Frayed but Not Broken: Understanding American Division in a Polarized Age 

By Greg Berman

Is the United States coming apart?  

The past few years have presented plenty of warning signs: some of the largest street protests in our nation’s history, rioting in several cities, attempted (and successful) assassinations of political officials, an increase in hate crimes, and the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021. These developments (and more) have created a feeling that our social order is fragile and that America is a nation on the brink of coming apart. There is even talk of a new civil war.

At the same time, the fissures that currently define American politics may not be as deep as they appear. The funhouse mirror of social media distorts as much as it reflects. Research suggests that only a small fraction of Americans post about politics online and those that do have disproportionately extreme views.¹ Many conflict entrepreneurs have a vested interest in fueling American division. “We are living through a time of toxic self-involved drama that threatens to make things worse through twitchy overreaction,” argues journalist Matt Yglesias. 

Over the course of 2024 and 2025, I spoke with eighteen thinkers steeped in American polarization. I sought out voices from a variety of academic disciplines, including history, political science, psychology, sociology, and philosophy. Experts from philanthropy and civil society actively working to build bridges across the various divides of American life supplemented the scholars’ observations. While each conversation followed its own path, a few fundamental questions formed the root of this inquiry: Just how worried should we be about the health of American democracy? Is polarization creating an environment that could lead to increased political violence? And how might we reverse course?

I came away from my investigation convinced that polarization is no small problem. Indeed, it may be the most urgent problem currently facing our country. After all, resolving any crisis will be difficult if politicians are constantly at each other’s throats and Americans cannot agree about their shared identity and values. 

“The state of America is that we have strong partisanship but … partisanship is not necessarily synonymous with violence.”

Yphtach Lelkes, “The Problem Comes from the Top”

But my investigation also provided plenty of evidence that things may not be as bad as they seem at the moment. Polarization isn’t inherently a bad thing, of course. Indeed, it is fair to say that some degree of polarization can be a sign of a well-functioning democracy where politics has real, meaningful stakes. 

While some kinds of polarization can be healthy, the American obsession with culture wars, and the accompanying talk of profound division, runs the risk of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.

In one provocative experiment, social psychologists showed participants two different maps of the United States. One was a standard electoral map, with states depicted in red or blue depending upon how they voted in the presidential election. The other was a proportional map, with states colored in shades of purple depending upon how intensely they leaned Democratic or Republican. The result? Participants viewing the red/blue electoral maps perceived the nation as more politically divided than those who viewed the purple maps.

(Nathan Howard/Getty Images)

In recent years, American history has become yet another battleground in the culture wars, with various left- and right-wing commentators using the past as a weapon in today’s political disputes. Beyond the noise, any honest look at American history would reveal that apocalyptic thinking, violent behavior, and social unrest are regular features of our civic life, waning and waxing periodically. According to the New York Times, 

America has a particularly complicated relationship with the idea of political violence. This is, after all, a country born out of violent struggle, as the T-shirts and bumper stickers and speeches at any Republican event endlessly attest. This is also a country where the major expansions of civil rights, from Emancipation to desegregation, happened under the fact or threat of state violence, and where few on the left are willing to categorically condemn violent protest in the name of social justice. It is a country where many still nod at Thomas Jefferson’s aphorism that “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants,” or to Malcolm X vowing “by any means necessary.”

Our current historical moment is unique (every moment is), but it is not a time of unprecedented danger. While threats against public officials have increased, the incidence of actual violence in the United States remains low. This is not to diminish the significance of violent threats against public officials, even when they are not carried out. The prospect of violence warps political discourse and shapes the behavior of decision makers. According to Mitt Romney, at least one Republican congressman revealed after the fact that he would have voted to impeach Trump following the January 6 attacks, but the fear of threats against his family by Trump supporters stopped him.

