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The Polarization Project November 18, 2024

‘There Are Very Few Democracies That Are as Polarized as We Are Today’: A Conversation with Jennifer McCoy

By Greg Berman

Jennifer McCoy

How worried should we be about the state of democracy in the United States?

According to Jennifer McCoy, a professor of political science at Georgia State University and a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who has been studying democracy, both in the US and in other countries for more than three decades, there is ample reason for concern. 

McCoy believes that a form of “pernicious polarization” is crippling Washington, eroding the ability of our leaders to engage in the normal work of politics, including legislative compromise. Even more worrying, this polarization is seeping into the groundwater of our culture, pushing Americans into two increasingly hostile political camps. 

According to McCoy, “Pernicious polarization involves a perception of threat and a zero-sum mentality, which leads people to cut off communication with those on the other side. This kind of division complicates governance, reduces the capacity for compromise, and fosters deep social and political rifts.”

While the situation in the US is dire, it is not unprecedented. McCoy’s research draws on her international experience, which includes nearly two decades on the staff of The Carter Center, to look for possible solutions to America’s democratic backsliding.

McCoy recently spoke with Greg Berman, the distinguished fellow of practice at The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, about how the American political system encourages polarization, the way that elite political rhetoric influences the behavior of the general public, and whether both parties are equally to blame for our current predicament. 

The following transcript of their conversation, which took place before the US election on Nov. 5, has been edited for length and clarity. 

When people talk about polarization, they are often referring to different things. You use the term “pernicious polarization.” What does that mean to you?

It is taking a systemic, national-level view of polarization rather than looking at individual attitudes, as many studies of polarization do. 

Pernicious polarization is a process that divides an electorate into two mutually distrustful camps. It can be thought of as us-versus-them polarization. It occurs when politics is reduced to a single dividing line around some kind of identity.

Along with my co-author, Murat Somer, I developed this concept to refer to a process that divides an electorate into two mutually distrustful camps. It can be thought of as us-versus-them polarization. It occurs when politics is reduced to a single dividing line around some kind of identity. It happens when two camps have broken their cross-cutting ties so that they no longer communicate across this dividing line. 

How can we tell when we tip over from normal political polarization into something that feels malignant?

A system tips into pernicious polarization when rival camps begin to distrust each other to the point that they see each other as an existential threat to their way of life or to the nation. It is at this point that we see that both politicians and voters are willing to sacrifice elements of democracy because they feel so threatened by the other side that they’re willing to take extraordinary steps to keep the other side out of power.

What you’ve just described certainly maps the divide between hard-core Democrats and hard-core Republicans right now. But my sense is that there are a lot of people who don’t fit neatly into those categories, who are not engaged in the kind of toxic polarization that you are identifying. 

We certainly have to recognize that Americans are not divided on specific issues or ideologies to the point that we sometimes think they are. It’s political leaders that are most divided on issues and on ideological measures. We also have to recognize that there’s a large group of people, probably 40 percent of the population, who do not identify with either political party and don’t have a clear partisan identity. There’s also a large portion of Americans who simply want to withdraw from politics because they see it as nasty, and they just want all of the fighting to stop. In the United States, we have a political system with two parties. This binary choice really contributes to partisan polarization. 

What is the relationship, if any, between pernicious polarization and political violence?

First of all, like polarization, political violence has different definitions. If we take a broad definition, it’s violence that is either directed at political targets or is motivated by a political agenda. The link between polarization and political violence is not entirely clear, but there are aspects of polarization that do contribute to political violence. 

The rhetoric of pernicious polarization is dehumanizing. It’s about discrediting opponents and saying they’re traitors to the country, that they’re disloyal. Just the other day, the comedian who spoke at Donald Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden referred to Puerto Rico as a garbage dump. That’s essentially dehumanizing Puerto Ricans, saying they’re trash. We know from wartime training that soldiers are trained with dehumanizing techniques so that it makes it easier for them to kill. So dehumanizing political rhetoric contributes to the possibility of political violence. 

When politicians foment distrust in our institutions, whether it be the election system or the courts or the media, people start to believe that there's nobody to solve problems or to ensure security.

Another thing that potentially contributes to political violence is creating distrust in political institutions. When politicians foment distrust in our institutions, whether it be the election system or the courts or the media, people start to believe that there’s nobody to solve problems or to ensure security. Or sometimes they just don’t know who to believe. This sense of distrust also affects the way we think about each other. As we lose interpersonal trust, and pernicious polarization and stereotyping take hold, that may lead people to be more willing to tolerate political violence.

You have done some online experiments looking into the impact of different kinds of political rhetoric. Walk me through what you have found.

We know that political rhetoric that appeals to anger and resentment can trigger polarization. A politician who uses polarizing rhetoric intentionally will often exploit a grievance. Politicians can stoke that grievance and create resentment and anger by identifying and blaming an enemy, whether it’s immigrants, whether it’s a foreign power like China, or whether it’s an opposing political party. By blaming a group of people, they’re simplifying the problem. 

The problems that we face are complex and driven by a number of factors. A politician who tries to simplify them by blaming an enemy gives people a sense of control because now they have an answer. They want to know who to blame. And once they know who to blame, that also makes it more possible to entertain the idea of attacking that person. Even if politicians never say, “You should go out and shoot this particular enemy,” devoted followers may hear a politician’s message and take it upon themselves to go out and attack that enemy. We’ve seen that happen.

In one experiment, we exposed survey respondents to a political speech where somebody was blaming an enemy. We then measured their emotions afterward. We could see anger and resentment going up. And then we could measure their views of the other side and how much they adopted a populist attitude, which we defined as putting things in us-versus-them terms. And we could see that going up. 

So we wanted to see how to mitigate that. And, in particular, we wondered whether a different kind of political speech, using positive emotions, could bring people together. What we learned is that it’s very difficult for positive emotions to counter negative emotions. But the positive emotion speech was able to lessen the amount of resentment and anger that people felt. So it was helpful in that sense. 

Another experiment I did tried to prompt a sense of threat from the other side. Those people who felt the most sense of threat to their way of life or to the nation—and also those people who had the strongest attachment to their political party—were the ones most willing to support behaviors by their political leader to erode democracy or to violate democratic norms. So the role of emotion is important, and the perception of threat is important.

What’s your sense of how worried we should be right now about the state of polarization in the United States? Should we be at DEFCON 1? 

A lot of the polarization we see comes from the top down. And a lot of it has to do with the choice of rhetoric our leaders employ. I think the question we need to ask is whether there is any basis for the rhetoric that our politicians are using. Are they identifying some actual truth, some actual problem with the other side’s behavior? Or are they simply blaming groups, dehumanizing and discrediting without a basis? 

So if we take the example of Trump saying the Biden administration is weaponizing the justice system against him, you can look at that and you can say, well, in reality, there are a number of different courts, at different levels of government, that are investigating him for a number of different potential crimes. This is just the justice system at work. This is how it should be. 

If we changed our electoral system and went closer toward what most democracies around the world have, which is some form of proportional representation, I think it would break this binary divide that's locked us into polarization.

And you can look at January 6th and all of the attempts around the last election to file lawsuits and to claim fraud that were debunked and rejected by the courts. Yet Trump continues to deny that he lost that election. So is it unfair to call him an election denier and a threat to democracy because he refused to participate in the peaceful transfer of power? I would say, on an objective basis, that, yes, this constitutes a threat to democracy. 

You have to assess and evaluate each allegation to know whether they are politically motivated exaggerations or they are truly a threat to democracy or a violation of democratic norms.

I read your work as being very critical of Far-Right parties and Trump in particular. What blame, if any, attaches to the Left for our current polarization?

Political scientists have looked at the ideology of the two political parties in the United States. Measures of the speech and the platforms of the two political parties over time have found that the Republican Party has moved further to the right and has become anti-pluralist, meaning less willing to tolerate diversity of opinions and less willing to respect their political opponents. These measures place the Republican Party much closer to the Far-Right parties in other countries that have suffered democratic erosion. That’s what political scientists have found in looking at this. 

The Democratic Party has a choice. The opposition always has a choice. Are they going to reciprocate and use the same kind of rhetoric, or are they going to try to move in a more depolarizing way? And at times, yes, the Democrats have certainly responded in ways that have encouraged polarization. Take gerrymandering, for example. There were attempts to move toward independent redistricting commissions. And the Democratic Party in many places moved away from that. They decided they couldn’t disarm and have a unilateral arms race. And so they gerrymandered as well. So that’s a reciprocation.

When we say that the Republican Party and Trump, in particular, are more polarizing and have adopted more democracy-threatening moves than the Democrats, we often get this response: “Well, what about what the Democrats have done?” And, yes, they have done some things, but it is not symmetrical in objective measures. It is simply not symmetrical. 

It seems to me a difficult problem: How do you fight back against a polarizing enemy without fostering more polarization yourself? 

This gets to the question of whether polarization can ever be constructive.

My co-author Murat Somer and I came up with this term: “transformative repolarization.” What we suggest is that, under certain conditions of social injustice and democratic backsliding, it may be necessary to shift the axis of polarization.

For example, if the polarization has been focused on immigrants versus non-immigrants, you may need to shift the axis and create a new line of polarization around, say, democracy versus authoritarianism, or following the Constitution versus violating the Constitution. And in doing that, you do have to differentiate between the two groups. You do have to say that one person or one party is threatening to the Constitution. Ideally, this should be built around values and ideas. So rather than saying that all Trump supporters are fascists or all Trump supporters are racists, or any kind of insult like that, what you want to do is say, “We’re trying to build a broad coalition of all citizens who want to protect and strengthen democracy.” When you’re talking about ideas and not demonizing the people, that would be constructive polarization. Going back to the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King, that is what he tried to do. 

You’ve studied how other countries that have struggled with polarization have depolarized. What have you learned from that research?

When we went back and looked over the past century and a half, back to 1900, we saw that countries tended to depolarize after major systemic interruptions. Things like civil war or international war. Or they were in an authoritarian system and they transitioned to democracy. Or they were in an independent struggle during colonization. 

We don’t want to be in any of those situations in the United States. There are very few examples of democracies that are as polarized as we are today. Among the well-established, wealthy democracies that the United States considers its peers in Europe, Japan, Australia, et cetera, there are no examples. The United States is exceptional as being the most polarized. There are examples of democracies that are younger or less wealthy that are as polarized as we are. One thing they have in common with the United States is that they tend to be large, multiracial, and multicultural democracies. Brazil was getting to that point but is now beginning to come out of it. India, I would say, is to that point. There are other examples.

We’ve identified four fault lines of polarization that we’ve seen historically around the world. The first one is about identity and belonging. Questions about who is a rightful citizen, that’s one big fault line of polarization. Another fault line is about the type of democracy we’re going to have, and who is presenting a threat to our democracy. A third fault line is around inequality of income and life opportunity. And the fourth fault line is around the social contract: What obligations do we have, citizen-to-citizen and the state-to-the-citizen? What are our collective responsibilities to the society as a whole? 

In many countries, we’ve seen that they have experienced one, maybe two, of these fault lines. In the United States right now, we would say we’re experiencing all four, and that’s what makes our polarization problem extremely complex.

Are there examples of countries overcoming polarization that we can learn from?

There are definitely ways to overcome polarization. Brazil is a recent example. They had a leader, Jair Bolsonaro, who was polarizing around both ideology and cultural identity issues. He was ultimately defeated by a politician on the left who was able to build a very broad, pro-democratic coalition. He got the business community behind him, centrists, and intellectuals. And so Brazil is depolarizing somewhat. It doesn’t mean that Bolsonaro could never come back. The country is still divided, but the threat to democracy is lower today. 

So that’s one example of how to defeat pernicious polarization. It’s about building a broad coalition. And that is something that we’re seeing to some extent today in the United States with the “Never Trump” Republicans coming out and endorsing Kamala Harris. They are doing this not because they are in agreement with her policies, but on the basis of the threat that they see to democracy.

People don't want this polarization, but it's locked in because of our political system.

In terms of solutions, a critical part is for people who are in positions of responsibility or who are influencers in the public eye to denounce violence and anti-democratic behavior when they see it. When that doesn’t happen, when people simply go along because they’re afraid of losing their position of influence, that’s when we’re in real trouble. Leaders have to be courageous to denounce these things if we’re going to stop the potential for violence and the potential for threats to our democracy.

Another solution is changing the electoral system of representation. I think this is really critical for the United States. Our electoral system is like only a very few other democracies, which all happen to be former British colonies. We have single-member districts. Sometimes it’s called a first-pass-the-post system. We are electing just one person to Congress from a given district. The people who vote against that person, who might be 49 percent of the local population, may feel like they have no representation.

Many aspects of our democracy, including the two-party system and the way we’ve created primaries, the electoral college, and the power of the Senate, create the potential for disproportionate representation. And that means that one party can gain power disproportionate to the actual support they have in the population. 

In the United States, people don’t really have much of a choice, politically. They may not like their party’s candidate, but they’re so afraid of the other side in a polarized context that they keep voting for them. That’s not healthy. If we changed our electoral system and went closer to what most democracies around the world have, which is some form of proportional representation, I think it would break this binary divide that’s locked us into polarization. People don’t want this polarization, but it’s locked in because of our political system.

What role do you think civil society plays in all this? Do you buy the argument that part of the problem in the US right now is the erosion we’ve seen over time in the kinds of organizations that used to bring people together across lines of ideology?

Oh, definitely. I think the reduction of unions and churches and other organizations means that we don’t have the kind of spaces we need in order to have contact with, and come together with, other people no matter our political views. 

There’s been a number of grassroots efforts to bridge the divides in American life. I think that work is important. It’s important to create the civic skills so our citizens can talk with each other in a productive way. 

I’m a strong believer that we need citizens to have better civic knowledge and civic education, including news literacy and how to interpret information. We need to arm people so that they can recognize the warning signs of extreme polarization and so that they can resist the emotional appeals that politicians use. 

The problem that I see is that if we only do that at the citizen level, it’s not sufficient. We have to address the top political level too. Because voters respond to political messages. Top-down cues can undo all of the good work being done at the bottom. 

My last question may be an impossible one. You spent a long time working with Jimmy Carter. What would he be saying right now if he were running for president?

He would be appealing to our better angels. He is a man of tremendous faith who always looked for the kernel of good in every human being, even the worst dictators around the world. I think he would appeal to that aspect of good in all American citizens. I think he would say that we need to get back to the normal negotiating and bargaining of our politics. But he would also say that just restoring the status quo isn’t good enough. We need to continue to improve it. 

I think Jimmy Carter would say that democracy is like marriage: You have to work at it continually to make it better.

I think he would say that democracy is a continuous task, like marriage. He and Rosalynn worked on it, and they had a marriage that lasted a long time. I think he would say that democracy is like marriage: you have to work at it continually to make it better for every human being. 

This is part of a series of interviews by Greg Berman, Distinguished Fellow of Practice at The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, entitled “The Polarization Project.” 

Berman is co-editor of Vital City, an urban policy journal, and co-author of Gradual: The Case for Incremental Change in a Radical Age. In 2022, Berman led At the Crossroads, a series of interviews for HFG.org assessing the causes and solutions of rising crime in NYC after the pandemic.

This interview also appears in The Fulcrum through a copublishing agreement.

Previous interviews from The Polarization Project:
The Polarization Project November 12, 2024

‘Political Polarization Has Become Almost a Form of Entertainment’: A Conversation with Clionadh Raleigh

By Greg Berman

Clionadh Raleigh
Clionadh Raleigh

Clionadh Raleigh, a professor of political violence and geography at the University of Sussex, has been studying violence for more than twenty years and has come to a depressing conclusion: global rates of conflict are rising dramatically. Raleigh tracks global conflict with the help of researchers at Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED), an organization she helped to create when she was a PhD student.

According to Raleigh, the rise in violence reflects the chaotic politics we are living through at the moment. “The most potent and growing forces in the world are political competition and authoritarianism, not inclusion, democracy, or a desire for peace,” she argues.

Raleigh recently spoke with Greg Berman, the Distinguished Fellow of Practice at The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, about violence across the globe, from Ukraine to Myanmar, and about the effects of political polarization in the United States. The interview took place before the Nov. 5 US election.

The following transcript of the conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

There’s an old quote that’s often attributed to Joseph Stalin that suggests that the death of one person is a tragedy, but the death of millions is just a statistic. It seems to me that ACLED is essentially dedicated to disproving that adage. Let’s start with the basics: Why is it important to track statistics about conflict?

I always emphasize, especially now, that the small conflicts and the ones that are constantly ongoing—think Somalia or Chad or Pakistan—are just as meaningful and can tell us just as much about the nature of violence as the Ukraines and the Gazas can. Large wars fought between states generate a tremendous amount of violent events and fatalities. But they don’t vary very much in their iterations. The lines of the conflict are well-defined. But it’s these other conflicts where the violence is constantly shifting. The groups involved change. The ideologies change. The conflict in these countries is far more interesting than some of the larger wars, but it doesn’t generate the same amount of heat, the same amount of global audience.

"The small conflicts and the ones that are constantly ongoing—think Somalia or Chad or Pakistan—are just as meaningful and can tell us just as much about the nature of violence as the Ukraines and the Gazas can."

