OK so here is the thing I have been sitting with for months, chewing on it like bad gum that has lost its flavour but I cannot figure out how to spit it out without making a scene.
I am not a political scientist. I am not a sociologist (oh wait, I am sort of, I did go to school for sociology, lol), but note this… I am a disabled, autistic, chronically ill woman from Canada who reads too much, sleeps too little, and has watched, over the last decade give or take, something quietly go sideways in how people relate to each other. And the ever-changing and emerging chaos that is what we call “politics” at the moment is right in the middle of it. Not at the edges. Dead centre.
I am going to say something upfront and I need you all to actually hear it before you decide I am your enemy: this post is not a takedown of the left or the right. If you are waiting for me to validate your team and roast the other one, you are going to be annoyed with me by the end. Both sides have earned some real side-eye here. Both sides are doing something that I think is genuinely dangerous. And I say that as someone who has opinions of my own, especially the loud ones, but who also believes that what I am seeing is bigger than party lines.
This is about what happens when politics stops being a tool and starts being a fanatical zombie tribe.
Because that is what it has become. For a growing number of people, political identity is not just how they vote. It is who they are. Who they love. Who they trust. What they eat, what they wear, what music they listen to, what they are allowed to find funny. It is their in-group signal, their moral framework, their social safety net, their sense of purpose. And for some it has become a “bandwagon.”
It is, in other words, functioning like a cult of personality and religion. Or a family. Or a hometown. The things that used to do that job.
And I think that should concern every single one of us. Regardless of where we fall on any particular spectrum.
The Research Is Not Subtle About This
Social psychologist Henri Tajfel developed what is now called “Social Identity Theory” back in the 1970s. For those with limited braincells of education: humans derive a meaningful chunk of their self-concept from the groups they belong to (myself included). We are wired for it. Tribes kept us alive for millennia, and our brains never fully got the memo that we are not on the savanna anymore. We still desperately want to know: who are my people, and who is not my people… (i.e. where on this planet do I fit in anymore)
Tajfel and Turner found that even arbitrary group membership, and they tested this with genuinely ridiculous groupings, like whether people preferred Klee or Kandinsky paintings, was enough to generate in-group favouritism and out-group hostility. You did not need a real reason to favour your group. The group itself was the reason. Just like those who debate pineapple on pizza (… I’m on the pineapple side.)
Now apply that to the modern political landscape and try not to feel vaguely ill.
A 2019 study published in PNAS by Eli Finkel and colleagues titled “Political sectarianism in America” introduced the term affective polarization to describe a shift that researchers had been tracking for years. The shift is this: people no longer just disagree politically. They despise the other side. They view them as morally inferior, not just wrong. The emotional hostility toward political out-groups has, in the United States, grown more extreme than racial out-group hostility in some measurements. That is a genuinely staggering sentence and it deserves to sit there alone for a second.
Now. Canada is not the United States and vice versa. I know. We like to remind ourselves of that a lot, usually while doom-scrolling the same platforms and absorbing the same content. Statistics Canada and the Environics Institute have both documented rising political distrust and social fragmentation in Canadian society over the past decade, ever since a specific event happened which I won’t get into right now. The 2023 Environics Focus Canada survey found that Canadians report declining trust in federal institutions, increasing anxiety about social cohesion, and sharply rising disagreement about core values. Not just policies, but values. That is the shift. Policy disagreements are normal and healthy. Values disagreements feel existential, because they are about who you fundamentally are as a person.
And when politics becomes a values identity, every election feels like a referendum on your soul.
But What Actually Happened to Belonging
I want to back up. Because I do not think politics caused this. I think politics stepped into a vacuum.
Sociologist Robert Putnam wrote about this in his landmark 2000 book Bowling Alone, which documented the collapse of civic life in America (and now happening in Canada): churches, bowling leagues, union halls, community clubs, parent-teacher associations. The physical, regular, repeated gathering of people around something shared. Putnam’s data showed these institutions had been gutting themselves since roughly the 1960s, and the social capital they generated (trust, reciprocity, the feeling of mattering to a community, even common sense) went with them.
