“The Problem Comes from the Top”: A Conversation with Yphtach Lelkes

By Greg Berman

On January 6, 2021, the threat of political violence in the United States became an issue of urgent national concern. America has long had political extremists who have advocated for violent struggle of one kind or another—the Weather Underground, Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and others. But the rioting on Capitol Hill seemed to suggest something else entirely—namely, that support for political violence had moved from the fringes and into the mainstream of American life.

According to Robert Pape of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats at the University of Chicago, more than half of the January 6th insurrectionists were white-collar workers—business owners, architects, doctors, and lawyers. “We need to really come to grips with the fact that what we saw on January 6th is not simply the usual bad apples acting out yet again,” Pape says.

What do Americans really think about political violence? How widespread is support for the use of force to achieve political goals? It is difficult to wrap your arms around these kinds of questions. Different polls suggest different answers. 

One of the researchers actively trying to come to grips with public support for political violence is Yphtach Lelkes, an associate professor of communication at the University of Pennsylvania and the co-director of the Polarization Research Lab. Among other projects, the Lab conducts a series of weekly polls designed to take the pulse of Americans on a range of topics, including political violence. 

Lelkes talked to Greg Berman, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation’s distinguished fellow of practice, about the relationship between political violence and polarization. This transcript of their conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

Berman: The Polarization Research Lab argues that polarization threatens democracy. Walk me through the argument. Why do you believe that’s the case?

Lelkes: Polarization can be defined in a few different ways, but let’s talk about it in terms of affective polarization, which is what we’ve mostly focused on at the Lab. Affective polarization is essentially antipathy towards the other side. This threatens democracy in a few ways. One, if you dislike or fear the other side, you are more likely to let your side get away with things it otherwise wouldn’t have. For instance, if someone on your side is corrupt or violates some democratic norm, you will let that slide because the alternative is that the other side gets in power, and the other side getting in power in your mind is a worse outcome than any bad behavior on your own side. So there’s an accountability issue. 

Another issue related to affective polarization is that you are more likely to elect extremists if you are polarized. And with extremism comes all sorts of dangerous policies that potentially abrogate the rights of other people. Also, if you are polarized, you’re engaging with information in ways that don’t live up to the requirements of democracy. We are supposed to consume information in an unbiased way and try to move towards some sort of semblance of reality and truth. When you’re polarized, you may selectively expose yourself to certain information and ignore other information. So the marketplace of ideas stops working when people are polarized. 

Morris Fiorina at Stanford argues that most Americans are not ideologically polarized and that the polarization problem is primarily among political elites. Do you think that analysis is wrong?

There are lots of different ways we can define polarization. He takes one definition, which is: Have people moved further to the extremes? Meaning that there’s more people lumped far left and far right. I think it is an empirical fact that that has not happened. People have not moved to the extremes. But that’s not the only way to define polarization, and it’s not necessarily clear to me that movement towards the extremes is the most dangerous form of polarization. At the Polarization Research Lab, we tend to define polarization in terms of affective polarization, which is partisans disliking one another a lot more. This moves the conversation from the policy realm to the psychological realm. And with that comes all sorts of outcomes that may be potentially worse in terms of how you treat others and who you elect.

Although Americans are affectively polarized, they are overwhelmingly democratic in terms of the policies they support and in their disavowal of violence.

If you follow Morris Fiorina, you’ve probably also run into Alan Abramowitz’s work. Abramowitz talks about the increasing alignment of party and ideology. So if you ask Abramowitz, partisan sorting is also polarization. And that is certainly happening. Democrats now hold consistently liberal positions, and Republicans hold consistently conservative positions. And that’s a problem because democracy relies on finding common ground and creating coalitions to pass bills. When there is a flattening of conflict, there’s no room for compromise. When everyone on your side believes one thing and everyone on the other side believes the other thing, you can no longer build coalitions, and democracy doesn’t work very well. 

Looking at the Polarization Research Lab’s weekly surveys, one finds very, very low levels of public support for political violence. You’re documenting 98 percent, 99 percent disapproval of assault and vandalism and murder. That seems like as good as one could hope to get. I mean, if I polled people on the question of whether ice cream was a delicious frozen treat, I’m not sure I’d get 99 percent approval of that. 

We don’t want to seem Pollyanna-ish, but in the polarization world, we are more on that end of the spectrum compared to researchers who have their hair on fire. We argue that although Americans are affectively polarized, they are overwhelmingly democratic in terms of the policies they support and in their disavowal of violence. We think that is generally a good news story. 

There's a huge disconnect between the support for January 6th among elites and the lack of support for violence among the mass public. This seems to indicate that the public is not serving as a check on political elites.

At the Polarization Research Lab, our mentality is essentially that the problem comes from the top. The fish rots from the head. The anti-democratic stuff we see emerging is coming from entrepreneurial elites who have some incentive in stoking this stuff. For example, there’s a huge disconnect between the support for January 6th among elites and the lack of support for violence among the mass public. This seems to indicate that the public is not serving as a check on political elites. That’s another polarization problem. Elites can currently push policies that they want to without fear of being punished in the election.

How do you conceive of the relationship between polarization and political violence? Aren’t there places that have pretty spirited partisanship but don’t feel like they’re on the brink of civil war?

Sure. I think the conventional wisdom in political science is that parties and partisanship are good. Right now, the state of America is that we have strong partisanship but weak parties. When parties are strong, they work as a filtering mechanism. They can vet candidates. They can move money around. They can organize coalitions.

Partisanship is not necessarily synonymous with violence. It may even be negatively correlated with violence—generally you find that the people who are the most politically engaged are also the ones who are least likely to support political violence.

In America, we have strong partisanship where people will always vote for their political party no matter what, yet there’s weak parties. This means candidates can do whatever they want to. An outside candidate like Donald Trump can come in and take over the party because there’s no mechanism in place to control the candidates. 

Partisanship is not necessarily synonymous with violence. It may even be negatively correlated with violence—generally you find that the people who are the most politically engaged, the strongest partisans, are also the ones who are least likely to support political violence. The people who tend to support political violence are anti-establishment people, people who are less engaged in politics, people who hate the other side more than they like their own side. 

