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The Polarization Project December 4, 2025

“Ordinary People Are Really Not All That Extreme”: A Conversation with Matthew Levendusky

By Greg Berman

Matthew Levendusky
Photo: John Pankratz, Albright College

Newsweek reports that a “Plurality of Americans Believe ‘Civil War’ Likely in Next Decade.” The Atlantic documents “The Doom Spiral of Pernicious Polarization.” The Guardian declares that “The US Has Entered a New Phase of Political Violence.” The American political scene is rife with gloomy headlines and predictions of disaster. 

In this context, the work of Matthew Levendusky, a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, is a breath of fresh air. Levendusky is the author of a series of books about partisanship in the United States, including The Partisan Sort, How Partisan Media Polarize America, and Our Common Bonds: Using What Americans Share to Overcome the Partisan Divide. 

While Levendusky is no Pollyana—writing that “animosity and ill will between the parties have become the norm,”—he does believe it is possible to lower the nation’s collective political temperature. “By working on correcting the misperceptions that people have about the other party, you can reduce that level of animosity that they have,” Levendusky said in an interview with the Niskanen Center.

Levendusky has studied a number of different strategies designed to bridge political differences and has identified nearly two dozen ways to reduce polarization and improve attitudes toward the other party. Among them, showing videos to partisans in which people bond after having a political disagreement, or having partisans read news stories highlighting how people on both sides of the political aisle are tired of polarization. 

Levendusky recently discussed his findings with Greg Berman, distinguished fellow of practice at The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation. This transcript of their conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Greg Berman: I’ve read a lot about how Americans have basically sorted themselves into two separate bubbles—red America and blue America. In contrast, you have written that most of us still have very good friends on the opposing political team. To what extent have Americans really sorted into separate worlds, and to what extent is that construct overhyped? 

Matthew Levendusky: I think it’s important to understand the difference between “mostly” and “completely.” If the question is: Are there important differences between the parties? Or: Do members of the two parties value different things? The answer is “Sure.” But does that mean that there’s no overlapping communication between the two sides, that people don’t know anyone from the other party? The answer to that is clearly “No.” 

It’s also important to understand the difference between a survey response and reality—they are not the same thing, and people often confuse them. A survey response is a very artificial scenario with very low cost. That doesn’t mean surveys aren’t valuable—I use them a lot. But you have to think about the difference between what someone says and what someone means. People will tell you all sorts of things in surveys. It’s not that they’re lying, but their answers have to be understood within a particular context. 

Most people are still closer to the middle than the extremes on most issues.

There’s a lot of skepticism right now about surveys. In addition to the usual complaints that the wording of questions can drive certain answers, the consistent underestimation of support for Donald Trump has led some people to argue that pollsters are no longer able to construct truly representative samples. How fair do you think that critique is? 

Modestly fair. There are low-trust individuals who are less likely to be polled. That has probably always been true. The difference is now that maps onto politics in a more meaningful way. If being low-trust doesn’t tell you much about someone’s politics, it doesn’t really matter that much if you miss low-trust people in a political poll. But these days, being low-trust is correlated with a certain kind of politics. That’s the problem for pollsters now. 

Echoing the political scientist Morris Fiorina, my instinct is that the American public hasn’t moved much ideologically since I was a kid, with the exception of a handful of issues like gay marriage and marijuana legalization. Is that an accurate read of the polling? 

Most people are still closer to the middle than the extremes on most issues. Ordinary people are really not all that extreme. Now, you will see significant differences among the donor class and among the kinds of people who are very involved in politics. They tend to look more extreme on one side or the other. 

Look at the recent kerfuffle over book bans. A lot of that was driven by a relatively small number of actors who were deeply involved in politics already. In the school district where I grew up, it was being driven by the daughter-in-law of the state senator from the district. So not exactly a randomly selected person from the district, right? I think if you ask most people, they wouldn’t have felt super strongly about the issue. They might have an opinion, but it is a weak one. I think we see this dynamic over and over again with relatively small groups of people who care intensely about an issue.

What are the biggest misconceptions that Democrats have of Republicans and vice versa? 

Because we tend to interact more with people who are like us than unlike us, we have a particularly bad understanding of people who aren’t like us. Birds of a feather flock together—that’s just true in lots of things. I’m a middle-aged, White, college-educated person, so a lot of the people I know are middle-aged, college-educated White people.

The people we interact with a lot tend to be like us along many dimensions, including politically. If I don’t know a lot of people in the opposite party, I’m going to draw inferences from what I see on social media, or from what I see talked about in the mass media, or from the political elites that I see in campaigns. 

The people that they really dislike are the sorts of people who make everything political—the stereotypical family member who wants to argue with everyone at Thanksgiving dinner. That's the sort of person most people object to politically.

In general, when people think about those on the other side, they tend to think of them as being more extreme than an ordinary person would be from the other party. I published a paper a few years ago with a couple of collaborators, and we asked people, “How do you feel about the Democrats or the Republicans?” When we did that, the kind of person they’re bringing to mind is not someone who is very typical of the other party. They’re bringing to mind someone who’s quite ideologically extreme and who’s very politically engaged. But if you ask people about someone who looks more like the average partisan—someone who’s not very politically interested and not all about political extremes—they’re basically fine with them. The people that they really dislike are the sorts of people who make everything political—the stereotypical family member who wants to argue with everyone at Thanksgiving dinner. That’s the sort of person most people object to politically. 

The two professional worlds that I know best are the nonprofit sector and academia. In recent years, both nonprofits and universities have been attacked for being almost uniformly left wing. I fear that there is some truth to this critique. Do you share my worry?

I share it, but I think it goes to a deeper issue. One of the most deleterious things that has changed in the United States has been the growing educational polarization divide. This predates Trump. To be honest, there’s not a super clear, compelling explanation for why this has happened. I worry about creating a cycle where access to better opportunities becomes centered in a world that is seen as believing in one side of our political divide, but not the other. Having said that, I’ll believe that Republicans are truly skeptical of universities when they stop trying to have their kids come to institutions like mine. Plenty of Republicans are still fighting very hard to have their kids attend Penn and Stanford and Harvard, and all the rest. So, there’s definitely some political double-speak there. 

It is important to try to get people to communicate better so that they can come away with a deeper understanding of why people believe what they believe.

In Our Common Bonds, you argue that it is, in fact, possible to change our political climate. How do we do that?  

To be clear: it’s not some magic wand that you just get to wave. You know, on the internet, when you see things like “One weird trick to a flat belly”? Well, there is no one weird trick that we can use to reduce partisanship. It’s a deep problem. It’s less about magic wands and more about moving things on the margin. 

I think a big part of addressing the problem is learning to communicate with those who have opposing views in ways that enhance understanding. It is hard enough for us to have knowledge of ourselves. But we really tend not to do a good job of understanding the rationales of people who are unlike us. It is important to try to get people to communicate better so that they can come away with a deeper understanding of why people believe what they believe. And that means teaching people about civility, about listening, and about asking good questions, with the idea that you’re setting up conversations to be constructive rather than destructive.

Now, sometimes what surfaces in conversations between partisans can be common ground, a sense of “Oh, I didn’t realize that we actually agreed on some things.” But a lot of times the goal is simply to better understand what someone else is saying. The kinds of people who usually want to come to these kinds of conversations are generally pretty political. They tend to be interested in persuading people to come to their side. My pitch to them is always that they will never persuade someone if they don’t understand their perspective and their point of view. I’m part of a working group with many other people across lots of universities and nonprofits trying to think about how to test this at scale. 

Talk to me about the challenge of scale, because one of the things that makes me skeptical about bringing people together for conversations across political differences is that I think it’s hard to scale up. I also worry that any positive effects from these conversations may wear off very quickly as people return to their normal lives.

Are those reasonable concerns to have about these kinds of things? Sure. Again, there’s no magic wand here. These sorts of exchanges shouldn’t be a one-off thing that you do. It’s about building up a set of skills. It’s about rethinking how you approach learning about other people.  

Do you think there is a connection between polarization and political violence? 

Define violence and define polarization. 

I guess I would define polarization as affective polarization. And political violence is using force to try to achieve political goals. 

In a book I published in 2024 with a bunch of coauthors called Partisan Hostility and American Democracy, we asked some questions about support for politically motivated violence. And the relationship with animosity was basically flat. One caution here is that it is really hard to gauge support for violence in a survey. 

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.

Help me parse the academic debate about public support for political violence. I know that a number of professors argue that we’ve recently seen a significant increase in the percentage of Americans who support the use of violence. But then I look at the work that the Polarization Research Lab and others have done which suggests the levels of support for political violence have been, and remain, very low.

So this is a case where the way in which you ask the question matters a lot. What people are envisioning when you ask them about violence varies from person to person. This is also a case where the inattentiveness of survey respondents matters. The modal person taking a survey these days is doing it on their phone—they’re flipping through and clicking buttons. And the truth of the matter is that a lot of people aren’t paying super close attention. So you’ll get some people who are just inattentively clicking, “Yes” to things. To be clear, it’s not that the support for political violence is zero. It’s that the true support, if properly measured, is probably pretty low.

The problem with political violence isn’t that there’s a significant percentage of the public who think violence is acceptable and that if we put the issue to a vote, we might lose. To be honest, in some ways, I think this whole thing about surveys is sort of a distraction. The problem is really the seeming justification for political violence that comes from elite actors. I think the way violence actually spreads is that a small fringe of people who are willing to engage in violence get messages from elites that this kind of behavior is OK.

You have recently published some research about cancel culture. What did you find? 