Violence against public officials is only one form of political violence, of course. Since the January 6 storming of the Capitol, the prospect of street violence triggered by armed extremist groups has loomed large in the American psyche. Here again, we find a similar pattern: disturbing indicators but limited real-life examples of violence. 

In The Rise of Illiberalism, Baruch College professor Thomas Main argues that there has been an explosion of traffic to extremist websites that do not embrace liberal values like individual rights, tolerance, and the rule of law. His findings suggest that the audience for illiberal left-wing websites is about 1.3 percent the size of its right-wing counterpart. Main concludes, “The Illiberal Left is minute, entirely isolated, and unengaged. The Illiberal Right is sizeable, closely connected with mainstream political tendencies, and dramatically more engaged with political discourse than any other ideological tendency.”

“A lot of people are getting radicalized in their opinions without becoming radicalized in their actions.”

Clionadh Raleigh, “Political Polarization Has Become Almost a Form of Entertainment”

But, despite prolific media coverage of white supremacist groups on the right (and antifa on the left), no substantial extremist group mobilization has occurred since 2021. And, for all of the fears to the contrary, the 2024 presidential election did not result in significant violence.

According to Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED), an organization that collects data on political violence around the world, “Extremist group activity — meaning the participation of all actors of concern across the political spectrum, such as militia groups, openly white supremacist or neo-Nazi groups, militant street movements, etc. tracked by ACLED in demonstrations and acts of political violence — has been on the decline … Taken separately, the number of acts of political violence involving extremist actors has also declined each year since 2020.”

Of course, American history is replete with examples of an even more disturbing form of violence: the state wielding weapons against its own citizens. Historically, Native Americans and Black Americans have been on the receiving end of much of this violence—a reality made painfully clear by the 2020 killing of George Floyd. From 2020 to 2024, more than 1,000 Americans were shot and killed annually by police, according to the Washington Post. But there is little indication that these deaths are directly related to politics.

The Trump administration’s focus on strengthening immigration enforcement—and the deaths of two protestors at the hands of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in Minnesota—brought the issue of state violence to the forefront of public discourse once again. The Trump administration’s aggressive immigration policy has engendered significant public backlash. According to Yuval Levin, a conservative journalist and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, 

Americans do not generally share the dark, bitter, vindictive hostility toward immigrants and immigration that characterizes the views of some of Trump’s senior aides. And so most voters are not encouraged but alarmed by the thuggish and fascistic tone of much of the administration’s rhetoric on the subject. The militant ICE recruitment ads, the nativist DHS tweets, the mendacious White House press statements, and the callous reactions of senior officials to the killings of protesters in the course of immigration enforcement operations all convey a hunger for confrontation (if not a lust for blood) that is not only grossly unbecoming of the government of a free society but also extremely unappealing as a way of talking to the country.

As public opinion shifts, so too does the administration’s behavior. In response to public protests, the Trump administration pulled back from the surge of ICE enforcement in Minnesota. This is a healthy sign that we still live in a democracy and that the government is still capable of being moved by public concerns. 

“In a democracy, sometimes the other side wins. We can disagree vehemently about abortion, gun control, immigration policy, whatever, but we need to be able to live with that disagreement.”

Ilana Redstone, “A Healthy Democracy Requires Social Trust”

What the polls say

What does the public think about the current state of affairs?  

There are good reasons to be skeptical of public polling, particularly after pollsters underestimated support for Donald Trump in three consecutive election cycles. But, despite its weaknesses, polling is still an essential tool for taking the pulse of the American people. 

Has American polarization reached a crisis point? A 2024 Reuters/Ipsos poll says yes: “Four in five Americans fear [the] country is sliding into chaos,” the poll reports. The Pew Research Center seems to agree, citing data from 2020: “Roughly eight-in-ten registered voters in both camps said their differences with the other side were about core American values, and roughly nine-in-ten—again in both camps—worried that a victory by the other would lead to ‘lasting harm’ to the United States.” 

