“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.

“Illiberal Ideas Are Having a Negative Effect on Our Political Culture”: A Conversation with Thomas Main

By Greg Berman

In a 2022 speech at Independence Hall in Philadelphia, President Joe Biden issued a dramatic warning: democracy in the United States is “under assault,” he announced. Biden declared that the dangers of rising extremism, particularly from “MAGA Republicans,” posed a “clear and present danger” to the country. 

In making this claim, Biden was echoing the sentiments of countless pundits, think tanks, and editorial pages that have been warning of a “coming crisis.” For many, the recent shooting of former president Donald Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania has confirmed the idea that the country is falling apart at the seams. 

According to Rachel Kleinfeld of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “Ideas that were once confined to fringe groups now appear in the mainstream media. White-supremacist ideas, militia fashion, and conspiracy theories spread via gaming websites, YouTube channels, and blogs, while a slippery language of memes, slang, and jokes blurs the line between posturing and provoking violence, normalizing radical ideologies and activities.”

The difference between “posturing” and “provoking” violence is, of course, a significant one. To what extent does the spread of radical, and even authoritarian, ideas online translate into real-world action, let alone violence? To get a handle on this question, Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation Distinguished Fellow of Practice Greg Berman reached out to Thomas Main, a professor of public affairs at Baruch College in New York, who has been tracking illiberalism in American politics for years. In two books published by the Brookings Institution, The Rise of the Alt-Right (2018) and The Rise of Illiberalism (2022), Main traces the trajectory of illiberal political ideas and voices in the United States in the years since World War II. 

Main defines illiberalism as any political ideology that explicitly rejects principles of liberal democracy, including values such as political egalitarianism, human rights, electoral democracy, the rule of law, and tolerance. While he acknowledges the existence of some movements that meet this definition on the left of the political spectrum, most of Main’s energies are devoted to studying extremist right-wing political thinking. What he finds is sobering. 

The centerpiece of The Rise of Illiberalism is a study of nearly 2,000 websites that have been identified by various sources as being illiberal. Main establishes a taxonomy of different kinds of illiberal websites (e.g., antisemitic, anti-feminist, conspiracy theorist) He also tracks the number of visitors to each site as well as the amount of engagement sparked by each site. The findings suggest that the illiberal left audience is about 1.3 percent the size of its right-wing counterpart. Main concludes, “The Illiberal Left is minute, entirely isolated, and unengaged. The Illiberal Right is sizeable, closely connected with mainstream political tendencies, and dramatically more engaged with political discourse than any other ideological tendency.”

The following transcript of Main’s conversation with Berman has been edited for length and clarity.

Berman: Your most recent book is entitled The Rise of Illiberalism. I wanted to start by asking you a basic question: Has there actually been a rise in illiberalism, or is what we’re living through now just a case of illiberal tendencies that have always been with us becoming more visible because of the democratizing effects of the internet?

Main: I think that there has been a rise over the post-war period, although it’s kind of hard to pin that down. In my book, I look at the numbers of visitors to illiberal sites. Strictly speaking, if I was going to say that there has been a rise, I ought to be able to present numbers from an earlier period and then compare them. Unfortunately, that turns out to be very difficult to do—it is hard to get good data on visits to websites that go back more than a few years. I’ve also looked to see if you can find circulation numbers for the John Birch Society’s publications and other earlier illiberal publications, but these numbers really can’t be compared with visits to websites. So that’s the first thing I’d say: it’s kind of been difficult to actually quantify a rise.

What I've been concerned about is the penetration of illiberal ideas, anti-democratic ideas, into American political culture and, therefore, the undermining of liberal democracy.

Nonetheless, I think in terms of the salience of illiberal ideas in American political culture, I would say that there has been a rise. If you go back to the late ’50s and early ’60s, there were racist and antisemitic movements which were analogous to the illiberalism we see today. But you also had gatekeeping by editors of political magazines and publishers and by broadcast media. If you couldn’t get into the National Review, you had to start your own publication, which was very expensive. So, for the most part, the John Birch Society, the Ku Klux Klan, and the hardcore segregationists were pretty effectively marginalized. This was true right up to the coming of digital media. Digital media allowed these illiberal groups that had been hanging on by their fingernails to attract larger audiences. And by the way, my reading is that the old right-wing extremists like the John Birch Society were much less radical than places like The Daily Stormer are today.