Does it exist? Yes. But most ordinary people are not really subject to it. I think the prevalence is low. Most of the examples that you can find tend to be relatively high-profile people. But for me, the more interesting aspect of cancelling is that this is a way of signaling your bona fides to your group. So I think the way to understand these dynamics when they happen is that this is less about genuine beliefs and more a kind of performative action that is designed to signal who your group is. 

Did you find any difference between Democrats and Republicans when it comes to engaging in cancellation? 

If there are differences, they’re relatively minor. 

What is your take on the current fight over gerrymandering? Are the Democrats justified in responding in kind to the Republican gerrymander in Texas? Or is this a case of the Democrats trying to save democracy by engaging in deeply anti-democratic actions? 

I think there is a danger of tit for tat. Partisan hardball is just a bad equilibrium. The fight over congressional districts only matters because of the even balance of power in the country. The parties are so evenly divided that small things can tip things one way or the other. If we were to go back to the 1960s or 1970s, five or six seats aren’t going to make a difference in terms of control of Congress. Frances Lee’s book Insecure Majorities talks about this problem, that part of the reason why our political fights have become so intense is that very small things on the margin now matter a lot. 

The fight over gerrymandering also seems to me like a prime example of the nationalization of politics. I’m wondering how you think of the relationship between hyperpartisanship and nationalization. Which comes first?

I think that they’re pretty endogenous to one another. I don’t really have a strong opinion on which one moved first. I think in some ways, they kind of moved concurrently. The sorts of things that used to promote interest in local politics have just slowly eroded—a sense of place, local media, local elites. Our sense of community is just weaker on lots of different levels.  

And at the same time, the whole idea of what it means to be a member of a party has also changed. If you want a good example of this, look at Congressman Mike Flood of Nebraska. He was interviewed on The Daily about town halls. And at one point, he says something like, “Well, you know, I just have to pick and choose my battles with President Trump. I can’t be fighting with him every time my constituents are upset about some issue. He’s the leader of our party, and I have to go along with what he says.” I’m paraphrasing, but that’s kind of an amazing perspective. I think if you played that clip for Alexander Hamilton or James Madison or John Jay, they’d be pretty horrified by that sort of sentiment, which suggests that we have a separation of parties, not a separation of powers.

The effect of social media isn't zero, but I have not seen any compelling evidence that this is really the thing that drives polarization. I think it is more a case of amplifying tendencies that people already have.

I’ve recently been reading about the movement, which I think started in academia, towards what is known as “responsible parties.” This is going back more than a half century. There was a deliberate attempt by both Republicans and Democrats to increase ideological polarization so that voters would have a clearer set of options when they went to the polls.

You mean the 1950 American Political Science Association report? 

Yes.

I think that may be a case of be careful of what you wish for. There was a movement among political scientists to do precisely that back then. But I’m not sure how important it ultimately was to the parties. Political scientists, like everyone else, we like to center ourselves. But I think the evidence is pretty thin that Dwight Eisenhower and LBJ carefully pored over that report and used that as the basis of what they should do. I think a bunch of other things intervened to generate the kind of partisanship that we see today. I think ultimately it’s about the incentives that political actors face. 

One thing that hasn’t come up so much in our conversation is social media. I know that correlation is not causation, but for me it seemed like things really started going off the rails around 2014–2015, right around the time when people got smartphones and started to be on social media all day long. 

Does social media contribute to the problem? Sure. That said, there are a lot of studies on this and, at least so far, it’s really hard to generate the kind of empirical evidence you need to show social media having big effects on the way that people think. Going back more than a decade, a team of researchers looked at Facebook data and tried to see whether the algorithm moves people one way or the other. And the answer was, “Yeah, a little bit,” but the much bigger thing is just people’s preferences. The effect of social media isn’t zero, but I have not seen any compelling evidence that this is really the thing that drives polarization. I think it is more a case of amplifying tendencies that people already have. 

If I were to appoint you the czar of American political science, and you had the ability to direct all of the research in the field of polarization in the years to come, how would you direct your peers? 

In true academic fashion, I want to reject the premise of the question. The older I get, the more convinced I am that you need to let people just do their thing. It’s not always obvious what the best and most rewarding thing is going to be. These are just hard problems. They don’t have easy solutions.

This interview is part of  The Polarization Project, a series about political division from Greg Berman, distinguished fellow of practice at The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation.

Berman is co-editor of Vital City, an urban policy journal, and co-author of the book Gradual: The Case for Incremental Change in a Radical Age. In 2022, Berman led At the Crossroads, a series of interviews for HFG, which addressed the rise in crime in New York City following the pandemic.

This interview also appears in The Fulcrum through a copublishing agreement.

Previous interviews from The Polarization Project:
The Polarization Project November 13, 2025

“It’s Probably as Bad as It Can Get”: A Conversation with Lilliana Mason

By Greg Berman

Lilliana Mason

In the aftermath of the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, the threat of political violence has become a topic of urgent concern in the United States. While public support for political violence remains low—according to Sean Westwood of the Polarization Research Lab, fewer than 2 percent of Americans believe that political murder is acceptable—even isolated incidence of political violence can have a corrosive effect. 

According to political scientist Lilliana Mason, political violence amounts to a rejection of democracy. “If a person has used violence to achieve a political goal, then they’ve given up on the democratic process,” says Mason, “Instead, they’re trying to use force to affect government.”

Mason, a professor at Johns Hopkins University, has devoted her professional career to the study of American partisanship. In her first book, Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity, she looked at the social sorting of Democrats and Republicans into increasingly hostile parties. This was followed by Radical American Partisanship: Mapping Violent Hostility, Its Causes, and the Consequences for Democracy (co-authored with Nathan P. Kalmoe), which used national opinion surveys to document the spread of radical beliefs among Americans, both left and right.  

Mason comes away from her research with deep concerns about the state of American democracy. According to Mason and Kalmoe, “the data is undeniable: although public support for political violence is increasing across the partisan spectrum, people on the Right are far likelier to translate this sentiment into real-world, violent action.” 

Mason recently sat down with Greg Berman, The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation’s distinguished fellow of practice, to discuss her research. The following transcript of their conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Greg Berman: In recent years, we have seen two assassination attempts on Donald Trump and the storming of the US Capitol. This suggests to me that we’re currently in a very dark place. On the other hand, if you zoom out a little bit, there have certainly been periods in American history where political violence was much more widespread than it is today. I guess my question is: How worried should we be about polarization and political violence in our country right now? 

Lilliana Mason: In terms of polarization, it’s probably as bad as it can get. The way that we think about each other as partisans is deeply distrustful and even vilifying and dehumanizing. Having vilifying and dehumanizing beliefs about another group doesn’t always lead to mass violence, but when mass violence does occur, those beliefs are usually there beforehand. 

Now, we still have relatively strong norms against political violence in the US. Even in the worst numbers that we find, there is still something like 80 percent of Americans who think that violence should never be used to achieve political goals. But the worrisome part is that we went from 7 percent of people approving of political violence in 2017 to 20 percent today. That’s potentially significant. 

Let’s be clear: the people who do engage in political violence are generally unwell people. In some cases, like the assassination attempt against Trump [in Pennsylvania], it was clearly a plea for attention—that kid could just as easily have been a school shooter. The guy in Minnesota [who killed a lawmaker and her husband] was also having a mental health event. I think that what political polarization does is take people who are already unstable and point them in the direction of politics. They are being fed information that makes them believe that there’s an existential threat coming from the other side. That’s what creates political violence. 

I think that what political polarization does is take people who are already unstable and point them in the direction of politics. They are being fed information that makes them believe that there's an existential threat coming from the other side. That’s what creates political violence.

In your book, Radical American Partisanship, you compare Democrats and Republicans across a variety of measures and find that there’s not much difference in terms of radicalization. But you don’t believe that both parties are equally responsible for our current political situation. Walk me through the difference that you see between the two parties. 

We do see similar levels of vilifying attitudes in the electorate as a whole. But when it comes to actual violent political events, they’re just unimaginably more prevalent on the right. Right-wing domestic terrorism has outpaced all other kinds of domestic terrorism in the United States.

We can’t exactly identify why, but there does seem to be pretty clear evidence that political rhetoric on the right is much more vilifying than rhetoric on the left. You find a lot more far-right media that explicitly says things like, “Democrats are violent criminals, and they’re coming to hurt your family.” The types of storylines that we see in right-wing media are just much more extreme in terms of their intent to vilify Democrats and people on the left in general. 

The other thing that I would say is that we know that approval of political violence is correlated with anti-pluralistic and anti-egalitarian attitudes. Racism, Christian nationalism, replacement theory… those types of attitudes tend to be associated with approval of political violence. And those kinds of attitudes are more prevalent on the right. 

The reason that Democrats and Republicans hate each other right now is that they’re having a fight about questions that are truly existential. The people who are the most vilifying and dehumanizing of their opponents are Republicans who are high in racial resentment and Democrats who are low in racial resentment. These Republicans say that Democrats are subhuman because they’re minorities. And the Democrats say that Republicans are subhuman because they’re racist. The fact that vilifying attitudes are equally prevalent on both sides doesn’t mean that the moral argument is the same on both sides. The current project of the Right is to undo our pluralistic, multi-ethnic democracy. And so this isn’t just a normal political fight. 

What impact, if any, has Trump had on all of this?

