“It’s Time to Be Very Afraid”: A Conversation with Peter Coleman

By Greg Berman

“I am very worried about political violence,” Columbia University professor Peter Coleman told C-SPAN in August of 2023. “You have such anger in the media—it increases the chances that people with weapons and rage are going to become violent.” 

Coleman is not the only American who feels this way, but he is one of the few who is devoting his career to combating the kind of toxic polarization that he believes is a precursor to political violence. 

A professor of psychology and education, Coleman has written dozens of scholarly articles, but he is increasingly focused on trying to make an impact beyond the ivory tower. His recent book, The Way Out: How to Overcome Toxic Polarization, distills lessons from the fields of conflict resolution and complexity science to provide readers with concrete tools for bridging difficult divides. Working with a group called Starts With Us, he has also helped to create the Polarization Detox Challenge, a series of exercises designed to help participants develop better relationships with people who do not share their political beliefs. 

Greg Berman, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation distinguished fellow of practice, sat down with Coleman before the current protests over the war in Gaza to talk about the root causes of American political polarization. How worried should we be that our political divisions will result in violence on the ground? Is it possible to change the dynamics that threaten our fragile union? Are there individuals and organizations currently working to bring warring parties together that we should be augmenting and expanding? 

The following transcript, which has been edited for length and clarity, covers these and other questions. 

In The Way Out, you write about the importance of destabilizing shocks as a precursor to hitting the reset button on a given conflict. Why wasn’t January 6th such a shock? 

Well, it’s always hard to know. Sometimes political shocks have delayed effects. The research on punctuated equilibrium suggests that society finds a balance and then stabilizes in that balance. There may be incremental changes at the margins, but these strong patterns will pretty much hold over time. It often takes major destabilizing events to move in a different direction. 

“There are peaceful societies around the world that have moved away from violence. In the vast majority of cases, there was some sort of destabilizing time that caused people to question their basic assumptions. And that can lead to significant change.”

We study societies, like Costa Rica, that were deeply divided, had civil wars and ethnic violence, and then at some point really just stopped and pivoted and took a different direction. There are peaceful societies around the world that moved away from violence. In the vast majority of cases, there was some sort of destabilizing time that really caused people to question their basic assumptions. And that can lead to significant change. What we see from international conflicts over a 200-year period is that something like 95 percent of protracted international conflicts end within ten years of some kind of political shock. 

COVID is an example of something that could have been a major political shock that would unite us. In my field, we have something called disaster diplomacy. This happens when there are ethnic groups that are fighting each other and then a tsunami comes and wipes out much of their community. When this happens, oftentimes, they will put down their arms and join together to help in the recovery.

COVID could have been such an opportunity for us. So could January 6th. And it still could. It depends upon what we do with these crises. 

Are there green shoots that you would point to that have come out of January 6th?

January 6th obviously was a historic moment. In the Washington Post, a colleague of mine, Amanda Ripley, wrote about a group called the Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress. Sometimes these kinds of committees are worthless and get nothing done. But this group, which was actually brought together before January 6th, has a mandate to try to change the culture of Congress to make it more functional and less antagonistic because it had gotten so out of hand. 

The co-chairs were Derek Kilmer, a Democrat from Washington, and William Timmons, a South Carolina Republican. When January 6th happened, they said, “All right, this isn’t business as usual. We really have to think about how to do this differently.” So they interviewed a bunch of experts—me,  Amanda Ripley, Adam Grant and others—to ask, “What do we do? How do we come out of this time in a more constructive way?” 

And through these interviews, they created a process that actually was a very effective process. They ended up making something like 205 recommendations to the leadership of Congress, and about two-thirds of them have been adopted. These were not major recommendations, but they were nudges to try to change the culture of Congress.

Let me give you one example. On day one of a new Congress, they will typically bring the freshmen in and they would put them on a red bus and a blue bus and send them off in different directions to strategize and have a war council. And so one of the recommendations of this committee was: Don’t do that. Let them spend more time together thinking about their responsibilities and learning who their colleagues are and how impressive everybody is. Let them have time together before you move into these warring camps. So they’ve implemented these recommendations. 

