E Pluribus Unum

I've been to the U.S. Capitol a handful of times. On one visit I recall getting corralled into a large theater to watch a 13-minute film called "E Pluribus Unum".

Out of many, one.

The film traces how that motto became our national promise: that Americans from wildly different backgrounds, with competing interests and incompatible beliefs, could somehow forge a single democratic system. The idea advocates consensus, compromise, and unity under one flag. Those ideas, however, are predicated on something more modest: we live in a shared reality.

We should be able to fight viciously over what to do about the facts, as long as we agree on what the facts are.

This past week, like so many of you, I’ve been watching various news outlets cover the government shutdown. While it’s the same 1.6 million federal workers furloughed, same Congressional Budget Office reports, and same Senate votes, depending on where you’re getting your news, you’ll see wildly different stories about what is happening and why.

MSNBC: "Trump is using the shutdown to govern like a king."

Fox News: "DEMOCRAT SHUTDOWN: Dems Block Funding Over Illegals’ Healthcare."

I’ve spent hours toggling between websites, trying to understand where the realities diverged. Both MSNBC and Fox cite the same CBO report to support contradicting conclusions; same data, opposite meanings.

That Capitol film feels like an historical artifact now. The premise of E pluribus unum has been eviscerated by the same technology that promised to connect us.

Algorithmic personalization (the invisible architecture determining what news we see, which stories get amplified, whose version of events reaches our screens) has atomized American reality into millions of private experiences optimized for engagement rather than truth.

We don't disagree about solutions anymore. We inhabit incompatible understandings of the world around us.

Here's what both sides agree on:

The government shut down at 12:01 a.m. October 1st when the Senate failed 55-45 to pass a continuing resolution, short of the 60-vote threshold. Roughly 900,000 federal workers were furloughed, 700,000 work without pay.

Enhanced ACA subsidies expire December 31st, affecting 24 million Americans who buy marketplace insurance. Without an extension, the CBO projects 4 million lose coverage entirely while others face average premium increases of 114%.

Beyond that, consensus collapses. Who caused this, what it's about, whose demands are reasonable, all of it splits into incompatible narratives constructed from identical facts.

On Fox News, the story is unified and clear:

The House passed a clean, 24-page continuing resolution. Speaker Mike Johnson calls it "simple, conventional, bipartisan". Identical to versions Democrats "voted for 13 times during the Biden administration."

Democrats blocked it in the Senate over healthcare demands: extending enhanced ACA subsidies and reversing cuts to immigrant coverage. The Wall Street Journal editorial board calls these "turbocharged ObamaCare subsidies" from "a COVID emergency that ended long ago," warning they'd cost "$450 billion over a decade" while noting Democrats deliberately set the 2025 expiration "to make the Inflation Reduction Act look less expensive over a 10-year budget window."

Vice President JD Vance frames it as an immigration issue: "Democrats want to reinstate Biden-era federal funding for emergency healthcare for illegal immigrants."

The White House website along with dozens of other federal agency sites state Democrats demand "welfare payments for illegal aliens."

Johnson revealed the strategy on Fox Business: "While a shutdown is damaging, it can provide an opportunity to downsize the scope and scale of government, which we've always wanted to do."

Republicans defend fiscal responsibility. Democrats exploit federal workers to fund permanent government expansion and benefits for immigrants.

On MSNBC, you’ll find an entirely different story:

Republicans are stripping healthcare from 24 million middle-class families. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries: "They wanted to shut down government because they were unwilling to provide healthcare to working-class Americans."

The immigration framing is false. Federal law prohibits undocumented immigrants from receiving ACA subsidies or non-emergency Medicaid. Democrats fight to restore coverage for refugees, asylees, and lawful permanent residents whose coverage was cut in July's "One Big Beautiful Bill Act."

Georgetown researchers assert Republican immigration claims have "no discernible factual basis."

Trump is implementing Project 2025. He posted on Truth Social about meeting "my budget chief, Russ Vought, he of PROJECT 2025 Fame, to determine which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut." Vought, who co-authored Project 2025, now decides which services continue and has directed agencies to prepare permanent layoff plans.

Senator Patty Murray emphasizes urgency as insurance companies send 2026 premium notices this week: "Later is too late. The new higher health care rates are being set right now. Notifications to families… they're in the mail now."

MSNBC: "Making massive cuts, firing employees en masse, maximizing political pain, that has always been the plan, written down in Project 2025."

Republicans manufactured this crisis to advance an authoritarian agenda, disguised as fiscal discipline rhetoric.

Both sides cite real events. The House did pass a CR. Democrats did block it. Subsidies expire December 31st. Extension costs roughly $350 billion over ten years. Trump embraced Vought and Project 2025. Insurance companies are setting 2026 rates now.

The divergence happens in interpretation, emphasis, and what gets shown at all.

Consider the immigration dispute. Review the actual legislative text and CBO analysis and it’s clear the Republicans are factually wrong. ACA subsidies legally cannot go to undocumented immigrants, federal law prohibits it. The dispute involves refugees, asylees, and permanent residents. FactCheck.org and some conservative analysts call the Republican framing "misleading."

But Fox viewers never encounter that correction. The distinction doesn't penetrate their ecosystem.

This pattern repeats everywhere. Federal agencies sent employees emails stating "President Trump opposes a government shutdown... Unfortunately, Democrats are blocking this Continuing Resolution." Fox never mentioned controversy around the emails. MSNBC called them potential Hatch Act violations. Same emails, opposite realities about whether they're appropriate or scandalous.