At ACLED, we believe every conflict is important, from the peaceful protest to the act of mass killing. The intensity and the characteristics of these events can differ, but they each tell us something about the political environment in which people are living. And so we collect every one of these events.

Every Monday, we release information about thousands of events across the world from the previous week. We try to track every sort of characteristic of these events. That enables us to offer pattern analysis. So we can say things like, “Violence has increased 27 percent in the last two years.” 

It seems to me that fatality numbers are often intensely disputed by groups with a political stake in the conflict at hand. I imagine that there are also enormous difficulties with compiling information about far-flung places. Talk to me about the challenges of compiling this data. Berman:

I’m on record saying that fatality statistics are largely made up, in almost every scenario. People tend to think that there aren’t accurate fatality numbers because of under-reporting, or even, as you say, the difficulty of collecting events in hard-to-reach places. But that’s actually not where we see the greatest differences in numbers. The greatest disparities come out of places like Ukraine and Gaza. There is no lack of information about these conflicts, but there is plenty of disagreement about different types of counting. 

In Ukraine, recently, the US was giving us some numbers. The Russians were putting out different numbers. And the Ukrainians were putting out still different numbers. Each country refuses to agree with each other because the numbers are central to their thesis about the war. We often find situations like that.

"Fatality statistics are largely made up, in almost every scenario."

To be honest, the where, when, and how of an event is often very straightforward to collect as long as you have been rigorous about the sources that you’re willing to use and how you collect them. So, for example, Ethiopia has at least three major languages that you need to be collecting information in. None of them are English. If you don’t have stringers in different places, you’re going to miss the events of that country, especially if you’re relying on them to be reported in English. Local knowledge is extremely important to ensure that you are capturing not just the top-line conflict events, but also the ones that represent the reality to most people. 

At ACLED, we don’t use automated coding, and we don’t use AI. We have researchers knowledgeable in several languages that live in these countries. We take in all this information from local partners and local media. And then we go through and we clean it and compare it to previous data from that place and other places to make sure that it’s really robust, and then that’s what we release into the world.

Clearly, there’s a deep appetite for information about what’s going on in places like Gaza and Ukraine. I would imagine that, if I were in your shoes, I would struggle with the need to feed the beast, continuing to satisfy the outsized interest in those locations, as opposed to focusing attention on other places, like Myanmar, that are suffering from intense conflict but aren’t on the radar screen of most people.

The beast is bigger than me, and it needs to be fed. We devote a lot of resources to these high-profile conflicts simply because the number of events coming out of them is so large. When Ukraine started—and, in fact, in Gaza as well—we were getting about 900 events a week. It takes a lot of researchers to be able to collect that much information and make sure it has notes, it’s translated, etc. So we do end up hiring more people and keeping them on for years because of these conflicts. 

But you’re certainly right about the importance of focusing on places like Myanmar. I have called Myanmar the most violent place on earth because it has the most armed organized groups, it has a very high rate of civilian fatalities, and it’s a very diffuse conflict. What’s happening there is very dangerous for the majority of people within that country.

"There is a pervasive sense at the moment that we are living in an incredibly violent time—and that we could be entering one of the most violent eras since World War II."

I often challenge people to move away from fatalities as the primary way to understand conflict and instead to look at events. We need to look at the exposure rate. Because in Ukraine, for example, we have a huge number of events, but it’s only a very small proportion of the Ukrainian population that is exposed to the violence regularly. Whereas in Myanmar, we have a very large number of events and most of the Burmese population is exposed. That juxtaposition is really important. 

ACLED has documented that something like 15 percent of the world’s population is exposed to conflict. I was wondering if you could help me place that in some sort of historical context. Steven Pinker has famously argued that if you look at many categories of violence, we’ve seen dramatic reductions over the past couple of centuries. But of course, his work has also gotten a lot of pushback, with many people arguing that we haven’t really made significant progress. I’m wondering what you think of that debate.

The Pinker argument kind of loosely hangs on this notion that he’s been able to quantify the amount of violence a person would have been exposed to in the past. [Thomas] Hobbes once said that “life is nasty, brutish, and short.” And it is certainly true that people used to be exposed to a huge amount of violence over the course of their lifetimes. Now, whether or not that reality can be compared to the political violence of today seems to me difficult to quantify.

What I would say is that there is a pervasive sense at the moment that we are living in an incredibly violent time—and that we could be entering one of the most violent eras since World War II. It’s hard to disagree with that just based on the numbers. There may be fewer wars between countries than there used to be. After World War II, we saw a distinct rise in civil wars.

Some of those were wars of independence, of course, in the 1950s and ’60s. And then there were what could be, I think, incorrectly, called “proxy wars” during the Cold War era. But really they were competition for political authority as newly established countries emerged. As civil wars have decreased, rather than countries becoming peaceful, what we’ve seen is a rise of political militias. There have been many more gangs with political and often economic objectives that have controlled territory and controlled economies. 

"The most drastic rises [in rates of conflict] are happening in middle-income states and in countries that have adopted some democratic features."

In the West, the public’s working theory of conflict is that it is something that happens in fragile states, in failed states, and in poor places. But what we’ve seen is that the most drastic rises are happening in middle-income states and in countries that have adopted some democratic features. This is worrying because it suggests that there’s no insurance against political violence and that it can happen even in places that have the kind of institutions that are supposed to protect people from violent political competition. 

So when I think about The Better Angels of Our Nature, I’m left with a sense that Steven Pinker was not particularly aware of the ways in which violence was evolving in different countries and how that would maybe dampen his optimism. Lots of people were attracted to Pinker’s thesis that basically we’ve sorted everything out. That argument hit at a particular moment of optimism about new technology. But I think it was just kind of a moment, rather than a fundamental change in society and politics. So I’m not on Pinker’s team, I guess.

Most of us want to live in a world without violence. But there’s no indication that we’re going to get there in our lifetimes. So I guess my question to you is: What can we reasonably aspire to in terms of global conflict? ACLED has said that 15 percent of the world is currently exposed to conflict. What should we be shooting for that number to be? Seven percent? Five percent? 

I don’t know the answer. But I do want to say that that 15 percent number could just as easily go up as down. WorldPop, who’s our partner in putting together the conflict exposure metric, is about to release much more precise information about the demographics of many of the countries affected by violence. When we re-run those statistics with this updated demographic information, we might find that the figure increases. 

"Polarization may make the environment a little more fertile to violence, but alone it is insufficient."

I think the important thing to remember about the 15 percent figure is that some people might be exposed to conflict once or twice, but some people are exposed much more frequently. In Ukraine, I think it’s only about 4 percent of the Ukrainian population that is regularly exposed. But they’re exposed hundreds of times a year. I worry about the populations that are living in a constant state of terror.

What can we learn from places where conflict isn’t happening on a daily basis?

The places that I’ve seen that do not have any conflict consistently are places in which there is incredible adherence to law and order, whether by force, so there’s a high level of police or security services, or there’s a very high level of political and cultural homogeneity. In those places, everybody has kind of bought into the idea of how they’re going to run the country rather than being at each other’s throats. So Malawi, for example, is a pretty peaceful place. And so is Norway. They look very different, but they’re peaceful for some of the same reasons, which is that the cost of violence in that society far outweighs the benefits that anybody would receive for engaging in it.

Help me wrap my mind around the relationship between polarization and violence. Clearly there are places where there is very intense partisanship, but the threat of political violence is not elevated. How much should we be worried when we see increases in affective polarization?

What I would say is that polarization may make the environment a little more fertile to violence, but alone it is insufficient. Polarization is pretty common. It’s found in most political environments, but it operates on a different track from the violent competition in those environments. 

Let me give you an example. In the United States right now, you have a very high rate of polarization. But the lines of polarization do not map onto the abilities of groups to organize and arm themselves for conflict. It takes a lot to organize an armed group. It takes a lot to engage in a strategy of violence in order to win some sort of political contest.

I took some heart from your report that extremist mobilization in the US is at the lowest level since you began tracking in 2020.

In the US, I think political polarization has become almost like a form of entertainment. I don’t mean to dismiss it. But what I mean is that it’s an identity for people now. It’s an identity that can become super salient during electoral contests and then die away after those electoral contests are over. By contrast, you need a much more robust strategy for violent conflict. 

To put my cards on the table, I think the talk about an American civil war is massively overinflated. At the same time, I am deeply worried about polarization. Even if it doesn’t lead to widespread rioting in the streets or assassinations, I think we’re seeing polarization erode faith in democratic institutions and make governance even more difficult than it usually is. Does ACLED track those kinds of outcomes?

I think that you’re 100 percent correct that polarization has real effects. They just don’t happen to be violent. Its effects on the social fabric of a country can be dire, as you lay out. We don’t track social trust among individuals. But my sense is that now might be the wrong time to measure it. Right before an election, people’s sense of how much polarization is coloring their lives is probably pretty pronounced. 

People in the US have a deep distrust of both local and national government, and that is true regardless of who’s in government. A lot of the campaign rhetoric plays into this, whether it’s talk about the illegitimacy of Biden’s win in 2020 or the discussion on the Democrat side that a win by Trump would be dangerous to democracy. I’m not saying these are equivalent claims, but it all sounds the same to the audience it’s aimed at. The result is to delegitimize [government]. 

I’ve been reading this book called When the Clock Broke by John Ganz. He’s writing about the 1990s, when Newt Gingrich was becoming a player in the Republican Party. The rhetoric back then was pretty intense too. It was not that different from the hateful rhetoric of today. I think it is natural to feel a lot of anxiety about our current moment, but I’m not sure how much of a deviation it is from how the country’s politics tends to play out.

Well, one big difference between the 1990s and today is the rise of social media. 

The media environment in general, regardless of whether it’s social media or more traditional media, is pretty important to what’s going on. There are silos of information on the Left and on the Right where it’s not encouraged for you to be moderate. The media environment on the Right is particularly toxic.

"The protests about Gaza were, in general, largely peaceful. Screaming in someone's face isn't an act of violence. "

I went to Wisconsin after Trump won. I had lived there for high school and for undergraduate. The people there are lovely, genuinely lovely. But when I went back, I found that people were wicked. They felt that they were able to say things that they would have never vocalized before. There was this sense that they had been allowed to be their worst selves because of what Trump was saying and doing in Washington. But I think that a lot of people are getting radicalized in their opinions without becoming radicalized in their actions. 

I’m curious to hear what kinds of reactions you’ve gotten to your reporting on the American protests about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I could imagine that your headline takeaway—that the vast majority of the protests have been peaceful—would upset some readers. 

They are mostly peaceful in the same way that the protests that emerged from the killing of George Floyd were mostly peaceful. When we initially reported that finding, it really annoyed the administration, but there was clear evidence that, in fact, they were mostly peaceful. But the news media focused on the rare phenomenon of violence, even when that violence was often directed towards those protestors. The protests about Gaza are very similar in the sense that there were thousands of events, and they were, in general, largely peaceful. Screaming in someone’s face isn’t an act of violence. 

In general, how do you think about incidents that may be small in numbers but that are quite symbolically powerful. I’m thinking of things like the killing of George Floyd or the attempts on Donald Trump’s life. 

This comes back to where we started, with your Stalin quote. Events differ in their significance. There are certainly cases where an event is so significant that you can talk about a dividing line, before and after. October 7th is clearly one of those kinds of events. This is certainly one of the most significant events that’s happened in the world in the last five years or so.

By contrast, I would say that the attempted assassinations of Donald Trump have not resonated in the same kind of way. It was not significant in part because it wasn’t successful. And of course, the person who perpetrated it, he wasn’t on the Far Left, he wasn’t even on the Left at all. So there was nothing to kind of grab onto that would stick to a pre-existing narrative. When that happens, events tend to fade into the political tapestry of a country. 

This is part of a series of interviews by Greg Berman, Distinguished Fellow of Practice at The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, entitled “The Polarization Project.” 

Berman is co-editor of Vital City, an urban policy journal, and co-author of Gradual: The Case for Incremental Change in a Radical Age. In 2022, Berman led At the Crossroads, a series of interviews for HFG.org assessing the causes and solutions of rising crime in NYC after the pandemic.

This interview also appears in The Fulcrum through a copublishing agreement.

Previous interviews from The Polarization Project:
The Polarization Project October 7, 2024

‘There’s Nothing Inevitable or Permanent about Democracy’: A Conversation with Robert Talisse

By Greg Berman

Robert Talisse
Robert Talisse

Robert Talisse, a professor of philosophy at Vanderbilt University, believes that polarization is a problem that cannot be solved, only managed. He also believes that the greatest threat to American democracy comes from within.

In Talisse’s diagnosis, American democracy suffers from a kind of autoimmune disorder. He makes the case that democracy can break down even when every participant in the process is operating in good faith to pursue their version of the common good. The reason this is so, Talisse argues over the course of a trilogy of books—Overdoing Democracy, Sustaining Democracy, and Civic Solitude—is an occurrence that he calls “belief polarization.” 

According to Talisse, this is “the phenomenon by which interactions among like-minded people tend to result in each person adopting more radical versions of their shared views.” Simply by engaging with others who share our beliefs, we end up becoming more extreme and less open to other viewpoints. Do this often enough—and for long enough—and you end up demonizing your adversaries. Ironically, it is our political allies and not our opponents who undermine our capacity to behave democratically. 

Talisse talked with Greg Berman, distinguished fellow of practice at The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, about how belief polarization can erode democracy, what happens when our political affiliations become lifestyle choices, and where our current depolarization interventions are going wrong. 

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity. 

I know you’re not running for president, but I wanted to get your sense of the state of the nation. How worried should we be? How likely is it that we are going to tip over into chaos and political violence?

I think we should always be worried about the health and viability of democracy. I think it’s dangerous for people to think that democracy is a set of institutions or practices and that once you’ve set them up, it is self-perpetuating and can keep going by itself. We need to remind ourselves that there’s nothing inevitable or permanent about democracy or democracy’s health, that it’s something that has to be tended to.

I think the core of Donald Trump’s strategy, and perhaps even the core of the MAGA worldview, is that only those people who vote for Donald Trump are properly American. And if you accept something like that premise, it follows that any election that he doesn’t win is a fraudulent election. The idea that it’s a necessary condition for being a proper citizen to vote for the Republicans generally, or Donald Trump in particular, just strikes me as deeply anti-democratic. There’s no room for disagreement, or debate, or differences of political judgment. So, yeah, I think we should be worried.

In Overdoing Democracy, you argue that it is possible to have too much democracy. Why isn’t democracy an unalloyed good?

Well, there’s a strong tendency to think that more is always better. I mean, it’s an intuitive thought: How could there be too much happiness? How could there be too much friendship? 

We become really bad at doing democracy when democracy is all we ever do.

I think that democracy can be overdone because the pursuit and practice of democracy can crowd out other things that are also unalloyed goods. And it turns out, by way of some pretty robust empirical data, that when democracy is all we ever do together, when our entire social worlds are structured around our political alliances and our political rivalries, other good things in life get crowded out and transformed into expressions of those allegiances and rivalries. We become really bad at doing democracy when democracy is all we ever do.

Democracy is a set of institutions, it’s a set of practices, it’s a style of political arrangement. Democracy is also the aspiration to create, and to work towards, a society of self-governing, political equals. Part of what democracy asks of us is not only to be active participants helping to direct our government, it also asks that we recognize our fellow citizens as our partners, as our social equals. 

And it turns out that when politics comes to dominate our social lives such that everything we do is understood in terms of our partisan affiliations and rivalries, we erode. We begin to lose the kinds of cognitive and emotional capacities that are necessary in order to regard our fellow citizens, both our allies and our enemies alike, as our equals. We come to see our enemies as mere obstacles to be overcome, to be “owned,” as they say. And we come to see our allies as merely resources for achieving our political ends. In neither case do we see our fellow citizens as co-authors of a shared social world.

This idea that politics has slipped its bounds and now infects our social life, helping to determine what teams we root for, what we eat, and what we buy … that seems to map onto my experience of the world. But to play devil’s advocate for a second, my sense is that a huge percentage of Americans, perhaps the majority of the population, are basically apolitical. Or at least they are low-engagement, plugging into politics only once every four years, if that. Is your diagnosis that politics is also seeping into every part of their lives?

You are right that maybe some of these trends are more pronounced among highly engaged voters. And in fact, there’s some empirical work that suggests that the dysfunctions of in-group conformity and out-group hostility are heightened among people who pay attention to politics.

We live in a country where people would rather see their kid marry somebody who worships a false God than somebody who votes for the wrong candidate.

However, what we’ve seen happen since the mid-’90s is that political affiliation has become more like a lifestyle than anything that we would call a collection of ideas about what the government should be doing and what would make society better. Politics has become more about lifestyle choices—what kinds of clothes you wear, what kind of car you drive, what occupation you’re in, how many children you have, where you vacation, where you shop for groceries. These have become more reliable markers of political affiliation than your opinion about the tax rate. Our social worlds are now structured according to the political categories of the day. Low-engagement voters tend also to be very highly embedded within social worlds that are politically homogeneous.