I’ve stayed in touch with Derek Kilmer, who’s the chair. I met him last summer, chairing a different bipartisan committee. The Select Committee has had an impact on the culture of Congress and has influenced other committees to see what is possible. 

I mean, some of these Congress people were barricaded in their offices for hours on January 6th and were texting their families goodbye. They had this extraordinary experience, all of them in different ways, which they then shared with one another, and that created a sense of trust and possibility that moved them in a very different direction. So I just use that story as an example of what can happen in key places like Congress, the epicenter of our division, when there is a recognition that more of the same is not the direction to go.

One of the points you make in your book is that there is value in taking a strengths-based approach to polarization, asking not just what’s going wrong, but what’s going right and identifying the forces that are helping to hold things together, however imperfectly.

I think you see that in a lot of places. I’ve been involved with a group that’s working with volunteer organizations across America—groups such as Habitat for Humanity, the International Rescue Committee, Mercy Corps, and the YMCA. These are all organizations that do dedicated service for the community. It’s a huge ecosystem of volunteerism across the country, which is part of the American way. And what this group has been doing for the last two years is looking carefully at how they do what they do, and asking if there are ways to bring red and blue America together to build a sense of connection and relationship across the divide. Habitat for Humanity is not going to change what they do because they’re very effective at building homes for the poor and local communities, but maybe as part of that work, they can think differently about how they bring people together.

“This is a highly armed, highly angry, frustrated society where a lot of the leaders are using divisive, hostile, violent discourse to blame the other side or to blame the institutions.”

There are groups, not just in voluntarism, but in popular media, in politics, in business, that have really taken January 6th seriously, as well as other destabilizing events like the murder of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement. What people can do in reaction to these kinds of crises is to really ask themselves, “All right, how do we change course, and what does that look like in my sphere of influence?” And we see that happening in various sectors across the country.

Going back to Congress, I think sometimes we overstate the gridlock and dysfunction in Washington. In a similar vein, I also worry that sometimes we overstate the extent of polarization in this country. There is certainly polling that suggests that we’re not actually that ideologically polarized and that there is fairly broad public agreement about a range of public policy issues. So I guess I’m trying to calibrate how anxious to be. I do think there is a real problem. But I also think that there’s a lot of hyperbole in the air and that there is the possibility for overreaction, too.

So my take on it is that we have to be able to hold two contradictory thoughts in our head at the same time. If you think about Congress, of course, there are mechanisms in Congress that are still functioning. And so it would be crazy to say that everything has stopped. 

But I will also say that I went to Congress this summer to meet with the bipartisan working group, the Problem Solvers Caucus. And at some point, I asked, “Do you have a sense of dread about the 2024 election?” And Derek Kilmer said to the rest of the group, “I currently have three restraining orders against people that have threatened me or my family. How about you all?” They all had different stories of fear for their lives and their family’s lives, except for one guy who said, “I just hire armed security to travel with me now.” And what that said to me is, this is different. They now dread town halls because it’s just vitriol and attack, and there’s no space for any kind of constructive airing of concerns and problem-solving. 

We know from looking at other societies that you can reach a tipping point where political violence becomes pervasive and very hard to get out of. These days, when societies tip into civil war, as Barbara Walter suggests, it’s more stochastic terrorism than it is armies in uniforms on a field. Terrorist groups seek to destabilize communities in order to increase anxiety and frustration and, ultimately, support for violence. And I think that that trend is here. So I’m highly concerned.

Look, we’re a country that has 440 million guns for 330 million people. This is a highly armed, highly angry, frustrated society where a lot of the leaders are using divisive, hostile, violent discourse to blame the other side or to blame the institutions. So I would say it’s time to be very afraid. 

I have to say one other piece of this. When I was at the Aspen Festival this summer, Eric Schmidt was there, and he and others were talking about the exponential growth of AI. And one of the things they said at the end was, “Oh, by the way, it used to be that only state-level actors could mount massive disinformation campaigns because they take so much effort and strategy and timing and resources. But now, on the dark web, what is available to hundreds of thousands of people is a platform that can help them launch their own disinformation campaign about whoever they want to.” We’re highly susceptible to the exponential increase of disinformation, not just from a dozen bad actors, but from perhaps hundreds of thousands of bad actors.