In a 2021 American Political Science Review article I wrote with some co-authors, I looked at a unique data set. Basically, in 2011, something like nine thousand people were interviewed, and then they were reinterviewed in 2016, 17, 18, 19, and 20. 2011 was before Trump was a major political figure, so this enabled us to ask a basic question: Did Trump encourage people to be more racist or did Trump bring already racist people into the Republican Party? And I think we have pretty good evidence that it’s the latter. The people who liked Trump in 2018, when you go back to 2011 and ask what they had in common, you see that those people were much more likely to dislike traditionally marginalized groups like Latinos, Muslims, African Americans, and LGBT people. Trump brought those people into the Republican Party. They were largely independents in 2011. Trump made the Republican Party a comfortable place for them. 

Don’t get me wrong: these attitudes existed in the Republican Party before Trump, but they tended to be the minority of the party before he came in. When Trump came in, he essentially empowered the ethno-nationalist faction of Americans. That faction is now in control of one of our political parties. This wouldn’t be as much of a problem if we had more than two political parties, but because we only have two, they can control the levers of government. 

It feels like there is a lot of anger out there at the moment. It is unclear to me to what extent Trump has created this problem and to what extent he is a symptom of this problem. 

The problem definitely didn’t start with Trump. You can go back to Rush Limbaugh, who said things like “The Democrats are evil and they’re coming to get you and your family.” That type of rhetoric became really popular in the 1980s when Limbaugh had his AM radio show. 

And then, when the Republican majority came into power in the 1990s, Newt Gingrich had the GOPAC memo, where he basically laid out a vocabulary list of words that Republicans should use to describe Democrats. And that really did change the tenor of how political leaders talked. Before Gingrich, it was considered kind of uncouth to use that type of language. 

And then, of course, in 1996, we get Fox News. In the beginning, Fox News was not explicitly a project about vilifying the Left and pushing right-wing talking points, but by 2001, it had become a very explicitly pro-Republican news source. 

So I don’t think that Trump started it. I think that he is an outgrowth of decades of extremist right-wing rhetoric. 

I’ve always taken some comfort from issue polling, which suggests that Americans are actually not that far apart ideologically, even when it comes to controversial issues. But in Uncivil Agreement, you argue that partisans don’t have to hold extreme positions in order to grow increasingly biased against their political opponents. Walk me through how that works. 

A while ago, I worked on some experiments where I had people read blog posts that threatened either their issue positions or the status of their political party. So one group of blog posts said things like “If this person is elected, we’re not going to have abortion rights anymore” or “We’re not going to have health care anymore.” Another set said things like, “If this person is elected, no one is going to like Democrats anymore. Everyone is going to hate us and we’re going to lose elections.” And what we found was that the partisan messages make people a lot angrier than the issue-based messages. 

I have also looked at the extremity of people’s issue positions versus the strength of their identification with the label “liberal” or “conservative.” What I found was that if someone identifies really strongly with one of those labels, then they really hate people in the other ideological category, regardless of what their policy attitudes are. I looked specifically at the most liberal people who nonetheless identify as conservative. These are people who hold liberal policy preferences, but they identify as conservative. That identification still makes them hate liberals, even though they hold very similar policy preferences.

What most of the data show is that we do have a lot of policy preferences in common. There are huge proportions of Americans that agree on even divisive issues like abortion and guns. So we have a lot of common ground, but we deeply hate each other. And that’s based in identity. 

The reason that Democrats and Republicans hate each other right now is that they're having a fight about questions that are truly existential.

One of the themes that runs through your work is a concern about social sorting and how our political parties are overlapping with other categories like geography and gender. Given this, I’m wondering how you read the results of the most recent presidential election. The exit polls suggest that Trump was actually a force for racial depolarization, attracting greater numbers of Blacks, Hispanics, and Asian American voters to the Republican Party. 

Just being a member of a minority group doesn’t mean that you don’t dislike other minorities. Whatever resentments you might have against other groups of people, Trump activated those. I think the reality is that there are plenty of Black Americans who don’t like LGBT people. There are plenty of Muslims who don’t like LGBT people. There are plenty of Latinos that don’t like Black people. 

What I’ve found in my more recent research is that the people who voted for Trump in 2024 were really motivated by attitudes about the appropriate roles of men and women in society. A lot of people, despite being a member of a racial minority group, voted for Trump on this basis. They were not voting based on the interests of their racial group, but on the interests of their gender group. The people of color that were voting for Trump were generally men. 

Men of all races are listening to the manosphere bro podcasts, which really like Trump. They like the way that he talks. They think he’s funny. Bloomberg did a really good analysis of the content of the nine most popular bro podcasts in the year leading up to the election. And they basically found that, as we got closer to the election, these podcasts started talking more about transgender issues and about distrusting medical science and about how the economy was terrible. These podcasts are disproportionately listened to by men of all races. So the stories that these people were hearing were stories that were about how you can’t trust the establishment and you should be worried about the economy and that Trump is going to be able to fix all that. 

How much do you blame social media for our current political environment? 

I think social media has some responsibility, for sure. Particularly algorithmic social media. Because we know that in the two weeks before the election in 2020, Facebook changed their algorithm to promote happy news instead of angry things. And they lost engagement. So they changed it back after the election. 

To the extent that we are being rewarded for being angry all the time on social media, I think that’s definitely making things worse. It’s actively changing norms. Now the norm is to be extremely rude and harassing rather than the traditional way of thinking about politics, which was that you have to be serious when you’re talking about the government. 

It’s like the kids have taken over the elementary school, like the principal is gone. And so we’re just going to get rid of all the rules. Trump’s approach was basically, “I’m just going to say all the things that you’re not supposed to say. And that’s going to be really fun.” There’s probably some connection with social media, but I think that political leadership still has a lot to do with it. I don’t think that social media alone would have done this if we didn’t have political leaders willing to behave this way. It’s probably symbiotic in some way. 

In recent months, we’ve seen a few prominent examples of left-wing political violence, including the killing of the UnitedHealthcare CEO, as well as acts of violence against Jews that seem to have been motivated by the war in Gaza. Are you concerned that we could be on the brink of more left-wing political violence?

The antisemitic violence is not surprising to me in that the language used to describe what’s happening in Gaza is very similar to the kind of existential language that is prevalent in right-wing, conspiracy theorist circles. It’s about genocide. It’s about good versus evil. You know, you cannot compromise with evil. So I’m not surprised that there’s been violence coming out of the Left related to this issue. That’s not to say that this kind of rhetoric is not appropriate. It really does feel existential, I think, to a lot of people. 

In terms of the UnitedHealthcare CEO, I’m not sure how political that was. I feel like that was done by a guy who was just troubled and struggling.

Some of the response to that murder from left-wing commentators was not exactly full-throated condemnation.

I didn’t hear that as much from elites as I heard it from random people on Bluesky. There’s a real difference in the standards that we have for Democrats and Republicans these days. When one Democrat on Bluesky says something, it’s taken to be emblematic of the entire party. But most of the Democratic leadership really doesn’t use extremist language. Whereas on the right, we see extremist language coming from the president of the United States. I think a lot of Democratic voters are really frustrated with the lack of passion coming from the Democratic leadership. They think the party is not being angry enough. 

Talk to me about the role that institutions can play in moderating the behavior of Americans. Am I wrong to think that part of the problem with polarization in the US right now is that people are not participating in institutions, or trusting institutions, the way that they used to in the past?

The Bowling Alone argument suggests that we’re not part of communities in the way that we used to be. And communities are important because that’s how we get our norms. That’s how our norms are enforced. So to the extent that we’re not part of communities anymore, then norms are not being enforced to the same degree. 

I do think that COVID played a pretty big role in ways that I don’t think we’re going to be able to see for a long time. What COVID did was drive people online and away from each other. We’re now having political conversations online. And a lot of people went online during COVID to find comforting information. In that context, comforting information was “COVID is not real. It’s not going to kill you. It’s not going to kill anybody.” That type of misinformation was really attractive during a global pandemic. 

We have institutions in part to tell people what’s real and what’s not real. Those institutions are failing. I’ve listened to focus groups with Trump supporters, and the things that they’re talking about are things I’ve never heard of before. These people have entire soap operas that they’re worried about that are not real, that are not based in science. The type of institutions that might help these people find some more information and look at the evidence are collapsing, if they haven’t already collapsed. I don’t know who can play that role anymore. Our political leadership is pushing misinformation and condemning science and eliminating evidence from government websites. 

I get the sense from reading your work that you don’t consider the looting and property destruction that have attended some political protests in recent years to be political violence. Am I reading that correctly? 

That kind of thing can certainly be political violence. But in general, the thing that I’m most worried about is hurting people. That’s the political violence that I think is the most damaging to democracy. Protest is democratic. Protest is 100 percent protected by the First Amendment. Protests are often a sign of a healthy democracy and people having their voices heard. So, to the extent that property damage is associated with protests, I don’t want to paint all protests as violent. 

To the extent that we are being rewarded for being angry all the time on social media, I think that's definitely making things worse. It's actively changing norms.

While you’re obviously deeply concerned about political violence, you take pains not to say that all political violence is bad. When is political violence justified in your mind? 

If we ask Americans, “Was the Civil War justified?” Most people would say, “Yes, we needed to end slavery.” The vast majority of Americans would also say that the Revolutionary War was justified. So the context is always important. And a lot of the questions that we tend to ask about political violence are context-free. A lot depends on what the violence is trying to achieve. In general, we tend to agree that violence that is meant to increase the level of equality in the country is more justified than violence that’s intended to oppress people. The context matters. Political violence is sometimes okay if we’re fighting for a more just future. 

What gives you hope these days? 

The reason everything is so hard and tense and polarized right now is that we’re fighting over some pretty existential questions about who belongs in America and who deserves the full rights and protection of the Constitution.  