Canada was not immune. Church attendance in Canada has dropped dramatically over decades. Statistics Canada data shows that the percentage of Canadians who report no religious affiliation has grown substantially and steadily. The United Church, the Anglican Church, the Catholic Church, all reporting declining, aging congregations. Now I say this not as someone mourning the specific institutions, but as someone noting that for centuries those institutions were doing a job. They were providing weekly gathering. A moral framework. A community that knew your name. A ritual for grief. A context for joy. They were, whatever their flaws (and brother, there were flaws), belonging infrastructure.
When belonging infrastructure collapses, people do not stop needing to belong. That is not how humans work. They find something else.
Unions were another major source of working-class identity and belonging. The feeling that your labour meant something, that you were part of a collective, that your dignity was defended collectively. Union membership in Canada peaked in the 1980s and has declined significantly since. Again: I am not making a pure policy argument for or against unions here. I am noting that they did a belonging job that has not been replaced by anything equivalent.
Add to that the accelerating geographic and economic sorting of Canadians (the concentration of economic opportunity in specific cities, the hollowing out of rural and small-town community life, the explosion of housing costs that make it impossible for young people to put down roots and build community) and you have a belonging crisis that was absolutely primed and ready for something to fill it.
Then social media showed up and politics volunteered for the job.
The Internet Did Not Create This But It Absolutely Turbo-Charged It
Here is where I want to be careful because I do not want to do the lazy “social media bad” take. It is more complicated than that and also yes, parts of it are just that straightforward.
What social media platforms are optimized for is engagement, and what drives engagement is emotional arousal. Specifically, outrage. Fear. Tribal threat. The feeling that your group is under attack. Researchers at MIT published a study in Science in 2018 (Vosoughi, Roy, and Aral) finding that false news spread significantly faster on Twitter than true news, and that emotional novelty was the key driver. Outrage is a renewable energy source on the internet and every platform has figured out how to harvest it.
What this means practically is that political content which frames the world as us versus a monstrous them gets amplified. Content that is nuanced, boring, locally specific, or calls your own side to account gets buried. The algorithm does not care about political parties. It cares about keeping you clicking. But the result is that political discourse online is systematically warped toward catastrophism and tribalism. So yeah the internet sucks at times. Great resource, bad distribution of anxiety.
Canadian political discourse online has not been spared. Our election cycles have increasingly taken on the aesthetic of American culture war content, not because Canadians have suddenly all developed American political values, but because we are swimming in the same information ecosystem. American political content is financially incentivized to flood the zone. And it does. Research from the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and various media scholars has documented the significant spillover of American political framing into Canadian online discourse.
And here is the belonging piece: online political communities give you everything a real community does, faster and with lower stakes. You get in-group recognition instantly. You get moral validation. You get a clear enemy. You get language, memes, shared references that signal “you are one of us.” You get the dopamine hit of belonging without the inconvenience of actually having to show up for anyone in physical reality. (Or starved for gratificaton)
It is “belonging-flavoured”. But it’s not the same thing. And I think a lot of people are malnourished on the substitute.
What It Looks Like When Politics Becomes Identity
Let me just describe what I observe because what I see is going to be different from someone else and, because I think it will be recognizable to most people regardless of where they stand.
People who won’t be friends with, or will end friendships with, someone who votes differently. People who describe their political affiliation first when introducing themselves in a personal context, before their job, their relationships, their actual life. People for whom consuming political content is a primary leisure activity, not because they are civically engaged in any concrete way, but because it is emotionally stimulating and gives them a sense of purpose. People for whom every cultural product (movies, music, food, clothing brands) must be filtered through a political lens to determine whether it is safe or tainted. People who feel genuine grief and existential dread when their political team loses an election, not because of specific policy consequences they can name, but because it feels like a verdict on whether they are good people.
That last one is the tell. That right there is where politics has crossed into identity.