I think we are seeing the inclination towards violence increasing. Are we a hundred percent sure that we’re going to see a different level of violence? Absolutely not. You can’t say that with things that are stochastic. All you can say is the probabilities are changing in a way that should be very concerning to everybody.

Recently, Yascha Mounk released a book called The Identity Trap, that’s basically a liberal argument against the brand of left-wing politics that sometimes gets derided as wokeness. In a similar vein, you wrote a piece bemoaning the intellectual climate at your university. Why should we care that there’s a small but vocal minority of students and faculty members who are particularly idealistic and over-exuberant in advocating for social justice? Why does that matter?

What Columbia students have been saying for the past several years is that they feel like they can’t share their thoughts. They’re afraid of their peers. And I would say that as a faculty member, you have to be on your toes and be hypervigilant about what you do and don’t say, where you do and don’t go. And so it does shape and constrain and even pervert the discourse that’s happening at universities, which are supposed to be places where people are exposed to a variety of ideas and are able to learn.

“Societies that are good at mitigating intergroup political violence are societies with a lot of crosscutting structures. You want people across racial differences, ethnic differences, and political differences to live near each other and have daily mundane experiences with one another.”

I think it is having a chilling effect on the role that universities play in our society. Jonathan Haidt has written about this. Universities are more and more problematic and more and more divorced from the concerns and needs of real Americans. It does breed this kind of bubble elitism that is highly problematic. 

There are absolutely causes to stand up and protest for. But we don’t want to tip into civil war. A few months back, there was an editorial by a Princeton senior in the Times, and he was writing about becoming more radicalized as a conservative on Princeton’s campus because he felt his views were just never tolerated. The more intolerant that the left becomes on college campuses and elsewhere, the more it perpetuates a similar extremism on the right. And that’s a dynamic that we really have to interrupt. We have to think carefully and strategically about how to do that. 

A lot of people seem to be drawn to a monocausal analysis of the polarization and the illiberalism that we are seeing in the US. Your book pushes back against that, pointing to literally dozens of factors that are driving our current political division. On the one hand, I’m drawn to this because it just feels more accurate than a simplistic take that points its finger at just one problem. On the other hand, I must confess that I found your rundown kind of exhausting. How could we ever hope to change the dynamics if they are so varied and complicated?

I think we tend to look for these essentialist answers—Trump is the problem or gerrymandering is the problem or the internet algorithms are the problem—because that’s sort of how we’re trained to think. Karl Popper, who is a philosopher of science, said that a lot of problems that we face are “clock problems.” These are mechanical problems that can be fixed if you identify one or two things that aren’t working. And that’s oftentimes where scientists go and where policymakers go. 

“This sense of dread that many of us are feeling is mobilizing what was a kind of nascent ecosystem trying to mitigate violence and build bridges into a movement.”

What we often don’t understand is that sometimes constellations of different dynamics fuel each other in complex ways and create very strong patterns that resist change. These are [what Popper called] “cloud problems.” Addiction is a cloud problem because addiction to drugs is a biopsychosocial-structural problem. It’s in our biology, it’s in our neurology, it’s in our psychology, it’s in our relationships, it’s in our opportunity structures. It’s fed by all of those things.

And so we have to think about problems like political polarization as a qualitatively different kind of problem. It’s not going to lend itself to a simple fix. It’s a very hard mindset to change, I have to say.

Looking at some of the case studies from your book, I can easily imagine that bringing people together to talk in some sort of facilitated way can help resolve conflicts between neighbors and families, but I guess I have a harder time imagining how that adds up to change in a country of 330 million people spread over millions of square miles.

The good news is that this crisis that we’re in, this sense of dread that many of us are feeling, is mobilizing what was a kind of nascent ecosystem trying to mitigate violence and build bridges into a movement. There are thousands of groups that have sprung up. There’s a website called the Bridging Divides Initiative that comes out of Princeton where there’s a map of the country, and you can toggle onto any county or city and find places that are bringing people together in dialogue and joint action. 