As a country, we have made so much progress toward racial equality and gender equality over the last fifty years. My mom couldn’t get a bank account without her husband’s permission until she was twenty-eight years old. We just marked the sixtieth anniversary of the Voting Rights Act. We’ve only had the right to same-sex marriage for ten years. In historical terms, these changes have been extremely rapid. 

That kind of change can’t happen without some kind of backlash from the people who previously held power. There’s no way for us to make progress without living through this resistance to it. We’re just in the struggle right now. But it would be extremely naive to imagine that we could make this much progress and not have a strong backlash. 

Maybe that makes my final question irrelevant. I was going to ask you where we should be making investments if the goal was to reduce polarization and political violence in the United States. But maybe you think polarization is necessary right now because we need to fight an authoritarian movement on the right.

I certainly don’t think polarization is always a bad thing. The world was polarized against the Nazis during World War II, right? I think polarization becomes bad, specifically within a democracy, when it obscures reality and political accountability. If we’re so polarized that we can’t believe anything bad about our own side, and that we will never vote against our own side, that undermines democracy. 

If I were putting a lot of money somewhere, I would actually put it into local media. I would like to rebuild local news because many people will only trust information when they’re reading it next to the high school football scores and whatever is happening at the farmer’s market on Saturday. To the extent that people trust media anymore, they trust their local media. And there is really good evidence that the decline of local media has increased political polarization. 

This interview is part of  The Polarization Project, a series about political division from Greg Berman, distinguished fellow of practice at The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation.

Berman is co-editor of Vital City, an urban policy journal, and co-author of the book Gradual: The Case for Incremental Change in a Radical Age. In 2022, Berman led At the Crossroads, a series of interviews for HFG, which addressed the rise in crime in New York City following the pandemic.

This interview also appears in The Fulcrum through a copublishing agreement.

Previous interviews from The Polarization Project:
The Polarization Project September 10, 2025

‘The Potential for Terrorism Is Pretty Frightening’: A Conversation with Gary LaFree

By Greg Berman

Gary LaFree
Gary LaFree

When terrorists hijacked and crashed planes into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, criminologist Gary LaFree was teaching at the University of Maryland, where he had built a career researching global and domestic crime. In fact, in the ’90s, LaFree was awarded two grants by The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation to support his research on global homicide rates, as well as race and crime. But the events of 9/11 forever changed the trajectory of his career.

Before the attacks, the field of criminology did not take much interest in terrorism, according to LaFree. “In fact, at the turn of the twenty-first century, it was not at all clear that most criminologists considered terrorism and politically motivated violence to be a legitimate part of criminology,” he says.

LaFree was determined to change that. In the years that followed, he focused his energies on studying terrorism and violent political extremism. In 2005, he helped found the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) at the University of Maryland, where he still sits as a professor emeritus. START, among other things, maintains a global terrorism database that provides researchers with data about global and domestic incidents of terrorism from 1970 to the present.

LaFree has largely succeeded in his quest. Today, the study of political extremism has been widely accepted into mainstream criminology. In 2024, LaFree received the Stockholm Prize in Criminology, the most prestigious award in the field.

LaFree recently sat down with Greg Berman, the distinguished fellow of practice at The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, to talk about the current state of political extremism, terrorism, and polarization in the United States. The following transcript of their conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

Greg Berman: How did you come to be an expert in terrorism?  

Gary LaFree: It was kind of serendipitous. I have an undergraduate degree in history, and I’ve always been interested in archives and in longitudinal data. I was at the University of Maryland, and I had been doing a lot of work on international homicide rates. One of my graduate students told me about this data set being collected by the Pinkerton Global Intelligence Service. This is the old detective agency. It turns out they’re still around and located in northern Virginia. So I take the subway out to visit them. And these guys have been collecting data on terrorism for fifty years. They’d hire former intelligence officers when they retired to help them collect the data. When businesses would send people to a place like Zimbabwe and they would want to know what the terrorism risk was, Pinkerton would give them the information and then sell them a bunch of other products. 

Anyway, it turned out Pinkerton was phasing out that end of their business. And when I looked at the data, it looked exactly like international homicide data. Essentially, you have cases on one axis and variables on the other. So I sort of naively thought, “Well, I’ve been doing all this work on one kind of violence. Why not just move over to a different type of violence?” This was around 2000.

And then 9/11 happens. Pinkerton had allowed me to carry all of their archival data on terrorism to my office in Maryland. Suddenly, I’m sitting on this huge cache of terrorism data, and there was a great amount of interest. The US government was not really interested in terrorism until 9/11. It was really a secondary concern up until then—even organizations like the FBI didn’t devote that many resources to it. Pinkerton actually had more data on terrorism, collected from open sources, than the government did. 

When you take a step back and look at the data about terrorism over the decades, what trends do you see?

First off, the data only goes back so far. This whole enterprise was made possible by the invention of satellite technology and handheld cameras. That made it possible to sit in Washington and gather data on other parts of the world through the media. So basically, most of the data on terrorism starts around 1970. So you’re only looking at about fifty years. It’s not because terrorism started then, of course, but because that’s when we’ve been able to measure it using these open databases. 

In terms of big-picture trends, looking globally, what happens is that you have relatively low rates of terrorism starting in 1970. That steadily increases until reaching a peak in about 1991, and then it begins to trail off. It’s hard to prove this, but my suspicion is that the turning point was the collapse of the Soviet Union. In fact, right before 9/11, you had probably the lowest point in the fifty-year history of terrorism data. After that, you get a rapid increase being fueled by groups like Al Qaeda and ISIS, hitting a peak at about the end of the caliphate in 2014–2015. 

Looking over a fifty-year period, we found that Islamist and right-wing extremists are way more violent than left-wing extremists.

What about the US? My sense is that political violence was much more prevalent in the US in the 1970s than it is today.

The US rates look very different from the rest of the world. The US had the most activity in the ’70s. Back then, you had a variety of student groups, Black activists, Puerto Rican separatists. After the ’70s, the level of political violence in the United States begins to trail off, but in recent years it has started to pick up, driven primarily by right-wing extremists, and, to a lesser extent, Islamist cases. 

Given that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, how do you define political violence?

With the Pinkerton data, our idea from the beginning was that we wanted to preserve the legacy data, because we thought having longitudinal data would be very useful. So that moved us in the direction of trying to keep the definition they used. And fortunately, Pinkerton essentially used the US Department of Defense definition, which is a pretty general one. Essentially it involves violence or the threat of violence for a political purpose. It’s a little more complicated than that, but basically that sums it up. 

By that standard should we consider Antifa a domestic terrorist group? What about the Proud Boys? 

Yes, the Proud Boys would definitely qualify. Antifa is a more complicated case. We basically go where the definitions take us. At START, we maintain another dataset called PIRUS (Profiles of Individual Radicalization in the United States), and I think we do have some Antifa cases in there. We try to be as objective and as consistent as possible. So, for example, historically we have cases from South Africa involving attacks against the apartheid regime where you can certainly sympathize with the attackers, and yet if they fit the definitions we have established, we include them in the database. Sometimes people ask me, “Would you have included the Boston Tea Party?” And the answer is yes, we would have if it met the criteria. 

Continuing on that theme, I’ve spoken to some people who are fairly dismissive of the idea that looting and property destruction should be counted as political violence. Do you have a point of view on that? 

Basically, what we have tried to do is to create the broadest tent possible and then put flags in the data to allow people to define terrorism the way they want to define it. In general, we have included property crimes if they result in irreversible damage.

I've been surprised that we haven't seen that much left-wing terrorism yet. Certainly, it's been very light compared to the activities of the left during the 1960s and ’70s.

So if I throw a brick through a window, that doesn’t count? 

We’d only count it if we can get enough evidence about your intention. If it is just vandalism, then no. But if you throw a brick through the window and you scrawl “Death to the Jews” on the wall next to it, then we would include it. 

You’ve compared the prevalence of political violence among left-wing, right-wing, and Islamist extremists. What did you learn?

We did a large study on this, not too long ago, looking both internationally and also for the United States alone. And in both cases, looking over a fifty-year period, we found that Islamist and right-wing extremists are way more violent than left-wing extremists. 

You’ve said that right-wing perpetrators of political violence are more common in the US than in other countries. Do you have a theory on why that might be? 

I don’t have a very good answer for that, except to say that it seems to be a pretty long-standing situation. Right-wing political violence has been pretty uncommon in other parts of the world from about the ’80s on. I think in our worldwide database on terrorism, something like 4 percent of the cases are right-wing, whereas in the United States, right now it’s definitely a clear majority. For whatever reason, the political Right in the United States seems to feel that they are really being sidelined and cut out of the political process, and they seem more willing to use violence to settle the score. 

What role do you think political elites play here? Peter Coleman introduced me to the idea of stochastic terrorism. How much blame should we place on the shoulders of President Donald Trump and the other leaders who engage in heated political rhetoric?

I certainly wouldn’t put it all on Trump. The right-wing movement is much broader than Trump. But if you take the specific case of the January 6 insurrection, it’s very hard for me to look at that and say that Trump did not play a major role. The people who stormed the Capitol were clearly responding to thinly veiled suggestions from the president. I think there’s very strong evidence that Trump was instrumental in the January 6 insurrection. 

Let's face it, when we talk about terrorism, we are largely talking about young men.

What elements in our current political environment should we be keeping a particular eye out for in terms of their potential to spark domestic terrorism in the future? 

I think we’re in a very volatile situation right now. You have public opinion polls that show that many people, particularly Republicans, think that using violence for political ends is acceptable. We have tremendous polarization in terms of whether the 2020 election was stolen or not. That belief is pretty much an official part of the Republican platform. Certainly, all of the party’s leadership seems to be buying into it. I think the potential for terrorism is pretty frightening. Frankly, I’ve been surprised that we haven’t seen that much left-wing terrorism yet. Certainly, it’s been very light compared to the activities of the Left during the 1960s and ’70s. 