And one further point about this: intensely negative attitudes towards cross-partisan marriage have escalated beyond similarly negative attitudes towards interracial and interfaith marriages in this country. And so we live in a country where people would rather see their kid marry somebody who worships a false God than somebody who votes for the wrong candidate. Once you ascribe to yourself a political identity—once you identify yourself as Republican, Democrat, whatever—it is the most stable social identity that a person will have throughout their life. You’re more likely in this country to change religions than parties.

Lastly, I would just say that wealthy conservatives in Oregon have more in common lifestyle-wise with poor conservatives in Georgia than they do with wealthy Oregonians who are liberals. 

If that is true, it suggests that you believe that the culture wars are real, correct?

Yeah, the culture wars are real, if by that you mean that there is a social sorting phenomenon that goes along with the centering of partisan identity. In other words, as partisan political identity becomes the central thing that we understand about ourselves, then our social worlds become fractured in all kinds of ways. And I think that’s bad for democracy. It becomes much easier to demonize millions of your fellow Americans when everybody you know is just like you. 

Staying in devil’s advocate mode, walk me through what you would say to a trans person who says, “How am I to treat my opponent as a political equal when they would deny me my right to exist?” 

I’m not suggesting that anybody who understands themselves to be in a position of social vulnerability, like in the example that you mentioned, has to get out and form friendships with people that they view to be existential threats. 

Look, maybe there can’t be much done in the kind of case that you’re envisioning, where you have a citizen with views that are fundamentally at odds with democracy. The trouble is that the social and cognitive dynamics that emerge when all we do together is politics lead us to overpopulate that category, people who are beyond the pale of democracy, with anybody who’s not just like us. I think that’s the problem. Overdoing Democracy is an argument about how social and cognitive dynamics lead us to regard all of those with whom we disagree as a monolith that represents the most extreme kind of opposing view.

The positive proposal I’m making is that we should find things to do together that are not political so that we can see other people display their virtues in ways that don’t so easily permit us to attribute their virtues to the fact that they’re on the same political side that we’re on.

Turning to Sustaining Democracy, I think the part of that book that resonated the most for me was the way you unpacked how engaging in normal political activity with my allies—volunteering, participating in rallies, and all the rest—can lead me to develop more extreme positions than I had at the start of that process. So let’s talk about what you call “belief polarization.” 

Let me start just with a quick distinction. People talk about “polarization.” They don’t always say what they mean by it. It’s almost always presented as if it’s obviously something bad. I don’t know that polarization is obviously bad. It might be bad when it reaches a certain intensity.

The first distinction that’s worth keeping in mind is that oftentimes when people talk about polarization, they’re talking about the pulling apart of two opposed political units. When they say we’re a highly polarized country, commentators are usually saying that the common ground between the two sides has fallen out, and there’s no common ground for compromise. That’s what I call political polarization. 

The more you surround yourself with people who agree with you, the more radical you become in your thinking, the more convinced you become that you've got the right view, the less receptive you are to countervailing evidence, and the more inclined you are to see anyone who's not just like you as ignorant, uninformed, and threatening.

Political polarization can lead to deadlock and a lot of frustration in politics. However, political polarization is not all bad. When the two parties are polarized, that just makes it easy for voters to tell the parties apart. It means that there’s a real difference and there’s something at stake in an election. I think that can be a good thing. So political polarization is complicated, and I don’t know that it’s such a terrible thing for democracy.

So that’s political polarization. What’s belief polarization, then?

Belief polarization is about what goes on inside our heads when we surround ourselves with people with whom we agree. One of the most solidly established findings of social psychology in the history of the discipline is that the more you surround yourself with people who agree with you, the more radical you become in your thinking, the more convinced you become that you’ve got the right view, the less receptive you are to countervailing evidence, and the more inclined you are to see anyone who’s not just like you as ignorant, uninformed, and threatening.

Belief polarization is not a strictly political phenomenon. We’ve got all kinds of experimental data that suggests that if you get a bunch of people in a room together, all of whom agree that Denver, Colorado, is notable for being particularly high above sea level, the longer they talk about the elevation of Denver, Colorado, the higher they will say it is. In mock jury experiments, if you’ve got a mock jury who’s agreed that the accused is guilty, and now they’re talking about punishment, the longer those jury members talk about what the fitting punishment is, the more punitive they become. And in fact, they become more punitive than they report being willing to be before the jury deliberation started.

As we become more extreme, more confident, and more dismissive of countervailing voices, we also become more willing to engage in risky behavior on behalf of our beliefs.

It’s a piece of cognitive architecture that is deeply baked into us. Belief polarization impacts like-minded groups without regard for what the content of their like-mindedness is. It could be some banal fact like the elevation of Denver. But the crucial part is that when the dynamic is at work, it makes us more extreme. We come to think Denver is higher than it is. 

When we surround ourselves with like-minded others, we not only shift into more radical versions of the things that we believe, we also become more confident in those more radical views. We think that more people agreeing with us means more evidence, even if those people are just saying the same thing. And we become more dismissive of anyone who doesn’t agree. Our mind gets made up.

It is easy to imagine how this would help fuel some pretty dangerous political dynamics.

This has been tied to what’s sometimes called the risky shift phenomenon. As we become more extreme, more confident, and more dismissive of countervailing voices, we also become more willing to engage in risky behavior on behalf of our beliefs. We become more inclined to think that behavior that is risky is warranted. 

In experimental settings, people who, before long conversations with like-minded others, would say, “Under X and Y conditions of police brutality, there should be a protest. We should write op-eds. We should hold a candlelight vigil.” And then, as they talk among their coalition about police brutality, they start saying things like, “We should set cop cars on fire.” And so we become more invested or more willing to engage in risky behavior that we wouldn’t otherwise have endorsed. I think January 6th is an example of this.

Our more extreme selves are also more conformist. That is, as we shift into more extreme beliefs, and become more confident in them, we become more and more invested in policing the border between our allies and our foes. And as we become more invested in policing that border, the litmus tests for allyship become more demanding.

So now it’s not enough for you to agree with me on immigration policy for you to count as my ally. Now you also have to agree with me about fracking. Now you also have to agree with me about taxation. The demands for authentic allyship become more exacting. Members of like-minded groups that are belief-polarized begin dressing alike, they begin pronouncing certain words alike.

As conformity pressures escalate, our coalitions shrink and become more dysfunctional. But more importantly, they become less internally democratic. Homogeneous coalitions that are fixated on the authenticity of their members and policing the border between the in-group and the out-group start relying on high-profile members of the coalition to set the standards of authentic membership. This is how we get to the point where you’re not really a Republican unless you wear a red MAGA hat. That strikes me as democratically dysfunctional.

The paradoxical thing is that all of this is the product of people doing what they should do as democratic citizens. It’s an internal source of dysfunction in democracy. Democracies need citizens to get together in like-minded groups, to plan how they’re going to advance their agenda, to talk about all the reasons why their agenda is better than their opponent’s agenda. They need to do these things. But it turns out that there are hazards that come along with it that we need to be attuned to, or else, along the way of doing good democratic practice, we start to erode the capacities that enable us to engage in responsible democratic citizenship.

In Civic Solitude, you argue that in order to be good democratic citizens, sometimes we need to retreat from the political fray. Are you suggesting that we all take time out of our lives to go to Walden Pond and contemplate deep thoughts, or do you have something else in mind?

So there’s a lot of democratic theory and practice that sort of accepts the broad diagnostic story that I’ve been telling you about political sorting being a problem. And a lot of energy is being spent on trying to figure out a way to intervene.

I think there’s an error in thinking that because incivility is the dysfunction that we’re trying to address, the right response to that dysfunction is to create interventions where citizens can interact in the ways they should have been interacting all along. That is, I don’t think the cultivation of civility is achieved by creating forums where people start behaving in the ways that they should have behaved all along.

The lifeblood of democracy is that we disagree. That's why we need democracy.

It’s an error that I call the curative fallacy, which mistakes a preventative measure, what we could have done in the past to prevent the problem, for a remedial measure, which is what we should do now that we’ve got the problem. I think that those are two different things. There are many cases in which the preventative measure is really as bad as the remedial measure. For example, if you have heart disease, it’s true that had you been a rigorous exerciser for most of your life, you wouldn’t have gotten heart disease. But it is very, very bad advice to suggest that now that you have heart disease, you should start jogging. 

Now that we are a thoroughly sorted, belief-polarized population that finds it very, very difficult to describe in anything other than totally disparaging terms any fellow citizen who’s politically not on our side, what are we going to do? I want to suggest that, given where we’re at, given those dysfunctions, it is our responsibility as democratic citizens to find occasions where we can be alone with our thoughts and engage in a kind of reflection that is not pre-packaged in the idiom of our contemporary political divide.

I buy the argument that some of this work must happen at the individual level, within each of our hearts and minds. But is there nothing that can be done at the collective level to help us lower the temperature of our political discourse? 

A lot of democracy practitioners think that depolarization has to do with bringing two sides together under a certain set of rules where they can hear one another and maybe see that the other side has a good point. 

All this stuff is great. But what I want to suggest is that, if I’m right about the dynamics about how belief polarization works, those kinds of bridge-building exercises, although they’re necessary, I don’t think they’re sufficient. 

I think that you’ll get a better depolarization effect if these curated interventions between political opponents are structured in a different way. What if we brought the gun control guy and the Second Amendment guy together and had the gun control guy ask the Second Amendment guy, “What do you think is the weakest part of my view? What’s your best argument against my view?” And vice versa. 

That kind of conversation doesn’t require opponents to come in with the attitude that, “Hey, the other side might have a point.” It’s not a bad attitude to have, but I think we need depolarization interactions that don’t rely on citizens having goodwill about the other side. I think that we need depolarization interventions that are fully consistent with my showing up to a conversation with you and saying, “I know Greg is 100 percent wrong. I want to find out how badly Greg understands my position so that I can formulate it in a way that counteracts his misperception.” We’ve lost sight of the idea that even if you have all the right opinions, your articulation of them can always be improved. 

The lifeblood of democracy is that we disagree. That’s why we need democracy. Totally sincere, competent citizens aren’t ever going to converge on a single political idea. There’s such a thing as good faith political disagreement, even about things that are really, really important. You and I can disagree about something, but ideally, I should still see you as entitled to an equal say, despite how wrong I think you are about environmental policy or whatever. Unfortunately, the capacity to see each other as co-equals atrophies very, very quickly under the kind of conditions we’re experiencing right now.

This is part of a series of interviews  by Greg Berman, Distinguished Fellow of Practice at The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation,  entitled “The Polarization Project.”  

Berman is co-editor of Vital City, an urban policy journal, and co-author of Gradual: The Case for Incremental Change in a Radical Age. In 2022, Berman led At the Crossroads, a series of interviews for HFG.org assessing the causes and solutions of rising crime in NYC after the pandemic.

This interview also appears in The Fulcrum through a copublishing agreement.

Previous interviews from The Polarization Project:
Violence, Politics & Democracy Speaker Series October 17, 2024

‘We Want You To Be A Proud Boy’: How Social Media Facilitates Political Intimidation and Violence

Amid a volatile election season, the report ‘We Want You To Be A Proud Boy’: How Social Media Facilitates Political Intimidation and Violence outlines the steps social media companies like Facebook, TikTok and Telegram can take to reduce their contribution to increasing levels of political intimidation and violence across the U.S. and around the world. 

The HFG-funded report written by Paul M. Barrett of the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights is part of HFG’s Violence, Politics & Democracy initiative, a multi-year project examining how these phenomena interact in mature democracies to understand and counter political violence and other forces that damage democratic norms and institutions, imperiling the safety of citizens. Based on a review of more than 400 social science studies, the report identifies particular features of social media platforms that make them susceptible to exploitation and suggests how to mitigate the dangers.

On October 17, Barrett spoke with Justin Hendrix about how social media can lead to political violence and how social media companies, government and users can reduce the likelihood that virtual speech will lead to real-world violence.

Watch Video Below

Paul M. Barrett is the deputy director of the Center for Business and Human Rights at New York University’s Stern School of Business. He joined the Center in September 2017 after working for more than three decades as a journalist and author focusing on the intersection of business, law, and society. Most recently, he worked for 12 years for Bloomberg Businessweek magazine, where he served at various times as the editor of an award-winning investigative team and a writer covering topics such as energy and the environment, military procurement, and the civilian firearm industry. Barrett is the author of four critically acclaimed nonfiction books, the most recent of which are GLOCK: The Rise of America’s Gun, and THE LAW OF THE JUNGLE: The $19 Billion Legal Battle Over Oil in the Rain Forest and the Lawyer Who’d Stop at Nothing to Win.

The Polarization Project September 30, 2024

‘Stories about the Way the Nation Is Organized Are Dividing Us’: A Conversation with Richard Slotkin

By Greg Berman

RICHARD SLOTKIN

Is the United States on the brink of a civil war? Few people are better placed to answer that question than historian Richard Slotkin.

Slotkin, an emeritus professor at Wesleyan University, has devoted his career to the study of violence and American history. In an award-winning trilogy of books (Regeneration Through Violence, The Fatal Environment, and Gunfighter Nation), Slotkin explained how the myth of the American frontier—the idea that violence against a racialized other must be employed to conquer the wilderness and make way for civilization—has been used to justify government action across the history of the United States.

In his latest book, A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America, Slotkin turns his attention to contemporary politics. He is alarmed by what he sees.

According to Slotkin, the culture wars are not a trifling distraction but rather a fundamental clash between conflicting versions of the United States. While he thinks a “war between the states” like that of 1861–1865 is unlikely, he does believe that the country is on the brink of entering a death spiral. Looking forward, he predicts a future of renewed political violence, plagued by “terrorism, urban uprisings, and intercommunal violence of the kind that has plagued Israel and Northern Ireland.” 

We've been hit with a series of self-reinforcing crises that have called into question our feelings about the government and our feelings about belonging to America.

Slotkin spoke with Greg Berman, distinguished fellow of practice at The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, on the importance of the stories we tell ourselves about American history and how the past influences contemporary culture and politics. The following transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity. 

There are a lot of theories about why the US feels so divided right now. Some people point the finger at inequality. Others at globalization or technology. Your book makes the case that a big part of what’s happening is that we are suffering through a loss of a unifying national story. Walk me through the argument. How did that come to be? Why is that so important?

Well, the loss of the national story is linked to the other things that you mentioned. When we talk about a national story, we’re talking about a story that leads people to identify themselves with the nation-state and to see the government as an extension of themselves in some way. What has happened is that we’ve been hit with a series of self-reinforcing crises that have called into question our feelings about the government and our feelings about belonging to America. 

One of the big ones obviously is demographic change. Then you get the globalization of the economy, where workers get a lower share of income, less dignity, less job security and so on. And then compounding all of that, you have a series of crises which really called into question the government’s ability to understand, to make sense of, or to deal with these problems—the dot com crash, the savings and loan crisis, the Great Recession. These crises really distorted the economy. And the government responded generously to the bankers and stingily to the rest of the people who were suffering. And then you had COVID, which, again, struck people unevenly. The government’s response was irrational and untrustworthy, partly because Donald Trump was in charge of it. You put all of that together and you have a real crisis of confidence in government. 

You identify four principal myths that have undergirded the US. How did you arrive at these four?

What I looked for were stories that perennially are invoked to explain the existence and operations of the nation-state. And it’s pretty clear that the frontier myth is the oldest one and that the founding has to be the second one. The Civil War, and the various ways of interpreting it, are added to the mix because the Civil War tests the question whether the nation can continue, and if it continues, in what form should it continue? And then the final one, the myth of the Good War, is the one that really shaped my consciousness and shaped America’s approach to foreign policy and domestic policy after the 1940s. The myth of the Good War is the idea of America as the liberator nation, as a multiethnic democracy fighting against totalitarian and racist powers.

You have argued that the US, more so than other nations, is beholden to its mythology. Why is that? Why are we different in that respect?

Because Americans have always been of such different ethnic, religious, and racial origins. All of the modern nation-states have had to overcome ethnic and religious difference and, in some cases, linguistic difference as well. But it was much simpler to unite French-speaking people behind the idea of France when they all look like French people. 

I do think that it is possible for a national story to be one that includes the dark side of our history. And in fact, the overcoming of the dark side is a great story. It's a story we tell all the time in popular culture and classical literature.

It is much harder to unite a nation which has included, since the very beginning, English people, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Scots, Africans, Native Americans—and then expanding as we go along to include every nation on the globe as potential citizens. So what is it that enables people of such diverse origins to think of themselves as Americans? We are born to our communities and our families. We have to learn to think of ourselves as belonging to this larger community called America, which is not really visible to us most of the time. It’s known to us through the stories that tell us we belong to America.

I recently came across a quote from Ernest Renan, the French historian, who said that forgetting and historical error are essential elements in the creation of a nation. I’m wondering whether it is possible to have a 100 percent truthful national story. 

I think it’s possible to have one that is true in principle. When we talk about the translation of history into myth, we’re talking about a simplification process in which a complex, multifaceted reality is reduced to a story with a few characters in it. So there’s always going to be some forgetting, some elimination. But I do think that it is possible for a national story to be one that includes the dark side of our history. And in fact, the overcoming of the dark side is a great story. It’s a story we tell all the time in popular culture and classical literature.