It is hard to have this conversation without talking about Donald Trump. Some people say Trump is more a symptom than a cause. And other people say that Trump is a unique danger and is guilty of stochastic terrorism. Given what you’ve said about the importance of leadership, what role do you think Trump plays in our current polarization moment?

I think the groundwork for someone like Trump was laid many years ago. So he is a symptom, but he is also a cause in that he foments anti-democratic attitudes. People tend to follow political elites. Trump has made a bad situation worse. Candidates, especially on the right, saw Trump’s behavior, and they started mimicking it. Trump affected how people talk to one another. He affected the tone. He affected how Democrats and Republicans perceive each other. And he still dominates media coverage.

There is a narrative that says the Democrats are a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic coalition and the Republicans are the party of White America. But one of the things that has been confounding in recent months, to me at least, is the polling that suggests that there has been significant movement towards Trump among Black voters, Hispanic voters, and potentially Asian American voters, too. I’m wondering how you read that phenomenon.

I’m a little bit hesitant to read too much into new polling data because I haven’t been following it that much. I’m also a little bit skeptical. I’m not sure how much to read into it. I think the standard answer you’ll get from people is that the left has turned off certain voting blocs who hold more conservative positions on social issues. Hispanics, African Americans, and Asians to a certain degree are not completely in line with the progressive policy agenda. So to the extent that they are moving toward the Republicans, I would probably surmise that it is partially due to their perception of what the left’s policy agenda is.

You have looked into media bias in the past. What did you find when you tracked the politics of CNN, MSNBC and Fox over time?

The data we collected was from 2010 to 2020 or so. And what we see is what you would expect, where Fox News is to the right and MSNBC and CNN are to the left. Up until Trump, the trends tended to be fairly highly correlated, meaning that when Fox News moved to the right, CNN also moved to the right. So it seemed like the media was following the national mood.

When Trump got elected, we see this rapid polarization where the channels move into their camps. Fox News became far more right wing and CNN became far more left wing and MSNBC became far more left wing. They stopped really being correlated with one another. So the channels now seem less focused on maximizing their audience and more interested in appealing to a niche audience. 

We also find that there’s a lot of difference within the day’s programming. So in the morning and the afternoon, when you have hard news, you see that all the channels are fairly centrist. But in the evening during prime time, that’s when you get Tucker Carlson and Rachel Maddow and things become pretty left or right wing.

Talk to me about the role that you think social media plays in all of this. You’ve written that access to broadband increases consumption of partisan media and increases partisan hostility. More recently, Andy Guess at Princeton documented that reducing exposure to content shared by those who agree with you politically doesn’t change political attitudes. Intuitively, it seems to me like social media is a big part of the problem, but I’m having a hard time finding research that I find persuasive or conclusive about it.

I think it’s very much an open question. I’m not convinced that we are looking at it through the right lens. A lot of research these days is looking at changing individual pieces of content. I think that is a drop in the bucket. People consume a lot of information from all over the place. I’m not sure the ten minutes or twenty minutes a day they spend on Facebook will have a particularly substantial effect. 

I’m not sure we even have the methodology to think about social media as a giant system of information. You can tweak a button here and tweak a dial there, and it may or may not have an effect on the individual. But that seems a little bit too narrow to really capture the effect of social media per se. But what if we take people off of Twitter, Facebook, etc., and really change their information diet? Would we find an effect there? There is a recent study where they asked people to turn off Facebook. That decreased polarization.

I think that the information we see matters, but I’m not sure that changing individual pieces of information matters all that much. The people who are engaged on social media are not representative of the public. They tend to be the most extreme. The algorithms work by amplifying information that gets the most engagement, and negative, vitriolic content gets more engagement. So all of this produces, as Chris Bail calls it, a distorted prism into what other people think. And we rely on public opinion for our own opinions. On a lot of issues, we don’t know what position to hold, so we look at what everyone else is thinking to figure out our opinion.

We rely on this perceived opinion climate to gauge what other people think and that affects what we think. I think you see that clearly now with the Israel-Palestine stuff. If you talk to people who are very online, they’ll see the conversation on Twitter as being very firmly anti-Israel. But the truth is that the American public is generally quite pro-Israel. But if you talk to Jewish people who are very online, this perception that the world is very anti-Israel is really framing how they are thinking about their place in the world and their attitude towards the Democratic Party.

The University of Pennsylvania, where you teach, has been on the front lines of the American fallout from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. What’s your take on what’s been going on on campus in recent weeks?

I think my perspective is a little bit skewed. I’m on sabbatical now, so I don’t come to the campus that much. But there is an obvious disconnect between the story that is being told about UPenn being a place that is terrible for Jewish people and the reality, which is that it’s a very safe environment that has had sporadic incidents. The media is incentivized to talk about outlier events. So that means that we focus on some naive 19-year-old who says something inflammatory, rather than the fact that Penn remains a very quiet campus.

There’s clear splintering of the Democratic coalition on this issue right now which has some interesting potential implications for polarization. If we define polarization as the sorting of identities and ideology where the Democrats all hold liberal positions, that falls apart when Jewish people start looking around and saying, “Well, maybe I don’t identify as strongly with the Democratic Party because of how I perceive the Democratic base to think about Israel.” This might have downstream effects. A well-known finding in political science is essentially that when you adopt an identity, you then adopt the attitudes that go along with that identity. You saw this in the sixties when southern Democrats switched parties. They had been liberal economically, but after they joined the Republican Party, they started adopting more conservative positions. So there could be interesting feedback effects on sorting and ultimately polarization.

It would be ironic indeed if the Israel-Palestine conflict ended up reducing polarization in the United States.

To be honest, my sense is that Americans will probably stop caring about the issue pretty soon. Everyone switched their Facebook photo for Ukraine for a month and now you don’t hear anything about it.

In The Identity Trap, Yascha Mounk argues that in recent years, colleges have, instead of promoting universalist humanistic values, actively encouraged students to see the world in terms of simplistic binaries—oppressor/oppressed, settler/colonized, etc. Do you think that’s true?