Numerous surveys echo these findings, underlining the impact of affective polarization in the US. Affective polarization is a measure of how much partisans dislike each other. According to Northwestern University’s Institute for Policy Research, the gap between Americans’ positive feelings toward their own political party and their negative feelings toward the opposing party increased markedly over the past two decades.  

And yet, it is also possible to find polling that tells a very different story. Stanford University political scientist Morris Fiorina has written extensively about public opinion and polarization. He believes there is an important distinction between how political elites and the general public have polarized. Fiorina’s contention is that the political parties have polarized, but not the people: “There is little evidence that Americans’ ideological or policy positions are more polarized today than they were two or three decades ago, although their choices often seem to be. The explanation is that the political figures Americans evaluate are more polarized. A polarized political class makes the citizenry appear polarized, but it is largely that—an appearance.”²

Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill have polarized for many reasons. Some of the polarization was deliberate—for decades, political scientists argued that Democrats and Republicans should make their ideological positions more consistent and more distinct in order to give voters a clearer choice at the polls. As President Lyndon Johnson and others predicted, the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 helped to remake the composition of the parties, leading to the defection of many Southerners and conservatives from the Democratic Party. We are also likely seeing the ripple effects of more sophisticated and aggressive gerrymandering efforts, which increased the number of “safe” Congressional districts and reduced the need for many candidates to tack to the middle to appeal to voters across the aisle.  

“Ideological extremism has captured our political conversation and undermined the institutions that are the bulwark of our system.”

Suzette Brooks Masters, “Democracy Is Something We Have to Fight For”

Jennifer McCoy of Georgia State University suggests that America may be at risk of pernicious polarization. This occurs when society becomes divided into two opposing camps that view each other not just as political adversaries but as existential threats. Others have suggested that we could easily tip over into a state of toxic polarization, which encourages violence by dehumanizing political opponents. 

But there are also signs that point away from such a grim vision of the future. Far from embracing division, many Americans are souring on political parties. According to Gallup, in 2025, 45 percent of Americans consider themselves independent, compared to 27 percent who identify as Democrats and 27 percent who identify as Republicans. Despite all of the talk of “red” and “blue” America, it appears that most Americans do not identify with either party. 

Democrats and Republicans may express more dislike for one another than they used to, but how much of this mutual antipathy is based on reality and how much is based on half-truths, misperceptions, and exaggerated claims, which are rampant on social media?  

In a 2021 study entitled “The Ties that Blind: Misperceptions of the Opponent Fringe and the Miscalibration of Political Contempt,” four researchers found that “partisans consistently overestimated the prevalence of their opponents’ extreme, egregious political attitudes. (Over)estimation of political opponents’ agreement with extreme issues predicted cross-partisan dislike, which in turn predicted unwillingness to engage with opponents, foreclosing opportunities to correct misperceptions.” It is likely that we are suffering from a fair amount of false polarization, where antipathy is based largely on misperception. 

“We are overestimating how extreme the other side is. And that helps to fuel the perception that the other side is a threat and that their views are dangerous to your existence.”

Ben Klutsey, “A Truly Pluralistic Society Has Both Inclusion and Dissent”

Many Americans who follow politics closely think their opponents hold opinions that they don’t actually hold. Tellingly, More in Common, a nonprofit that seeks to bridge partisan divides, reports that the perception gap is widest among the most ideologically-committed at either end of the political spectrum—the progressive activists and hardcore conservatives who constitute just a small share of the general public. Encouragingly, polling also suggests fairly broad public support for policy initiatives in a host of areas, including many, like policing, that are widely considered gridlocked and polarized. 

More good news: the preponderance of the evidence suggests that the vast majority of Americans do not support political violence. For example, the Polarization Research Lab, which has regularly polled Americans on polarization since 2022, finds that just under 3 percent of respondents support partisan violence.