If the story you tell about the nation is too fairytale-positive, it will fail to produce belief. People won't believe that America is always good, always has been good, and never did anything wrong.

Take, for example, the way we tell the story of the Civil War. In what I call the liberation version of the story, we don’t deny the existence of slavery. We don’t deny the evil that slavery was, but we tell the story of how that evil was overcome through struggle. Or take the civil rights movement and the story of Martin Luther King. It’s not the story of going from the Garden of Eden to the Garden of Eden. It’s the story of the overcoming of the dark side of American life. So I do think that myths can and do incorporate some notion of the darkness and the overcoming of the darkness.

For Americans, the question is, how much will we admit to what we’ve done wrong on the issue of race? How much will we talk about what we have done wrong in terms of exploiting the environment? How much will we talk about what we’ve done wrong on the exploitation of labor? There have been moments in the past where we’ve done fairly well with that. And I think it’s possible to do that again. 

Let me just also say that whether it’s possible or not, it’s necessary, because if the story you tell about the nation is too fairytale positive, in the end, it will fail to produce belief. People won’t believe that America is always good, always has been good, and never did anything wrong. 

Sure, but isn’t the flip side true as well, that if you tell a story about the country that is too negative—that it’s just been 400 years of unremitting racial oppression—that you also won’t generate a sense of positive American identity?

You can certainly tell the story as 400 years of unremitting racial oppression. And, yes, that version fills people with disgust. But that’s not the truth. The truth is that as powerful as the exploitation was, there were always people who fought against it. Even in America’s worst episodes, there were always people who were working for the good. And I think if you want people to identify in a positive way with our history, and also to see politics as a place capable of producing good, you have to tell the story in such a way that those struggles can be seen.

Given all that, I’m curious about your reaction to the 1619 project. 

I thought that it was uneven. As a thought experiment, it was very interesting because it does change your view of history if you look at it from the perspective of slavery and the people who came here as slaves. My own view, though, is that the beginning of American history is not 1619, it’s 1586, it’s Roanoke, it’s the beginning of the confrontation with the Indigenous people. It’s the foundation of a settler state. That’s really the core of things. 

I don’t know that moving the founding date to 1586 leads to a more optimistic reading of our history.

Have you read Native Nations? The book basically argues that, as settler-Indigenous relationships developed, there were possibilities for mutual accommodation, some of which were actualized and some of which failed for want of good faith support. I certainly don’t want to sugarcoat that history, but I do insist that it was never all one way. There were always possibilities in that history for a different turn of events. 

The point of myth is not simply that it’s a way of conceptualizing the past. It’s about using the past to create an action script for taking positive action in the present. That’s the point of mythmaking. And that’s why I say that the way you tell the story has to include the possibility for good outcomes. Whether they were realized or not, they existed.

Kurt Andersen’s book, Fantasyland, makes the argument that the US has always been a place of religious zealots, hucksters, and con men and that a significant portion of Americans have always been untethered from reality at some level. Looking through that prism, I’m wondering whether our current moment is a departure from the norm, or is it a return to the norm of American history?

Well, I wouldn’t call it a return to the norm. What Andersen is describing is certainly an aspect of our culture. Hucksterism, grandiosity, narcissism … that’s a part of the American story. But I think that we’re currently in a moment in which different visions are being asserted. 

A significant percentage of the population is devoted to a story of America as a great White Christian nation corrupted and overrun by a racial and ideological enemy.

What I call the MAGA vision, the right-wing culture war vision, really starts in the 1990s. Look at Pat Buchanan’s primary campaign in 1992 against George H. W. Bush, where he was basically speaking for conservatives who felt that Ronald Reagan had failed as a cultural conservative, that he had done nothing to advance the values of White Christians. That was the start of the sense of racial grievance, the sense that White people are being discriminated against. 

Then you get the 2010 midterm election, in which the Tea Party comes to the fore with a very powerful reaction against Obama’s presidency and the notion of the nation becoming a majority minority country. It’s also in that period that you get a deeper radicalization of the gun rights movement where it really begins to solidify around a kind of anti-government ideology, the idea that the purpose of the Second Amendment is to arm citizens for possible resistance to the government. That becomes openly stated under Obama.

America has given a peculiar license to the individual right to use deadly force and violence.

Violence is a theme that runs through all of your work. Why is America so violent? Is this a congenital defect of our national character?

I think it is. It’s not that other cultures are not violent. It’s that we have given a peculiar license to the individual right to use deadly force and violence. It’s there from the start of the settler state—the need for violent self-defense on the border. You can see it in our acceptance of vigilante justice, not just on the frontier, but in the Jim Crow South. You can see it in this whole notion of the gun as private property that you have an absolute right to use however you want. It’s our extreme notion of individualism coupled with a history in which violence by individuals has played a central role.

Speaking of vigilante justice, one of my favorite parts of your book was your description of the period from 1870 to 1920, which you call the Age of Vigilantism. Are there lessons that we can learn from that era that might help us now? 

The Age of Vigilantism was very complex. You had the violence of lynch mobs in the Jim Crow South. You also had an extremely violent labor movement in which private, mercenary armies were used against labor organizers and in which workers armed themselves to resist these anti-labor vigilantes. We came out of that era in part through the Great Depression and the establishment of the New Deal.

What you get, starting in the 1930s, was a legal regime that offered labor some protections from violence. It wasn’t complete, but it was far more than had existed before. You also get a legal regime that put a stop to some of the causes of lynching in the South. The New Deal was the key to ending the Age of Vigilantism because it led to a government in which people were willing to place greater reliance than in their private use of arms.

You have highlighted the way that race, or fear of an increasingly diverse country, has motivated a powerful reaction on the Right. But then I look at the recent polling numbers for Trump, which suggest that he’s doing better than any Republican presidential candidate has done in a long time with Black voters and Hispanic voters. I’m wondering how that squares with your analysis.

I don’t really try to get into the details of electoral politics. There are so many factors that cause small percentage shifts one way or another in an election. Certainly, the cultural conservatism of many Blacks and Latinos might lead them to be attracted to the culturally conservative aspect of the MAGA program. And the fact that the Democrats haven’t been able to fulfill their program of racial reform inevitably leads to some disillusion. In general, I don’t think that the kind of analysis that I’m doing can explain things at that micro level. 

If we could think of ourselves as members of a national community, sharing common interests and a common identity, we might be able to work out some kind of response to the challenges we face.

What I see is a larger pattern in which a significant percentage of the population is devoted to a story of America as a great White Christian nation corrupted and overrun by a racial and ideological enemy. A significant percentage of the national population, and a majority of Republicans, have adopted that worldview—or at least effectively endorsed it. And that really is, I think, the most critical issue in the present moment. Because even if that school of belief represents a minority of the national population, through their control of the Republican Party, the program that they’ve adopted is a serious danger to the way American politics and society are organized.

Your version of recent political history points the finger at the Koch brothers, Grover Norquist, the NRA and a host of malevolent actors on the Right. But reading your book, I found myself wondering why you hadn’t offered a similar account of the Left. 

I’ve been accused of being basically a flack for the Biden administration. There may be some truth to what you say. But is there really a fair comparison between the Left and the Right? So Hillary Clinton said “basket of deplorables” and some liberal college students have said some fairly outrageous things. But what is the left-wing equivalent of the Proud Boys? Which left-wing organizations are arming themselves for violence against the government? What is the left-wing equivalent of Project 2025?

I don’t want to push this argument too hard, but I guess the counter would be that if you look at the institutions of cultural power in our country—from the media to universities to the nonprofit sector to Hollywood—those institutions are not reflective of conservative ideas at the moment. It seems reasonable that this would provoke some kind of a backlash among conservative Americans.

What those institutions are rejecting is the concept of gender, sexuality, and family organization that conservatives believe in. I don’t want to minimize it, because that rejection is a serious thing. I think the Right is not wrong to react to it, because these things really are a genuine challenge to their fundamental values. If someone considers the legalization of gay marriage to be an insult, there’s no way to respond to that. 

But that’s only part of the story. Part of the conservative backlash is not just about race, gender, family. It’s about defund the police. It’s about prison abolition. It’s about a host of issues where the Left has pushed the envelope far beyond what the median voter believes. 

I agree with you on that. Defund the police was stupid. But let’s be real: it was a position taken by a minority of voices. The Squad has not moved to defund the police. The police haven’t been defunded. Quite the contrary.

In your book, you use the vocabulary “red America” and “blue America” to describe the divide in American life. I understand why you and others use that shorthand. But I think that formulation only describes part of America. In my estimation, there’s a huge chunk of America—and I might argue that it is larger than either red America or blue America—that is either blissfully apolitical or ideologically incoherent. I think the chunk of America that I’m identifying offers some ballast against our country really going off the rails. I’m wondering whether you disagree with my reading of the American population.

No, I don’t disagree with it. I think that the red-blue structure that I adopted is partly an artifact of my subject. If I’m talking about myths as stories that are used to organize political thinking, I’m going to exaggerate the role of partisans because they are the ones who are actively using the myths. It remains to be seen whether there is a story with which that great undefined middle identifies.

At the end of the book, you outline a left/Democratic vision rooted in the civil rights movement and the New Deal that you think has some chance of succeeding as a new national myth. I just wonder whether there’s a built-in cap on how appealing that kind of vision is going to be to any American that doesn’t already identify as a progressive.

You may be right. I’m 82 years old. I’ve lived a long time. I think that the right-wing vision, of minority rule and of giving the country back to the “real” Americans, is a dead end. The only alternative I can imagine that makes any sense at all is one that links some notion of economic reform with social and racial justice. 

My concern would be that for basically my whole life, the American electorate has been a center-right electorate. So I wonder whether the trick is to use conservative language to achieve progressive ends. That way you are speaking to both red and blue America.

Well, Bill Clinton tried that. Clinton tried to use conservative rhetoric to achieve moderately liberal ends, and it didn’t work.

The stakes in the upcoming election are real stakes. If MAGA and the Right get the kind of power that they’re aiming for, they will change the way that politics works in this country. They will limit the possibility of progressive change. And I think that would be a bad thing.

The real core issue in my mind is the question of identity. If we could think of ourselves as members of a national community, sharing common interests and a common identity, we might be able to work out some kind of response to the challenges we face. But we don’t think of ourselves that way anymore. We think of ourselves as an us-versus-them community. If one side benefits, the other side hurts. Stories about the way the nation is organized are dividing us.

________________________________________________________________________________
This is part of a series of interviews  by Greg Berman, Distinguished Fellow of Practice at The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation,  entitled “The Polarization Project.”  

Berman is co-editor of Vital City, an urban policy journal, and co-author of Gradual: The Case for Incremental Change in a Radical Age. In 2022, Berman led At the Crossroads, a series of interviews for HFG.org assessing the causes and solutions of rising crime in NYC after the pandemic.This interview also appears in The Fulcrum through a copublishing agreement.

Previous interviews from The Polarization Project:
The Polarization Project September 23, 2024

‘We’re Ignoring Our Common Values and Interests’: A Conversation with Monica Harris

By Greg Berman

Monica Harris

National elections in the United States tend to spark talk of “red” and “blue” America—two parallel nations divided by geography and politics, with rural and central states trending Republican and coastal and urban areas voting for Democrats.

This shorthand obscures as much as it reveals, of course. There are many blue voters in red states, and vice versa. Indeed, there is some research to suggest that the very creation of red and blue-colored voting maps leads people to overestimate the extent of American political polarization. 

Monica Harris, the author of The Illusion of Division, agrees that “Americans are profoundly divided by partisan politics, race, gender identity, vaccination status, and an assortment of labels that keep us fixated on our differences.” But Harris believes these divisions are illusory: “The media and political establishment amplify this division by focusing on fringe voices on the right and the left, ignoring the vast majority of sensible Americans in the center who agree on ‘big picture’ problems and solutions.”

Harris has been seeking to bridge the divides in American life through her writing and by leading the Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism (FAIR). FAIR was founded as a critique of the anti-racism curricula introduced into many American schools in the aftermath of the slaying of George Floyd. Instead of focusing on racial differences, FAIR seeks to advance “pro-human” values by promoting open discourse and advocating on behalf of free speech.

Harris talked to Greg Berman, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation’s distinguished fellow of practice, about how she came to lead FAIR, what’s really dividing us, and why race relations in the United States have gotten off track. This transcript of their conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

You wrote a book about the illusion of division in this country. What’s the argument? 

Let me start by backing up. I’m someone who’s Black and female and gay. I grew up in Southern California. Someone who looks like me, that kind of person is typically, I think, branded as progressive, especially in California. I graduated from Princeton and Harvard Law in the eighties and early nineties. So that further solidified my identity. And after I graduated, I went into entertainment law. For the lion’s share of my adult career, I worked in Hollywood for various networks, from Walt Disney to Viacom. I was the quintessential progressive for many years. 

But to make a long story short, about 14 years ago I had an epiphany that prompted me to make a radical lifestyle change. I took a trip with my family to Montana and we stayed in a little town, just outside of Yellowstone. 

There's this idea that people who don't vote the way we do, who don't look the way we do, who don't share our lifestyle…that they're people we can't communicate with. They're people we can't exchange ideas with.

We were there for about a week—no Wi-Fi reception, just my partner and our extended family. I didn’t think about anything except being present and absorbing the natural beauty and interacting with my family and friends. And it was just such a nourishing experience. On the way home, I told my partner, “God, we’ve never really seen Montana. Let’s explore the rest of it.” 

And so here we are, an interracial family with our biracial child, and we’re driving through Montana and we stop in all of these little towns. I was expecting, given my identity, to be treated a certain way as a Black person, as a gay woman, when I went into these towns that were 99 percent White. And what blew me away is that I connected with these people. They were treating me like I wasn’t different at all. 

I left that trip thinking not only did I feel comfortable there, but I could actually imagine myself living there. About a year and a half later, my partner and I decided to move to Montana. We sold everything and we bought a twenty-acre ranch at the foot of the Continental Divide. 

What kind of reaction did you get from your friends back in California?

A lot of people were kind of stunned: “Montana, what are you thinking? That’s not your tribe. I mean, you know they vote mostly Republican. You know they have guns there. Montana’s not friendly to gay people.”

They're people who don't share our values in any respect. That's the illusion of division.

That reaction—that’s what I call the illusion of division. There’s this idea that people who don’t vote the way we do, who don’t look the way we do, who don’t share our lifestyle … that they’re people we can’t communicate with. They’re people we can’t exchange ideas with. They’re people who don’t share our values in any respect. That’s the illusion. 

After my time living here as a classically blue person transported to a red state, I’ve come to realize that even though we are different in so many ways, what we’re ignoring are the ways in which we are so similar, our common values and interests. What we have in common is far more important than what separates us. We just don’t realize it because our media constantly reminds us of how we’re different and because the people we elect constantly remind us how we’re different. 

You have said that we are living in a culture of outrage. What’s driving this culture?

This is not a news flash, but I think our media are driving the culture of outrage. In my book, I write about a Hidden Brain podcast episode that I was listening to. A woman was talking about how she had seen a video of a Native American gentleman who was being taunted by these young White kids on the mall in Washington, DC. And she tweeted out a comment that was something like, “White supremacy on display again, this is horrible what they’re doing to this poor indigenous man.” And she got a lot of likes and that made her feel good.

But then her son brought to her attention, “Hey mom, I don’t think you’ve seen the full video.” And as it turns out, when she saw the unedited version, there was much more backstory. These kids had been taunted by another group, I think it was the Black Israelites, and they had been harassed, and the Native American man was trying to break it up, and they lashed out at him for getting involved. Anyway, the point was that the initial video was totally taken out of context. And the woman in the interview instantly felt ashamed. But when she tried to post this on social media to explain what really happened, people weren’t welcoming. Actually, the response was more along the lines of, “How dare you give comfort to the enemy? Why are you backing down? Why are you giving racists an excuse to be racist by giving some insight on the context of this encounter?” 

All of that is an example of the culture of outrage. Not only are we compelled tribally to support outrage, but when we even attempt to bring ourselves back from outrage, we’re discouraged from doing it. Others won’t let us retreat. Nowadays, we can express ourselves any way we want on social media. And if we’re wrong, like this woman in Hidden Brain was wrong in her assessment, there’s no cost. There’s no penalty. I think that’s a big reason why the culture of outrage has flourished.

Let’s talk a little bit about race, which has always been a fault line in American society. I recently saw some polling data from Gallup that showed, for many years, fairly stable and positive views among both Black and White survey respondents about the quality of race relations in the United States. And then it just goes off a cliff around 2015. Today, the majority of both Black and White Americans have a negative view of race relations. 

I don’t think the timing is coincidental. That was literally the year before Donald Trump was elected. And I think anyone paying attention to that presidential campaign could see that Donald Trump, rightly or wrongly, was being labeled a White supremacist and a racist. Which is somewhat ironic since, as far as I’ve seen, most of Donald Trump’s racist comments were directed towards immigrants. His comments really weren’t directed towards Black people, but it was Black people who expressed the greatest outrage.