This is something I don’t know too much about. The only thing I can really say is that the vast majority of academics are not working in that framework. We’re just trying to get students to understand basic science and basic math. I’m just trying to educate people about basic social science. I think that is very much the case for most social scientists. Most math professors just want their students to understand calculus. Most political science professors just want their students to understand how the American government works. So I don’t really have a good sense of what percentage of classes talk about the kinds of things that Yascha Mounk talks about. 

In a piece you wrote for The Hill last year, you said that the midterm election results made you hopeful. Are you still hopeful?

I think so, yeah. I don’t have that sense of lingering dread that the next election will be the last one. The reason we were hopeful in 2022 is that the election deniers overwhelmingly lost. There’s still enough independents out there that are turned off by the anti-democratic rhetoric and vitriol. And when politicians see that they don’t have people on their side to win, they will have to tone it down to win an election. I think that ultimately candidates are self-interested. They say stuff to get elected, that’s their goal. And if it doesn’t get them elected, then they won’t say it.

If the goal is to address affective polarization, support democracy, and reduce the chances of political violence, what kinds of investments should we be making in the days ahead? 

This is something we think about a lot in the Polarization Research Lab. Let me start by saying what I don’t think works very well, which are these exercises where you bring people into a room together to bridge differences. I think a lot of foundations are spending a lot of money on that right now. I think the problem with that stuff is that the effects are very short lasting. As soon as people hear Donald Trump again, they just revert to their prior positions. 

In my mind, what we focus on in the Polarization Lab is changing elite behavior. We are launching soon a tracker where we’ve ingested political rhetoric of basically all federal politicians, and we’re hoping to extend it to state-level politicians as well. Every social media post they make, every news release, every cable news appearance, we input that data, and then we categorize it in terms of: Is it talking about policy? Is it vitriolic? Is it working towards the good of the country? We’re not taking a political stance in terms of left versus right, but we’re saying that politicians should represent their constituents and think about policy. Our hope with this platform is that voters will use it to choose people who are helping, not hurting the system. We are also hoping that donors will use this platform and funnel money away from people who aren’t talking about policy.

The ultimate goal is to change elite behavior. I think polarization has occurred because of structural issues. And those structural issues can be things like getting attention on social media or things like how the electoral system works. And so I think the right solutions to polarization have to be focused on changing political elites because, like I said, things run off from the top. 

Are there particular structural reforms that people have mooted to the political system that you think have real potential to make a difference?

You have to balance what will work really well with what will actually ever happen. And so I think abolishing the electoral college, adopting proportional representation, I think those things would probably work. But I also think those things are probably not going to happen. I’m very skeptical of things like ranked-choice voting. The evidence just really isn’t there, but there’s a lot of money being poured into that. 

I think other things that are potentially doable include working with social media companies to not reward vitriol on their platforms. I think there are also possibilities in bringing people together, as long as it’s not a one-time thing and not just a neat experiment that some researcher wrote up for a journal. It needs to be a lasting thing. When people join a union, they become less polarized because they’re interacting with people with views all across the map. Ideas like mandatory civic service I think may work to make people more open-minded about others. 

On that theme, I am attracted to the idea, echoing Robert Putnam, that part of what we’re experiencing has been a gradual erosion of American civic organizations, unions, churches … the kinds of institutions that used to bring people together across class and ideological divides. Does that argument have any appeal to you?

It does seem appealing. We need cross-cutting experiences and we need exposure to cross-cutting information. Unfortunately, we don’t get a lot of cross-cutting exposure because of the increasing homogenization, ideologically speaking, of where we live and where we work. And social media and the Internet in general have contributed to this reality where we can avoid hearing from other voices. Or when we do hear other voices, as we do now on social media, the voices we hear tend to be the most insane ones. So I think there’s something inherently appealing about thinking about how we can reduce homogeneity and incentivize pluralism.

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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.

“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.

“We’re in the Danger Zone”: A Conversation with Caroline Mehl

By Greg Berman

College campuses are often depicted as “ivory towers,” purposefully set apart from the rest of the world so that students and faculty can pursue intellectual inquiry in an unfettered way. But of course, colleges are not immune to what happens in the world beyond their gates. This includes the problem of political polarization. 

Even before protests over the war in Gaza took place on many campuses during the last school year,  the Associated Press reported that many American colleges fear “a return to violent protests that roiled campuses in the 1970s,” and are “re-examining how to protect free speech while keeping students and employees safe in a time of political polarization.” A Chronicle of Higher Education article titled “Could Political Rhetoric Turn to Campus Violence?” grimly warns that “college leaders should be ready for protests, provocations, and lone attacks.”

As schools look to the start of classes in the fall, there are plenty of reasons to be concerned.   The temperature on college campuses seems to be rising to unhealthy levels.

How serious is the polarization problem on campus? Is it possible to turn down the volume at our colleges and universities and promote reasoned discussions about politics and other complicated topics? The Constructive Dialogue Institute was founded by Jonathan Haidt and Caroline Mehl in 2017 in an effort to address these questions. The Institute seeks to combat campus polarization by “equipping the next generation of Americans with the mindset and skill set to engage in dialogue across differences.”

Greg Berman, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation distinguished fellow of practice, sat down with Caroline Mehl to talk about how we can improve our civic culture. The following transcript of their conversation, which took place before the campus protests over the war in Gaza, has been edited for length and clarity. 

Your organization is predicated on the idea that there is a growing problem of polarization in our country. What makes you think that polarization is growing? How do you respond to people who would argue that things were worse in the 1960s or during the Civil War period? 

There are a lot of different data sources that are tracking different types of polarization, and most, if not all, of them have been pointing to the fact that polarization has been increasing over the last few decades. You can think about polarization in terms of the polarization of elites, like members of Congress, and you can also think about polarization of Americans, like the voters. There is clear data that, over the last few decades, polarization of members of Congress has been increasing, based on legislative voting patterns. More and more politicians are voting along party lines, and there isn’t as much cross-partisan support for policies as there used to be. 

The ideological polarization between Republicans and Democrats is at the highest point right now than it has been in many decades.

