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I’m a huge fan of Disney movies.
One of my favorites is “Inside Out,” which gives viewers an animated look at the five core emotions that make us tick: joy, anger, sadness, fear and disgust.
What we learn throughout the course of the movie is that all of those feelings work together to make us human, and things veer off-track when one feeling dominates or actively tries to invalidate the others.
We’re having an “Inside Out” moment as a country right now, but the emotion that’s dominating us isn’t the one you might imagine.
It would be easy to write a column about anger. After all, we just lived through a primary election battle royale where the president of the United States made it his goal to take out members of the Indiana Senate who didn’t follow his lead last year on mid-decade redistricting.
Buckets of money — $13 million in total — bought oodles of mailers and television spots that stoked enough outrage to oust almost every single one of the anti-redistricting incumbents, including a race where the president didn’t endorse.
Anger in politics isn’t the emotion that worries me most. It’s fear. And not the kind President Franklin D. Roosevelt spoke of nearly a century ago when Americans were suffering through the midst of the Great Depression.
No, this is a different kind of fear, the kind that subconsciously settles in and fundamentally changes the way we interact with our democracy and with each other.
Pew Research data from earlier this year show that 56% of Americans have stopped talking to someone about political or election news because of something they said. That’s an increase from 45% of respondents who said the same thing in 2024.
Worse, 58% of adults reported avoiding talking about political news because they’re concerned about making things uncomfortable. Other reasons include lack of knowledge of or interest in talking about the news.
As a nation, we’re retreating from each other, from our ability to have conversations where we disagree and walk away as friends. Instead, we are choosing silence and silos. We inherently distrust all institutions, including media, at record-high levels, and we self-select news sources that align with our political views.
And let’s be clear that the anger referenced above, when repeated time and again, contributes to the fear.
The senators who lost their elections earlier this month faced insults and death threats long before they faced intra-party revenge at the ballot box. Some simply chose not to run again, a decision that kept them out of harm’s way altogether and now seems prescient.
Can we get back to a time when we could politically parry and thrust and grab a beer afterward?
It feels impossible, but we have to, and I’ve got a crazy idea that marries our drift toward fearful isolation with our inherently human need to be connected to one another: use artificial intelligence to bridge the gap.
Pick your favorite AI and ask it to play your political opposite. Try out your best arguments and see what it has to say in return. Listen, respond, rinse, repeat. You can keep asking it questions, making it defend its positions while you defend yours. The best thing about AI is that it never gets mad or tired.
Who knows? Maybe if we can get to a safe place using large language models to comprehend and empathize with others’ views without recoiling in fear, we can actually move closer to peacefully disagreeing with each other as humans again.•
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Chartier is a lifelong Indianapolis resident and owner of Mass Ave Public Relations. Send comments to [email protected].
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