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

By Greg Berman

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

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

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

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

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.