(Darren McCollester/Getty Images)

Recent public polling documents a concerning increase in affective polarization, particularly among political elites but also among unelected officials, including foundation executives, nonprofit leaders, pundits, and others whose work impacts politics. But there is less evidence to suggest that Americans have become ideologically polarized. Gallup has tracked some movement to the left on social issues in recent years—for example, the majority of Americans now support gay marriage and marijuana legalization, a significant change from a generation ago. And there is no doubt that the electorate is becoming more diverse, with Latino voters increasing significantly over the past twenty years. 

In many ways, the American electorate is currently in flux. Donald Trump’s 2024 victory was fueled by a number of surprising developments. Contrary to expectations, Trump improved on his 2016 and 2020 performances with several groups that traditionally vote overwhelmingly for Democrats, including urban, Latino, and Black voters. Ironically, for someone repeatedly accused of racism, it appears that Trump is a depolarizing force, at least when it comes to the racial composition of the political parties. 

“In the United States, even though our democratic institutions are starting to wobble, they’re still far stronger than other countries”

Caroline Mehl, “We’re in the Danger Zone”  

As Matt Grossmann and David A. Hopkins argue in Polarized by Degrees, one of the central dividing lines in American politics today is education; a strong political divide now exists between college graduates and non-graduates. The college-educated increasingly flock to the Democrats while those without a college degree gravitate toward the Republicans—a reversal of the dynamic that previously characterized American politics for generations.

Many hailed the 2024 success of the Republican Party in capturing the presidency, the Senate, and the House as a significant turn to the right by the American public. Despite this victory, it remains a fundamental truth that most voters describe themselves as moderates. Polling by More in Common in 2018 suggests that two-thirds of Americans belong to what it calls “the exhausted majority,” composed of voters who are neither left- nor right-wing extremists. As Matt Yglesias notes, “the median voter is a 50-something white person who didn’t go to college and lives in an unfashionable suburb.” 

In sum, the “red” and “blue” labels often used to describe the American political divide obscure some fundamental truths. Many Americans do not identify with either party. As a result, the labels offer some protective ballast against the headwinds of partisanship, as does the fact that precious few Americans say that they approve of vandalism, assault, and other forms of political violence. 

“There’s this idea that people who don’t vote the way we do, who don’t look the way we do, who don’t share our lifestyle [are] people we can’t communicate with…That’s the illusion [of division].”

Monica Harris, “We’re Ignoring Our Common Values and Interests”

The causes of polarization

The intensity of political partisanship in the United States has become a subject of urgent public concern in recent years. And with concern comes analysis and a search for underlying causes.

Many commentators point a finger at Donald Trump—and for legitimate reasons. According to The Bulwark, a center-right media outlet, “No American public figure has done more to normalize political violence” than Donald Trump. Trump has been a uniquely divisive figure, galvanizing supporters and alienating opponents like few other politicians in history. 

In a 2024 podcast interview with Yascha Mounk for The Good Fight, Rachel Kleinfeld of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace said,

[Political violence] usually happens when politicians take a highly polarized society and push on all those fissures and try to polarize further. And as they do that, people who may not be very ideological actually (they often are not, they’re often more disturbed than anything) act in order to ingratiate themselves to a group, sometimes a political party, and sometimes just for fame and notoriety—all sorts of different reasons. But you tend to see political violence rise when you have politicians doing what…former President Trump and others in the MAGA faction and also on the far left [have been doing]. 

Donald Trump’s violent rhetoric may not have helped to advance the cause of civility and unity, but few scholars believe he is the primary cause of American polarization. The sources of the problem vary and span decades. There is no consensus in the academic community, but scholars have posited a variety of theories to explain our current predicament. In addition to the political developments noted above, here is a small sampling:

• The nationalization of politics, which inverted Tip O’Neill’s old aphorism that “all politics is local” and raised the stakes of many disputes.
• The collapse of local journalism and the rise of more explicitly partisan media.
• Increased college attendance and the resulting educational divide in American life. 
• The growing diversity of the American public, which changed the electorate in some ways and sparked fear among some white voters of their declining influence in American life.
• A generational shift, with younger Americans holding a different set of values about social issues than older Americans.
• Globalization, which has helped to fuel the post-industrial economy and contributed to economic inequality.
• The rise of social media and the way it creates information bubbles and encourages outrage to boost user engagement.
• The many reverberations from COVID-19, which had an outsize impact on American mental health, trust in public institutions, educational systems, politics, and more.
• Foreign interference, particularly by Russia, which has sought to influence elections and sow dissension in America. 