That may be changing. I’m thinking of the killing of the UnitedHealthcare CEO and recent cases of antisemitic violence motivated by the war in Gaza. Or maybe you think I’m overreacting to a few isolated examples. 

I don’t think you are. You asked a moment ago about the big-picture trends. I’ve been looking at this data for a long time. One of the things that has impressed me is how wavelike terrorism is: once you start to get one form of it, it often builds. The trendline doesn’t look like an EKG, where it oscillates wildly up and down. Instead, it’s more like a wave. That tells me that once you start going in a particular direction, you tend to go in that direction for a while. Eventually, you’ll hit a peak. And frankly, we’re not all that good as social scientists at predicting where the peak is going to be. I don’t know if we are at the beginning of a new era for left-wing terrorism, but it very much bears watching.

What does the evidence say about the relationship between polarization and political violence? 

Well, we’re not in an experimental setting, so we’re always guessing to some extent. But I would certainly say that those two things—polarization and political violence—have traditionally been correlated in the United States.

As someone who has spent the bulk of my career in the nonprofit sector, I find myself drawn to Robert Putnam’s “bowling alone” argument, that civic engagement has declined as people pursue more solitary activities. I worry that over the years there’s been an erosion of participation in civil society. Nonprofits and other voluntary associations used to help us bring people together and bridge divides, but it doesn’t seem like they’re performing that role as well as they used to in American society. Does that idea resonate with you at all? 

It very much does. Let’s face it, when we talk about terrorism, we are largely talking about young men. And in all sorts of ways young men are in crisis right now. There’s some interesting scholarship talking about how young men in the Gilded Age went through a similar crisis. And society sort of responded in a way that I think Putnam would support—this is when the YMCAs were set up, when the Boy Scouts were set up, when there were all these institutions that were organized to sort of bring young men into the fold and help them avoid doing dangerous sorts of things. 

I think we are in a similar situation right now. You can see it in the voting patterns. In the last election, the voting patterns for young men and young women were strikingly different. I don’t think there’s been another period in history like it. So if you want to deal with terrorism, you have to deal with the problems of young men. Interestingly, we are not talking about minority men here. Unlike some other crime categories, terrorism tends to involve mostly young White men.

In terms of explaining terrorism, you want to try to get into the heads of the people who commit these acts to figure out what makes them tick. And a lot of times when we do this, we find an individual whose identity is being threatened in some way.

I think that the conventional wisdom says that political extremism flourishes in places of economic hardship. But you’ve done some research into the relationship between domestic terrorism and unemployment that complicates that picture. 

From a criminology standpoint, economics usually is at least part of the explanation for rising crime rates. Less so with terrorism, however. Oftentimes, the individuals that get into terrorism, they’re not on the bottom of the food chain. Don’t get me wrong: they’re not at the top, either. They’re more like underperformers—people that are punching below their weight, that are not doing as well as they should be. 

I think in terms of explaining terrorism, you want to try to get into the heads of the people who commit these acts to figure out what makes them tick. And a lot of times when we do this, we find an individual whose identity is being threatened in some way. They feel like they’re being left behind, that they’re not being treated fairly, that they’re not being given a chance. And in that situation, there’s not as much difference as you would think between Osama bin Laden and Mother Teresa. When your identity is being threatened, there are different ways you can go to restore your identity and make yourself feel like you have some self-worth. And to some extent, I think whether you go the Mother Teresa route or the Osama bin Laden route is a matter of chance. 

You’ve also looked at the role of incarceration in sparking radical extremism. What did you find there? 

Prison is an amplifier, basically. In terms of predicting violence, at least, if you are radicalized in prison, you’re even more likely to be violent. So prison has a corrosive effect. Now, this study was only limited to the United States, but I think researchers in Europe have come to similar conclusions. 

You’ve argued that 9/11 changed policing in the United States in some pretty profound ways—that prioritizing counterterrorism meant deprioritizing community and problem-oriented policing. Talk to me about that transformation and what impact you think it has had. 

I think this transformation has really been underappreciated. I think the unfortunate impact of 9/11 is that it moved police much more to a sort of SWAT team mentality. And this was aided by programs that enabled the US military to turn over surplus equipment to urban police departments. 

If you look at the image of the police, I’d say there’s almost a straight line leading from 9/11 to George Floyd, where we end up with more and more aggressive police use of force. I think police changed their attitude about their role—they came to see their job as patrolling hostile territory as opposed to trying to work with citizens to come up with solutions. Frankly, I think a lot of people go into policing because it sounds kind of glamorous to be going in with weapons and knocking down doors to apprehend terrorism suspects as opposed to helping people get cats out of trees.

In fairness, it’s a really tough problem because if you want to take counterterrorism seriously, there’s no way to keep the police out of it. I don’t know how many FBI agents we have on terrorism right now, but it is maybe a couple thousand, whereas we have hundreds of thousands of police officers. It’s pretty much impossible to imagine any kind of effective counterterrorism without involving the police. 

I think we have this idea from watching television and movies that terrorism cases are solved through computer technology. But when you look at the cases that actually get solved, it’s almost always just on-the-ground, standard police work. It’s people coming forward as witnesses and informants. So if the community doesn’t trust the police, it’s going to be very difficult for them to be effective in policing terrorism.

I’ve spent most of my career in criminal justice reform. Many of my friends from that world are very skeptical that deterrence has any impact whatsoever. I’m wondering what you’ve learned, if anything, about deterrence and political violence. 

Again, we’re not in an experimental setting, so it’s difficult to say with certainty. But if you’re looking at the number of sworn officers and terrorism, I think the relationship is pretty weak. In the area of imprisonment, though, I think many criminologists would say that the big drop in crime that happened starting in the ’90s, probably about 25 percent of that could be attributed to increased imprisonment. I mean, you could debate whether it made political sense to do it, but I think it probably did have a measurable impact. So sometimes deterrence does seem to work. We looked at some of the things that Britain tried against the IRA in Northern Ireland. And one of the few things that seemed to work was this huge military buildup called Operation Motorman. It didn’t work in the long run, but it did have measurable effects in the short run. 

What about on the prevention side? What kind of investments should we be making there? 

I would go all in on Putnam’s idea. I think we need to do what we can to get disaffected groups to essentially buy into the legitimacy of the political system. A lot of the work people have been doing to reduce street crime and build greater confidence in the criminal justice system will probably also give you benefits when it comes to political violence as well. 

Are you hopeful as you look to the future?

I tend to be an optimist. The worldwide picture, in terms of terrorism at least, has been relatively calm. We’re even relaxing some of the requirements for getting on airplanes for the first time in many years. But I’m pretty nervous about our domestic situation in the United States and the extent to which we can survive and stay within a democratic regime.

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 the book 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 will also appear in The Fulcrum through a copublishing agreement.

Previous interviews from The Polarization Project:
HFG Knowledge Against Violence Speaker Series May 28, 2025

Words of War: Does Negotiation End or Extend Conflict?

“In Words of War, Eric Min pulls back the curtain on when, why, and how belligerents negotiate while fighting.” – Cornell University Press

Negotiations during war have long been used to end wars and quell conflict. Over the last two centuries, two-thirds of interstate wars were ended using negotiated settlements. In his recent book, Eric Min, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles, interrogates when and why talks occur and, more importantly, under what conditions they can lead to a peaceful resolution.

“Rather than thinking that it “cannot hurt” to promote diplomacy during war, or that we should just “give war a chance,”” writes Min, his theory “offers guidance about when and how diplomacy can be used to help settle wars—or when it can be exploited by belligerents to potentially win them.”

In his March 26 article for HFG, Min applied his theory to current international conflicts: In Ukraine and Elsewhere, Is Third-Party Diplomacy Helpful in Ending Wars?

On May 28, Min led a virtual conversation for HFG on the role of third-party pressure on belligerents and the tradeoffs of using diplomacy to garner short-term vs. long-term peace.

Watch Video

Eric Min is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at UCLA. He received his B.A. in International Relations at New York University, where he was valedictorian of the College of Arts and Science. He earned his Ph.D. in Political Science at Stanford University and was also Zukerman Postdoctoral Fellow in Social Sciences at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). Eric’s research focuses on interstate diplomacy, information gathering and sharing during crises, and applications of machine learning and text analysis techniques to declassified documents related to conflict and foreign policy. His dissertation received the 2018 Kenneth Waltz Prize from the American Political Science Association’s International Security Section.

The Polarization Project April 15, 2025

‘When People Spend Time Together, They are Less Inclined to See Each Other as the Enemy’: A Conversation with Matt Grossmann

By Greg Berman

Matt Grossmann

In The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway famously observed that a character went broke in two ways: gradually, then suddenly. The same dynamic has been at work in American politics. For decades, the composition of our principal political parties has been slowly shifting, without a great deal of public attention. And then the 2024 presidential election happened, and it was suddenly obvious: the Democrats, traditionally the party of the working class, had become the party of educated elites. 

Matt Grossmann has been a keen observer of this transition. A professor of political science at Michigan State University, Grossmann also directs the Institute for Public Policy and Social Research and hosts the “Science of Politics” podcast for the Niskanen Center. With his co-author David A. Hopkins, Grossmann recently published Polarized by Degrees: How the Diploma Divide and the Culture War Transformed American Politics, a book that documents a remarkable shift in American society. Since 1960, we have seen a massive expansion in the number of adult Americans earning college degrees—from roughly 7 percent of the population to nearly 40 percent. 

