Uriel González-Bravo

An Unexpected Confession

It was 6:22 p.m. on February 18, 2025, when James H. sent me a message with a certain air of unease—one of those revelations that are never spoken aloud but find their best hiding place in the brief text of a phone screen: “I think I’m a Trumper.”  Two days earlier, James was set to attend the funeral of a family friend in Arkansas, where he hoped to run into a Republican senator. He told me he was excited—it would be an excellent opportunity to connect with him if he happened to see him. Almost instinctively, I asked about the senator’s political affiliation, and James, slightly annoyed, replied: “Why are you asking that? I think that is not important.” I said nothing. I kept silent and nodded, as one does when filing away an uncomfortable detail for later. I’ve always found this so-called political neutrality frustrating—that belief in being “above” ideology when, in reality, it’s just fear of being seen for what one truly believes. But that afternoon, I stayed quiet, too. I was dating James, and the relationship felt so fragile that any argument seemed like a risk.

In that February 18th message, I asked him what he meant by being a “Trumper,” and he replied that when talking with his mother about social and economic issues, he sometimes found himself thinking: “Wow, they have some valid points!” It wasn’t the first time he had expressed views like that. During the 2024 campaigns, I asked for his thoughts on the candidates and the elections. He said: “You know, people don’t like Trump for a lot of what they say, but I think people are too emotional. I think the American economy would benefit from him.” I asked about a friend of his whose immigration status was in limbo—neither documented nor fully undocumented—and he responded: “You know, it might not be great for Bob socially, but his business is going to grow. He’ll see.”

Understanding a Country: A Society

For a long time, I tried to understand James. I read some of the business self-help books he recommended, and time and again, I found the same formulas: rules for efficiency, habits for success, and personal life framed in corporate metaphors. There was a belief system there that went beyond the books. At some point, I came across Morris Berman’s The Twilight of American Culture and began to understand that belief system a bit more. Berman describes American society as one where critical thinking has been replaced by quick-success formulas, consumerism becomes an ideology, and anti-intellectualism masquerades as common sense.

Understanding a society is no easy task and can be approached from different angles. Some believe it’s enough just to live there. For me, living in a country is only part of the picture. There are other ways of understanding it: through art—its literature, its cinema, its television (even if Hollywood often projects a hypertrophied vision of American power); through academic, sociological, and psychological studies like Berman’s; and, perhaps most urgently, through journalism—through chronicles, news coverage, and reporting. Because history is also being written at the margins of daily life—in chats, awkward silences, and inherited phrases.

The contradiction I found in James was fascinating. It was the same contradiction I saw in American society, like a spectator watching from the eye of the hurricane. James, with his mix of liberal and conservative ideas, embodied the complexity that Cristina Olea describes in La gran fractura americana.

In him coexist many aspects of American progressivism but also much of conservative ideology. He is, in the end, a reflection of the polarization Olea documents: a country where the “average citizen” may defend individual liberty while supporting restrictive immigration policies, where the Constitution is invoked to protect entrepreneurship but also to deny universal access to healthcare.

But James is not an exception. Episodes like that are just a glimpse of a much deeper fracture that runs through the social fabric of the United States: a tense coexistence between seemingly opposing values that nonetheless live side by side in everyday discourse. It was precisely that latent contradiction—between freedom and control, progress and nostalgia, individual success and structural inequality—that I saw clearly portrayed in Cristina Olea’s La gran fractura americana.

That was when journalism became indispensable. I needed to understand this fracture not just through personal experiences or sociological intuition but through a broader, more documented lens. La gran fractura americana arrived at that moment as a lucid guide to understanding the emotional, ideological, and political landscape of a country in constant tension with itself.

The Great American Fracture

La gran fractura americana is a work of journalistic reportage that dissects the state of polarization in the United States with surgical precision. Cristina Olea, TVE’s correspondent in Washington, builds this narrative through a series of human stories, historical context, social data, and key political moments. Across its fourteen chapters, readers meet citizens as diverse as the country itself: war veterans and activists, evangelical pastors and environmental defenders, disillusioned youth, and nostalgics of the American Dream. One of the central threads is the persistent tension between two opposing ideas of nationhood. For Republican voters, the United States represents freedom—of speech, of religion, of bearing arms; for many Democrats, it means diversity, equity, and an unfinished project of social justice.

As the book progresses, one notices that the country isn’t just divided: it seems to live in two parallel narratives that cross without touching as if they share a territory but not a language. The book explores some of the most profound fissures in American society: the tension between liberty and equity, the still-present legacy of slavery, gun violence turned routine, the opioid crisis as a symptom of a collapsed healthcare system, and a Supreme Court that, in its ultraconservative turn, has dismantled rights once thought immovable. Through personal stories, damning statistics, and sharp analysis, Olea shows how the United States is home to both a longing for lost greatness and a fear of the other—the migrant, the progressive, the poor—in a cultural war where the weapons are literal and the rhetoric incendiary.

Of course, Trump appears as a central figure: indicted, idolized, feared, caricatured, and yet still able to channel the discontent of millions. Opposite him is an aging Biden who promised reconciliation but now governs a citizenry so polarized that it no longer believes the country can survive if the other side wins. At his side, Kamala Harris, who rose as a symbol of diversity and renewal—the first woman, the first Black and South Asian person to serve as Vice President—but whose role has often been overshadowed, either by political machinery or by a media narrative that has yet to grant her an autonomous voice. Olea captures that ambiguity too: the hope Harris embodies and, at the same time, the symbolic weight she carries without always translating it into visible presence. La gran fractura americana offers no easy comfort, but it does provide an unflinching X-ray of a country that, while seeking redemption, continues to bleed from within.

And How Does That Make You Feel?

“And how do you feel about that?” I asked James after his confession. “Conflicted. But also like I’m a reasonable person. But that I can’t talk to anyone logically about my feelings because it’s so emotionally charged.” Weeks later, he stopped talking to me. Not because of our political differences but because of his silent withdrawal: a voluntary exile, born of an unwillingness to engage in emotional labor, that quietly ended the relationship. Logical, I suppose.

Still, his words lingered. That supposed impossibility of speaking “logically” about politics without everything becoming emotional is perhaps one of the clearest symptoms of the fracture Olea describes: a country where disagreement has become unbearable, trenches have replaced dialogue, and even nuance is perceived as a threat. In that landscape, it’s not just ideas being disputed; it’s also a matter of who gets to feel part of the conversation.