Trump tapped into a sense of historical outrage stemming back to the legacy of slavery. That’s a wound that we as Black people have had for centuries that has never truly healed, for obvious reasons. During those years when it seemed like race relations were progressing, the wound was healing, but like with any wound, it doesn’t take much to make it bleed again. I think that’s what happened in 2015—there were very opportunistic parties that started scratching at that wound. And it didn’t take long for blood to flow.

I don’t think rage is confined to White rural America. My perception is that rage is spilling over into White suburban rage, White urban rage, Black urban rage. It's a general rage.

As a member of Gen X, I was part of the first generation that reaped the benefits of integration. I didn’t go to school accompanied by the National Guard like people in my mother’s generation. I was able to mingle with my White peers, other students. I studied beside them, and it felt organic to us. There was still racism that I experienced, but it was nothing like what my parents experienced. 

I think we do ourselves a disservice when we continue to remind Black people that we’re still struggling with systemic racism and that America is inherently racist. Black Americans in 2024 have really made profound strides since 1964 when the Civil Rights Movement was in full swing. We are not where we need to be, but we are getting closer. I think the pitfall that people often succumb to these days is that we’re not appreciating our progress. We’re focusing on our failures.

Speaking of generational divides, you wrote in Quillette that there is a generational schism in terms of how people think about diversity. What are the Millennials and the Gen Zers getting wrong and what are they getting right when it comes to diversity?

The Millennials, and Gen Z as well, have not only come to take integration for granted, but I think they also have also embraced a very distorted form of diversity. As a Gen Xer, I was raised in a climate in which diversity wasn’t just race and sex and gender. It also contemplated class. It also contemplated political perspective and geographic diversity. All of these were forms of diversity that contributed to, particularly on campuses, a very textured way of looking at people as individuals and interacting with them and learning from each other.

I think what’s different today is that Gen Y and Gen Z seem to view diversity through a very narrow lens of race, gender, sex, and maybe ableism. But they seem to be completely disregarding some equally important aspects of diversity. And I personally believe that class is probably the most important issue today in America. I think it even supersedes race. A lot of Black people are struggling not because of their race, but because of the class they were born into. But I’m Black. I’m living in a state that’s mostly White, and my standard of living is higher than the average White person in Montana. And that’s solely based on my education and class.

Even if we got rid of racism overnight, even if tomorrow every one of us woke up and we were the same color and we couldn’t distinguish between each other physically, we would still have an enormous problem in this country relating to class. There are generations of people who have been cut out of the American dream because they lack access to education and decent-paying jobs. Their families are being torn apart by drug addiction. That’s something that we don’t talk about nearly as much as we should. The fentanyl crisis is affecting White families more than Black families. And again, not wealthy White families. It’s mostly middle-class and working-class families. 

Gen Ys and Gen Zs are focused on the power and oppression model. The error, in my opinion, is that people are projecting this power and oppression model onto other groups of people who are also being oppressed. I think that’s one of the big blind spots that the younger generation has now. They have a lot of legitimate anger towards the condition of society, but I think it’s misdirected. Class is the elephant in the room. That’s the kind of diversity that I think needs far more attention right now.

Have you seen the book White Rural Rage? It basically argues that rural White people are a unique threat to American democracy. I’m wondering how much evidence of that rage you see as you go about your life in Montana? 

I do see White rural rage. But to be clear, that rage is against the machine, not against Black people. I almost fall prey to that rage myself sometimes. It’s rage against the inequities in the system. 

The source of White rural rage is class. It is becoming increasingly apparent to anyone who’s paying attention that elite and corporate interests have dominated our government and are dominating our economy. 

A true commitment to free speech must encompass the people you don't agree with. The greatest danger I see is that the “DEI” branding threatens to undermine all diversity. And diversity is the lifeblood of this country.

I actually think that rural White people were some of the first to pick up on what’s happening because they were affected sooner than anyone else. For example, upper middle class White-collar workers didn’t see the effects that NAFTA had on working- and middle-class Americans. They weren’t working in factories, they weren’t doing work with their hands. They weren’t farmers. But White people in rural America—they felt those effects immediately. Their lifestyles changed. They took a huge drop down in socioeconomic status. 

But I don’t think rage is confined to White rural America. My perception is that rage is spilling over into White suburban rage, White urban rage, Black urban rage. It’s a general rage. Every day I meet more Black people who are just as outraged by inflation, who are just as outraged by the endless wars, who are just as outraged by our pharmaceutical industry. These people are waking up and they’re angry. So yeah, I would say that I’ve seen White rural rage, but there’s no way I would confine it to that environment. It is much broader.

I want to talk a little bit about the Gaza protests on campus. What kind of long-term impact do you think they will have? On the one hand, I think that they have been incredibly divisive. On the other, I think that they have actually upset the apple cart in some interesting ways—for example, encouraging some people on the left who had previously been supportive of the idea of aggressively policing speech to see the value of free speech protections. 

Among people who are free speech purists like myself, I think there’s some concern that this new tolerance of free speech may be opportunistic and driven more by convenience than out of a sincere belief in the principles of freedom of expression. I question how people on college campuses can on October 6th insist that speech must be restricted—or compelled, in many ways, in terms of people being compelled to use pronouns in class—and then on October 7th, you do a 180 and you completely embrace free speech.

I think that a true commitment to free speech must encompass the people you don’t agree with. And I think the jury is still out as to whether the kids on campus now who are supporting free speech are doing it only because it benefits them. I think we have yet to see whether that commitment will last once the Gaza protests are over. I have my doubts. 

In a similar vein, I wanted to ask about Donald Trump, who I think is a uniquely divisive figure. On the other hand, the current polling data suggests that Trump is going to outperform any Republican candidate in a long time with Black voters, and perhaps with other minority groups as well. So I think it is possible to make the case that Trump, in a weird way, is actually driving depolarization, at least in certain respects. 

Wow, I had never thought of it that way. But I think you’re right. I think what Trump may be doing, unwittingly even, is that he’s taking the White rural rage that fueled his election in 2016, and he’s expanding it. Weirdly enough, he’s making a lot of Americans, across the socioeconomic and political spectrum, aware of their common frustrations. I think that’s very threatening to powerful interests.

I didn’t vote for Donald Trump, I’m an independent, but there’s a part of me that wonders if the greatest opposition to Donald Trump is not because he’s sexist or racist or whatever else, but because he is one of the few candidates in modern history to actually focus on the most important issue in this country today, which is class. Now, Donald Trump doesn’t specifically call out class. I don’t think he’s articulate enough to even express that. But I think he’s paying attention to something that, unfortunately, I don’t think Joe Biden and the Democrats are really looking at. They just aren’t.

Lots of people are now saying that we need to scrap DEI. Just to put my cards on the table, it’s hard for me to imagine that we’re going to step away from the concept of diversity. That seems like a fundamental thing that we should want to hold on to. Is there a way to do DEI programming that makes sense and that doesn’t engender enormous backlash?

At FAIR, we believe the country was driving along with the car doing pretty well with a certain set of wheels. We took these wheels off and we put DEI wheels on. All we need to do is take these DEI wheels off and put on the wheels we had before. 

For the past twenty to thirty years, corporate America had diversity trainings. They weren’t DEI trainings—they were simply called diversity trainings. We were brought into rooms, and we were instructed, “All right, this is how you deal with someone who may come from a different ethnic background, from a religious background, someone who’s handicapped, someone who’s Republican. Someone who may have grown up in a super, super small town and doesn’t have the same values you do having grown up in New York. We all have to still work together, and we can do it.”

The old-school diversity training was more about bridge-building, whereas DEI seems more about wall-building. So I think we just need to get back to the kind of diversity initiatives that we once had. 

The greatest danger I see is that the DEI branding threatens to undermine all diversity. And diversity is the lifeblood of this country. I mean, we are a nation founded on immigration. We benefit from that immigration. It makes us, I think, the most special country in the world. I think it’s enabled so much innovation, culturally and technologically. It is our blessing and our curse. Because when you’re a heterogeneous country, it’s also hard to remember what you have in common.

"Equity,” in a vacuum, means justice and fairness. But the way it’s being construed now is a very distorted interpretation of equity that essentially means that in order for some people to have more, or in order for some people to succeed, others must be brought down.

But to your point, we can’t get rid of diversity. We at FAIR believe we simply need to return to a more authentic and holistic form of diversity and inclusion. The biggest problem that we at FAIR have with DEI is the equity component. I think “equity,” in a vacuum, means justice and fairness. But the way it’s being construed now is a very distorted interpretation of equity that essentially means that in order for some people to have more, or in order for some people to succeed, others must be brought down. It’s a sort of leveling, of bringing people down to the lowest common denominator. And it doesn’t allow for excellence. And it doesn’t reward the ambitious. And I think that those are part and parcel of the American experience.

So equity to me is antithetical to everything America stands for. There’s a reason that DEI isn’t called diversity, equality, and inclusion. Equality is what we at FAIR support—equality of opportunity. We are not guaranteed success. Life is not guaranteed to be fair. And our government can’t guarantee that it will be fair in all respects. The only thing that we can and should be assured of is equal treatment and equal opportunity. So we support diversity, we support equality, we support inclusion, but not DEI in its current form.

FAIR is a fairly new organization that has already been through some ups and downs. How is FAIR doing, and what role do you see it playing going forward?

I became executive director of the Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism last October. The reason I was attracted to this organization is that it’s nonpartisan, and it’s dedicated to protecting and defending civil liberties on multiple fronts through legal channels.

We’re similar to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, but where FIRE protects the First Amendment, we protect the first and the Fourteenth Amendments, that’s free speech and equal protection. So that’s the niche that FAIR fills. I like to say we’re what the ACLU was intended to be, and once was, but no longer is. Our mission at FAIR is helping people understand and appreciate our common culture, interests, and values as Americans. 

I think that FAIR’s future is bright because there’s a real need for the work we’re doing around depolarization and advancing and defending civil liberties when they’re under fire. I think realizing that we are all human, and that our biggest challenges are ones that affect all of us, is the key to moving forward and to reversing a lot of the damage that’s been done in this country.

This is part of a series of interviews  by Greg Berman, Distinguished Fellow of Practice at The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation,  entitled “The Polarization Project.”  

Berman is co-editor of Vital City, an urban policy journal, and co-author of Gradual: The Case for Incremental Change in a Radical Age. In 2022, Berman led At the Crossroads, a series of interviews for HFG.org assessing the causes and solutions of rising crime in NYC after the pandemic.

This interview also appears in The Fulcrum through a copublishing agreement.

Previous interviews from The Polarization Project:
The Polarization Project September 16, 2024

‘A Diffused Climate of Threats and Intimidation’: A Conversation with Daniel Stid

By Greg Berman

Daniel Stid
Daniel Stid

The problem of polarization has been on Daniel Stid’s mind for a while.  

Trained as a political scientist, Stid has spent time working in government (as a staffer for Congressman Dick Armey), business (at Boston Consulting Group), and the nonprofit sector (at the Bridgespan Group). But Stid is perhaps best known for founding and leading the Hewlett Foundation’s US Democracy program. From 2013–22, Stid helped give away $180 million in grants to combat polarization and shore up American democracy. Since leaving Hewlett, Stid has created a new organization, Lyceum Labs, and launched a blog, The Art of Association, where he writes frequently about civil society and American politics.

In all of these settings, Stid has argued for taking an expansive view of American democracy. According to Stid, “Democracy is the means through which we resolve our political disputes and determine what government does. But to reduce democracy to politics … is to see only part of it. Such a truncation ignores the extent to which democracy in America is ultimately grounded in and supported by our civic culture.”

The strength of American civic culture was the subject of this conversation between Stid and Greg Berman, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation distinguished fellow of practice. Has there been a hollowing out of American civil society? What role have foundations and nonprofits played in fueling polarization? Are we heading toward a new civil war? These are just a few of the topics covered in the following conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity. 

You are a few years removed from your time at Hewlett. I’m wondering how you reflect on your experience there. It seems like you were ahead of the curve in identifying polarization as a threat to US democracy. But in all candor, I can’t honestly say that I think things are better today than they were in 2013, when you started.  

Fair enough. My term at Hewlett, from 2013 to 2022, was certainly not the best days for democracy in America. My overall assessment is that we were rowing the boat and making some headway, but a strong tide was pulling us out to sea.

I think both Larry Kramer, who was the foundation’s president, and I had a realistic conception of how our system of government is meant to work. Elections bring forth new majorities and new leaders. There’s always a lot of hollering and horse-trading, but new policies are eventually produced that are responses, in aggregate, to the problems facing the country. 

The problem was much deeper than we supposed. It was less about polarization amongst our political elites and more about a growing body of activated citizens on the poles who were picking up cues from elites.

When we started in 2013, we felt that that process had broken down and that, until that was fixed, the problems our country was facing were not going to be solved. I think that was a fair assessment. I think we were early to spot the problem. And yet, we still failed to size it up properly and appropriately. We said at the time we were starting that if we didn’t get this process back on track, in twenty or thirty years time, the country would be encountering very strong headwinds. We were off by an order of magnitude because it was only two or three years later that the country was really reckoning with those headwinds.

Did your thinking change in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s election in 2016?

I think there were three things in particular that we did not understand initially. In the fall of 2013, when we were starting, Tea Partiers like Ted Cruz had shut the government down for three or four weeks to try to get President Obama to defund Obamacare. That was the hyper-partisan, ideologically framed conflict that made us say, “This is the problem: the bipartisan space for policymaking has really completely eroded.”

Very early on, we decided to pressure test our strategy. We got a lot of good feedback. One thing we learned was that the problem was much deeper than we supposed. It was less about polarization amongst our political elites and more about a growing body of activated citizens on the poles who were picking up cues from elites. 

This was quite obvious on the right, but over time, it became clear that this pattern was happening on the left, too. I think the Trump phenomenon, the populist phenomenon, is clearly something that doesn’t, at present, have an analog on the left, but the partisan antipathy and feelings of disrespect and contempt clearly exist on both sides. We realized that we were thinking about things too narrowly and too rationally. So the first learning was: the problem of polarization is much more complicated and based in psychology and irrational impulses than we originally suspected.

I think the second thing that I came to understand—and in fairness, Larry Kramer might disagree with this—was that polarization was not just an American problem. Initially I thought this was an exceptionally American challenge, but as we came into 2016, and we were looking at this in a comparative perspective, we saw Brexit in the UK, the National Front in France, the reaction to the influx of immigrants and the rise of the [far-right] AfD [party] in Germany. … Very similar strains of populist thought were emerging. It had different expressions in different places, but a range of things, including globalization and immigration, were generating a populist backlash.

This was less of an American problem and more something that post-industrial democracies in a lot of places, at least in North America and Europe, were grappling with.

At the same time, we were not seeing reasonable responses from the center-left. There’s been a hollowing out. There’s a great Irish political scientist, Peter Mair, who wrote a book called Ruling the Void, which is really looking at what happens in liberal democracies when political parties and intermediating structures like unions and churches are hollowed out. I think that’s a pattern that we’ve seen in lots of places. So the second learning was that this was less of an exceptionally American problem and more something that post-industrial democracies in a lot of places, at least in North America and Europe, were grappling with. 

And the third learning for me was that, over time, I became increasingly skeptical about what I would call “if only” solutions, which are things like nonpartisan redistricting, or open primaries, or campaign finance reform, or proportional representation, or citizens’ assemblies. There was this sense in the field that if only we could impose those kinds of solutions systematically, then somehow the problem of polarization would be solved. By 2015, I was really deeply skeptical of this idea, primarily because of the sheer challenge of trying to do implementation on a state-by-state basis. The idea that there would be some kind of a big national bill to do this never struck me as practical.

At some point, you said that the goal of your grant program at Hewlett was to improve public perceptions of Congress. In retrospect, was that the right goal? Do you feel like you made progress toward that goal?

In retrospect, that goal was too narrow. I think that modest and limited goal was what we started off with, but we had basically moved on from it by 2017. 

Philanthropy has changed pretty profoundly, at least in the democracy and civic life space, since Trump came down the escalator ... More and more funders now see themselves as having effectively taken a side, whether it's resisting Donald Trump or supporting efforts to combat the administrative state.

When we started, public approval of Congress was below 10 percent. Unlike executive approval, congressional approval almost never rises above 50 percent. But if you look at the periods of time when American government was working best, you see approval ratings fluctuating between 35 and 50 percent. And so that seemed like a reasonable bellwether to us. 

One thing that’s worth noting is that we wanted to go out of our way to establish that we were doing this on a nonpartisan basis in a field where there’s a lot of frankly partisan actors. And so we, I think, erred on the side of having a goal that was more about the process than about specific policy outcomes. But we got feedback early on that said, “This seems like pretty thin gruel. Are you aiming high enough?”

When we started, I don’t think we felt the need to articulate that the program wasn’t just about getting Congress working better again. It was about restoring the importance of pluralism, the rule of law, free and fair elections, and all of that. After the election of 2016, we realized those were the things that were now at stake, and we tried to articulate more clearly the goals we were trying to achieve.

Since you left Hewlett, you have offered some targeted criticisms of philanthropy. Walk me through how you think philanthropy could improve.

