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

By Greg Berman

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.