Washington Post polling found 47% blame Trump and Republicans, 30% blame Democrats. Fox provided minimal coverage, with Trump even criticizing them for being insufficiently loyal. MSNBC featured the polls prominently as validation that Americans see through Republican spin.

Same numbers. Fox viewers remain unaware Republicans bear more public blame. MSNBC viewers see the polling as confirming what's obvious.

Each feed constructs a complete moral universe and both feel sufficiently coherent if you accept their premises.

Virginia Tech computer scientist Eugenia Rho analyzed 300 billion words from CNN and Fox broadcasts between 2010-2020. On the topic of racism, CNN mentions "protests" while Fox mentions "crime". Identical events generating entirely different vocabularies and conceptual frameworks.

Rho’s conclusion: "When major broadcast networks diverge completely, portraying almost different realities, you have irreconcilable division."

Three structural forces enable this breakdown:

Media business models prioritize engagement over accuracy. Traditional media depends on subscriber fees from passionate partisan audiences rather than advertising revenue from broad viewership. Networks are audience-captured: Fox risks viewer exodus if it significantly criticizes Trump; MSNBC faces progressive pressure to intensify attacks. Social media algorithms amplify whatever triggers emotion. Outrage is a renewable energy and consensus just doesn't scale.

Trust collapsed asymmetrically. In 1973, 74% of Democrats and 68% of Republicans trusted media. By 2023: 58% of Democrats trust media while only 11% of Republicans do. That 47-point chasm means one party largely exited mainstream information sources, creating market demand for alternative narratives where fact-checking from traditional outlets becomes evidence of bias rather than correction.

Geographic sorting reinforces information bubbles. Democrats cluster in urban areas, Republicans in rural and suburban zones. Natural exposure to opposing viewpoints through daily life has declined precisely as media fragmentation allows complete self-selection of information sources. A rural Republican can go weeks without encountering a Democrat in person or consuming center-left content. An urban progressive can avoid conservative perspectives entirely.

Research finds Americans hold systematically erroneous beliefs about the other party, and these misperceptions are strongest among the most “politically informed”. More engagement reinforces false beliefs because engagement happens within partisan information streams. The democratic ideal where informed citizens make better decisions has been inverted.

While cable news constructs competing narratives, actual people navigate actual consequences.

A 27-year-old making $35,000 will see ACA premiums jump from $1,033 to $2,615 annually if subsidies expire. Insurance companies sent those notices this week.

Air traffic controller sick calls increased from their normal 3% baseline, causing flight delays at Newark, Denver, and Burbank. Burbank's control tower closed entirely yesterday (October 7) due to staffing shortages.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics shut down, delaying the September jobs report at precisely the moment the Federal Reserve is making interest rate decisions. Small businesses face $2 billion in delayed SBA loans. The WIC program serving 6.9 million women, infants, and children nearly ran out of money before the White House announced temporary funding through tariff revenue.

These events are happening regardless of which channel you watch.

But political response depends entirely on the reality you inhabit. Believing Democrats caused this by demanding healthcare for illegal immigrants generates fury at Democrats. Believing Republicans manufactured crisis to implement Project 2025 generates fury at Republicans.

The technology enabling this fracture is personalization: the algorithmic sorting of information based on predicted engagement rather than shared importance. What started as convenience (my playlists got better, my Instagram ads are more relevant) metastasized into worldview. The algorithm replaced the editor. Information stopped flowing through civic importance and began following emotional physics.

Every click, every share, every scroll trains these systems to deliver more of whatever keeps us engaged and enraged. Platforms discovered that anger is renewable energy while consensus is finite. We became raw material in an economy powered by division.

The public sphere didn't fragment by accident. It was optimized for fragmentation because fragmentation is profitable.

E pluribus unum presumed Americans could disagree passionately while occupying the same reality, but that presumption is gone. The motto describing our democratic promise has been rewritten: E pluribus ME. Out of many, an unknowable multitude of private realities.

The government shutdown will end when Congress reaches a deal. Someone will blink, compromise language will emerge, operations will resume.

The epistemic shutdown, where Americans inhabit incompatible realities, won't resolve through political negotiation.

Right now, 1.6 million federal workers aren't getting paid because two parties can't agree whether they're negotiating about healthcare affordability or illegal immigration. Both descriptions cite identical legislative text. Both are internally coherent, and both woefully misunderstand the other.

Democracy can handle passionate disputes about values and priorities. It was designed for exactly that kind of conflict. But democracy cannot function when citizens can't agree on what they're disagreeing about. Compromise requires acknowledging legitimate concerns on the other side. When your information ecosystem tells you the other side is lying about their concerns, compromise becomes betrayal.

This is the trap: a truth shutdown where the pathways to shared understanding have been blocked by information architectures that profit from confusion.

While the policy dispute will hopefully resolve through bargaining, the epistemological crisis requires rebuilding information systems that prioritize shared reality over engagement. Provenance over personalization. Truth over tribal affirmation.

Media needs to show how information is assembled rather than just delivering conclusions. Platforms should reveal the algorithmic choices determining what we see. Citizens need to treat their information consumption as something requiring active curation rather than passive reception.

None of this will be easy. Reconstructing a shared reality rarely is. Plus, the financial incentives may never allow us to try.

But the alternative is permanent: a country where governance becomes theater, every crisis becomes ammunition, and political opponents become incomprehensible rather than just wrong.

That Capitol film about E pluribus unum ends with soaring music and the American flag. Thirteen minutes of optimism about democratic possibility. Walking out into the rotunda afterward, tourists take photos and feel momentarily united by something larger than themselves.

I wonder if they still show that film. I wonder if anyone believes it anymore.

Up and to the right.