What I Got Wrong About the Other Side
Something is wrong with this country, and I think most of us know it.
Not wrong in the way that partisans mean when they point at the other side and say “they’re destroying America.” Wrong in a deeper way. Wrong in the way where people who used to be able to disagree and still be neighbors can barely stand to be in the same room. Wrong in the way where every issue, no matter how small, becomes an identity test. Wrong in the way where millions of Americans have simply stopped believing that the people on the other side of the political line are acting in good faith at all.
If you’re reading this, you probably feel it. You might blame different people for it than I do. That’s fine. I’m not here to tell you who’s at fault. I’m here to tell you about something I got wrong, how I figured it out, and why I think it matters for all of us.
I voted for George H.W. Bush in 1988, my first election. I’ve voted Democratic in every election since. I’m not neutral and I’m not going to pretend to be. But this isn’t about defending my side. If anything, it’s the opposite. I’m going to start with what I got wrong, because someone has to go first, and I can only speak honestly about my own mistakes.
I suspect that by the end, some of what I say will feel familiar no matter where you stand. Not because we’ve made the same mistakes, but because we’ve all been building the same kind of walls, even if they’re made of different things. Fear. Certainty. The comfort of never having to truly understand someone who scares you.
Here’s what mine looked like.
For years, I looked at the tens of millions of Americans who support Trump and I couldn’t make it make sense. How can this many people back something that seems so clearly harmful? Not just to the country, but to them? I ran this question in circles for years, and eventually I settled on an answer that was simple and satisfying: they’re followers. They’ve been told what to think by leaders, by their churches, by their media, and they’ve gone along with it. They’re sheep.
I wouldn’t have said that word out loud. But that’s what I believed. And I held onto it because it was comfortable. It made the world simple. They follow, I think for myself. When you’ve got an explanation of other people that makes you feel smart and them feel stupid, you should look at it harder. I didn’t, for a long time.
What finally broke it was Trump’s staying power. People who are simply following orders eventually get tired, disillusioned, or distracted. They drift away. But Trump’s support hasn’t weakened over scandals, indictments, policy failures, or anything else. Nearly a decade now. That kind of durability doesn’t come from obedience. It comes from something deeper. I didn’t know what, so I decided to find out.
I started with what seemed obvious: religion. Trump’s base must be heavily religious. These are people accustomed to faith, to trusting spiritual authority, and that pattern transfers to a political leader. It fit my story perfectly.
Then I looked at the numbers.
Only about 31% of Trump voters attend church weekly. Roughly 48% attend seldom or never. When Pew Research looked at religious commitment more broadly, not just whether people call themselves Christian but whether they actually practice it (prayer, scripture, importance of faith in daily life), only 23% of Trump voters scored high. About 79% identify as Christian, but most are Christian in the way that means culture and background, not active devotion.
My story didn’t hold up. If religious obedience were driving this, the most committed supporters would be the most devout. They aren’t. Most of his base doesn’t go to church regularly. Something else was going on.
It took me a while to see it, because I was looking for a single explanation: one thing that makes them all tick. But there isn’t one thing. There are millions of people with different lives, different problems, and different reasons for feeling the same way.
The factory worker whose town emptied out when the jobs moved overseas. The small business owner buried in regulations written by people who’ve never run anything. The churchgoer who watched their faith go from respected to ridiculed in a generation. The parent who feels like they can’t say what they actually think about gender or race without being called a bigot. The veteran who came home to a country that feels unrecognizable. The farmer who’s watched the family operation get squeezed out by corporate agriculture and government policy.
These people don’t all agree with each other. They’re not one movement. But they share something: the feeling that the country moved on without them. That the things they were raised to believe were good (hard work, faith, self-reliance, patriotism, a certain kind of community) are now treated as suspect or backwards. That the people running things not only don’t care about what they’ve lost, but look down on them for caring about it in the first place. That everybody else gets ahead while they’re stuck or falling behind. And that what’s being offered isn’t help. It’s: change. Become like us. Your values are outdated, your way of life is backwards, and you’re welcome to join the future, but only if you leave behind everything that makes you who you are.
It isn’t fair. And nobody with power has fixed it.
And then someone showed up and said: I see you. I hear you. The people who look down on you? They’re the enemy. And I’m going to fight them for you.
So they said: finally. And they gave him everything. Their support, their trust, their loyalty. Not because they were told to. Because he was the first person in a long time who made them feel like they mattered.
Maybe he meant it. Maybe he didn’t. But nobody else was even pretending to care. When you’re drowning and someone throws you a rope, you don’t stop to ask about their motives. You grab it. That’s not gullibility. That’s what anyone would do when the alternative is to keep drowning.
I couldn’t see this for years because I was behind my wall. And I want to be honest about what that wall was made of, because I think it matters.
I had contempt. Not the loud kind. Not the kind where you yell at someone at Thanksgiving. The quiet kind. The kind where you watch the news and think, “how can they be so stupid?” The kind where you read about a rally and feel a mix of horror and superiority. The kind where you’ve quietly decided that tens of millions of your fellow citizens are either dumb or broken or both, and you’ve stopped being curious about whether you might be wrong.
I don’t want to make this about my side or your side. I want to make it about walls.
I think most of us have built one. Made of different materials, shaped by different fears, but serving the same purpose: protecting us from having to truly understand someone who threatens our sense of how the world works. My wall was contempt dressed up as intelligence. Yours might be built out of something else entirely. Betrayal, maybe. Or exhaustion. Or the conclusion that the other side doesn’t deserve your effort.
Whatever it’s made of, the wall does the same thing. It replaces curiosity with certainty. And certainty feels good. It feels safe. But it also means you stop learning. I stopped learning about half my country for years because I was sure I already understood them.
I was wrong. I was wrong in a way that felt good, and that was exactly the problem.
When I finally set the wall aside and looked, I didn’t find sheep. I didn’t find people who’d been duped or who couldn’t think for themselves. I found people whose lives had changed in ways that nobody with power seemed to notice or care about, who’d been dismissed and talked down to for years, and who grabbed onto the first person who said: you matter.
And underneath all of it, underneath the anger and the loyalty and the refusal to let go, I found something I didn’t expect. Fear. Not the kind that comes from being told what to be afraid of. The kind that comes from watching the world you knew disappear, piece by piece, year after year, with no sign of it stopping and nobody in charge who seems to care.
I thought I understood that much. But when I started to look at what they’re actually losing, how deep it goes and how real it is, it changed something in me. It changed how I see them. And it changed how I see my own fears too.
This is the first of a five-part series called “Same Team.”
[Next: What We’re Not Seeing]
Sources: Pew Research Center (2020, 2024 voter studies); Democracy Fund Voter Study Group; PRRI American Values Atlas (2024, 2025); Edison Research exit polls.
Greg Hayward is a pseudonym. The author writes under it to protect his family's privacy. The biographical details in this series are real.