At the same time, policy has moved to the left on a number of hot-button issues, including gay rights,  drug legalization, and criminal justice reform. For many Americans, these are long overdue developments – and indications that the long arc of history bends toward justice.  But, of course, not everyone thinks these are signs of progress. Indeed, many Americans believe the exact opposite – that they augur a dystopian future and that every effort must be made to change course. According to Grossmann, “These transformations have polarized the nation’s political climate and ignited a perpetual culture war.” 

Grossmann spoke with Greg Berman, the distinguished fellow of practice at The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, about the current state of American politics, the potential for political violence, and strategies to reduce polarization. 

This transcript has been edited for both length and clarity. 

Walk me through the argument of your most recent book. Why is education, rather than race, class, geography, or ideology, the central dividing line in American life?

Well, all those dividing lines are important. The book isn’t a comparison of whether voting gaps between Black and White people are larger or smaller than between higher education and lower education voters. The argument is more that educational polarization is a big recent change that’s occurring in the US and across the rich world. And this change has been associated with a significant change in our politics, which are increasingly focused on social and cultural issues rather than economic issues. 

Does anything make you think that the trendline is going to reverse itself, or should we expect American educational and cultural polarization to continue to grow?

Right now, there’s a lot to suggest that the process will be self-reinforcing in the days to come. That doesn’t mean that we won’t see changes, however. For example, it is clear that the Biden administration produced a backlash that moved social attitudes in a culturally conservative direction on several issues, including those related to race and immigration. So you can have these long-term trends in progress, but still things can go up or down during any given political cycle. 

But I haven’t seen anything yet that I think would break the long-term trend. And there are at least two things that would tend to perpetuate it. One is that the educational divide had previously been concentrated among white voters, but now it seems to be extending to minority voters. And second, the educational divide seems to be self-reinforcing with geography—educated places are moving in a culturally liberal direction even faster than educated people are. And the opposite is true of less educated places. So all of that would tend to keep the trend going.

Polarized by Degrees was published before Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 election. Has anything that has happened since the book came out caused you to rethink your priors?

The election itself didn’t have a huge effect on my view of the trends. I believe that this is the third election in a row where the polls have overestimated Black movement toward Republicans, but underestimated Hispanic movement toward Republicans. So that’s sort of an interesting quirk that we still don’t quite understand. But in general, the things that have transpired since the election have been pretty consistent with our book. I do think that the idea that Republicans were turning against big business has been reshaped by the Elon Musk relationship and the rise of the tech right. That is not something that was anticipated by our book. Similarly, I don’t think our book anticipated the quick action that Republicans would take in terms of going after the professional class of bureaucrats and universities.

Our increasingly individualized media environment is allowing a lot of people to tune out politics completely until they absolutely have to. I think that’s what is happening more than they're getting fed a bunch of misinformation that's pushing them to one side or the other.

Do you think that Trump’s victory means that I should rethink my priors—that the public has essentially rejected incrementalism in favor of something more disruptive?

I certainly don’t think, when given the choice of incrementalism versus disruption, that the public is always going to side with incrementalism. I think it’s more the case that when the party in power moves policy quickly in a given ideological direction, then there is a backlash in the opposite direction. Generally speaking, the public is in the middle of the two political parties. But I don’t think it necessarily means that the public is consciously saying, “We want things to move incrementally rather than through quick action.” Sometimes they are in favor of quick action. 

We have extreme status quo bias in our political institutions. It’s especially large when you are trying to reduce the size and scope of government through congressional action. And so that’s why you have the conservative movement saying, “Well, let’s try to do it all at once through the executive branch and see if that works.” I’m skeptical that executive actions will achieve those ends, but I think this strategy is born of a basic understanding that working through Congress almost always entails incrementalism.

I am drawn to the idea that, notwithstanding our political debates, which seem to gravitate toward extremes right now, most American voters are still in the muddled middle, broadly defined. Do you think that’s an accurate depiction of the American electorate? 

On almost any measure, if you ask the public a bunch of policy questions, they would fall in between Democratic and Republican elites. That is, if you give people five policy choices in a spectrum, they tend to choose the ones in the middle. But the big thing that has changed is that people tend to have more positions that are consistently on the left or the right. In other words, there aren’t as many people who are culturally liberal but economically conservative, or the reverse, as there have been in the past. And so that can look like everybody’s lining up on the two sides.

You’ve argued that our current era of polarization and nationalized politics favors the Republicans more than the Democrats. Why is that?

The last time we had a long-term, majority party in the United States was the Democrats. It was a strange majority party. It included segregationists in the South and African-Americans in the North. Republicans understood that they did not have the advantage in partisanship, but they did have the advantage in ideological identification—there were more people who identified as conservatives than liberals. So they sought to remake the party system along more ideological lines. In doing so, they had allies among many liberals who believed that their ideas were being blocked by a conservative coalition in Congress. 

Today, we have parties that are much more internally cohesive in terms of ideology. I don’t think it’s inherently true that this dynamic will always favor the right or the left. I just think we moved from a system where the Democratic party was a coalition that wasn’t very ideologically defined. That was why it was able to be a majority party. We don’t have that anymore.

Do you have a prescription for what ails the Democratic party? I realize you aren’t a Democratic strategist, but what would you do if you were in charge of the party?

Well, first of all, I think the challenge is always overestimated in the wake of losing a presidential election. The average shift away from the party that won the presidential election in the following midterm is five points. And so, absent any other information, you would expect that Democrats would regain the majority in the House and have a substantial gain in the popular vote in two years. Further, the more that the party in power moves policy, the bigger the backlash you would expect. If your goal is to build Democratic majorities, it doesn’t feel great at the moment because you’re losing a bunch of policy battles, and it looks like Trump is doing a lot. But all of this suggests that the public will move in the Democrats’ direction before too long. 

In general, everything people are saying right now about moderation in elections is true: moderate candidates do better than extreme candidates. Candidates who can successfully distinguish themselves from the national Democratic Party’s liberal orientation do better. That kind of thing is necessary for Democrats to win elections. But the effect size is small compared to the likely shift from Republicans to Democrats just on the basis of there being a Republican president.

You’ve characterized our current moment as being defined by hyperbolic political conflict, combined with very minimal policymaking achievements. I think that combination has driven a lot of frustration with our political system. But many would argue that this is actually a case of the system functioning the way it should. Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats have been able to cobble together a sizable majority. In that environment, our government is set up to essentially stymie big policy change. 

Well, our system was certainly designed to have a large status quo bias, and it is achieving that. But of course, that comes with problems. Republicans aren’t making it up when they say that we don’t do a very good job of looking at the programs that we have already implemented to see if they are actually achieving good results. And Democrats are right that we tend to produce systems that are built on top of previous systems, which may not function at all well. And that means that our healthcare system or our education system don’t necessarily achieve their goals. So I think the system is achieving status quo bias, but it is not necessarily achieving our broader policy aims.

Comparative research suggests that polarization is one factor that drives political violence. It has also certainly played a role in leading to some things that are intermediary factors in political violence, like political officials who contest election results.

Many of my friends are concerned that the Trump administration is going to reshape society over the next four years, but I am pretty skeptical that political actors can change the culture. I’m curious to hear what you think about that.

In general, I would say that the specific policy aims of liberals are popular, but the broader ideological goal of liberalism is unpopular. So people can simultaneously say, “Yes, we should extend rights to this particular population which is facing this particular problem,” and also say, “Things are changing too fast.” People can maintain a conservative predisposition about cultural change even while, over time, they continue to accept more and more cultural change. 

The second thing I would say is that a lot of times, policy is really an exercise in codifying a social change that has already been achieved. Take gay marriage, for example. What moved opinions slowly over time appears to have been things like more gay characters on television and movies, and more people coming out in real life. It’s not like campaigns for gay marriage successfully convinced people. In fact, when it became a political issue, that’s the only time that we moved backward in public support of gay marriage. 

How do you think about the relationship between polarization and political violence? How worried are you that our heightened state of partisanship could lead to violence?

Comparative research suggests that polarization is one factor that drives political violence. It has also certainly played a role in leading to some things that are intermediary factors in political violence, like political officials who contest election results. But of course, there are tons of other factors, and you wouldn’t want to just draw two lines going up and say there’s a relationship.

How much do you blame social media for where we’re at?

Certainly, the media environment is a big factor. There’s evidence that the rise of faster internet access and the rise of mobile cell phones are associated with polarization. It’s part of a broader pattern. The rise of cable television was also associated with more polarization. One of the things that I think people underestimate is the divide between people who care about politics and people who do not. Part of what our increasingly individualized media environment is doing is allowing a lot of people to tune out politics completely until they absolutely have to. I think that’s what is happening more than they’re getting fed a bunch of misinformation that’s pushing them to one side or the other.

The institutions that I care about the most—our media organizations, universities, and nonprofits— tend to be controlled by elite actors who are more liberal than the general public. I think in recent years, many of those institutions have been drivers of polarization. Do you accept that many nonprofits, many media outlets, and many universities have helped fuel polarization? And how can we change that?

I agree with all of that, but I would add two caveats. Caveat number one is that I don’t think people in these institutions thought that was what they were doing. They thought they were standing up for fundamental values that were under attack. It’s also true that social and cultural issues have become more important in our political debate in recent years. Educated people in these institutions have always had more liberal views on these issues. It just wasn’t always the case that these issues were the focus of our political debates. Now they are. 

The other caveat is that when it comes to the erosion of public trust, a lot of that has been driven by conservatives actively turning against these institutions and attacking them. Without that, you would still have a decline in public trust, but nowhere near the level that you had once people actively started saying these institutions are liberally biased, they are intervening in the culture wars, and they’re actively harmful. So those are just the two caveats that I would add.