When your political team losing feels like you losing, when it feels like being told your existence is wrong, that is not civic engagement anymore. That is identity threat. And identity threat produces a very specific neurological response, the same one that produces fight-or-flight. Which is why political disagreement in this era feels like a survival situation to so many people. Because for their identity-brain, it is.
Henri Tajfel saw this coming. Social identity theory predicts that when group membership becomes central to the self-concept, threats to the group are processed as threats to the self. You will do cognitively and behaviourally whatever it takes to protect the group, including dismissing evidence that contradicts the group’s worldview, dehumanizing out-group members, and escalating conflict.
This is not a left-wing phenomenon. It is not a right-wing phenomenon. It is a human phenomenon being currently activated at scale by specific social conditions. Both progressive online communities and conservative online communities show the same structural dynamics. The content differs. The tribalism is identical.
The Canadian Specific Wrinkle
Canada has a cultural myth I want to gently poke at. We tell ourselves (and I grew up believing this) that we are more reasonable than our neighbours to the south. More polite. Less tribal. More committed to pluralism. And I think there has historically been some truth in that. Our political culture has genuinely had different norms around civility and compromise.
But I think we are kidding ourselves if we look at the current moment and feel smug about it.
The 2021 and 2025 federal elections both produced deeply polarized outcomes with significant regional fracture. The convoy protests of 2022 (whatever your view of their legitimacy or their politics) revealed a level of genuine social fracture between Canadians that our national self-image was not prepared for. People were not just angry about a policy. They were expressing something that felt, to them, like a profound alienation from the institutions and communities that were supposed to represent them. And the reaction to those protests from the other side was equally revealing: not just policy disagreement, but contempt. Dehumanization. “These are not real Canadians.” Which is exactly the in-group/out-group language that Social Identity Theory predicts.
The Angus Reid Institute has tracked Canadian political polarization and consistently found increasing partisan animosity: not just policy disagreement, but personal contempt across partisan lines. A 2022 Angus Reid survey found that significant majorities of both Conservative and Liberal supporters held unfavourable views of the opposing party’s voters, not just their politicians. We are heading somewhere we have not been before and pretending we are immune because we are Canadian is the kind of hubris that precedes a very uncomfortable lesson.
Here Is Where I Roast Everyone Equally And Mean It
Sorry, not sorry! Can’t help it I’m CANADIAN.
Progressive political culture online (and I say this as someone who holds a number of progressive values) has developed a very specific flavour of identity politics that has real problems. The moral certainty. The rapid cycling of who is acceptable and who is cancelled. The way that how you talk about something has become as important as what you actually do about it. The purity spirals. The way people perform their political values for social approval in their online community without necessarily building anything concrete in their actual communities. The contempt for people who do not use the right language, as though vocabulary is the unit of moral currency.
This is not politics. This is status signalling within a tribe. And it actively alienates the people you need to actually build coalitions with. It also, and this is the belonging point, functions as a really effective social sorting mechanism that keeps your tribe small and ideologically homogenous, which feels safe but is not how you win anything in a democracy or build anything lasting in the world.
Conservative political culture online (and I say this as someone who holds a number of values that would read as conservative) has developed its own version of this, and I am not letting it off the hook. The victimhood industrial complex. The way “common sense” has become a content-free slogan that means “whatever my tribe agrees with without having to examine it.” The contempt for expertise. The grievance as identity, where what unites the group is not a positive vision but a shared enemy: elites, the media, immigrants, the woke, pick your flavour. The way some communities that claim to value tradition and community have become so focused on online political warfare that they have stopped actually doing the work of building the traditions and communities they claim to care about.
Also not politics. Also tribe. Also social sorting. Also keeps you small.
Both of these are what happens when belonging is running on political fumes instead of actual community. Both of them are telling you that you are righteous and surrounded by enemies. Both of them are harvesting your loneliness and your need to matter and converting it into content and clicks and, in some cases, donations.
Use your brain. You deserve better than that.
The Loneliness Variable
I want to name this explicitly because I think it is the core mechanism and it does not get enough airtime.