When you look at actual Americans, there has also been rising polarization among political partisans. The ideological polarization between Republicans and Democrats is at the highest point right now than it has been in many decades. Pew tracks what they refer to as “ideological consistency.” They find that more and more partisans will have the same views consistently across ten different political issues, as opposed to saying, “I lean this way on this issue and this way on that one.” So Republicans and Democrats will have consistent views on these ten issues, whereas in the past, there was a lot more heterogeneity across those different issues. 

The other major measure that we think about a lot is what’s known as affective polarization. So far, most of what I’ve been talking about is ideological polarization. Affective polarization looks at the feelings that people have towards the other side compared to their own side. The rates of affective polarization have more than doubled since the 1990s. 

So, there are all these different trends, and they’re all showing an increase in polarization. To the question of whether it’s not as bad as during the Civil War or the 1960s, I’d say that the fact that you’re even asking this question is a sign that we’re in the danger zone. Maybe we’re not at the level of hostility that we were leading up to the Civil War, but what’s happened over the last few decades is that there has been a sorting of ideological parties. In the past, there was more ideological diversity within the Republican and Democratic parties. Now there’s more ideological consistency within the parties. So we have these “stacked identities” that Ezra Klein and others have talked about, where people’s ethnicity, religion, and ideology are all now stacked upon each other, creating this mega identity that correlates with their political affiliation. People no longer say, “I’m a liberal Republican” or “I’m a conservative Democrat.” The more that happens, the more that people see others as a threat to their way of life.

I buy your analysis for those Americans who strongly identify as Democrats and Republicans. But in our most recent presidential election, which had the highest turnout in living memory, you still had roughly a third of Americans who didn’t vote. And many of those who did vote are so-called “low-information voters,” who don’t really identify with either the Democrats or Republicans. How do you think about those people? Are those people polarized as well? 

Part of what’s happening is that the extreme partisans on both sides are the ones who are becoming more extreme, and they're also growing more and more vocal, partially due to the role of social media. There's this toxic feedback cycle where social media elevates the most extreme and the most outrageous voices.

What I was describing really applies to partisans. The majority of Americans, as you say, are actually not so polarized. I’m sure you are familiar with the idea of “the exhausted majority.” The exhausted majority includes people who are not very informed, who don’t show up to the polls, who are exhausted by all the argumentation and want politicians to work across party lines to get things done. Part of what’s happening is that the extreme partisans on both sides are the ones who are becoming more extreme, and they’re also growing more and more vocal, partially due to the role of social media. There’s this toxic feedback cycle where social media elevates the most extreme and the most outrageous voices. It creates a perception that “Everyone who’s a Republican thinks this,” and “Everyone who’s a Democrat thinks that.” That’s actually masking the reality that most Americans are actually not extreme and not every partisan is as extreme as the most extreme within that group. 

But that’s not to say that we should be complacent. Because, unfortunately, this vocal minority is playing an outsized role in shaping our politics at a national level. The way that our electoral system operates helps further this dynamic. Those who are most vocal and most engaged are the ones who are showing up at primaries. Therefore, politicians are campaigning in a particular way, posturing in a particular way, to appeal to the most extreme voices in their party. So extreme voices are actually having an outsized role in who is being elected to public office.

In an interview with the Philanthropy Roundtable, you said, “There’s a very clear path from having contempt for others to dehumanizing them and, ultimately, being willing to commit violence against them.” To play devil’s advocate for a second, I do see lots of Democrats saying bad things about Republicans and Republicans saying horrible things about Democrats online, but when I go outside, I don’t really fear that we’re going to see clashes in the street between Democrats and Republicans. How real is the threat that polarization leads to violence in the real world? 

There’s a difference between political violence and civil war. I don’t think civil war is something that we should be that concerned about. But in the last five years, there has been a big spike in political violence, particularly coming from the political right. I’m not an expert in political violence. Most of what I’ve read is by Rachel Kleinfeld at Carnegie. She says one of the key characteristics of a country that ends up in civil war is having really weak democratic institutions. In the United States, even though our democratic institutions are starting to wobble, they’re still far stronger than other countries. So I’m not so concerned about civil war anytime soon.

But what has been happening, particularly among the political right, is that political violence is becoming more and more mainstream. Political elites are normalizing the idea that violence is okay. Some of the things that you hear politicians saying today, they would be completely shut down and de-platformed if they said those same things even fifteen years ago. You’re seeing high-profile acts of violence like the attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, for example. And you’re also seeing a rise in threats of violence against school boards and mayors. So there has been a rise in political violence, even though it hasn’t risen to the level of the 1960s.

Surveys show that a lot of students feel uncomfortable talking about sensitive topics and that this tends to be more common around political minorities. So if you're in a deep red state and you're a Democrat, then you feel less comfortable talking about your views and vice versa. In general, more college campuses tend to be liberal, so more conservative students feel uncomfortable speaking up. 

There has been a lot of media coverage in recent years about free speech on campus, and particularly the idea that right-wing viewpoints have become difficult, if not impossible, to express at certain colleges. You do a lot of work with universities. How would you characterize the campus environment these days?

I’d say in some ways things are getting better and in some ways things are staying the same. I think that the problems really started to accelerate around 2015. Between 2015 and maybe 2022, you had all these high-profile incidents of student protests, shutting down speakers, things like that. Surveys show that a lot of students feel uncomfortable talking about sensitive topics and that this tends to be more common around political minorities. So if you’re in a deep red state and you’re a Democrat, then you feel less comfortable talking about your views and vice versa. In general, more college campuses tend to be liberal, so more conservative students feel uncomfortable speaking up.

When these issues began to emerge, a lot of college leaders seemed to be taken by surprise and unsure of how to move forward. A lot of administrators either didn’t respond or they went along with these student demands and student protests. What I’ve been seeing in the last year is that a lot more university leaders have been taking a firmer stance. They are saying, “Well, actually, academic freedom is critical to the mission of this institution, and therefore, we’re going to speak out against some of these actions.” 

A few months ago, there was a high-profile incident at Stanford Law School where a judge was shouted down, and the law school dean wrote a very strong memo arguing about the importance of the First Amendment and explaining why this is critical to the institution as a whole. Since then, a number of other universities have taken similar strong stances to stand in support of academic freedom. In our own work, we’re getting more and more requests from universities interested in working with us to promote better dialogue on campus. 