We need to have institutions and programs that are designed to reveal things like the fact that we aren't actually as far apart as we're portrayed to be, that the two sides aren't as socially distinct as people believe them to be, and that we share lots of values in addition to the ones that we disagree on.

In terms of how we get out of it, I guess I would say that we sometimes underestimate our capacity to build bridges with those who are skeptical of institutions. I work at a state university that runs a bipartisan training program for newly elected state legislators in Michigan. I have done this orientation for a while now, and I have certainly seen rising skepticism among Republican legislators. But that does not mean that they don’t think that they have something to learn from the university. There are plenty of assets that universities and nonprofits have that are of value to people on both sides of the aisle. You just have to be a little strategic about highlighting those things that can be most helpful. And you also have to go into the relationship knowing that you’re going to be perceived as liberal and out of touch. But you can still have a useful relationship once you acknowledge that basic starting point.

Are there other things we should be doing to try to advance depolarization?

We need to have institutions and programs that are designed to reveal things like the fact that we aren’t actually as far apart as we’re portrayed to be, that the two sides aren’t as socially distinct as people believe them to be, and that we share lots of values in addition to the ones that we disagree on.

There are a bunch of things that we know work with the public in terms of reducing polarization. When people spend time together, they are less inclined to see each other as the enemy. And when people feel that their opponents at least understand where they’re coming from, they’re less likely to be hostile to the political system as a whole. I don’t know if these things are scalable, especially when you compare them to a national presidential political campaign, which is going to polarize people, but they at least move things in the right direction

I actually think that there hasn’t been enough effort to put these kinds of ideas to work with elite audiences. On the one hand, you would expect these kinds of interventions to work less well with elite audiences because they are more polarized than the general public. On the other hand, you might expect them to work better because elites often know that they can get along with people on the other side. So we are about to launch an exchange program that will send Republican and Democratic state legislators to one another’s districts to learn about a policy issue. That’s the kind of thing I’m working on. 

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
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.

A version of this interview will appear on The Fulcrum through a copublishing agreement.

Previous interviews from The Polarization Project:
HFG Knowledge Against Violence Speaker Series March 27, 2025

Pathways to Conflict: The Impact of Climate Change on Violence

“As extreme weather events become more frequent, the risk of conflict is likely to rise, driven by their effects on economic stability, agriculture, and migration.” (Vally Koubi, 2025)

In her HFG Research and Policy in Brief, professor of economics and senior scientist, Vally Koubi examines the direct and indirect pathways through which climate change can lead to conflict. From resource scarcity, economic hardship and increased migration, this year’s first Knowledge Against Violence speaker series event answered questions about the conditions under which climate change and insecurity exacerbate violent conflict.

The virtual conversation took place on Thursday, March 27.

Watch Video

Vally Koubi is a Professor and Senior Scientist at the Center for Comparative and International Studies (CIS) at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich), and a Professor at the Department of Economics at the University of Bern, Switzerland. Her research focuses on the social consequences of climatic changes and the determinants of domestic environmental policies and outcomes as well as international environmental cooperation across countries and time. Her research on the social consequences of climatic changes aims at understanding the effects of climatic changes on migration and conflict mainly in the developing world. Koubi received her BA degree from the University of Athens, Greece, and her MS, MA and PhD degrees from the University of Rochester.

The Polarization Project November 18, 2024

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

By Greg Berman

Jennifer McCoy

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. 

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.

Previous interviews from The Polarization Project:
The Polarization Project November 12, 2024

‘Political Polarization Has Become Almost a Form of Entertainment’: A Conversation with Clionadh Raleigh

By Greg Berman

Clionadh Raleigh
Clionadh Raleigh

Clionadh Raleigh, a professor of political violence and geography at the University of Sussex, has been studying violence for more than twenty years and has come to a depressing conclusion: global rates of conflict are rising dramatically. Raleigh tracks global conflict with the help of researchers at Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED), an organization she helped to create when she was a PhD student.

According to Raleigh, the rise in violence reflects the chaotic politics we are living through at the moment. “The most potent and growing forces in the world are political competition and authoritarianism, not inclusion, democracy, or a desire for peace,” she argues.

Raleigh recently spoke with Greg Berman, the Distinguished Fellow of Practice at The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, about violence across the globe, from Ukraine to Myanmar, and about the effects of political polarization in the United States. The interview took place before the Nov. 5 US election.

The following transcript of the conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

There’s an old quote that’s often attributed to Joseph Stalin that suggests that the death of one person is a tragedy, but the death of millions is just a statistic. It seems to me that ACLED is essentially dedicated to disproving that adage. Let’s start with the basics: Why is it important to track statistics about conflict?

I always emphasize, especially now, that the small conflicts and the ones that are constantly ongoing—think Somalia or Chad or Pakistan—are just as meaningful and can tell us just as much about the nature of violence as the Ukraines and the Gazas can. Large wars fought between states generate a tremendous amount of violent events and fatalities. But they don’t vary very much in their iterations. The lines of the conflict are well-defined. But it’s these other conflicts where the violence is constantly shifting. The groups involved change. The ideologies change. The conflict in these countries is far more interesting than some of the larger wars, but it doesn’t generate the same amount of heat, the same amount of global audience.

"The small conflicts and the ones that are constantly ongoing—think Somalia or Chad or Pakistan—are just as meaningful and can tell us just as much about the nature of violence as the Ukraines and the Gazas can."

At ACLED, we believe every conflict is important, from the peaceful protest to the act of mass killing. The intensity and the characteristics of these events can differ, but they each tell us something about the political environment in which people are living. And so we collect every one of these events.

Every Monday, we release information about thousands of events across the world from the previous week. We try to track every sort of characteristic of these events. That enables us to offer pattern analysis. So we can say things like, “Violence has increased 27 percent in the last two years.” 

It seems to me that fatality numbers are often intensely disputed by groups with a political stake in the conflict at hand. I imagine that there are also enormous difficulties with compiling information about far-flung places. Talk to me about the challenges of compiling this data. Berman:

I’m on record saying that fatality statistics are largely made up, in almost every scenario. People tend to think that there aren’t accurate fatality numbers because of under-reporting, or even, as you say, the difficulty of collecting events in hard-to-reach places. But that’s actually not where we see the greatest differences in numbers. The greatest disparities come out of places like Ukraine and Gaza. There is no lack of information about these conflicts, but there is plenty of disagreement about different types of counting. 

In Ukraine, recently, the US was giving us some numbers. The Russians were putting out different numbers. And the Ukrainians were putting out still different numbers. Each country refuses to agree with each other because the numbers are central to their thesis about the war. We often find situations like that.

"Fatality statistics are largely made up, in almost every scenario."

To be honest, the where, when, and how of an event is often very straightforward to collect as long as you have been rigorous about the sources that you’re willing to use and how you collect them. So, for example, Ethiopia has at least three major languages that you need to be collecting information in. None of them are English. If you don’t have stringers in different places, you’re going to miss the events of that country, especially if you’re relying on them to be reported in English. Local knowledge is extremely important to ensure that you are capturing not just the top-line conflict events, but also the ones that represent the reality to most people. 

At ACLED, we don’t use automated coding, and we don’t use AI. We have researchers knowledgeable in several languages that live in these countries. We take in all this information from local partners and local media. And then we go through and we clean it and compare it to previous data from that place and other places to make sure that it’s really robust, and then that’s what we release into the world.

Clearly, there’s a deep appetite for information about what’s going on in places like Gaza and Ukraine. I would imagine that, if I were in your shoes, I would struggle with the need to feed the beast, continuing to satisfy the outsized interest in those locations, as opposed to focusing attention on other places, like Myanmar, that are suffering from intense conflict but aren’t on the radar screen of most people.

The beast is bigger than me, and it needs to be fed. We devote a lot of resources to these high-profile conflicts simply because the number of events coming out of them is so large. When Ukraine started—and, in fact, in Gaza as well—we were getting about 900 events a week. It takes a lot of researchers to be able to collect that much information and make sure it has notes, it’s translated, etc. So we do end up hiring more people and keeping them on for years because of these conflicts. 

But you’re certainly right about the importance of focusing on places like Myanmar. I have called Myanmar the most violent place on earth because it has the most armed organized groups, it has a very high rate of civilian fatalities, and it’s a very diffuse conflict. What’s happening there is very dangerous for the majority of people within that country.

"There is a pervasive sense at the moment that we are living in an incredibly violent time—and that we could be entering one of the most violent eras since World War II."

I often challenge people to move away from fatalities as the primary way to understand conflict and instead to look at events. We need to look at the exposure rate. Because in Ukraine, for example, we have a huge number of events, but it’s only a very small proportion of the Ukrainian population that is exposed to the violence regularly. Whereas in Myanmar, we have a very large number of events and most of the Burmese population is exposed. That juxtaposition is really important. 

ACLED has documented that something like 15 percent of the world’s population is exposed to conflict. I was wondering if you could help me place that in some sort of historical context. Steven Pinker has famously argued that if you look at many categories of violence, we’ve seen dramatic reductions over the past couple of centuries. But of course, his work has also gotten a lot of pushback, with many people arguing that we haven’t really made significant progress. I’m wondering what you think of that debate.

The Pinker argument kind of loosely hangs on this notion that he’s been able to quantify the amount of violence a person would have been exposed to in the past. [Thomas] Hobbes once said that “life is nasty, brutish, and short.” And it is certainly true that people used to be exposed to a huge amount of violence over the course of their lifetimes. Now, whether or not that reality can be compared to the political violence of today seems to me difficult to quantify.

