José Antonio Kast won the Chilean presidency in one of the most polarized presidential contests since the country’s return to democracy. File Photo by Elvis Gonzalez/EPA
Late last year, Chileans went to the polls in one of the most polarized presidential contests since the country’s return to democracy. José Antonio Kast, a conservative, defeated Jeannette Jara, a Communist Party candidate, by a wide margin: 58 percent to 42 percent. The gap between them was not merely political. It felt moral, even civilizational.
Chile is hardly alone. Across Latin America and the democratic world, citizens increasingly inhabit different moral universes. They do not simply disagree about policy. They distrust one another’s motives and interpret the same events through incompatible narratives.
The moral roots of political division
The American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt offers a useful framework. In The Righteous Mind, Haidt argues that political ideology is not a purely rational choice. It is also rooted in moral intuition and emotional disposition. We reason, but often only after our emotions have already chosen a side.
Haidt identifies several moral foundations that help explain why the left and the right see the world differently. The left tends to emphasize care, liberty and fairness. Its moral sensitivity is alert to suffering and oppression. It sees politics as the task of protecting the vulnerable and challenging structures of domination.
The right also values care, liberty and fairness, but often interprets fairness as proportionality: people should receive according to effort and merit. It places greater weight on loyalty, authority and sanctity. These foundations explain the conservative attachment to tradition and institutional continuity.
The left often functions as society’s alarm system. It hears the cry of those excluded by established structures and pushes for reform when institutions become rigid or indifferent. Yet it can undervalue social capital, weakening communities and traditions that hold society together.
The right often functions as society’s anchor. It reminds us that order is fragile and that civilization cannot survive on permanent disruption. Yet it can become blind to victims, its attachment to stability preventing it from seeing how existing systems perpetuate exclusion.
Healthy democratic life needs both impulses: the moral urgency to correct injustice and the prudence to preserve what allows community to endure. The tragedy of our time is that these impulses increasingly refuse to speak to each other.
Haidt also shows that political groups are moved by stories. The left often tells a story of liberation, in which history moves from oppression toward emancipation. The right often tells a story of order, in which civilization is difficult to build and easy to lose, and tradition serves as protection against chaos and tyranny.
Both stories contain truths. Both become dangerous when they harden into dogma. The left can come to see every tradition as oppression; the right can come to see every reform as collapse. When that happens, politics stops being a search for the common good and becomes a contest of moral annihilation.
When algorithms intensify polarization
The digital world has intensified this conflict. A landmark study published in Science in November 2025 offers the clearest causal evidence yet. Researchers at Stanford, the University of Washington and Northeastern University built a browser extension that reranked users’ feeds on X in real time, using an artificial intelligence model to adjust exposure to content expressing partisan hostility. The results were stark: reducing that exposure measurably decreased political animosity, and increasing it made things worse. The algorithms, the study confirmed, do not merely reflect division. They drive it.
That matters because the older left-right divide developed in an analog world. Political disagreement had a slower rhythm: imperfect, but with room for second thought. The digital world has collapsed that rhythm. Outrage travels faster than nuance. Platforms reward speed and emotional reaction, not patient reflection.
Haidt’s metaphor of the elephant and the rider helps explain what is at stake. The elephant represents intuition and emotion; the rider represents reason. The elephant moves first and the rider usually explains the movement afterward. In the analog world, the rider had some time to respond. In the digital world, the elephant is constantly provoked, leaving reason struggling to justify what emotion has already accepted.
This is especially troubling in Latin America, where democratic institutions are often young and under pressure. Chile’s election was shaped by real anxieties about crime and economic insecurity, yet those anxieties were also filtered through algorithmic systems that amplify fear over analysis. Political identity becomes less a matter of citizenship and more a form of tribal belonging.
What followed Chile’s election offered a brief counter-image. Kast pledged to be “the president of all Chileans.” Jara conceded with dignity, saying that “democracy spoke loud and clear.” For a moment, two people from opposite moral universes spoke the language of shared citizenship. The moment was fragile. The algorithms continue to run.
Humanizing disagreement again
This is why the future of democracy cannot depend only on better laws or better fact-checking. Societies need ethical limits on how platforms are designed. The Science study suggests such limits are both possible and consequential. Yet the harder task is cultural: a renewed practice of restraint and genuine human encounter.
The Chilean biologist Humberto Maturana spoke of love in social life as the acceptance of the other as a legitimate other. That insight is more urgent than ever. Democracy cannot survive when each side treats the other as an enemy to be erased.
In the age of algorithms, the great task is not to abolish disagreement. It is to humanize it again.
Carlos Cantero is a Chilean academic at the International University of La Rioja in Spain and the author of “Digital Society: Reason and Emotion.” An international lecturer, adviser, and consultant, he focuses on adaptability in digital society, ethics, social innovation, and human development. The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.