I want to drill down and talk a little bit about some of the potential causes of polarization. You mentioned social media before. I don’t know if you’ve read Amanda Ripley, who talks about “conflict entrepreneurs”—people whose business model relies on generating conflict. From Trump on down to your average Twitter/X troll, I’m wondering how much blame you place at the feet of conflict entrepreneurs. Or are they more symptom than cause?

Polarization is very complex, so it’s hard to say that there’s one specific thing that is causing it. Peter Coleman is one of the leading experts in polarization and conflict studies. The way he talks about polarization, I think, is the best I’ve seen. He refers to the philosopher Karl Popper’s framework of thinking about whether an issue is a clock problem or a cloud problem. A clock problem is very predictable and linear. If a clock breaks, you can open up the clock, figure out what gear is off, and then fix the clock. It’s pretty straightforward. Cloud problems are a lot more amorphous. They’re hard to predict, they move very quickly, and they change constantly. Polarization is much more of a cloud problem than a clock problem. There are a lot of factors that have contributed to the current situation in the United States. Many of the trends that have led us to this place predate the introduction of social media.

But social media is one of many forces that have been amplifying the problem. In particular, there are all these actors on social media who are spreading misinformation and spreading outrage. Social media platforms are designed to promote engagement. We know that the content that is the most inflammatory is what drives the highest engagement. So again, we have this bizarre scenario where people who are the most extreme are getting the loudest megaphone to spread outrage through social media platforms, which is exacerbating this whole cycle.

The last few years has seen an explosion of investment in diversity, equity, and inclusion programming within universities, nonprofits, and businesses. I’m curious to hear whether you think that this has had any impact on polarization, whether positive or negative.

I think it’s part of the broader set of culture issues that have been playing out in the past few years that have become really polarizing. Some of the biggest factors causing polarization today are identity-based issues. Issues that touch on identity tend to be the things that are the most difficult to talk about and the things that bring people furthest apart. So we’ve seen a rise in advocating for more DEI, and we’ve seen a reaction against that. 

You have said that the work of the Constructive Dialogue Institute has its roots in behavioral science research. What do you mean by that?

Our goal is to address polarization by translating behavioral science research into accessible evidence-based educational tools. When we first began, the higher-ed classroom was our target audience, and we offered educational tools that professors could adopt into the curriculum. What we have been doing over the last year is expanding outwards to think more about the culture overall within an institution. We want to try to shift institutional norms and create organizational cultures that support bridging across differences.

But right now our core offering is our online learning program, Perspectives, which seeks to shift the attitudes that people have towards those who are different from them and give people very practical skills for how to navigate difficult conversations. We begin by teaching psychological concepts in order to help normalize how our minds work, and how we’re inherently wired, to move away from blaming people for behaving in certain ways. So our educational platform explores dual process theory—the idea that our minds are divided into two systems, automatic and controlled, and that these two systems can lead to a variety of cognitive biases that can warp our reasoning. 

Basically, we are helping people realize that we should be more intellectually humble because we might be falling prey to cognitive biases as we’re thinking about certain issues. We are also helping people move away from thinking of the opposing political party as bad, evil, stupid, et cetera. We help them understand that other people might be falling prey to cognitive biases rather than demonizing them or assuming that they’re evil.

Then we introduce moral foundations theory, which is the theory that my co-founder Jon Haidt is well known for, which explores the psychology behind how we form our different worldviews. Moral foundations theory explains that we all have fundamental building blocks for morality in our minds and then we all combine them in different ways. It helps us recognize that people who have different beliefs than we do are often just as sincere as we are. Their values are just leading them in a different direction. Our research has shown that teaching these different concepts does help reduce affective polarization.

You mentioned that your organization has been evolving in recent months. Where are you going next?

We are really trying to move beyond the classroom to a more campus-wide model. We’re finalizing the final partnerships, but we’re on track to have between twenty-five and thirty campuses total who are partnering with us. 

For example, we have created a partnership with the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia. We recruited a cohort of 12 public colleges in Virginia, ranging from small rural colleges to large community colleges to Virginia Tech and George Mason. What we’ve done with them is a more hands-on, deeper dive. In order to be part of this program, we needed them to have senior leadership sign up and create a working group of key stakeholders to show that they were committed to doing this work. 

The next step is that we did an asset-mapping exercise to get a sense of what’s going on on campus. Where are the challenges? Where are the opportunities? Based on that work, we developed implementation plans for each campus, and the implementation plan includes a few key offerings. The first is our online learning program, Perspectives. Different campuses are implementing it in different ways. Some are incorporating it into semester-long or year-long courses for first-year students. Some are incorporating it into orientation. And some are incorporating it into gen ed courses. 

We have also developed a suite of trainings for staff, faculty, and student leaders. We recognize that it’s not enough to just train students, we need to train the adults around them to be able to create spaces that welcome diverse perspectives, that welcome discourse about controversial issues. The last piece is that we also are organizing a community of practice where, every few months, the key stakeholders come together and they talk about lessons learned and best practices across different campuses. Our goal is to replicate the kind of model that we’re doing with Virginia in states across the country.

I wouldn’t underrate the difficulty of what you are trying to do. Changing the culture of an institution that has existed for a long time, and where you are an outsider … that’s really hard. I think it is going to take a generation, at least, for you to succeed. 

It’s absolutely multi-year work. And it really requires the university to be committed to doing the work; otherwise, it’s not going to be sustainable.

You recently put out a piece called Building Bridges in the Context of Inequality. Do you think that the kind of work you’re doing to encourage civil dialogue inhibits people’s ability to advocate for systemic change?

I think it does not. If anything, I think it makes people more effective. I think part of the challenge, especially on campuses, is that issues of free speech and anti-racism have been pitted against one another in a binary way of thinking. It’s either we have free speech or we have anti-racism. The framing of those two things as being in opposition is a recipe for ongoing conflict. What our work is really intended to do is to shift that binary to a both/and framework. We want to encourage more dialogue so we can make progress on these issues. The goal of our work is to promote dialogue and to empower people to have conversations about incredibly difficult issues. It’s not meant to be a way to say, “Let’s just accept the status quo.” 