One of the things that I find in the social media era is that people have to yell pretty loudly these days in order to be heard above the din. As a result, I think that there is a lot of alarmism. How big a problem is the rise in illiberalism that you describe? How worried are you that it could lead to real-life violence as opposed to internet dust ups?

Up until very recently, I haven’t been so much concerned about the violence. What I’ve been concerned about is the penetration of illiberal ideas, anti-democratic ideas, into American political culture and, therefore, the undermining of liberal democracy. The undermining of liberal democracy doesn’t necessarily have to involve violence. 

When I wrote my first book on the alt-right, people would say to me that it’s just some crazy people that are having no effect and that even to talk about them is a bad idea. Nowadays, I don’t feel it’s necessary any more to demonstrate that there is a significant audience for illiberal ideas. Besides my research, the proof of that is the growth of election denialism in the GOP. Refusing to accept the results of a democratic election is a rejection of a key component of liberal democracy. So the evidence is quite strong that illiberal ideas are having a negative effect on our political culture.

An issue that I’m trying to deal with now is: Does this lead to violence? The Dangerous Speech Project has attempted a definition of dangerous speech. They say that dangerous speech is any form of expression that can increase the risk that its audience will condone or commit violence against members of another group. What I’m now trying to do is to go back to the illiberal websites that I identified in my earlier work and to pull out their characteristic vocabulary and come up with a dictionary of dangerous speech and hate speech. I’ve only just started this research. 

The roots of racism run deep in this country. This means that the potential audience for illiberal racialist movements is much deeper than the potential audience for anarchism and communism. 

Let me give you an example. Vox Day is a science-fiction writer and video game reviewer. He became involved in an episode that was known as Gamergate, which was all about sexism in video games. That was kind of the beginning of alt-right trolling. This guy, Vox Day, established a blog called Vox Populi, which has a couple million visits a month and high rates of engagement. Before he started up Vox Populi, he had another site called Alpha Game, which I believe no longer exists. Anyhow, when you go to Alpha Game . . . oh man, talk about violence. He says that aggression should always be met with aggression. That logic dictates that any failure to respond to violence with even more violence is only going to incentivize and encourage its use in the future. I could go on. It’s pretty radical stuff. I’m finding that on some of these illiberal sites, you do see stuff like this which is as close to coming out and endorsing violence as you can possibly imagine.

I’m thinking back to the kind of music that I listened to as a teenager and the films that I watched back then. I think you could fairly say that a healthy percentage were effectively glorifying violence. But I never engaged in any violent behavior. It is one thing to consume, or even engage in, violent rhetoric. It’s another thing to perpetrate violence in the real world.

I do think you are putting your finger on a problem with the dangerous speech concept. If you say that dangerous speech is any form of expression that can increase the risk that its audience will condone or commit violence, that’s a pretty broad definition. And how do you know that it increases the risk? How do you measure that? I don’t know what the answer is. I think it is possible to look at the way these sites talk about violence, but it’s very tricky to prove that talk actually results in more violence.

One of the things that you document in your book is that the audience for antifa and hardcore anarchist sites is dwarfed by the number of visitors to The Daily Stormer and other illiberal sites on the right. Why do you think it is that right illiberalism is a more powerful force than left illiberalism?

I think the roots of racism run deep in this country. This means that the potential audience for illiberal racialist movements is much deeper than the potential audience for anarchism and communism. 

In the ’60s, you had groups like the Weathermen on the left, but it was all pretty thin. It never had a massive audience. It never really succeeded in getting into any form of electoral politics. Communism has never been a big draw in the United States. Racism is something else. That has much deeper roots here. For many people, being White is what it means to be an American. Racial consciousness is a facet of the American psyche.

You are pretty dismissive of the idea that political correctness and censoriousness on the left is a big problem. But you also spend a lot of time talking about what you call an “ethics of controversy” that is rooted in tolerance and respect for one’s adversary. You call out the Ann Coulters of the world for engaging in “illiberalism lite.” Do you think that there are equivalent figures on the left?

