With President Trump in the White House, rising authoritarianism has prompted a battle royal within academia over polarization, pitting those who argue that it undermines democracy against those who see it as a tool to motivate defenders of democracy.
This debate in the rarefied atmosphere of elite academia is virtually certain to have real-world consequences three weeks from now, as Democrats are heavy favorites to take control of the House and have something like a 50-50 shot of turning the Senate. In power, they will have to decide how tough and how aggressive to be in pushing back against the Trump administration.
Lilliana Mason, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University and the author of the groundbreaking 2018 book “Uncivil Agreement,” is a prime exemplar of this shift.
In the book, Mason described how in recent decades, on both the American right and left, voters’ multiple social identities — race, religion, ideology, cultural outlook and party affiliation — increasingly aligned. The result: Elections became matters of political life-or-death struggles as the parties turned into antagonistic social groups.
In an article published in The Journal of Democracy this month, “Polarization Is Not the Problem,” Mason wrote:
Partisan polarization is not the greatest threat to U.S. democracy, but a symptom of a deeper struggle over who belongs and deserves equal rights.
Rapid gains by racial minorities, women and L.G.B.T.Q. citizens have produced an ethnonationalist backlash whose adherents now wield disproportionate power through the Republican Party. This conflict has intensified partisan animosity and moral disengagement, but a “both sides” diagnosis obscures the asymmetry between a faction seeking to reverse social progress and those resisting it.
“Polarization,” Mason then contended, with an artful turn of phrase,
is therefore less the disease than democracy’s immune response to an unpopular, antidemocratic movement.
Suppressing that response in the name of civility would only strengthen the movement and imperil pluralistic self-government. The United States can still become its most inclusive democracy, but only if leaders defend equal rights and voters hold accountable those who will not.
Mason is not alone in her assessment.
In a paper published in July, “It’s Not Polarization; It’s the Radicalization of the Political Right,” Petter Törnberg, associate professor of computational social science at the University of Amsterdam, argued:
Neutrality is not borne out by the empirical evidence. Across advanced democracies, crisis is resulting not from mutual divergence but from the one-sided transformation of the political right: the mainstreaming of authoritarian rhetoric, the normalization of conspiracy and hate as political strategies, and the systematic dismantling of institutional guardrails.
Törnberg makes the case that claims of objectivity and neutrality are themselves problematic. “Conceptual choices are not politically neutral,” he wrote. “Casting authoritarian threats as mutual breaches of etiquette is not simply a misdiagnosis: It is an abdication of responsibility.”
As polarization has assumed a central role in American politics, scholars have increasingly adopted a nuanced, ambivalent approach.
Yphtach Lelkes, a professor of communications at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote by email:
I think the world is a complex place, and I don’t believe polarization is simply either a cause or an effect. In Germany before Hitler, Spain before Franco and Italy before Mussolini, the common thread is that mainstream political actors were willing to accommodate authoritarian movements because they saw their political opponents as a greater threat.
At the same time, Lelkes continued, “we’ve also seen cases where mainstream parties have successfully kept extremist factions out of power. The various forms of cordon sanitaire established around far-right parties in Belgium, France and Germany worked for decades, even if some have begun to weaken.”
So what does Lelkes do?
“I take a Goldilocks view of polarization,” he said. “Too little polarization leaves out the diversity of ideas, viewpoints and maybe even the anger needed to make progress. Too much polarization creates the conditions for many of the problems we’re seeing today.”
The ivory tower debate over polarization is soon likely to become front-page news. Matt Grossmann, a political scientist at Michigan State, wrote by email: “Democrats are likely to regain power in Congress and states. If they confuse the current thermostatic liberal trends in public opinion as an opportunity for extreme governance, they are likely to face another backlash.”
These controversies over polarization are infused with high levels of a kind of moral charge — is this good or bad? — that Grossmann argues grow out of the “widespread concern among scholars about democratic backsliding in the United States. There is also perennial concern about the tendency to treat it as an outcome of polarization, or colloquially, to ‘both sides’ the discussion of that backsliding when Donald Trump is central instigator.”
To be more concrete, Grossmann continued, “We have just lived through the consequences of the Democratic reaction to the first Trump administration, which included moving leftward on immigration and racial injustice in response to Trump’s overreach. But the policy and rhetorical countertrends on these issues under Biden — however morally justified — contributed to Trump’s return.”
Marc Hetherington, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has adopted an approach akin to — although certainly different from — Mason’s, arguing that well before Trump took command of the Republican Party,
polarization resulted from the dominant disagreement between Democrats and Republicans shifting from the anodyne “how much should government do” to the visceral “how much racial, social and cultural change should the U.S. engage in.”
It results from disagreements about the rights revolutions — for African Americans, women, L.G.B.T.Q. folks — taking center stage in the conflict between parties.
When Hetherington talks to civic groups, he tells them:
While polarization is deeply unpleasant and results in government dysfunction, it is worth the costs. I encourage them to think about the present status of various political minorities today and ask whether their status has improved markedly over the last half century.
Although there remains plenty of room for continued improvement, the answer is obviously yes. The push for racial, social, and cultural change that produced greater equality for a range of groups and the resistance to that change is the source of polarization. The benefits of that fight outweigh the costs of the polarization that resulted from it.
Viewing the Mason article from a different angle, Julie Wronski, a political scientist at the University of Mississippi, wrote to me: “To the extent Mason or others treats polarization as an advantageous aspect of the current political landscape is through its diagnostic capabilities.” In this context, “Mason is hoping that people who support pluralistic democracy remain vocal and politically engaged, even if doing so perpetuates polarization in the short run.”
Thomas Zimmer, a historian at Georgetown, is an outspoken supporter of Mason’s thesis. “I am fully aligned with Lilliana Mason on this,” he said. “In fact, I have been offering a similar critique of what I would call the ‘polarization narrative’ for years.”