Reading between the lines, my perception is that the Constructive Dialogue Institute is trying to dance between the raindrops of the culture wars. I don’t know whether you saw it, but not too long ago the New Yorker ran a piece about the Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism. In the piece, one of the interviewees says that there is basically no marketplace among the donor class for moderation anymore. I’m wondering what you think of this critique. Part of your job is to go out into the philanthropic marketplace to fundraise. Do you think it is hard to raise money for moderate causes these days?

I haven’t thought about it in that way. It’s not like people will say, “Oh, this doesn’t align with my view of the world, that’s why I’m not interested in funding this.” It’s more that donors who have a partisan agenda are not necessarily prioritizing this kind of work. We try to identify funders who care about polarization. 

Are you finding that there is a rump of funders who are interested in this as an issue?

There is, but it’s definitely limited. Before the 2016 election, the space was very underdeveloped—I wouldn’t even call it a space—there were just a few actors that were doing this kind of work. Then after the 2016 election, there was an explosion. All of these different small organizations popped up and said, “We want to do something about this.” So the first few years after that was chaos, where every month there was a new organization popping up and no one knew who the funders were, and the funders didn’t know who the organizations were. It was just total free-for-all. 

Around 2020, there started to be a field emerging where the actors were all starting to become more aware of one another and starting to coordinate. A major development was the creation of an organization called New Pluralists, which is a funder collaborative. They’re bringing in more funders. But what I have found is that compared to other issues, the universe of funders who are interested in supporting this work is pretty limited, especially given the scale of the problem. So that’s been pretty surprising and definitely distressing. 

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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.

“Pluralism Is a Learned Value”: A Conversation with Dan Vallone

By Greg Berman

The headline of a recent Reuters special report tells a depressing story: “Political Violence in Polarized US at Its Worst since 1970s.” According to the report, “Explanations for today’s violence vary, ranging from widespread financial anxiety and the upheaval of the COVID-19 pandemic to unease at America’s changing racial and ethnic demographics and a coarsening of political rhetoric in the Trump era. Traditional divisions, typically rooted in policy differences between right and left, have given way to a perception that members of the opposing political party are an evil force bent on destroying America’s social and cultural fabric.”

More in Common, an international nonprofit organization, has devoted a significant amount of intellectual energy to exploring public perceptions about our political divisions. It is perhaps best known for its Hidden Tribes project, which is based on a survey it completed with more than 8,000 Americans.

Based on responses to a range of questions about their moral beliefs and values, the Hidden Tribes report sorted Americans into seven “tribes”: Progressive Activists, Traditional Liberals, Passive Liberals, Politically Disengaged, Moderates, Traditional Conservatives, and Devoted Conservatives. The report went on to argue that the bulk of Americans (everyone but the most extreme partisans) comprise an “exhausted majority.” According to More in Common, the exhausted majority are “fed up by America’s polarization. They know we have more in common than that which divides us: our belief in freedom, equality, and the pursuit of the American dream. They share a deep sense of gratitude that they are citizens of the United States. They want to move past our differences.”

The Hidden Tribes survey, and the idea that perhaps Americans are not as divided as they might seem, received significant media attention, including prominent pieces in the New Yorker and New York Times. To learn more about the research, Greg Berman, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation’s distinguished fellow of practice, talked to Dan Vallone, who at the time was the director of More in Common US. This transcript of their conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Berman: I must confess to some ambivalence about the topic of polarization. On the one hand, I spend time online, and when I do, I tend to find things that concern me. For example, the polarized reactions to COVID and January 6 were deeply upsetting. But then I go out into the world and it doesn’t feel like we’re on the brink of civil war when I walk the streets. So I’m kind of curious to hear your take: How big a problem do you think polarization is in the US at the moment?

Vallone: I kind of agree with how you have framed it. The impact of polarization is sometimes dramatically overstated. For example, we did a study before the 2020 election. We gave Democrats and Republicans two scenarios. One was a scenario where Biden was perceived to win the election, but Trump challenges it. With that framing, we asked Republicans, “Which of the following actions would you condone?” And we gave them a scale of actions that ended with physical violence. And similarly, with the Democrats, we presented a scenario where Trump was perceived to win, but Biden was claiming that the election was lacking in integrity. We asked them the same question: “Which of the following actions would you condone in this scenario?”

Among both Republicans and Democrats, only 3 or 4 percent actually said that it was permissible to conduct physical violence. But both Democrats and Republicans thought that 50 percent of the other side would condone physical violence. So we have this very distorted picture of our political opponents.

We then asked both Republicans and Democrats to assess what the other side would condone. So basically, we asked the Democrats, what proportion of Republicans would condone violence in a scenario where Biden is perceived to have won the election, but Trump is claiming it was stolen? And we asked Republicans the same basic question in a scenario where Trump was perceived to have won the election, but Biden claimed it was stolen. 

What we found was that, among both Republicans and Democrats, only 3 or 4 percent actually said that it was permissible to conduct physical violence. But both Democrats and Republicans thought that 50 percent of the other side would condone physical violence. So we have this very distorted picture of our political opponents. In that context, polarization itself is not anywhere near as bad as we think it is. 

So I would actually agree that some of this is a dramatic misperception that we have about contemporary dynamics in American society. At the same time, those very dynamics make our politics toxic and make it so much harder to pass meaningful legislation to address challenges, even where there’s broad support. It normalizes any number of negative behaviors and actions. There has been a spike in hate crimes and online activity that is coinciding with this worsening affective polarization. It is hard to prove causality, but it is worth looking at pretty seriously. The rise in dehumanization is very alarming. 

I first heard of More in Common when you released the Hidden Tribes research. One of the things that I appreciated about that project was that it seemed like an effort to move the conversation away from a binary, left-versus-right dynamic, where there’s only two sides to every issue. You were taking a more granular look at what the American public believes. And one of the things that stood out was the fact that most Americans were not die-hard progressives or die-hard conservatives. The term you used to describe the bulk of the American electorate was “the exhausted majority.” What did you mean by this? 

