The cooler face of division: which lines it runs along, and what people believe across them. Three findings from different corners of my work keep agreeing that identity does more of the organizing than substance does. Among foreign-policy elites, national identity outweighs professional expertise in deciding who talks to whom. In Congress, the parties differ less over whether technology is good than over which technologies deserve their attention. And inside language models, economic and social ideology occupy separate internal structure — the single left–right score is our simplification, not the model’s. Related: segregation · affect.