I think philanthropy has changed pretty profoundly, at least in the democracy and civic life space, since Trump came down the escalator. To quickly sketch out the context, when we first started funding in 2013, there was roughly a billion dollars a year going to support democracy, more or less. This year, there is likely to be upwards of three billion. 

The other big change is that philanthropy is really politicized. Several funders in the center that were, like Hewlett, intentionally and openly prepared to work with people across the political spectrum, have exited. A number of funders that had been in the center-left have moved sharply to the left. And some funders on the right, after Trump came on the scene, have broken further to the right. More and more funders now see themselves as having effectively taken a side, whether it’s resisting Donald Trump or supporting efforts to combat the administrative state.  

Whatever the political framing is, the foundations are increasingly joined to the party coalitions. I think that is a huge problem. Much of what people call “strengthening democracy,” particularly on the left, is really just an effort to support the Democratic Party and its candidates. Not that people in philanthropy are breaking the law, but they aren’t really serving the spirit of it in terms of the ban on electioneering.

Even before Trump came on the scene, there was generally a boom-and-bust cycle to philanthropy in this area. You tend to see a lot more giving to democracy in an election year. There’s far less long-term funding. Organizations working on longer-run change efforts that aren’t trying to impact the next election have a harder time attracting funding. That’s a shame because I think philanthropy is really bad at shifting near-term political outcomes, but it is uniquely positioned to shape longer-run developments and ideas.

In a similar vein, you’ve also been a gentle critic of the nonprofit sector. My sense is that belief polarization is a problem at a lot of nonprofits. Does that jibe with your experience?

It’s a huge, huge problem. Belief polarization within organizations that leads to these organizations being less effective in pursuing their professed goals is a much bigger problem on the left than the right, mainly for sociological reasons. The people at foundations and NGOs are almost always overeducated. They spend a lot of time marinating in hermetically sealed environments.  

I was really struck by the story you told in your book about Darren Walker and the backlash after he said that New York City should build decentralized jails to replace Rikers Island. I think that kind of thing is happening below the surface at a whole bunch of organizations. And not just at the Ford Foundation, but also at more mainstream or even nonpartisan organizations, especially related to questions of race and racial equity. 

I think one of the reasons for our current political impasse is this phenomenon of the “shadow parties” that Ruy Teixeira and John Judis have put their finger on. I think this is a phenomenon on both the left and the right. You’ve got these networks of media, NGO activists, foundations, think tankers, and policy wonks that are effectively pulling both parties out to the hyper-partisan poles, and making it harder for them to get back to the middle ground where they can start winning over the median voter.

If we're listening to people who disagree with us, then we're almost certainly going to be better allies and a safer harbor for the people who may not be a hundred percent on board with us, but are closer to us than those who disagree with us.

I think philanthropy is particularly implicated in this phenomenon. The different entities that comprise these shadow parties are all underwritten by philanthropy. Philanthropy isn’t just one among several participants, they’re bankrolling most of the elements of the so-called shadow parties. 

There’s an argument that maybe nonprofits don’t need to worry about being too radical, that their job is to move the Overton window. 

The one thing I would say to a nonprofit or philanthropic or civil society intermediary about why we should be concerned about polarization is that if we’re trying to realize our vision of a good society, we are going to need ultimately not just a narrow majority, but a sustained Madisonian majority for that. And we’re much more likely to be able to build up to that if we cast the widest possible net for potential allies. And the way we can ensure we’re casting the widest possible net is to be listening to people who disagree with us. Because if we’re listening to people who disagree with us, then we’re almost certainly going to be better allies and a safer harbor for the people who may not be a hundred percent on board with us, but are closer to us than those who disagree with us.

We’re in an election year, which brings with it all sorts of passions. As you look to the remainder of this year, how worried are you about the potential for political violence in the US?

For actual physical shooting, rioting, beating people up? I’m less worried about that, and I think there actually has been some progress.

I remain skeptical about the "next civil war" hypothesis. I think that is something that is very convenient for conflict entrepreneurs on the left and on the right to invoke.

If I can back up, this is another area where my thinking has really evolved. As it happens, a couple of grantees that we were supporting at Hewlett, in particular Rachel Kleinfeld at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, started flagging that there were things afoot in the US that would seem to be empowering groups disposed to violence. This was like 2017, 2018, 2019. At a couple of different junctures, Rachel had sent me some of the early things she was writing on political violence, and my thinking was, “I’m not quite sure this is a huge issue, but if you think it is …” In retrospect, of course, it was a huge issue, and thank God someone had been thinking and doing work around that before 2020. 

I remain skeptical about the “next civil war” hypothesis. I think that is something that is very convenient for conflict entrepreneurs on the left and on the right to invoke. Certainly when you have someone like Donald Trump and the forces that he’s encouraging in the mix, that always brings a whiff of violence. But in terms of malicious people challenging the election results, I think there’s actually a massive deterrent effect occurring. Seemingly every day, there’s two or three more people from Iowa or Idaho or Mississippi or California or New Hampshire going to jail because of what they did on January 6th. I think that sort of thing sends a strong signal. Now, obviously, if Trump is re-elected and proceeds to systematically pardon and free all of those people, that is definitely a mixed message. But at least for now, I’m not expecting to see a large group of people rallying to challenge the 2020 election.

I may be less alarmed about the immediate physical threats of violence and civil war, but more alarmed about the diffusion of a political setting in which people feel at liberty to make death threats and undermine everyone’s sense of security, not least the people in elected office.

To me though, the issue is more that there is a diffused climate of threats and intimidation. I’ve been talking with a lot of state and local elected officials across the country, and these are really public-spirited people, from both parties. And it’s something all of them are encountering in new and more intense ways. It’s often associated with online vitriol—the death threats and the intimidation. And in some cases people have had to have enhanced security. I think it bears more heavily on women. It bears more heavily on people who are different, whether it’s racial minorities or those with a different sexual orientation. It bears more heavily on them, but I think it is really throughout the system. 

Have you ever read The Field of Blood by Joanne Freeman? She’s a historian at Yale and she looks at Congress in the run-up to the Civil War. It’s a really powerful book, and one of her main points is that there were these outbreaks of violence. In the most famous instance, a senator was nearly caned to death on the Senate floor. But what really comes through in the book is that violence was part of the subtext of everything. People would be walking past colleagues who everyone knew had knives under their coats. That kind of intimidation within legislative bodies is corrosive. And I think, over time, thanks to the online world, that kind of thing is now much more diffused. … I guess what I’m trying to say is I may be less alarmed about the immediate physical threats of violence and civil war, but more alarmed about the diffusion of a political setting in which people feel at liberty to make death threats and undermine everyone’s sense of security, not least the people in elected office.

How closely are you following what’s going on on campus now and the reaction to the war in Gaza?

I follow it. I’ve gotten to know the people at FIRE and Heterodox Academy and others, like Eboo Patel and Interfaith America, that are working to try and open up dialogue in higher ed. It should be possible to say that the attack on October 7th was an outrage and at the same time be able to say that the humanitarian crisis visited upon the Palestinian people, both by Hamas and by Israel’s response to Hamas, is also an outrage. But there doesn’t seem to be, in my mind, a lot of nuance on campus. I think the threats and the extent to which people are actively shutting down or endeavoring to intimidate groups on campus feel like a naked form of illiberalism.

Much of what has happened at Harvard, where you got your PhD, has played out over social media. My instinct is that social media has helped to drive division, but I haven’t been able to find good research that supports this idea.

I got on Twitter around 2010, and I left it for reasons I won’t bore you with here, but my mental health and physical health and everything else dramatically improved. 

The more that we can try to solve this problem away from the thunderdome of national politics, the more I think we can make headway. I think the solutions to polarization are likely to be found in Ingham County, Michigan, or Paducah, Kentucky, or Fresno, California.

There are scholars who have shown that rates of polarization tend to be much higher among older Americans, who are the least likely to be online. And so my view is that what social media does is serve as the glue that holds together the partisan media outrage complex. I think the signals that are emanating from other parts of that complex, whether it’s television or friend networks and the like, is what does the damage. I don’t think social media is driving the underlying distrust. I think the Twitter thing in particular is an elite phenomenon. The vast majority of Americans aren’t on Twitter. Twitter is the way that elites speak to each other in dumbed-down ways. But the cues that elites send to their followers can do a lot of damage. 

What’s giving you hope? Where are the sparks of light for you these days?

I actually think all over the country, you’re seeing the emergence of locally situated, community-based activity. Often it isn’t described as democracy or bridge-building or depolarization, but it is just healthy communal activity. The more that we can try to solve this problem away from the thunderdome of national politics, the more I think we can make headway. I think the solutions to polarization are likely to be found in Ingham County, Michigan, or Paducah, Kentucky, or Fresno, California.  

So that’s where I’m really focusing my time and energy now—on trying to lift up those solutions. That’s also why I’m focusing on political leaders at the local and state level. Because I think there’s many more impressive and encouraging stories at that level than if you’re sitting around talking with members of Congress, who are so beleaguered and worn out. 

I think you’re also seeing the emergence of a handful of philanthropic initiatives that are focused explicitly on tackling longer-run challenges in a scrupulously nonpartisan or nonpolitical way. There’s the New Pluralists collaborative, which is really focusing on the underlying culture and community dimensions of our democracy and our civic life. The Trust for Civic Life is focused on trying to strengthen civic life in small town and rural America. The Trusted Elections Fund is an effort to bolster the mechanisms of elections, not so much for this year, but to provide longer-run support for strengthening elections over time. Those I would see as notably countervailing efforts to what is in general, I think, an increasingly polarized and politicized philanthropic field.

This is part of a series of interviews  by Greg Berman, Distinguished Fellow of Practice at The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation,  entitled “The Polarization Project.”  

Berman is co-editor of Vital City, an urban policy journal, and co-author of Gradual: The Case for Incremental Change in a Radical Age. In 2022, Berman led At the Crossroads, a series of interviews for HFG.org assessing the causes and solutions of rising crime in NYC after the pandemic.

This interview also appears in The Fulcrum through a copublishing agreement.

Previous interviews from The Polarization Project:
The Polarization Project September 9, 2024

‘A Healthy Democracy Requires Social Trust’: A Conversation with Ilana Redstone

By Greg Berman

Ilana Redstone photo
Ilana Redstone

Ilana Redstone has launched a personal campaign against certainty. A professor of sociology at the University of Illinois, and a former co-director of The Mill Institute, Redstone believes that certainty is the accelerant that has helped to fuel the culture wars and political polarization in the United States. “The power of certainty is easy to underestimate,” she writes. “And when it comes to both aspiring and established democracies, that underestimation can be downright dangerous. Certainty makes it possible to kill in the name of righteousness, to tear down in the name of virtue, and to demonize and dismiss people who simply disagree.”

In recent years, Redstone has sought to advance the idea of nuanced thinking and principled disagreement by becoming a prominent public intellectual, publishing frequently in mainstream media outlets like the Washington Post and in intellectual journals like Quilette and Persuasion. She is a vocal critic of the lack of viewpoint diversity in the media and higher education. 

Redstone spoke with Greg Berman, the distinguished fellow of practice at The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, about the decline in social trust in the United States, the importance of trying to understand your political opponents, and the tension between advancing free speech and protecting vulnerable groups. The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

How did you get here? Why have you chosen to spend so much of your time thinking about the challenges of communicating across ideological divides?

I was a Peace Corps volunteer in the late nineties in Togo. I think it’s probably safe to say, for most people, that being in the Peace Corps raises questions of moral and ethical complexity. It forced me to ask myself, “Am I propping up a corrupt government? Am I fostering a dependency mentality?” So I have always been interested in moral and ethical complexity and in political discourse.

I got a joint degree in demography and sociology from Penn. And for a long time, my work focused on immigration in a very dry, narrow, academic sense. I was a quantitative researcher. I analyzed data and wrote academic papers that nobody really read. I didn’t have a public-facing side to my work at all. 

But seven to eight years ago, I started noticing that there were a lot of conversations, both on my own campus and in other places, around issues of race, identity, ethnicity, gender, etc. To be honest, I felt like everybody had received a memo that I just didn’t get. It felt like all kinds of assumptions were being made that no one ever said out loud—assumptions about the causes of inequality or assumptions about how we think about identity or whatever. And so over time, I just started paying more and more attention to these assumptions and found they related back to my interest in moral and ethical complexity. 

Talk to me a little about your decision to become public-facing. Do you think of yourself as a culture warrior? What’s your relationship to the culture wars?

I really hope that nobody thinks of me as a culture warrior. I don’t feel that way at all. Most of the time, I don’t think I’m in the business of changing people’s minds about anything. I don’t care what your position on abortion or affirmative action or whatever is. I just don’t care. But I do care if you can have a conversation with somebody who disagrees with you. 

There's an argument to be made that one of the biggest threats to democracy is calling the other side an existential threat to democracy.

I don’t like smugness or snarkiness. And I think those are the kinds of things that in the culture war space get you a lot of attention. I’ve never been interested in talking with people who want to scream about wokeness. I try to be very careful and precise and thoughtful in my work. I can’t control what people will do with my work. But I try to model a spirit of questioning and curiosity about the world. I take that pretty seriously.

You have a book coming out called The Certainty Trap. What is the certainty trap? 

Concerns about free speech, self-censorship, lack of viewpoint diversity, academic freedom, civil discourse … all of these things to me are downstream consequences of a fundamental problem in how we think. The problem is certainty and the contempt with which we view people who disagree with us. In order to be morally outraged, you have to be certain of something. There has to be some value, principle or belief that you’re holding onto. 

Avoiding the certainty trap means really making an intellectual commitment to the idea that there are no ideas, principles, beliefs, or claims that are exempt from questioning, criticism, or challenge. Nothing. Nothing gets a free pass. It also means that there are no ideas that are off the table. Nothing. There is nothing that is off the table. And so you want to talk about why you think the Holocaust didn’t happen? Okay, let’s do it. Let’s dig in.

After the violence in Christchurch, New Zealand, you wrote a piece saying that celebrating viewpoint diversity doesn’t mean that we have to tolerate extremist hate. 

I haven’t gone back and read that piece, so I don’t know whether I would word it a little bit differently today, but I still stand by it. I believe all lives have equal moral value. Period. That’s a bedrock principle for me. When that principle is violated, when someone shoots a bunch of people, it isn’t hard to call that out. 

But isn’t part of the problem that what constitutes extremist hate turns out to be in the eye of the beholder? Aren’t there trade-offs between promoting free speech and combatting hate?

We can’t have a world where there is a diversity of viewpoints, pluralism, and communication across differences, and also have a world where nobody gets offended or upset by what somebody says. At the end of the day, you have to pick one. Because there is always going to be a tension between the two. What I say to students is: If what you’re trying to do is to make sure that no member of any marginalized group ever feels offended, or that their existence is never challenged, that’s fine, but just know that you can’t also have a culture of free expression. You just can’t. 

As we move toward the culmination of the presidential election, are you worried about the potential for political violence?

Of course I worry about it. A lot of the way that the 2024 election is being framed, perhaps unsurprisingly, is that this election is about protecting democracy, that Donald Trump and his MAGA supporters are an existential threat to democracy. I understand the thinking behind that. I get it. It’s trying to make people aware that the stakes are really high. At the same time, I do think there’s an argument to be made that one of the biggest threats to democracy is calling the other side an existential threat to democracy.

Human beings have two ways to resolve conflict: words and violence.

I think that there’s a distinction to be made between Trump and the people who would vote for him. I don’t think we should assume that because they support Trump that they don’t care about democracy. Any time we make assumptions about our opponent’s intent, it’s bad news. At the end of the day, when all the dust settles, when the inauguration is done in 2025, we all have to live together. 

Human beings have two ways to resolve conflict: words and violence. Part of what a healthy democracy requires is social trust. Because you’re not going to get what you want all of the time. In a democracy, sometimes the other side wins. We can disagree vehemently about abortion, gun control, immigration policy, whatever, but we need to be able to live with that disagreement.

It’s not just the job of the people who disagree with me to prove to me that they’re trustworthy. It’s also partly my job to come up with, as best I can, a version of their argument that makes sense to me and that is not rooted in hate, resentment, stupidity, ignorance. 

I try to teach this to my students. I’m in the sociology department. Most of my students, not all, but most, tend to be very progressive. In class a couple of weeks ago, we spent a lot of time talking about J.K. Rowling’s tweets that some people thought were transphobic. I asked my students to come up with a story about J.K. Rowling’s tweets where they were not rooted in hate, resentment, or ignorance. I didn’t ask them to believe it. I just asked them to come up with a plausible story. Once you do that, you have to acknowledge that there is a version of the world where somebody can hold that view and not be coming from a place of hate. We can’t be certain about our adversary’s motives. That’s something that we can all learn to do. If we care about reducing political polarization, strengthening democracy, etc., it is a skill we can all learn to develop.

What do you mean when you use the expression “political polarization”? I find that the phrase means different things to different people.

I do think it is important to try to be precise. What I mean by it specifically is how we view one another. Do I believe that the people who disagree with me are hateful, stupid, immoral, etc.? That’s what I mean by political polarization.