What I would say is that there is a pervasive sense at the moment that we are living in an incredibly violent time—and that we could be entering one of the most violent eras since World War II. It’s hard to disagree with that just based on the numbers. There may be fewer wars between countries than there used to be. After World War II, we saw a distinct rise in civil wars.

Some of those were wars of independence, of course, in the 1950s and ’60s. And then there were what could be, I think, incorrectly, called “proxy wars” during the Cold War era. But really they were competition for political authority as newly established countries emerged. As civil wars have decreased, rather than countries becoming peaceful, what we’ve seen is a rise of political militias. There have been many more gangs with political and often economic objectives that have controlled territory and controlled economies. 

"The most drastic rises [in rates of conflict] are happening in middle-income states and in countries that have adopted some democratic features."

In the West, the public’s working theory of conflict is that it is something that happens in fragile states, in failed states, and in poor places. But what we’ve seen is that the most drastic rises are happening in middle-income states and in countries that have adopted some democratic features. This is worrying because it suggests that there’s no insurance against political violence and that it can happen even in places that have the kind of institutions that are supposed to protect people from violent political competition. 

So when I think about The Better Angels of Our Nature, I’m left with a sense that Steven Pinker was not particularly aware of the ways in which violence was evolving in different countries and how that would maybe dampen his optimism. Lots of people were attracted to Pinker’s thesis that basically we’ve sorted everything out. That argument hit at a particular moment of optimism about new technology. But I think it was just kind of a moment, rather than a fundamental change in society and politics. So I’m not on Pinker’s team, I guess.

Most of us want to live in a world without violence. But there’s no indication that we’re going to get there in our lifetimes. So I guess my question to you is: What can we reasonably aspire to in terms of global conflict? ACLED has said that 15 percent of the world is currently exposed to conflict. What should we be shooting for that number to be? Seven percent? Five percent? 

I don’t know the answer. But I do want to say that that 15 percent number could just as easily go up as down. WorldPop, who’s our partner in putting together the conflict exposure metric, is about to release much more precise information about the demographics of many of the countries affected by violence. When we re-run those statistics with this updated demographic information, we might find that the figure increases. 

"Polarization may make the environment a little more fertile to violence, but alone it is insufficient."

I think the important thing to remember about the 15 percent figure is that some people might be exposed to conflict once or twice, but some people are exposed much more frequently. In Ukraine, I think it’s only about 4 percent of the Ukrainian population that is regularly exposed. But they’re exposed hundreds of times a year. I worry about the populations that are living in a constant state of terror.

What can we learn from places where conflict isn’t happening on a daily basis?

The places that I’ve seen that do not have any conflict consistently are places in which there is incredible adherence to law and order, whether by force, so there’s a high level of police or security services, or there’s a very high level of political and cultural homogeneity. In those places, everybody has kind of bought into the idea of how they’re going to run the country rather than being at each other’s throats. So Malawi, for example, is a pretty peaceful place. And so is Norway. They look very different, but they’re peaceful for some of the same reasons, which is that the cost of violence in that society far outweighs the benefits that anybody would receive for engaging in it.

Help me wrap my mind around the relationship between polarization and violence. Clearly there are places where there is very intense partisanship, but the threat of political violence is not elevated. How much should we be worried when we see increases in affective polarization?

What I would say is that polarization may make the environment a little more fertile to violence, but alone it is insufficient. Polarization is pretty common. It’s found in most political environments, but it operates on a different track from the violent competition in those environments. 

Let me give you an example. In the United States right now, you have a very high rate of polarization. But the lines of polarization do not map onto the abilities of groups to organize and arm themselves for conflict. It takes a lot to organize an armed group. It takes a lot to engage in a strategy of violence in order to win some sort of political contest.

I took some heart from your report that extremist mobilization in the US is at the lowest level since you began tracking in 2020.

In the US, I think political polarization has become almost like a form of entertainment. I don’t mean to dismiss it. But what I mean is that it’s an identity for people now. It’s an identity that can become super salient during electoral contests and then die away after those electoral contests are over. By contrast, you need a much more robust strategy for violent conflict. 

To put my cards on the table, I think the talk about an American civil war is massively overinflated. At the same time, I am deeply worried about polarization. Even if it doesn’t lead to widespread rioting in the streets or assassinations, I think we’re seeing polarization erode faith in democratic institutions and make governance even more difficult than it usually is. Does ACLED track those kinds of outcomes?

I think that you’re 100 percent correct that polarization has real effects. They just don’t happen to be violent. Its effects on the social fabric of a country can be dire, as you lay out. We don’t track social trust among individuals. But my sense is that now might be the wrong time to measure it. Right before an election, people’s sense of how much polarization is coloring their lives is probably pretty pronounced. 

People in the US have a deep distrust of both local and national government, and that is true regardless of who’s in government. A lot of the campaign rhetoric plays into this, whether it’s talk about the illegitimacy of Biden’s win in 2020 or the discussion on the Democrat side that a win by Trump would be dangerous to democracy. I’m not saying these are equivalent claims, but it all sounds the same to the audience it’s aimed at. The result is to delegitimize [government]. 

I’ve been reading this book called When the Clock Broke by John Ganz. He’s writing about the 1990s, when Newt Gingrich was becoming a player in the Republican Party. The rhetoric back then was pretty intense too. It was not that different from the hateful rhetoric of today. I think it is natural to feel a lot of anxiety about our current moment, but I’m not sure how much of a deviation it is from how the country’s politics tends to play out.

Well, one big difference between the 1990s and today is the rise of social media. 

The media environment in general, regardless of whether it’s social media or more traditional media, is pretty important to what’s going on. There are silos of information on the Left and on the Right where it’s not encouraged for you to be moderate. The media environment on the Right is particularly toxic.

"The protests about Gaza were, in general, largely peaceful. Screaming in someone's face isn't an act of violence. "

I went to Wisconsin after Trump won. I had lived there for high school and for undergraduate. The people there are lovely, genuinely lovely. But when I went back, I found that people were wicked. They felt that they were able to say things that they would have never vocalized before. There was this sense that they had been allowed to be their worst selves because of what Trump was saying and doing in Washington. But I think that a lot of people are getting radicalized in their opinions without becoming radicalized in their actions. 

I’m curious to hear what kinds of reactions you’ve gotten to your reporting on the American protests about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I could imagine that your headline takeaway—that the vast majority of the protests have been peaceful—would upset some readers. 

They are mostly peaceful in the same way that the protests that emerged from the killing of George Floyd were mostly peaceful. When we initially reported that finding, it really annoyed the administration, but there was clear evidence that, in fact, they were mostly peaceful. But the news media focused on the rare phenomenon of violence, even when that violence was often directed towards those protestors. The protests about Gaza are very similar in the sense that there were thousands of events, and they were, in general, largely peaceful. Screaming in someone’s face isn’t an act of violence. 

In general, how do you think about incidents that may be small in numbers but that are quite symbolically powerful. I’m thinking of things like the killing of George Floyd or the attempts on Donald Trump’s life. 

This comes back to where we started, with your Stalin quote. Events differ in their significance. There are certainly cases where an event is so significant that you can talk about a dividing line, before and after. October 7th is clearly one of those kinds of events. This is certainly one of the most significant events that’s happened in the world in the last five years or so.

By contrast, I would say that the attempted assassinations of Donald Trump have not resonated in the same kind of way. It was not significant in part because it wasn’t successful. And of course, the person who perpetrated it, he wasn’t on the Far Left, he wasn’t even on the Left at all. So there was nothing to kind of grab onto that would stick to a pre-existing narrative. When that happens, events tend to fade into the political tapestry of a country. 

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.

Previous interviews from The Polarization Project:
The Polarization Project October 7, 2024

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

By Greg Berman

Robert Talisse
Robert Talisse

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.

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.

Previous interviews from The Polarization Project:
Violence, Politics & Democracy Speaker Series October 17, 2024

‘We Want You To Be A Proud Boy’: How Social Media Facilitates Political Intimidation and Violence

Amid a volatile election season, the report ‘We Want You To Be A Proud Boy’: How Social Media Facilitates Political Intimidation and Violence outlines the steps social media companies like Facebook, TikTok and Telegram can take to reduce their contribution to increasing levels of political intimidation and violence across the U.S. and around the world. 

The HFG-funded report written by Paul M. Barrett of the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights is part of HFG’s Violence, Politics & Democracy initiative, a multi-year project examining how these phenomena interact in mature democracies to understand and counter political violence and other forces that damage democratic norms and institutions, imperiling the safety of citizens. Based on a review of more than 400 social science studies, the report identifies particular features of social media platforms that make them susceptible to exploitation and suggests how to mitigate the dangers.

On October 17, Barrett spoke with Justin Hendrix about how social media can lead to political violence and how social media companies, government and users can reduce the likelihood that virtual speech will lead to real-world violence.

Watch Video Below

Paul M. Barrett is the deputy director of the Center for Business and Human Rights at New York University’s Stern School of Business. He joined the Center in September 2017 after working for more than three decades as a journalist and author focusing on the intersection of business, law, and society. Most recently, he worked for 12 years for Bloomberg Businessweek magazine, where he served at various times as the editor of an award-winning investigative team and a writer covering topics such as energy and the environment, military procurement, and the civilian firearm industry. Barrett is the author of four critically acclaimed nonfiction books, the most recent of which are GLOCK: The Rise of America’s Gun, and THE LAW OF THE JUNGLE: The $19 Billion Legal Battle Over Oil in the Rain Forest and the Lawyer Who’d Stop at Nothing to Win.

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