This is something I’m going to have to look into more. But if you go to the websites of Black Lives Matter or mainstream Hispanic interest groups or feminist groups, it is hard to find a rhetoric that would really pass as anti-White, anti-Anglo, anti-male. I mean, if you go back to the sixties, you can find feminists creating organizations called Society for Cutting Up Men, which is SCUM. That would be an example of feminist illiberalism. I don’t see that kind of talk these days.

Fair enough. But I guess I do see a lot of left-wing politicians and pundits who, echoing Hillary Clinton, refer to conservatives and Republicans as being deplorable or words to that effect. That kind of rhetoric is not racism or misandry, but it treats political opponents with contempt, I would argue.

I think you have to distinguish between principled illiberalism and people just shooting their mouths off. And in American politics, you get a fair number of people shooting their mouths off. You can always find foolish remarks. It may well be that there’s more of that than there used to be on the left because the rhetoric on the right has become so extreme.

I think that there is a tendency to belittle the importance of ideas. This has been around for a long time. My sense is that intellectuals can have a great impact on policy and politics.

Occasionally, I run into progressive illiberalism that encourages a certain amount of self-censorship. But I think most of what passes as progressive illiberalism is within the spectrum of normal democratic politics. It’s not a healthy part, perhaps, but there’s quite a difference between that sort of stuff and the right-wing illiberalism I’m talking about. When you say the election was stolen and we have an illegitimate president, that’s crossing the line. Say what you want about Hillary Clinton, but she didn’t refuse to concede.

A lot of your book is about our current intellectual climate. Playing devil’s advocate for a second, how important are intellectuals really when you talk about combating illiberalism? How would you respond to the argument that it is more important to actually improve the material conditions of people’s lives?

Well, listen, you’d be crazy to say that intellectuals are more important than organizing to increase access to the ballot, or to defeat election denials, or to increase equality. 

I think intellectuals used to be more influential than they are now because they used to play an important role of translating and disseminating ideas. Among other things, intellectuals were gatekeepers. They were the people who sort of decided which ideas deserved to be more widely disseminated and which would be ignored. That was a very important function. Now I think the power of intellectuals has been vastly undermined by the rise of digital media and by the shake up in the public perception of the legitimacy of our regime. And it’s much harder for intellectuals to perform the gatekeeping function that they used to perform. I would like to see a world in which intellectuals regain the ability to gatekeep. And part of that involves finding a better way to moderate digital media. 

The American system was created to make big change difficult. Every system needs the capacity to occasionally make non-incremental change.

But I also think that there’s been, for a long time, a self-destructive streak amongst intellectuals. You have the curious phenomenon of anti-intellectual intellectuals. One example of that is Ibram X. Kendi. Kendi doesn’t believe that people come up with racist ideas that result in racist policies. He believes it goes the other way around: that people come up with racist policies and then dream up racist ideas to support them. I have respect for Kendi, but that particular position is kind of a vulgar Marxist position. How are you going to combat racism without engaging in ideas? I don’t understand what that even means. 

I think that there is a tendency to belittle the importance of ideas. This has been around for a long time. The Bible is right when it says that as a man thinks, so is he. My sense is that intellectuals can have a great impact on policy and politics. I think it’s a mistake to write off intellectuals.

Have you read Martin Gurri’s book, The Revolt of The Public? It’s a few years old, but it’s one of the better books I’ve read about the impact of the internet and social media, in particular. I think if Gurri were listening to this conversation, he might say that the crisis of public confidence in intellectuals has its roots in the underperformance of intellectual elites. That, at key moments, the intellectual consensus about things like the state of the economy pre-2008 or the handling of the COVID pandemic has proved to be wrong, or at least not entirely correct. And that the internet has essentially allowed the public to see that the emperor has no clothes. How would you respond to that argument?

You would have to make a list of all of the positions that intellectuals took and then you somehow would have to decide objectively whether those positions were right or wrong. And then you would have to compare the percentage of correct positions to that of other groups like politicians or businessmen or lawyers. Would you find that intellectuals were right much less frequently than other elites? I don’t think so. 