Thankfully, at this point, the actual incidence of political violence in this country is still pretty minimal. But it does feel to me like we have an increase in threats of violence, which I think can warp our public discourse. I’m wondering how you would characterize the state of the intellectual climate at the moment.

I think it’s a mess. I think one of the things that we’ve seen since October 7th, particularly within higher education, is a complete inability to navigate the conflict in the Middle East. I think it has been a spectacular own goal. Everybody was totally unprepared for this conflict, which is the mother lode of controversial topics. In my view, we did this to ourselves, which is really frustrating. Because nobody wants to touch this problem. 

The fallacy of equal knowledge ... is the idea that if only you knew what I knew, then we would agree.

What do you mean when you say “this problem”? What’s the problem?

The problem of how we communicate with one another. The problem of certainty. To go back to something that I said earlier, there’s going to always be a tension between wanting to not offend people and wanting to make space for a diversity of viewpoints. 

It seems like October 7th, or more accurately, the reaction to October 7th, revealed a schism on the left in this country. A lot of my Jewish friends in particular were really surprised by the unwillingness to condemn Hamas in some quarters. I’m wondering whether October 7th has had any impact on your thinking?

For me, with October 7th, I was horrified, in the same way that I think most serious people were. But I wouldn’t say that the reaction surprised me. In some ways, maybe, it surprised me that it surprised people. These are the rules of the game. This is how we set it up. It’s all about identity. Since October 7th, I’ve done workshops with Palestinian and Israeli students who will both say that they feel like they’re being silenced. How did we get here? How is that a good place to be?

In Tablet a few years ago, you wrote that many DEI training programs are based on a dangerous combination of “coercive measures and misplaced confidence in our knowledge.” Has anything changed in the way you think about DEI programs since you wrote that piece?

It’s not that I think diversity is bad. I like diversity. But what I would say about DEI programming is that there are certain assumptions underneath it. One is about identity—that we can, and should, think about who we are primarily along the lines of race, ethnicity, gender, gender expression, sexual orientation, etc., and that we can lean into these identities basically as much as we want and there’s no downside. I think that’s a debatable assumption, but we never even bother having that conversation.

In The Certainty Trap book, I write about the fallacy of equal knowledge. This is the idea that if only you knew what I knew, we would agree. And so I’m just going to give you information, and then we’ll be on the same page. It doesn’t work that way because people vary along all of these other dimensions, including moral values and the way that they interpret their experiences and find meaning in their lives.

DEI training and anti-racism training often fall into this trap. I actually think there are ways to take the best of what DEI training is trying to do and leave the ideological stuff behind. 

Not long ago, you wrote a piece for The Hill that expressed some skepticism about the idea of bringing partisans together for conversation across their differences. So if that’s not the answer, what is? How do we get out of the certainty trap? 

The whole idea of we’re going to take a red person and a blue person and put them in the same room … I don’t mean to throw shade on that. I think it’s important work. I think it has value. My concerns with it are twofold, really. One is scalability. In a country of 330 million people, I don’t know how many dyads and focus groups you can convene. There’s a scalability question. 

The goal is not agreement. The goal is to figure out how to live with disagreement.

If I’m blue and you’re red, and we sit together and we have a conversation, and, at the end of that conversation, you’re like, “Oh, she’s not such a snowflake.” And I’m like, “Oh, he’s not such a racist.” That’s obviously a good thing, but it’s not totally clear to me whether that then generalizes to the next red person that I meet. Maybe it does, but it’s not immediately obvious to me that it does.

So the question of what to do … first of all, I would just say there’s no easy solution. We got ourselves into this mess. There’s no magic wand to solve it. But I think we need to change the way we think about education. We have to get people to understand that if you care about the health of our political discourse, you can’t then say the conversation is over when someone feels offended. You can’t hang an argument on an assumption about someone else’s intent. You have to be precise in your thinking. 

How successful do you think you’ve been with imparting these ideas to your Gen Z students? 

My experience in general is that they are very open. Whatever degree of success I have had is because I’m not trying to convince them of anything. I’m not making political arguments. The goal is not agreement. The goal is to figure out how to live with disagreement.

________________________________________
This is part of a series of interviews  by Greg Berman, Distinguished Fellow of Practice at The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation,  entitled “The Polarization Project.”  

Berman is co-editor of Vital City, an urban policy journal, and co-author of Gradual: The Case for Incremental Change in a Radical Age. In 2022, Berman led At the Crossroads, a series of interviews for HFG.org assessing the causes and solutions of rising crime in NYC after the pandemic.

This interview also appears in The Fulcrum through a copublishing agreement.

Previous interviews from The Polarization Project:
The Polarization Project September 3, 2024

‘Democracy Is Something We Have to Fight For’: A Conversation with Suzette Brooks Masters

By Greg Berman

Suzette Brooks Masters
Suzette Brooks Masters

Is polarization in the United States laying the groundwork for political violence? It is not a simple question to answer. Affective polarization—the tendency of partisans to hate those who hold opposing political views—does seem to be growing in the United States. But as a recent report from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace makes clear, “many European countries show affective polarization at about the same level as that of the United States, but their democracies are not suffering as much, suggesting that something about the US political system, media, campaigns, or social fabric is allowing Americans’ level of emotional polarization to be particularly harmful to US democracy.”

Suzette Brooks Masters is someone whose job it is to think about threats to American democracy. The leader of the Better Futures Project at the Democracy Funders Network, Masters recently spent months studying innovations in resilient democracy from around the world. The resulting report, Imagining Better Futures for American Democracy, argues that one way to help protect American democracy from “authoritarian disruption” is to engage in a process of “reimagining our governance model for the future.”

Masters recently sat down with Greg Berman, a distinguished fellow of practice at The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, to talk about polarization, ideological conformity in the nonprofit sector, and the lessons she learned from two decades in immigration philanthropy. The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

What is the democracy movement?

Broadly speaking, I would say the democracy movement is civic engagement folks, bridge-builders, social cohesion folks, electoral reform and integrity folks. And then there are the democracy innovation folks—people who are experimenting with different ways of doing things using technology, citizens’ assemblies, and different forms of deliberation. And then there are the people who are thinking about what should democracy look like if you were starting from scratch? And there’s a whole other group worrying about political violence and what happens should we take a fascist turn. But I think the biggest chunk of what people call the democracy movement is actually election-related. The bulk of the money and effort and energy is being spent around how to make elections better and how to bring in voters. 

How do you think about your place within the democracy movement? How did you come to be a part of it?

2016 was a huge wake up call for so many people, myself included. I’d been working on immigration policy for 20 years, and I was taken aback by the way the issue was weaponized in 2016. This led me to do a lot of soul searching. How did our movement, the pro-immigrant movement, not see the possibility of a backlash? How did we not see that the push for more and more people coming to this country would activate a portion of the electorate that feels under threat and that in turn wants to take draconian action as a result of that? I think there were a lot of people, like me, who were working relentlessly on a single issue and didn’t necessarily connect the dots to the larger system. 

Ideological extremism has captured our political conversation and undermined the institutions that are the bulwark of our system.

Starting in 2016, I started to feel like we were taking democracy for granted and that, actually, it’s something we have to fight for. 

What I spend most of my time on now is trying to look into the future. There’s a very tiny part of the pro-democracy movement that’s actually trying to think about what comes next and focusing much more on having a long-term vision than on what’s going to happen in the next election.

The reason that I moved in that direction is that I felt that the pro-democracy movement was often in a reactive mode, just trying to hold our ground against these threats all around us. And I thought, well, that is just not very inspiring. Starting from such a negative premise doesn’t tell you where you’re going. We need to be generative, not just reactive. 

You wrote a piece on Medium in honor of the 100th birthday of your dad, who was a World War II vet. You said that if he were alive, he would be dismayed at the state of America. I realize you aren’t the president, but give me your sense of the state of our union at the moment. 

I think that ideological extremism has captured our political conversation and, in the process, it has undermined the institutions that are really the bulwark of our system. If you have read Peter Coleman’s stuff, you know that the more polarized you get—and the more you feel like the other side is an existential threat—the more you’re willing to take extreme measures to justify saving the country from the enemy. In that specific article, I think I was really worried about the growing authoritarian threat and the fact that a lot of people, on both sides of the aisle, are willing to take extreme measures.

I wouldn't be surprised if, after our election, regardless of who wins, people take to the streets because they feel like the election was stolen.

Now, I’m more worried about the threats on the right than on the left. The extreme right is way more organized than the extreme left. But I wouldn’t be surprised if, after our election, regardless of who wins, people take to the streets because they feel like the election was stolen.

I buy the argument that we have a rise in affective polarization, but I have to say I’m somewhat skeptical of the notion that the US is polarized ideologically. My read is that there is still agreement across a pretty broad political spectrum on a host of issues, including hot button issues like immigration, gun control, and abortion. But I think that somehow there’s a disconnect between where the American public is and where our politics are.

I completely agree with you. The ideological polarization I was talking about is among the people in a position to take action on the public’s behalf. I think our politicians are ideologically divided. 

The middle has really eroded among legislators. It used to be the case that politicians could operate with some independence. In the past, they’d break with their party sometimes, they’d vote with the other side sometimes. It is harder and harder to break with your tribe these days. 

This has always been the conundrum on immigration. We’ve had roughly 70 percent of the public supporting immigration reform for twenty years, but that has never translated into policy. We have not had substantive progress on immigration at the federal level since 1996. So you are absolutely right, there’s a disconnect between the public and political elites.

I think the tribalism and ideological discipline you talk about is real. On the other hand, it also feels like the tribes may be shifting at the moment. If you trust the polling, there are indications that Donald Trump and the Republicans are picking up support in the Black community and the Hispanic community. And in the aftermath of the October 7th Hamas attack on Israel, you’ve also seen a fracturing on the left. So I guess it seems to me like two things are happening simultaneously: positions are hardening and things are massively in flux at the same time. 

I really believe that a lot of what we’re seeing today might be the signs of a paradigm that’s on its way out. I think it has become clear that the old system isn’t working anymore. We’re not solving the problems we need to solve. We feel very divided, and our politicians don’t represent us and aren’t moving the ball forward.

But we haven’t figured out what the new paradigm is. Some people have said that we’re in the process of hospicing the old and midwifing the new. So there are a lot of contradictory signals. 

We’ve been mostly talking about democracy, but I also worry about the future of liberalism, not in a left-right sense, but in terms of values like due process, pluralism, and free speech. My sense is that these values are under siege at the moment. When you talk about moving beyond an old paradigm, I’m worried that might include jettisoning liberal values that I care about and think are worth preserving.

Well, I think there are lots of different potential futures. I think what you’re talking about is an outgrowth of tribalism and the use of social media and the fact that there’s been a flattening of diverse opinions. And I think it’s most notable on the left because progressives have often made room for a wide range of views. That’s changed recently. I think there is an increasing orthodoxy in the nonprofit world and in philanthropy these days.

And what’s your analysis of why that’s happened?

I think so many of us in the nonprofit and philanthropy world have already pre-decided what is right and what is wrong. I think you need to have curiosity and humility about what you’re trying to achieve and how you’re trying to achieve it. You need to be questioning yourself all the time and stress testing your ideas with others who don’t share your politics.

There is a lot of anxiety around all of the change that's happening around us and the fact that we don't have a shared sense of reality anymore.

The immigration movement is a perfect case in point. The reason things I think happened the way they did is because there was so much groupthink and there became this obsession with undocumented immigration. It became almost a dirty word to actually talk about legal immigration, even though that was how the vast majority of people came to this country. You would think that those people didn’t even exist. A very lefty movement ended up capturing philanthropy and it then became the dominant way that people were funding in the immigration space.

Pause there for a second. How did philanthropy get “captured,” to use your vocabulary? 

Well, I think a few things happened. First of all, there was a huge shift to focusing on what people call “directly affected populations.” In philanthropy, there was a huge move to hire people from the movement or who had identities that were somehow more authentic and more legitimate. There was a lot of pressure on the leadership of philanthropy to prioritize their hiring into program officer jobs. I think that urge came from a good place. We should have directly affected people in those roles. But I think that was also the beginning of the orthodoxy. 

What started happening was that, if you weren’t a directly affected person, then the message was that basically you cannot have an opinion or that your opinion is inferior to the opinion of a directly affected person. Only certain people with a certain identity had the right to speak about certain issues. And I think that’s where you get the threats to liberalism, the threats to diversity of opinion. And I think it’s really bad.

Do you think things have gotten any better of late within philanthropy and the nonprofit sector, or do you think it’s still in a bad place?

I definitely think it’s in a bad place. I think the Israel-Hamas War is roiling all sorts of institutions. I don’t think we’re out of the woods at all. And I think the media is having a field day talking about it. It is a really juicy topic to tear down these elite institutions and expose their fault lines and their fissures. 

You expressed a lot of this in an op-ed you wrote for the Chronicle of Philanthropy entitled “Philanthropy Needs to Own Up to Its Role in Fueling Polarization.” What was the reaction to that piece among your peers in the foundation world? 

I expected to get a huge amount of backlash from people in the immigrant rights movement because I was critiquing the groupthink and the fact that they weren’t really grappling with what the rest of the world thought about this issue. They were being really tunnel-visioned. I was so nervous when that piece was published because I was in that movement for twenty years, and I thought I was going to get a lot of flak. But the feedback never came. So either nobody cares or they just didn’t think it was worth their while to engage on this. 

Research suggests that deep canvassing reduces affective polarization among both the canvassed and the canvassers.

Do you think depolarization is possible at this point? What would that look like? How would that happen? 

I don’t think there’s any silver bullet, and I haven’t seen a single thing that works at scale. Almost everything that works has to be done either person-to-person or in a small group context. I really do believe in social contact theory. A one-time, brief encounter is not going to have a lasting impact. Going to a potluck and meeting an immigrant doesn’t make you love an immigrant. Democrats and Republicans having dinner together once—I don’t think that’s going to have a lasting impact. I think there’s a lot of self-selection that goes on with those kinds of events. The kinds of people that are willing to participate are probably not the target audience you actually need to reach. So I find a lot of the interventions flawed, but I do believe that there are some things that work. 

What’s an example?

I think deep canvassing is a strategy that is worth investing in. You should take a look at the New Conversation Initiative. They are very progressive, but they have empathy for all people. What I love about their approach is that they haven’t written off 50 percent of the country. Unlike a lot of progressive organizations, they’re asking, “Why aren’t these people with us?” They proceed from the standpoint that we’re not going to have a viable country and a viable democratic experiment if we have to write off 50 percent of our neighbors. I really respect them for being progressive, but being willing to say that everyone is a human being. Everyone deserves to be heard. A lot of people are pissed off because they don’t feel they’re being heard. 

Deep canvassing has had some really good results. Crucially, there is research that suggests that it reduces affective polarization among both the canvassed and the canvassers. All of the canvassers are progressives. But they’re changed by the process.

I’m hoping that people will engage in this at greater scale, including nonprofits who would never want to spend time talking to people they don’t perceive as already being in their camp. I think deep canvassing can be this little wedge, helping us to be more open to points of view that we might not share and trying to understand where people are coming from and what shaped their views. Even if someone doesn’t agree with you on abortion or climate or whatever, they’re still people, and they deserve to be taken seriously as people.

What other kinds of organizations or ideas are giving you hope at the moment?

There are a lot of people that feel that we need to fix the way we practice democracy in this country because people feel so disconnected from their legislators and their electeds. What if we gave more voice to people to solve problems together? There’s been some interesting experiments with things like citizens’ assemblies and other forms of deliberative democracy that could also reduce polarization. Because when you work with a random selection of people where you live and then you deliberate over long periods of time, people tend to come to agreement on how to solve a problem. We just don’t have a lot of vehicles in the US where we have a chance to work through problems with our neighbors in a way that doesn’t lead to yelling and screaming. I don’t know about you, but all the town meetings I’ve ever been to have been incredibly unproductive. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

There is a lot of anxiety around all of the change that’s happening around us and the fact that we don’t have a shared sense of reality anymore. What our political elites haven’t done is to speak to this anxiety.

So some of the things that give me hope are interesting methods that people can use to improve meetings. There’s one I’m obsessed with coming out of Japan called Future Design, where you do these role plays to inhabit different generational points in time. It helps participants to think about thirty years out, sixty years out, and to wrestle with the question of what do you want life to be like for our children and our grandchildren? What they have found is that when people do that kind of intergenerational role play and then get together to make decisions, they’re making different kinds of decisions than they would’ve made otherwise. They’re more empathetic towards future generations. They’re more willing to sacrifice today so that others can have more in the future. 

Like deep canvassing, I think there’s something about Future Design that helps build empathy, that sends the message that we’re not that different, even if we have different political persuasions. But that’s not the message you’re getting from Congress these days.

And how much stock do you put into efforts to address partisan gerrymandering or change how we elect our representatives? Do you think that those are worth investing in?

Sure. But I think the problem with those kinds of structural reforms is that those are just tweaks to our existing system. They don’t actually create opportunities for the kind of new ideas that I was just telling you about. They would just change at the margin the composition of who’s holding office. It doesn’t change the direction or the momentum of how government should function. It’s all tinkering at the margin with the existing paradigm.