Canada, like most of the western world, is experiencing a loneliness epidemic that is measurable and serious. Statistics Canada data from the Canadian Social Survey has documented elevated rates of loneliness among Canadians, particularly in younger age groups and among people living alone in urban centres. Former US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy published a major advisory in 2023 describing loneliness as a public health crisis with mortality effects comparable to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. Canada has no equivalent official framework yet, though researchers and public health officials here have been raising the alarm using comparable data.
Loneliness is not just feeling sad. Loneliness, at the neurological level, activates threat-detection systems. It makes you hypervigilant for social threat. It makes you more likely to interpret ambiguous cues as hostile. It makes belonging feel urgent, like a survival need, because evolutionarily, it was.
Now introduce a lonely person to an online political community that says: we see you, you matter, these people are your enemies, together we are righteous.
That community is not solving the loneliness. It is medicating it. And like a lot of medication taken without proper understanding, it has side effects. Side effects include: inability to have relationships with people outside your political tribe, escalating need for the emotional hit of outrage, decreasing ability to tolerate ambiguity or complexity, and a growing sense that the world is divided into good people (your tribe) and bad people (everyone else).
This is the substitute religion, is what I am saying. And I say that as someone for whom faith is real and present and not up for debate. I am not using “religion” as a slur. I am using it as a precise description of a function: political identity is providing the belonging, the moral framework, the in-group, the enemy narrative, and the sense of transcendent purpose that religious community historically provided.
And it is doing it worse. Because religion, at its best, calls you to love your enemy. Political tribalism calls you to destroy them. That is a meaningful difference.
So What Do We Do With This
I am genuinely not going to pretend I have the full answer because I do not and anyone who says they do is selling something.
But I have some thoughts.
The first is that we need to actually rebuild belonging infrastructure. Not just talk about it. Actual physical community. Churches if that’s your thing, and secular equivalents if it’s not: community leagues, mutual aid networks, local sports, whatever gets you in a room with real humans you did not pre-screen for ideological compatibility. This is not naive. It is the boring, slow, necessary work of being a civilization.
The second is that we need to get honest about what our online political consumption is actually doing for us and to us. Is it making you more civically effective or is it making you angrier and more isolated? Those are different outcomes. One of them is worth your time. I will let you figure out which one you’ve been experiencing.
The third is that we have to hold politics accountable to being a tool, not an identity. You can vote consistently, care deeply, and advocate loudly without letting it eat your personality and your relationships. Political engagement is not the same as political identity consumption. One of those actually changes things.
And the fourth, and this is me speaking from where I actually live: the human need for belonging, meaning, and transcendence is not going away. It is one of the most documented features of human psychology. The question is what you aim it at. Point it at a political tribe and you will get tribal dynamics, because that is what tribes produce. Point it at something that asks more of you (a faith community, a craft, a cause that requires actual sacrifice, relationships that require actual presence) and you get something that feeds you instead of just stimulating you.
I know what it is to need to belong somewhere. I know what it is to feel like the world was not built for you and to desperately want a community that gets it. I have felt that more times than I can count, with more urgency than most people understand. I am not being glib about the hunger. The hunger is real.
But political Twitter is not bread. It is the smell of bread piped through a speaker. And you can stand there sniffing it forever and never stop being hungry.
One Last Thing
If you read this and your primary response is that I was harder on your side than the other side, I want to gently suggest that response is itself worth examining. Because that reaction, that vigilance for whether your tribe was defended or attacked, is exactly the thing I have been writing about for three thousand words.
I am not your enemy for saying it. I am just someone who thinks you are worth more than what your political content feed tells you you are.
Belonging matters. Community matters. The hunger for meaning matters. You matter.
Now go talk to an actual human, in actual physical space, about something other than politics. Even for an hour. Regardless of side, affinity and or where they stand and just do something strange…
JUST TALK! Like civilized human beings trying to co-exist and help each other without battle lines of ideological beliefs.
I promise it will not kill you.
It might even help.
Peace out. Ya’ll!
