Copyright HuffPost
Most people are always going to get a little nervous when a cop locks eyes with them and starts walking over. Even if you’re just sitting in a coffee shop, minding your own business, breaking no laws ... wearing a “Veterans Against Trump” T-shirt. My brain sized him up before he even reached my table. Police officer. White. Middle-aged. Beard. Military tattoos. I made a snap judgment: Trump supporter looking to pick a fight. He stopped, smiled, and said, “Hey brother, I like your shirt. Thanks for your service.” “Thanks,” I replied. “And thanks for your service as well.” We fist-bumped, and he went on his way. That was the third police officer to compliment my shirt in the past few months, and still I was surprised. Which, of course, is its own kind of tell. Advertisement The human brain is a classification machine (it has to be to survive), but it can also be incredibly lazy. Psychologists call it heuristics: those quick, energy-saving shortcuts that let you spot patterns and threats without thinking too hard about them. They’re efficient in the wild, when a rustle in the grass might mean danger, but in a coffee shop, they mostly just expose how fast we build bullshit stories about people we’ve never met. Of course, I mostly fit the same description as that officer: I’m middle-aged, white, veteran, bearded, tattooed. I could’ve been the guy someone else quietly assumed was itching for a fight about the flag. In fact, I know I have been. Stereotypes don’t disappear just because you happen to fit the category they’ve placed you in. They keep multiplying until everyone’s sorted, and no one’s understood. Advertisement I don’t hold a Ph.D. in psychology (or anything else), but from the books and essays I’ve read on human behavior, it seems clear that our brains are built more for pattern recognition than precision. There’s a term for one of the ways that shows up: the out-group homogeneity effect. It’s the tendency to think “they” are all the same while “we” are individuals. Social psychologists have been watching it unfold in labs for decades through what’s known as the minimal group paradigm — experiments showing that people will favor their own group almost immediately, even when the division between groups is arbitrary. Give those groups visible markers, like different-colored jerseys, and within minutes they’ll start reading motives, intelligence and morality into the teams. It’s ancient tribal wiring dressed up in modern clothes, and it governs more of our public life than most of us want to admit. Would-be autocrats and strongmen like Trump know this. They depend on it. Authoritarian politics thrives on division because clarity — even false clarity — feels safer than complexity. “Us and them.” “Patriots and traitors.” “Law and chaos.” It doesn’t even matter which words they choose, only that the line stays bright and absolute. Once we accept the framing, we stop seeing individuals and start seeing teams. From there, almost anything becomes possible. Advertisement Donald Trump’s entire political career has been built on that simplicity. One of his earliest campaign speeches set the tone: “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” He sprinkled in a few “good people” for plausible deniability, but the damage was done. Every category since has followed the same pattern: journalists are “the enemy of the people,” judges who rule against him are “corrupt,” generals who disagree are “traitors,” and immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” — a phrase so steeped in fascist history it barely needs translation. It’s a worldview allergic to nuance, because nuance complicates control. This type of rhetoric doesn’t stay confined to rallies or cable news hits. It filters quietly into the national psyche. The more we absorb it, the more we start doing the demagogue’s work for him. Our brains begin scanning for the categories before we even realize it: who’s safe, who’s suspect, who’s “one of us.” Once that happens, truth becomes secondary to pattern recognition. And patterns, as every good propagandist knows, can be manufactured. The science behind this is uncomfortably literal. The amygdala — the brain’s threat detector — fires almost instantly. The prefrontal cortex, which is the part responsible for reason and restraint, lags behind by a fraction of a second. That tiny gap is where fear and politics meet. If you can keep people stuck in that first, reactive moment, you can get them to believe almost anything. Tell them the same story often enough, and they’ll stop checking whether it’s true. Advertisement So what do we do with this knowledge? For one, we can practice catching the story before it hardens. We can notice when the brain starts filling in the blanks and slow it down — not because everyone is secretly on your side, but because reality is always more complicated than the labels we reach for. We have to remember that the person in front of us has a name, and that the category we just built in our heads doesn’t. That brief interaction with the police officer reminded me of this. My assumption about him was lazy, and it mirrored the same kind of lazy thinking I claim to oppose. He didn’t break my stereotype because he was trying to; he just existed in the full, unpredictable way people do. For a moment, that was enough to puncture the fiction that says everyone in uniform must fit into a single story. Advertisement Democracy isn’t held together by slogans or speeches so much as by a million small moments when people resist the urge to oversimplify one another. Authoritarians want clean lines. They draw power from sharp divisions, while free societies depend on our willingness to see through them. I’m not making more out of these interactions than they deserve. I know there are plenty of times when my snap judgment would have been accurate. And I’m not pretending that a few friendly encounters mean police forces aren’t riddled with problems, or that none of them support the creeping authoritarianism of the Trump regime. I might be an optimist at heart, but I’m not that naïve. TheBacklashis Here! Your SupportFuelsOur Mission Your SupportFuelsOur Mission Cut through the chaos Americans just sent Trump a clear message — and Dems are calling it "a 5-alarm fire" for the president. Our reporters are here to keep you informed and make sense of Washington's chaos. Join HuffPost and be part of what happens next. We remain committed to providing you with the unflinching, fact-based journalism everyone deserves. Thank you again for your support along the way. We’re truly grateful for readers like you! Your initial support helped get us here and bolstered our newsroom, which kept us strong during uncertain times. Now as we continue, we need your help more than ever. We hope you will join us once again. We remain committed to providing you with the unflinching, fact-based journalism everyone deserves. Thank you again for your support along the way. We’re truly grateful for readers like you! Your initial support helped get us here and bolstered our newsroom, which kept us strong during uncertain times. Now as we continue, we need your help more than ever. We hope you will join us once again. Support HuffPost Already a member? Log in to hide these messages. Still, moments like these matter. They remind me that the same reflex that misjudges one person can scale into a culture that misjudges millions. The habit of seeing people as individuals isn’t some abstract virtue — it’s the daily maintenance work of a functioning democracy. Strongmen survive on stereotypes and neat categories. The rest of us have to keep looking past them. Advertisement Nick Allison is a former U.S. Army infantryman, college dropout, and writer based in Austin, Texas. A center-left political independent with a distrust of all ideologies (including his own), he spends too much time reading about history, democracy, and authoritarianism — and not nearly enough time being optimistic about any of it. His essays and poems have appeared in The Chaos Section, HuffPost Personal, CounterPunch, The Shore, Eunoia Review, Dissident Voice, New Verse News, and elsewhere. He recently curated and edited the anthology “Record of Dissent: Poems of Protest in an Authoritarian Age (TCS Press, 2025).” Also, he secretly enjoys writing his own bio in the third person, probably because it makes him feel a little more important than he actually is. Follow him on Bluesky @nickallison80.bsky.social. Do you have a compelling personal story you’d like to see published on HuffPost? Find out what we’re looking for here and send us a pitch at pitch@huffpost.com.