There’s a group called the Listen First Project, and there’s the Bridging Movement Alignment Council. The Solutions Journalism group has been looking at complicating the narrative, trying to rethink how reporters do their reporting. It’s happening in every sector.

I totally agree with what you say, that bringing red and blue Americans together for dinner and a conversation for an hour and a half is insufficient. One of the reasons we created the Polarization Detox Challenge is because most of the bridge-building work doesn’t go beyond that. We created this challenge because it really does start with each of us taking our own responsibility for our relationships with the people we’re estranged from and kind of scaling up from there.

Societies that are good at mitigating intergroup political violence are societies with a lot of what we call crosscutting structures. You want people across racial differences, ethnic differences, and political differences to live near each other and have daily mundane experiences with one another. But as you know, we are moving in the opposite direction. Red and blue Americans are physically moving away from each other. That’s a recipe where political violence becomes more likely because if you don’t have relationships with people on the other side, it’s easy to assume the worst of them. It’s much harder to demonize your pick-up basketball friends. 

Echoing Robert Putnam, it does seem to me that we are living through the decline of American civic associations, including churches and other groups, that in the past brought crosscutting populations together. Given my skepticism about bringing people together to discuss their political differences, I wonder if a better approach is to strengthen this kind of infrastructure, so that Democrats and Republicans can work together on stuff that doesn’t have an explicit ideological dimension, like filling the potholes on their block.

I think this is exactly what I talked about earlier with this group of national volunteer organizations. These are groups that are building homes for the poor, helping people in emergency situations. They’re service-oriented organizations. That’s what they do. But what they’ve also been trying to do in the last couple of years is to think carefully about how they might help people have this cross-contact, have these relationships with people that are different from them. So these are not bridge-building, red-blue connection groups. These are groups that are going to continue to do what they do, but do it in a way that might help lessen this divide.

Listen, with complex cloud problems like this, there is no one best way. And so what Braver Angels does, for example, in bringing red and blue America together is great. It’s useful, it’s helpful. We need other things as well. And so this movement by the volunteer organizations … there are millions of people who are volunteering in this country because they find meaning in that. Thinking about how they can do that in a way that also mitigates polarization is just one of the very promising events that are happening right now.

Your book is mostly focused on interpersonal approaches to reducing toxic polarization. But there are other approaches out there. Some people are focused, for example, on changing social media algorithms. Others are trying to advance reforms to our political system, including gerrymandering and advancing ranked-choice voting. If you were giving advice to a major foundation, where would you tell them to spend their money?

I would push back a little bit on your framing that what I’m talking about is interpersonal. What I try to talk about in The Way Out is a set of scientific principles that scale. So, for example, in Botswana, I talk about the fact that when they reached independence, they were very concerned about the probability of ethnic war because Angola and Mozambique had just got independence, and they immediately broke into civil war. And so Botswana thought, “What do we do?”

One of the things that they did at a policy level was to basically mandate that all civil servants, which is like 45 percent of the workforce of the nation, move physically every seven years to a different part of the country, so that they can connect with other tribal areas. They believe that that policy, as inconvenient as it is for people who have to move every seven years, has been largely responsible for the fact that Botswana is one of the most prosperous and peaceful nations in Africa. So what I write about in The Way Out in terms of these kinds of principles are not just relevant to you and me and how we do what we do. They’re also relevant at the policy level. There are a lot of groups, like Convergence, that are doing good work at a broader level. 

I think foundations need to begin with an accurate sense of the problem, because the problem is vast. They should also have a sense of who is doing good work. I have had so many wealthy individuals come to me and say, “Okay, what we’re going to do is we’re going to start up a dialogue project in communities across the country bringing red and blues together.” And I’d say, “Yeah, that’s interesting. Are you aware of the fact that there are already 8,000 of those?” And they’d say, “Yeah, but we’re going to do it differently.” Well, what does that mean? 

So my strong recommendation to philanthropic organizations is, don’t reinvent the wheel. Identify groups that are having powerful impact in a particular sphere that you wish to influence, and focus on those. Focus on helping to scale those groups that are already doing good work. The Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress is an excellent example. They’re doing the impossible in Congress at the worst possible time. So identify those groups that are effective and support and encourage them.

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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.