This is almost certainly an incomplete list, but it offers a sense of the multi-faceted challenges of our current moment. In the past, the United States was able to weather similar (and often worse) shocks to the system. Whether we will again in the future remains an open question.  

“The problem with political violence isn’t that there’s a significant percentage of the public who think violence is acceptable … The problem is really the seeming justification for political violence that comes from elite actors.”

Matthew Levendusky, “Ordinary People Are Really Not All That Extreme”

The power of association

One of the traditional sources of American resilience is the strength of our civil society, with a vast network of nonprofits, foundations, book groups, religious institutions, recovery meetings, rec leagues, and other local organizations that serve as the backbone of American life. Civic groups play a particularly large role in the United States, owing to a weaker government-provided social safety net and (no coincidence) a stronger libertarian tradition than many other wealthy nations. 

As Alexis de Tocqueville first observed, Americans traditionally learned how to be democratic citizens by tackling problems together in association with one another. Unfortunately, the evidence suggests that participation in American civic groups has diminished over time, a phenomenon that Harvard professor Robert Putnam famously detailed in Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community.³

(Roberto Schmidt/AFP via Getty Images)

Additionally, American nonprofits have become more explicitly politicized in recent years.  Funders and junior staffers have pressed nonprofits to take positions on a range of contentious issues. Many adopted language designed to signal their side in the culture wars. This slide towards politicization is understandable, but it also erodes these organizations’ ability to bridge divides; it is difficult to reduce polarization when you are an active contributor to it. 

In fairness, American civic groups have always been an unruly and disorganized bunch. They do not speak with a single collective voice. Some are out of touch with the American public. Many are ineffectual. But, taken together, they have traditionally added up to more than the sum of their parts. Our civic organizations are an essential emollient, helping to grease the engine of American society. If a path to depolarization is to be engineered, it almost certainly will rely on a vast constellation of civic organizations attempting to solve local problems in communities across America.  

“If we could think of ourselves as members of a national community, sharing common interests and a common identity, we might be able to work out some kind of response to the challenges we face.”

Richard Slotkin, “Stories about the Way the Nation Is Organized Are Dividing Us”

Columbia University psychology professor Peter Coleman, the author of The Way Out: How to Overcome Toxic Polarization, argues that societies that are good at mitigating intergroup political violence are societies with a lot of “crosscutting structures.”⁴ According to Coleman, “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.”

It is telling that Coleman uses pick-up basketball as an example of meaningful bridge building rather than a formal conversation about politics between Republicans and Democrats. In a similar vein, Robert Putnam argues that, 

Building social capital is not like castor oil — “you’ve got to take it because it’s good for you, even though it feels awful.” It ought to be fun. I am famous as the advocate of bowling clubs, but you don’t bowl so you can build a better community, you bowl because it’s fun. And in the doing of the bowling, in a team, you’re hanging out with folks and sometimes you’re talking about the latest TV show, or occasionally you might talk about the garbage pickup in town. And that’s democracy. Doing democracy doesn’t just mean — of course it means voting or it means organizing. I’m a political scientist, so I’m not opposed to that. I’m just saying, Don’t think the way to save democracy is just to set out to save democracy.

Where does this leave us?  

There is little doubt that conflict will continue to define American life for the foreseeable future. There will be no final victory in the culture wars. The fault lines between the haves and the have-nots, the elite and the non-college-educated, are not going to magically disappear. Unless something truly unprecedented happens, we will continue to mint social justice activists and right-wing populists (and everyone in between) for quite some time. 

