistic.

• Democrats think of themselves as open-minded, responsible, respected, and (in a tie) realistic and honest.

(A personal observation: I’ve lamented, in posts past — yeah, I lament once in a while — about how the Republican Party has taken the American flag as a symbol of their own. They are the patriots, they claim. Some 64 percent of Republican respondents listed patriotism as their No. 1 trait. Only 43 percent of Democrats listed patriotism as their top positive characteristic, behind things like being open-minded, responsible, respectful, realistic, honest, intelligent, ethical, inclusive, rational, and good. “Patriotic” was tied, down the list, with “capable.” So … is being patriotic more important than being honest, intelligent, ethical, or good? What’s most important?)

How Rs and Ds see the other party, though — especially what we dislike about the other guys — is probably more telling. The negative terms parties associate with their rivals, from the most voted-on term to the least:

• Republicans think Democrats are corrupt, dishonest, and out of control.

• Democrats think Republicans are dangerous, dishonest, corrupt, and hypocritical.

Them, as the irrepressible Southerner Preston Brooks would say (he’s the guy with the cane), are fighting words.

Breaking it down one more step may take us to the very essence of what’s between us, what separates us. The single biggest gap in how Democrats see Republicans, and how Republican sees Democrat, when the list of negative traits is offered, are these:

• Way more Democrats see Republicans as “racist” and “a cult” than Rs see Ds that way. (Some 43 percent of Ds see Rs as a cult; only 25 percent of Rs see Ds that way. More than half of the Ds surveyed — 54 percent! — see Rs as racist; only 36 percent of Republicans see Democrats that way.)

• Way more Republicans see Democrats as “anti-American” than the other way around. (Half of the Republicans surveyed — 50 percent! — say Democrats are anti-American; only 34 percent of Democrats call Republicans that.)

Sound familiar? Sure it does. Those terms are thrown around, sometimes without much thought, all the time. Sometimes by presidential candidates. Those are the words that inflame, drive us apart, and put us in the position that we now find ourselves in. They are the great dividers.

We’re patriotic. You’re not.

You’re racist. We’re not.

This, sad as it sounds, is where we are as the first half of the third century of this country comes to a close.

By now we know that we, as a nation, aren’t going to somehow decide to join hands any time soon to bridge this ever-present schism. If a national reconciliation hasn’t happened yet — through revolution and Civil War, through world wars and civil uprisings big and small, if a deadly pandemic that threatened everyone on the planet and killed more than a million Americans didn’t do the job — you can figure that a miracle American kumbaya moment, sometime between now and November, is just not happening.

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Depressed? Yeah. Join the crowd. But being the generally optimistic guy I am, I’d like to sign off on a more upbeat note.

Back in 2018, a research group, More in Common, did a year-long survey of Americans that was designed to, in its words, “better understand the forces that drive political polarization and tribalism in the United States today, and to galvanize efforts to address them.” The study is called “The Hidden Tribes of America.”

The report, worth the reading, is extensive, and the findings are illuminating. More in Common did an update to the report after the 2022 midterms, and a huuuuge majority of the respondents — this key takeaway should surprise no one and encourage almost everyone — said they were both exhausted by the divisiveness in politics (86 percent said that) and that they wanted the two parties to find a way to compromise (89 percent). One of the main findings of the original report is that 77 percent of Americans believe that our differences are not insurmountable.

That’s something, right?

The Hidden Tribes survey separates voters into seven relatively distinct groups, using shared beliefs and attitudes to define, and the groups kind of look like what you’d expect. You have your radicals on each end of the spectrum, both left (described as younger, secular, cosmopolitan, and angry) and right (white, retired, uncompromising, and patriotic), and you have folks who are a little less strident and with slightly different characteristics sitting slightly in from each side. Then you have a big blob of groups — some poor, some middle class, some engaged, some not, most distrustful and tired — bunching up in the middle.

What’s encouraging is that the big blob in the middle — what More in Common perfectly calls the “Exhausted Majority” — is much bigger, and therefore more politically powerful, than those nutjobs and nutjob-adjacents on the ends. If the Exhausted Majority can get its stuff together as a bloc, move past its fatigue and inertia (the EM, by definition, is less politically active), if a political leader can find a way to appeal to this group and get them motivated, that might be at least a temporary cure to our long national malaise. Or maybe it can simply drop the fever a bit. Maybe.

We are a nation of almost 350 million people. We’re going to have our political differences. Names are going to be leveled at the other side, fingers pointed, threats made, violence occasionally committed, doom often predicted. That’s who we are. It’s who we’ve always been.

But the mass of us, even though it may not seem that way, are not extreme. The majority of us share similar goals, dreams, and visions. The point is, we don’t always have to focus on what’s between us, that which separates us. We can concentrate on — apologies if this sounds a little gaggy, too — what’s within us that binds us.

That sounds like another post …