Is there a tension between the kind of futuristic ideas that you have been advancing, which call for pretty profound change, and your writing about immigration, where you say that the advocates didn’t reckon with how destabilizing change can be for a large segment of the population? How do you square both sides of your thinking?

The way I square it is by admitting that change is hard. I think there is a lot of anxiety around all of the change that’s happening around us and the fact that we don’t have a shared sense of reality anymore. What our political elites haven’t done is to speak to this anxiety. How do we navigate through this era where people have real questions about their sense of identity, their sense of self, their economic well-being, and whether they’re going to have a job in ten years? I have not heard a single elected official make a speech that acknowledges how anxiety-producing all of this is without weaponizing it, without making it about fear of the other. Maybe that would be a lousy speech, but honestly, if someone actually validated the fact that this is a super anxious time, I would really respect them for that. 

I think the algorithms are to blame. Once your preferences become clear, you just keep getting the same content. And if you don’t get a diversity of views on a topic, you’re going to just become indoctrinated in a particular viewpoint.

I think that’s what’s behind these bizarro numbers where our economy is supposedly thriving but everyone feels insecure. I think they don’t have the language or the tools to talk about this deep-seated anxiety they feel about all this existential change that’s going on around us. If you’re a White guy, all of a sudden it’s super bad to be a White guy. That’s a big change! Now women dominate colleges and universities. There are affirmative action programs that people don’t talk about for boys, because not enough boys can get into college anymore. How seismic is that? And that’s just one small example. 

I think the anxiety about change is what’s fueling a lot of the resentment and the grievance politics and the crazy groups on Reddit. We have to find a way to validate the upset and the sense of loss that people have. Just because you as a White person might feel a sense of loss, that doesn’t make you a White nationalist. The left will immediately say that if you care about your White identity, if you have pride in your White identity, you’re a White nationalist. Well, that’s not true. The more that Whites become a minority in this country, the more they will develop the attributes of a minority group and build identity around their minority status. That’s just a fact. 

What role do you think that social media plays in all this? My instinct is that social media has to be fueling some of this anxiety and some of this identitarianism, but I’m finding it hard to find research that actually documents that. 

I think the algorithms are to blame. Once your preferences become clear, you just keep getting the same content. And if you don’t get a diversity of views on a topic, you’re going to just become indoctrinated in a particular viewpoint. I can tell you that personally I feel so different when I look at social media and when I don’t look at social media. I was a huge Twitter follower, but I have not looked at Twitter in months. I could feel my blood pressure going up whenever I was on Twitter. It was designed to get me all emotional and all upset. It’s absolutely true that it does that. 

Before you left Twitter, you posted a little about your reaction to October 7th. What is your sense of the state of antisemitism in the US right now? 

I think what was shocking about the aftermath of October 7th was that it made it clear how pervasive antisemitism is. People were very happy to take Jewish money, to have Jewish board members, to have Jewish colleagues, as long as they were worrying about other people. But when Jews themselves were the victims, all of a sudden everything changed. Jewish victimhood was not put on the same level as the victimhood of other groups. And that was deeply painful for a lot of people.

My friend Eric Ward has been very active with progressive organizations explaining that they need to be fighting antisemitism as much as anything else. It’s an uphill fight because Jews have what he calls “conditional Whiteness.” Are Jews a minority group that faces bigotry? Are Jews people of privilege who can move freely in White circles? I think what’s happened post-October 7th is that conditional Whiteness has been placed front and center. 

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This is part of a series of interviews  by Greg Berman, Distinguished Fellow of Practice at The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation,  entitled “The Polarization Project.”  

Berman is co-editor of Vital City, an urban policy journal, and co-author of Gradual: The Case for Incremental Change in a Radical Age. In 2022, Berman led At the Crossroads, a series of interviews for HFG.org assessing the causes and solutions of rising crime in NYC after the pandemic.

This interview also appears in The Fulcrum through a copublishing agreement.

Previous interviews from The Polarization Project:
The Polarization Project August 26, 2024

‘A Truly Pluralistic Society Has Both Inclusion and Dissent’: A Conversation with Ben Klutsey

By Greg Berman

Ben Klutsey
Ben Klutsey

The documentary film UNDIVIDE US brings together Americans from across the political spectrum for conversations about abortion, immigration, guns, and other controversial issues. According to Ben Klutsey, who helped facilitate the conversations, “Participants came in expecting shouting matches, but they ended up exchanging phone numbers and wanting to stay connected because they found each other to be incredibly interesting. People are not as polarized as we think they are when we look at our screens and social media.”

This could also serve as a mission statement for Klutsey, who directs the program on pluralism and civil exchange at the Mercatus Center, a libertarian research center housed at George Mason University. At Mercatus, Klutsey is attempting to build a community of students and scholars who can exchange ideas and coexist with one another peacefully despite their political differences. Klutsey also regularly interviews leading thinkers about liberalism for the online journal Discourse.

Greg Berman, the distinguished fellow of practice at the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, spoke with Klutsey about what he’s learned from these conversations, the reaction to the war in Gaza on American campuses, and the corrosive effects of threats of political violence. This transcript has been edited for length and clarity. 

I think you are the first person I’ve ever met who has the word “pluralism” in their job title. I’m wondering what pluralism means to you and Mercatus.

At Mercatus, we love ideas. And what we were starting to see three or four years ago was an environment where it was more and more difficult for people to contest ideas and engage in open inquiry. And because ideas are our bread and butter, we decided to think a lot about the state of polarization right now and whether there’s anything that we as an organization that cares about a free and open society can do to help cultivate the habits for civil discourse. The question that we try to ask fundamentally with the program on pluralism and civil exchange is: How can we live together? How can we coexist when there are deep divides and differences? 

The American people aren't that polarized—it's more of an elite phenomenon that you see when you look at places like Congress.

In terms of what pluralism means to me personally, I’ve learned a lot from John Inazu’s book, Confident Pluralism. John would say that there are two key features of pluralism. One is inclusion, and that as a society becomes more and more morally enlightened, we begin to include more people who have been previously marginalized. Think about the women’s suffrage movement. Think about civil rights. Think about the changes we’ve seen in terms of people with disabilities. Over the decades, we’ve worked to include more and more people in our society. That’s important. 

But John Inazu also highlights another important feature of pluralism, which is dissent.

In a pluralistic society, people need the space to be able to dissent from orthodoxies, to form their own associations that diverge from what others might think. And so a truly pluralistic society is a society that has both inclusion and dissent.

As I dig into the topic, I find that a lot of people are talking about polarization these days, but I don’t think everyone is necessarily talking about the same thing. You have various different types of polarization—ideological, educational, political, affective, elite, etc. It is difficult to solve a problem if you can’t diagnose it properly. So I guess my question is: Do we have a polarization problem in the US at the moment? And if so, what kind of polarization should we be worried about?

I recently had a conversation with Rachel Kleinfeld, who’s at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, that got me thinking a lot about this. You’re right that there are different kinds of polarization. There’s political polarization, which measures the ideological distance between the parties. I think in terms of political polarization, you’ll see that the American people aren’t that polarized—it’s more of an elite phenomenon that you see when you look at places like Congress. 

But I think affective polarization is a big, big, big challenge right now. Our views on the issues haven’t changed that much over the past several decades. If anything, we’ve moved a little bit closer to each other. But the way we feel about each other has changed over time.

And that is driven by all kinds of things, including social media and the way that Congress functions. So we feel worse about each other.

We are overestimating how extreme the other side is. And that helps to fuel the perception that the other side is a threat and that their views are dangerous to your existence.

The funny thing is that these perceptions are often mistaken. There’s some really interesting research where they ask Democrats, “Do you think that Republicans would say it’s okay for the COVID vaccine to be released several weeks before the 2020 election if they knew that it was going to help Donald Trump?” And they’ll ask Democrats to guess where they think Republicans will be on this. And the numbers are off the chart. They say that 80–90 percent would approve of this. And then they ask Republicans the same question, and the majority of Republicans don’t think it’s a good idea to release it then, even if it’s going to help Donald Trump. 

And then they ask Republicans, “Hey, what do the Democrats think about immigration?” And they estimate that 90 percent want full open borders. But when you ask Democrats, they’ll say, “No, we think that there should be comprehensive structural reforms and there should be some restrictions.” So what Democrats actually think is much more nuanced. 

I think the challenge is that we are overestimating how extreme the other side is. And that helps to fuel the perception that the other side is a threat and that their views are dangerous to your existence. And that makes it difficult for us to solve problems together.

The other problem that Rachel identifies is what she calls pernicious polarization. We have political incentives and structures that drive us towards polarization. In our electoral system, you have relatively small numbers of Americans who participate in the primary process. Only the most energized and exercised about issues come out to vote. And these are the folks who tend to be a bit more polarized. And so they’re picking candidates that are more extreme. And given gerrymandering, in lots of places, winning the primary basically means you are going to win the election. So we end up with politicians who are very polarized. 

And then you have the media environment where the incentives are to show the sensational and the outrageous. This gives people this impression that we are in an existential crisis. I think affective polarization is a problem, and it’s a problem because of these two things—the pernicious incentives that drive us towards polarized options.

I don’t know if you’ve seen the research coming out of the Polarization Research Lab, but it suggests very, very low levels of public support for political violence in this country. It is obviously a good thing that we don’t have political violence in the way we did in the sixties. But we need to be concerned not just about actual violence, but about threats of violence as well. Threats of violence, even if they are not carried out, can be corrosive to our civic culture. In that context, I wanted to ask you a little bit about the reactions to the war in Gaza. Some of the protests have drawn criticism for using rhetoric that some people have found intimidating or that seem to call for the destruction of Israel or violence against Jews. Are people right to be concerned about such things? At what point does legitimate protest tip over into something more dangerous?

I do think people ought to be concerned when there is rhetoric that might generate threats towards certain people. The First Amendment gives a lot of leeway for a lot of different kinds of speech. I think it’s important for us to maintain not just the legality, but also the culture around free speech. 

Young people who are energized around justice also need to think about other virtues. Justice must be balanced with mercy and with prudence and with toleration.

When I look at what’s happening around college campuses, I worry that there is a lot of binary thinking. There isn’t a lot of nuance. Young people who are energized around justice also need to think about other virtues. Justice must be balanced with mercy and with prudence and with toleration. 

I do wonder though whether a lot of this stuff that we are seeing is based primarily in elite institutions. I wonder how many colleges are going through these types of tests. The Ivy League schools are not representative of all institutions. I also wonder to what extent some of this has been a media phenomenon. That’s not to say it’s not a problem. My question is just whether we are thinking about it in the right proportions when we look at the general landscape.

Given what you said at the start about the importance of dissent to a healthy pluralistic society, how worried are you about the doxing we’ve seen on campus, where some students feel like they have to disguise themselves so they won’t become the targets of deliberate efforts to take away their jobs for saying there should be a ceasefire in Gaza?

Joshua Cherniss wrote a wonderful book called Liberalism in Dark Times. One of the things that he talks about is the challenge that ruthlessness poses for liberalism. When you see your opponent engaged in ruthless behavior, like doxing or canceling, there’s a certain temptation to respond with the same level, if not more, ruthlessness. But Cherniss says that’s a mistake. He believes that liberalism is a kind of disposition. It’s not just a set of ideas, but it’s also a certain kind of temperament as well.

I very much like Cherniss’s idea of “tempered liberalism.” I wish more people embraced it as an approach to the world. But it seems to me that it is very, very hard to spread this way of thinking.

Yeah, it’s hard. I think we need exemplars who are capable of teaching others how to adopt this kind of temperament. Ilana Redstone, a sociologist at the University of Illinois, teaches a course called Beyond Bigots and Snowflakes, where she tries to introduce students to Isaiah Berlin’s thinking about foxes and hedgehogs. I think we have to get to a place where we are training more young people to be foxes. There are many different ways to see the world. 

We are in a difficult time right now where we don't have leaders who are modeling this type of disposition. I'm hoping that it is a fever that will soon break. I think that there is a big role for leaders to inspire people towards their better angels, if you will.

It is also important to teach people that they could be wrong. As Jonathan Rauch talks about in this book, The Constitution of Knowledge, two of the most important features of a liberal society are fallibilism and empiricism. We always have to look at the results, collect information, to be able to have an accurate assessment of what’s going on on the ground. 

If we are going to spread the kind of liberalism we’re talking about here, it’s going to take educational institutions, it’s going to take families. These values have to be modeled. I think that we are in a difficult time right now where we don’t have leaders who are modeling this type of disposition. I’m hoping that it is a fever that will soon break. I think that there is a big role for leaders to inspire people towards their better angels, if you will.

When you spoke with Monica Harris, the executive director of the Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism, she talked about diversity, equity, and inclusion as something that sounded like it would help create a more tolerant society but that it is actually dividing us. Do you think DEI is pushing us closer to pluralism, further away from pluralism, or something in between?

I think it depends on how it’s done. I think when identity is based on phenotypical traits and things like that, I think it can become dangerous. But you can also have a kind of training that recognizes that we are all part of this amazing human race and that regardless of our subtle differences, we all have equal dignity. Which is why I always go back to liberalism. The idea that you have as much right to be here as I do, and on the basis of that, we give each other mutual respect … that is important. And I think that if DEI is highlighting these things, I think that it’s going to be great. But if it’s not doing that, then I think that it will create challenges and will further divide us long term. 

You talked to Seth Kaplan, the author of Fragile Neighborhoods, recently. Echoing Robert Putnam, he argues that there has been a decline in the kinds of local institutions that used to help us build relationships across differences and that when people are relationship-poor, they end up becoming too invested in politics. Does that ring true to you?

It does. People are looking for a sense of identity and meaning, and politics is increasingly where people are finding that. I find it fascinating that negative attitudes towards inter-party marriages are now much higher than interracial or interfaith marriages. It’s wild that politics is really taking a new kind of importance for a lot of people when it comes to identity. There is a real danger of overdoing it.

Berman: When you talked to Robert Talisse, who wrote Overdoing Democracy, he said: “We have to make space in our lives for cooperative activities in which politics plays no role whatsoever.” That really resonated with me. I find myself skeptical about the utility of bringing together political partisans to talk about the issues of the day. I don’t think it’s harmful, but I’m skeptical that that’s going to help solve the problem of polarization.

I think it depends on the way that it’s done. Mónica Guzmán, who I also interviewed, wrote a book called I Never Thought of It That Way. When the 2016 election happens, her county votes 76 percent for Hillary, and she and her friends are just completely shocked that the rest of the country would vote the other way. So she takes a bus, goes down to a different county in Oregon that had the opposite of what they experienced, where 76 percent of them voted for Donald Trump. And what she writes in the book is that it was an experience that she thought was incredibly meaningful. One of the guys in this rural county said it was the first time he felt seen—that folks from urban areas never really come out to talk to them. I think that if the types of conversations that we have are about curiosity and about seeing one another, rather than trying to win arguments and shame each other, I think it could get somewhere. But if it’s just a debate, with the blues on one side and the reds on another, that doesn’t do anything.

Talisse’s point is about people doing something together that has nothing to do with politics, where politics are irrelevant in that context. My challenge to him is that it is very hard to think of what that could be. Everything has politics to it these days. I mean, during the pandemic just going to the gym could be political because of all the positioning and the posturing around mask wearing. I’d like to believe that there are still things, whether it’s helping kids to read or helping senior citizens with chores, where it is possible to form the kinds of citizen friendships that Talisse talked about.

I’ve spent my entire life in the nonprofit sector, so I’m a big believer that nonprofits are a force for good in the world. Recently I’ve been seeing nonprofits take on a fair amount of criticism from people like Ruy Teixeira that they are part of the problem, that they are contributing to polarization because they have become too extreme. I’m wondering whether you’ve run across this critique and what you make of it?

I haven’t thought too much about that. If I had to guess, I’d say that nonprofits are going through a similar thing as other American institutions. In Congress, you have a dynamic where many politicians are more moderate than their staffers. So the staffers are nudging and pushing their leaders for more extreme positions. Whenever you are in a mission-oriented environment, where “justice” or “doing the right thing” is a motivating factor for people, you tend to have this challenge with proportionality. 

You always ask all of your guests whether they’re optimistic about the future. Where’s your optimism meter pointing these days?

At the Mercatus Center, we are trying to run a lot more Pluralist Labs. These involve bringing students from across the country together to have conversations where we ask them to engage in reflective listening. You have to assume the role of the other person when they’re sitting right next to you. I think that there are lots of students who are really interested in looking at the nuances of issues. They just need a bit more courage to stand up. I think America is at its best when people see a challenge and are trying to find the solutions to those challenges. Sometimes we may go through some fits and starts. But I think over time we will get this right. We’ll get this right.

This is part of a series of interviews  by Greg Berman, Distinguished Fellow of Practice at The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation,  entitled “The Polarization Project.”  

Berman is co-editor of Vital City, an urban policy journal, and co-author of Gradual: The Case for Incremental Change in a Radical Age. In 2022, Berman led At the Crossroads, a series of interviews for HFG.org assessing the causes and solutions of rising crime in NYC after the pandemic.

This interview also appears in The Fulcrum through a copublishing agreement.

Previous interviews from The Polarization Project:

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