We live in an era of widespread doomscrolling. Those searching for reasons to be alarmed will always be able to find evidence of fracture and decline whenever they pull out their phones. And it is certainly true that violent rhetoric has become more commonplace. Threats against politicians continue to multiply. And a small number of Americans have come to believe that it is acceptable to use extreme methods to achieve their desired political ends.  

“The solutions to polarization are likely to be found in Ingham County, Michigan, or Paducah, Kentucky, or Fresno, California.”

Daniel Stid, “A Diffused Climate of Threats and Intimidation”

But those searching for good news will also be able to find it at the touch of a button. Any review of history will reveal that the United States has lived through periods of more intense, and more violent, political conflict. The incidence of actual political violence remains low. And there are a great many Americans who prefer coexistence to confrontation.  

In sum, there is a gap between discourse and reality, between what we fear and the reality on the ground. 

While we should take heart that things are not as dire as they sometimes appear, we should also take heed. Fear itself can be a driver of conflict. On social media, it is easy to be inundated by incendiary voices, exaggerated claims, and disturbing acts of rage. This information overload can warp perceptions, encouraging the most motivated partisans to demonize their opponents. Political violence does not require majority support; it simply requires a permissive climate in which a small minority feel emboldened to act.

The bonds that tie the United States together may have frayed, but the country is not yet coming apart at the seams. Pluralism—the idea that different people, ideas, and traditions can coexist peacefully in the same space without forced assimilation—remains a central theme in American life. Over the years, this principle found expression almost everywhere you find diversity in America, which is to say everywhere. Indeed, a tolerant, live-and-let-live ethos is crucial to the enduring success of the United States as a multi-ethnic democracy.

Our civic associations are an important part of this story. They provide an infrastructure that allows pluralism to flourish. In the process, they help keep a polarized society from becoming a violent one. Elected officials play an important role in turning down the heat on our political climate, but so does every American. Much of this work will happen in ordinary spaces, such as in pick-up basketball games, in book groups, and in non-political neighborhood organizations. By continuing to find reasons to associate, argue, compromise, and simply have fun together across political lines, we can gradually help change our political environment, shrinking the social and psychological space in which violence can appear thinkable. 

“The lifeblood of democracy is that we disagree. That’s why we need democracy.”

Robert Talisse, “There’s Nothing Inevitable or Permanent about Democracy”

America has always been a rough, contentious country, but a resilient one too. In his first inaugural address, delivered as the country stood on the brink of civil war, Abraham Lincoln appealed to “the better angels of our nature” in an effort to keep the union together.⁵ Over the course of our history, the bonds of affection that connect Americans to one another have often frayed. Each time, they were rewoven. 

For all of the intense passions of our current moment, we do not live in 1861. Whether the current tensions in American life deepen into something more dangerous, or fade as they have before, will depend not only on political actors in Washington, but also on the associations, civic institutions, and places where Americans still choose, every day, to show up for one another despite their differences.

Greg Berman is the distinguished fellow of practice at The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation and a contributing editor at Vital City. He previously served as the executive director of the Center for Justice Innovation, where he received the Peter F. Drucker Prize for Nonprofit Innovation. He is the author of six books, including most recently “The Nonprofit Crisis: Leadership Through the Culture Wars” (Oxford University Press).

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NOTES

¹Colleen McClain, “70% of U.S. Social Media Users Never or Rarely Post or Share about Political, Social Issues” Pew Research Center, May 4, 2021.

² Morris P. Fiorina, Samuel J. Abrams, and Jeremy C. Pope, Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America (Pearson, 2005), 8-9.

³ Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (Simon & Schuster, 2000).

⁴ Peter T. Coleman, The Way Out: How to Overcome Toxic Polarization (Columbia University Press, 2021).

⁵ Abraham Lincoln, “First Inaugural Address,” March 4, 1861.