The way that we produced that segmentation was via a cluster analysis. We asked respondents a large battery of survey questions that drew on findings from social psychology. For example, we leaned on the moral foundations theory that folks like Jonathan Haidt have done a lot of work to build out. We asked a battery of questions about people’s identities and how they understand those identities, including race, gender, ideology, faith, etc. To your point, we were really trying to understand at a much more granular level, how are Americans feeling in the moment? And then we wanted to categorize them based more on their values than on their demographics.

There's pretty credible data showing that the largest proportion of Americans identify as moderates. And the proportion identifying as independents has actually been growing. The reality is that, on so many levels, Americans do actually share a lot in common.

So the exhausted majority are different from what we call the wings on several levels. First of all, they are much less engaged in political behavior outside of voting. So the exhausted majority are much less likely to post political content online. They’re much less likely to give money to political candidates. Their level of engagement in politics is dramatically less than the progressive activists on the left or the devoted conservatives on the right. And related to that, they also feel left out of the political conversation. So folks in the exhausted majority are much more likely to say things like, “I don’t feel like my viewpoint is reflected in the political discourse.”

The other way in which the exhausted majority are different from the wing segments is they are much more prone to support compromise and moderation. We asked the survey respondents about whether political actors that represent your views should do more to compromise with the other side versus stick it out and fight. The exhausted majority are much more prone to see compromise as a valuable asset as opposed to the wings. The exhausted majority are literally exhausted by the divisiveness in our politics. The folks in the wing segments, the progressive activists and the devoted conservatives, don’t love division for the sake of division, but they do see it as a necessary part of winning.

In conducting research for the book on incrementalism that I co-wrote with Aubrey Fox, I looked at a lot of public opinion polling. And one of the things that stood out for me was that, even on contentious issues like abortion or policing or guns, you could actually identify pretty broad public support for a range of reforms. If that’s true, and if you are right that the bulk of American voters are not at the wings, why have our political parties and our political discourse gone to the extremes in recent years? 

There’s pretty credible data showing that the largest proportion of Americans identify as moderates. And the proportion identifying as independents has actually been growing. The reality is that, on so many levels, Americans do actually share a lot in common. So why does that not show up in our politics? I think different folks would advance different reasons. At More in Common, we don’t actually have a particular viewpoint on this. I think one factor that I would point to as being very salient is the media information ecosystem in the US, which is dramatically more fractured than most of its peer nations. In the US, it is possible not just to have competing explanations of what’s happening in the country, but actually coexisting realities. There’s less and less overlap in the information that people consume, so we have a harder time actually arriving at a shared sense of what the challenges are and what the priorities should be. That’s a big one.

We lack sufficient, healthy, collective settings where people can actually learn to do democracy together.

The second thing a lot of folks I think rightfully point to is the dynamics of the two-party system. Here, I think my point of view is a little bit more cautious about the degree to which purely structural factors in terms of how our elections are run contribute to toxic polarization. And the reason I’m a little bit cautious is that our colleagues in Europe work in countries that have parliamentary systems and multi-party systems. And even there—in France, for example—we see very dramatic shifts in polarization happening. Having said that, it is valid to look at the degree to which a minority group within either the Democrats or the Republicans can dominate because things are so gerrymandered that the primary has become more important than the general election in any number of settings.

And then the last thing I’d point to—and I think this is a little bit under-covered, to be totally honest—is that there has been a decades-long shift in terms of civic infrastructure in the country. What I mean by civic infrastructure is the settings within which people do public problem-solving across lines of difference. There are fewer and fewer organizations or settings where Americans feel a sense of membership, where that membership involves some sort of agency in solving public problems at the local level. Increasingly, people’s engagement with politics is that they’re giving money or they’re responding to national organizations that are typically led by well-educated folks. That hollows out a lot of our civic infrastructure and contributes to the nationalization of everything. We lack sufficient, healthy, collective settings where people can actually learn to do democracy together.

It sounds like you are echoing Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone argument. 

I think that Putnam emphasizes social relationships and social capital, which is really important. We would also say that an important part of social connection is actually being involved in collaborative problem-solving. Pluralism is, in many ways, a learned value and norm. It’s also a byproduct of doing problem-solving where you have to compromise with people with different backgrounds, where you have to realize that the democratic process can produce better outcomes even if, in some instances, your side loses. We have fewer and fewer spaces where people actually do that kind of work. We’ve allowed more of those kinds of efforts to be dominated by, again, national organizations that are more transactional in how they engage most Americans.

I’m old enough to remember the old Tip O’Neill bromide that all politics is local. It feels like that’s been turned on its head and now all politics is national. But I guess I don’t see a pathway to undoing that, given the realities of the internet.

Our society is changing not just demographically, but also we’re learning new ways of engaging with each other. The internet, Zoom, all of that. We’ve gone through enormous change over the last three decades. We have to figure out new ways of engaging with each other in civil society and in politics. 

One of the challenges we face is the erosion of important institutions. People are attacking institutions and no one’s defending them. At the same time, even as we see institutions being eroded, new institutions are being created. There are, I think, a lot of good things happening that are sometimes hard to see. I don’t necessarily think that we need to do some kind of revolutionary transition from the nationalization of everything to the localization of everything. I think much of the work is already underway. It would be great if we could accelerate that and if we could convince more Americans that this is actually happening.

You mentioned the erosion of institutions. As someone who cares about the health of American institutions, I’ve found the last couple of years destabilizing. It seems like many of our institutions have been stress-tested and been found wanting. You have written in the past about public perceptions of the military. How much do you worry about the politicization of institutions that have gotten dragged into the culture wars?

Working at More in Common has underscored for me the critical importance that institutions have in actually ensuring a healthy, vibrant, and inclusive democracy. So we need to make sure that we have institutions that work. I’m definitely concerned about the potential politicization of institutions. 

We see this playing out in the military. Although we should also be wary of hyping up the degree to which people are polarizing in their views towards the military. I think it was Gallup who did a poll that saw a noticeable drop in the percentage of Americans who said they had a great deal of confidence in the military. At More in Common, we do research on this, and we also saw a slight drop. I think at most we’re talking ten points, which is meaningful, but this should be viewed in context. The confidence level in the military is still 70 percent or higher, which is very high relative to many other institutions.

People feel very disconnected from many government institutions. And I think the prevailing paradigm has been that if we just improved the efficacy of the services we deliver, that that will resolve the problem. But what we really need is more membership.