I think intellectuals make a contribution. For example, the tax reform act of the mid ’80s was the result of a long-term analysis of the economics of taxation. Expert economists came to the conclusion that the income tax was unjustifiable. Their thinking got boiled down into a discrete public policy idea: lower the rates, broaden the base. That had an impact. There are many other areas of public policy where ideas have had an impact. 

Of course, we can also talk about episodes where intellectuals were wrong. You might point to the ’30s, when many intellectuals apologized for Stalin’s regime. So there are certainly examples of failures, but in general, intellectuals perform a function that is necessary.

One of the arguments you advance is that the rise of illiberalism has been driven by the suboptimal performance of the American government. Does President Biden’s recent legislative winning streak change your analysis? And, perhaps more importantly, how do you react to the argument, advanced by scholars like Frances Lee, that Congress is functioning pretty much the way it’s always functioned in terms of legislating? For all of the talk of partisan gridlock, bipartisan legislation still happens fairly regularly.

I think gridlock is a problem. It’s more of a problem now than it has been in the past. In my book, I argue that the gridlock is so strong that we need a realigning election, which brings all branches of government into alignment, so we can get big things done. Like a lot of people, I was hoping for Biden to pull that off. And I suppose he did, but he pulled that off as narrowly as humanly possible, with the smallest possible majority that you can get in the Senate.

And so Biden has been unable to make the kind of changes that Lyndon B. Johnson was able to make. LBJ had overwhelming majorities, and he had the Supreme Court on his side. But it turns out that even with the narrowest of majorities, Biden has gotten quite a bit done. So my conclusion is that a realigning election works.

To answer the second part of your question, if you say that Congress is functioning pretty much the way it always has because it was created to ensure that big change is difficult, I would say that’s part of the problem. The system was created to make big change difficult. Every system needs the capacity to occasionally make non-incremental change. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with incremental change, but sometimes, dramatic change is needed. So the American system, although it’s kind of built to mostly encourage incremental change, it occasionally allows big changes. And the main way that happens has been through realigning elections like in 1932 and in 1964.

I would be remiss if I didn’t admit that I have just written a book that attempts to make the case for incremental change.

I just want to be clear, incremental change and non-incremental change are the yin and yang of American politics. So I’m not saying that incremental change is bad by any means. Also let me just point out that I’m not talking about radical change in the sense of let’s throw the Constitution out and establish a dictatorship of the proletariat. Non-incremental change is different from radical change.

I think you and I mostly agree. Where you and I may depart is that I don’t see a significant appetite right now for non-incremental change in the country. If you look at our elections and at polling, there is no political mandate for non-incremental change. And I think that there are real dangers if the party in power pushes through non-incremental change in a deeply divided country.

I would agree that there’s got to be a long period of time spent building up a movement to achieve the kind of non-incremental change I’m talking about. The time is not ripe now by any means. And it’s going to be a long, hard slog to work our way out of the mess we’re in. It may be a 50-year project.

In your book, you argue that irony is the dominant mode of discourse on the internet. Maybe I’m occupying different parts of the internet, but I find umbrage to be the dominant mode of discourse. I find that the internet is a place where people are very open about expressing their outrage about this, that, and the other, rather than operating with the kind of cool attachment that irony implies.

That’s interesting. There’s a book called The Outrage Industry that was written about a decade ago that does an analysis of various sorts of websites and demonstrates that expressions of outrage are much more often found in right-wing media than in left-wing media. So, I think you could make that argument. I guess what I would also say is that the kind of irony I have in mind is not a cool kind of irony. It’s an irony that is used to cover or to excuse extreme statements. Someone like Nick Fuentes will say things like, “Women shouldn’t be allowed to vote.” Or, “I don’t want to return to 1999. I want to return to 1099.” He will say all sorts of outrageous things, but then if he gets called on it, he will say, “Oh folks, I didn’t literally mean it.” I think outrage and irony go together and that the most extreme forms of outrage are sometimes excused or covered up with irony.

This is the first in a series of interviews  by Greg Berman, a  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.