Public opinion in the United States increasingly seems to fall into a familiar pattern. Not a rule, not a law, and not a permanent split, but a recurring tendency. Roughly half the population appears to think that what is happening is not acceptable. Roughly a third seems broadly comfortable with it. The rest are harder to place: disengaged, cautious, unsure, worn down, or simply overwhelmed. These proportions change from issue to issue, but the shape itself shows up often enough to be worth noticing. Under sustained informational pressure, opinion does not spread evenly. It gathers into clusters, reaches limits, and then stops moving.
From this angle, disinformation and technocratically driven overreach act less like tools of persuasion and more like sorting mechanisms. They do not convince endlessly. They bring a segment of the population into alignment by offering certainty, identity, and simpler explanations. That alignment appears to hit a ceiling. Beyond that point, further pressure stops converting and starts stabilising. Support hardens where alignment already exists, opposition clarifies among those for whom the narrative no longer fits experience, and a remaining group drifts into quiet uncertainty or disengagement. The point of observing this pattern is not to forecast outcomes, but to understand dynamics. What is commonly labelled polarisation may simply be a system reaching the limit of how far shared meaning can be stretched before opinion stops moving together and begins to separate.
A useful way to think about this comes from work on chimera states, developed in the study of coupled oscillators and explored by Steven Strogatz and collaborators. A chimera state describes a system in which synchronisation and desynchronisation coexist: one part of the system locks into a shared rhythm, while another part remains incoherent or out of phase. What makes chimera states important is that they arise without central control and can persist stably once formed. Applied to the current communicative environment in the United States, this offers a way to understand how strong alignment, active resistance, and diffuse disengagement can exist simultaneously within the same political and media field. The system is not simply divided. It is partially synchronised and partially fragmented at once, producing a lived experience that feels intensely unified in some regions and profoundly disconnected in others.
References
Abrams, D.M. and Strogatz, S.H. (2004). Chimera states for coupled oscillators. Physical Review Letters, 93(17), 174102.
Kuramoto, Y. (1984). Chemical Oscillations, Waves, and Turbulence. Berlin: Springer.
Kuramoto, Y. and Battogtokh, D. (2002). Coexistence of coherence and incoherence in nonlocally coupled phase oscillators. Nonlinear Phenomena in Complex Systems, 5(4), 380–385.
Daedelus Kite 