So it’s important to pay attention to any shift in confidence, but at the same time, we have to recognize that public confidence in the armed services is still an incredible strength. The question is: How do we further bolster the strength? The first thing we have to do is avoid the tendency to overreact, which causes people to do, perhaps, unconstructive things because they’re responding to a misperception. So job one is really grounding ourselves in the data around what people feel towards institutions and not allowing false impressions in the media to drive our behavior. 

Number two, I think all institutions—whether it’s schools, whether it’s media, whether it’s government, etc.—need to be doing a lot more to build relationships physically. We tend to focus a lot on the internet because that’s where relational dynamics are moving, but there’s still an incredible amount that happens in person. One of the major issues is the distribution and accessibility of military bases, for example. Military bases tend to be concentrated in the Southeast, and they’re very hard to get onto because of security concerns. This has contributed to a huge dearth of relationships between many segments of the society and the military. Recruitment is increasingly looking like a family affair, where it is primarily people who have immediate family members currently in the military who are signing up. Long term, that’s really not healthy for the institution. So how can the military change its footprint so that more and more Americans have some sort of physical engagement with the institution? 

I think the same thing applies to other institutions. A lot of the negative dynamics that we see with regard to polarization of school boards would be mitigated if there was greater connectivity between schools and parents and community groups. People feel very disconnected from many government institutions. And I think the prevailing paradigm has been that if we just improved the efficacy of the services we deliver, that that will resolve the problem. But what we really need is more membership. We need people to actually feel a sense of belonging and connection to government, which means not just trying to toggle the interventions you’re delivering, but actually going out and building relationships. It’s hard work. It takes a lot of time and a lot of resources to connect with people. 

Vox did a critical piece on your Hidden Tribes research when it came out. One of its criticisms was that you were essentially engaging in what is sometimes known as “both-sides-ism,” placing blame equally on the left and the right. Many of my progressive friends argue that this is a trap and that the right is really much more to blame for the polarized situation we find ourselves in today than the left is. I’m wondering how you would respond to that critique.

What I would hope people take away from our work is that the two-side paradigm is just wrong and a huge constraint to understanding both the problems we’re facing and the potential solutions to make things better. There are many different ways in which actors across the political spectrum are contributing to polarization. It’s less about which side is doing what and more about figuring out ways to reduce our own individual and institutional contribution to the polarization that is harming all of us. 

I think getting away from the both-sides dynamic would improve our diagnostic capability to try and really understand what’s happening within specific institutional settings. The more that we have this binary framework locked in, the more we concede ground to what Amanda Ripley calls “conflict entrepreneurs”—the folks who are actively trying to divide us, trying to sow division mostly to make money. 

At the start, you talked about the gap between how Democrats perceive Republicans and the reality of the views that Republicans actually hold, and vice versa. One of the depressing findings from your work on the perception gap is that education and media consumption don’t actually help to ameliorate the gap. 

The dynamic that we discovered was particularly true for liberals and education—the best-educated liberals had the highest perception gap. And similarly, media consumption didn’t necessarily reduce perception gaps to a meaningful degree across the board. Diversity of social relationships was correlated with lower perception gaps. So the more friendships you have with folks who have different ideological backgrounds, the better in terms of the magnitude of your perception gap. 

I want to turn to the question of what is to be done. Earlier, you expressed some skepticism about systemic changes, like gerrymandering reform. I must confess to some skepticism about individual-level reforms. I am skeptical that getting people together to hash out their differences is a meaningful intervention, or can be done at the kind of scale that is necessary to make a difference. If you were a funder, where would you be investing your money if the goal was to reduce affective polarization?

We need a diversity of approaches. So if I were advising funders, I would tell them to take the portfolio approach. There’s definitely a place for structural reform. I think that I’m more cautious than skeptical about this approach. It would be great to see new innovations in terms of how we think about political engagement and how we run elections. I just would be cautious about the degree to which those changes will dramatically reduce polarization. I would put more energy behind engaging more people in the process. I think the depth and diversity of the folks that you engage in whatever movement you’re doing matters a lot more than the specific intervention that you produce.

A lot of the individual depolarization interventions are well done. These spaces are incredibly warm and welcoming. But there are a lot of issues with who shows up to those kinds of events. Selection bias is pretty hard to eliminate. There are also issues of scalability. 

I think the institutional setting is still dramatically under-leveraged by a lot of philanthropic actors and by a lot of other folks who are concerned about polarization. I think about work being done on college campuses right now by folks like BridgeUSA to try to foster healthy exchange of ideas, both among students but also across students, faculty, and other personnel on the campus. I would also point to One America Movement, which works primarily within churches, temples, and mosques to create institutional cultures that are able to engage healthily on polarizing topics. There’s a group called We the Veterans that’s trying to figure out how to bring together the veteran community. 

One of the challenges with this kind of work is that it is less easily measured using randomized controlled trials. It is also less likely to result in a clear policy victory at a local, state, or federal level. These kinds of interventions are seeking cultural change. They’re about norm shifting. They’re about bringing new actors into civic spaces. And those changes are just much harder to measure with the kind of rigorous models that have become very prevalent in social science.

We’re heading into presidential election season, which is typically a time when our divisions are heightened. I’m wondering how optimistic or pessimistic you’re feeling about polarization as you look to the next couple of years.

I’m optimistic. I’m more optimistic than I was three years ago. More and more, you see folks across the ideological spectrum cautioning us about the dangers of hyperpolarization. Without converging around some sort of mushy middle or centrism, lots of people are articulating that we need to have a more positive vision for the country. So I think that what we will see in 2024 will be many things, some of which will be hyperpolarizing, but also we’ll see really prominent actors across the ideological spectrum espousing pretty positive visions for the country and positive visions for how we relate to one another. We need to take seriously all of the risks that were present in 2020 and continue to work on mitigating against the degree to which polarization translates into actual violence.

The 250th anniversary of the country is coming up in 2026. I think that’s a really significant opportunity. As we honor this anniversary, we can have a vibrant and positive experience celebrating a story of progress. It is a chance to acknowledge our imperfections and flaws, but also honor the positive arc this country has gone through.

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