“Once polarization is adopted as an overarching diagnosis, as a governing historical and political paradigm,” Zimmer wrote by email, “it obscures not only what the key challenge to achieving a pluralistic democracy is — the anti-democratic radicalization of the right — but also transports a misleading idea of America’s recent past and how we got to where we are now.”
Much of academia’s polarization narrative creates a false picture of American society, Zimmer argued:
We tend to tell a story of the American polity in decline, almost always casting the “consensus” of the postwar era in a problematically favorable light, mythologizing it as a moment of unity and order.
And such a declinist tale often comes with a hefty dose of nostalgia for that long-lost ”consensus,” something the right has successfully weaponized. But political consensus, to the extent it ever existed, was usually confined to white male elites and based on a cross-partisan accord to leave a discriminatory social order intact and deny marginalized groups equal representation and civil rights.
Put differently, he continued, “it wasn’t a coincidence that polarization started when one party broke with the white elite consensus and supported — albeit reluctantly — the civil rights revolution of the 1960s. In many ways, polarization is the price U.S. society has had to pay for real progress toward multiracial pluralism.”
While Zimmer points the finger of blame at the rising strength of the radical right, Gregory Conti, a political scientist at Princeton, looks in the opposite direction.
In an Oct. 6 essay, “How ‘Woke 1’ Radicalized the GOP,” Conti and Aaron Sibarium, a staff writer at The Washington Free Beacon, an online conservative news site, wrote:
The radicalism of Trump II is better understood as a response to Peak Woke than as a continuation of a coherent ideology already in place during Trump’s rise. Despite his unorthodox and boundary-pushing rhetoric, in his first term Trump largely respected the cultural consensus of the Obama years, poking at its edges but leaving the most important assumptions intact.
It was wokeness, not Trump, that dissolved that consensus. If liberals had clamped down on their woke flank, many of their preferred policies would likely still be in place, and Trump’s second term (on the assumption that there was one) would have been more moderate in many respects.
Fortunately for my career as an analyst, the onslaught of these scholarly conflicts is unrelenting.
Kenneth Lowande, a political scientist at Rice University, responded to my query by email: “Mason has clear ideas about what is good and bad, who is to be praised and blamed, and ends with an exhortation about how people should pursue the good.” But, in Lowande’s view, Mason’s advocacy “is a bad idea.”
The professoriate’s “comparative advantage is studying things with dispassionate curiosity,” he said. “The moment we enter the political arena as advocates for some cause — or against one political party — people have every right to question our credibility as scholars.”
Doing so, according to Lowande, “gives the reader the impression that all of this is settled. The world is the way it is, this interpretation is right, the evidence is ironclad and there’s no more to do here except fight for the cause.”
If Lowande’s criticism of Mason is relatively gentle, the comments of Sean Westwood, a political scientist at Dartmouth, are not:
Unfortunately, this paper is a liberal cocktail-party conversation masquerading as academic scholarship.
The essay is deeply contradictory. It starts by arguing that polarization is “certainly a problem” that produces anger, legislative gridlock, violence and unaccountability. However, by the end it is presented as a healthy, immunelike response to nefarious (Republican) political actors.
At its core, Westwood wrote by email, “this parsing by arguing that Republican animus is pathological, while Democratic anger is curative. This is not falsifiable with data, which makes this essay personal opinion and not an empirical analysis.”
For her part, Mason does not take this fault finding lying down. In an email, she wrote, first of all:
The analysis I described is objective, in that it describes empirical findings faithfully. My original point was to say that when objectivity and neutrality are in direct conflict, we are forced to choose between them.
Some may prefer to choose neutrality, which requires ignoring the objective findings of asymmetries between the parties.
I prefer to privilege objectivity over neutrality. If neutrality is the primary directive and differences between the parties do indeed exist, neutrality requires us to ignore that fact, even when it is objectively true. I don’t consider it advocacy to explain those findings.
Second:
I don’t think my approach ignores the role of “woke” policies at all. In fact, everything I discuss in the article explains the MAGA movement as a backlash to advances in social progress and the undoing of the traditional social hierarchy.
I’m not sure what “woke” means if it isn’t that progress. Also, Trump had already been president for nearly four years when the summer of Black Lives Matter occurred. Trump’s misogyny and racism were apparent in 2016.
So does your vauntedanalyst have a take? I think they are all right.
The Republican Party is dominated by a president beneath contempt who reigns over a collection of spineless sycophants.
In the face of this opposition, the Democratic Party has repeatedly failed to stand tall, all too willing to succumb to left-wing orthodoxies that alienate the average voter.
My language may well be over the top. In an email, Ariel Malka, a professor of psychology and politics at Yeshiva University, expressed similar points in much more reasonable and thoughtful terms, so I’ll let him have the last word:
I agree that the major current threat to U.S. democracy stems from actions of the Republican Party. But I am not as inclined to view this through the singular lens of white male Christian backlash, or to discount the role that some forms of polarization have played in the empowerment of an anti-democratic movement.
Consider ideological polarization, in terms of the actual policy differences between the parties and voters’ perceptions of those differences. Ideological division (real and perceived) can make voters feel that so much is at stake in terms of policy that they must relegate democratic considerations to the back seat. It can also contribute to partisans rationalizing their party’s anti-democratic actions as compatible with, or even good for, democracy.
Trump won the popular vote four years after trying to steal an election, with substantial minorities of women, Latino and Asian American voters supporting him. Biden’s unpopularity and inflation were major reasons for Trump’s victory. But partisan polarization helps explain why a flagrantly anti-democratic candidate who makes ethnonationalist appeals can remain competitive.
Matthew Tobin contributed research to this article.
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