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

By Greg Berman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.