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

By Greg Berman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Berman is co-editor of Vital City, an urban policy journal, and co-author of Gradual: The Case for Incremental Change in a Radical Age. In 2022, Berman led At the Crossroads, a series of interviews for HFG.org assessing the causes and solutions of rising crime in NYC after the pandemic.

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

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

By Greg Berman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Berman is co-editor of Vital City, an urban policy journal, and co-author of Gradual: The Case for Incremental Change in a Radical Age. In 2022, Berman led At the Crossroads, a series of interviews for HFG.org assessing the causes and solutions of rising crime in NYC after the pandemic.
This interview also appears in The Fulcrum through a copublishing agreement.