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ABSTRACT
According to contemporary diagnoses, democracy is foundering because of polarization. It is natural to think that if polarization is a problem, the remedy is to reconcile the conflicting sides. Yet reconciliation seems to involve the disturbing prescription that citizens should reconcile with radicals who have divested from democratic norms. That assumes, however, that polarization is symmetrical, whereby each side is equally responsible for it. But polarization need not depend on the assumption of such symmetry, such that depolarization may be possible without reconciliation. If so, polarization may be a problem not only between political alliances but within them.
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Notes
1 https://www.idea.int/gsod/global-report#chapter-2-democracy-health-check:-an-overview-of-global-tre
2 One recent poll shows that over 40% of Americans do not believe that Joe Biden won the 2020 election fairly. https://www.surveymonkey.com/curiosity/axios-january-6-revisited/
4 A sample: In the New York Times, Thomas Edsell (Citation2021, 1) warns that polarization in the U.S. may have reached a “point of no return.” In The New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert (Citation2022, 1) asks “how did politics get so polarized?” President Biden’s Inaugural Speech was animated by the by the concern that America’s political divisions have reached the breaking point. On the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, G. W. Bush (Citation2021) lamented the “malign force . . . that turns every disagreement into an argument, and every argument into a clash of cultures.” In his op-ed about the January 6 Insurrection, Jimmy Carter (Citation2022, 3) urged Americans to “resist the polarization that is reshaping our identities around politics.” In announcing that she would not support changing Senate filibuster rules, Kyrsten Sinema (Citation2022, 2) declared that she “will not support separate actions that worsen the underlying disease of division infecting our country”; Mitch McConnell (Citation2022, 5) offers a similar argument in support of the filibuster.
5 Most citizens believe that the country is more divided than ever, that political divisions are likely widening, that they’re politically noxious, and that politics has grown too rancorous (https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/news-polls/polarization-december-2021). They say they want more civility and cooperation in politics (Pew Citation2019b).
6 Jason Brennan (Citation2016) sees polarization as democratically dysfunctional but endemic; he concludes that epistocracy should be tried. Kristoffer Ahlstrom-Vij (Citation2021) also accepts the diagnosis, but his prescription is that politics must be de-moralized. Alexander Guerrero (Citation2021, 166-67) claims that a central advantage of lottocracy is that it politically defuses various kinds of epistemic dysfunction.
7 Much of the literature devoted to debating whether the U.S. is polarized strikes me as merely semantic: it fails to keep different ways of construing the metric explicit and distinct.
8 In the United States, the terms “RINO” (“Republican in name only”) and “neoliberal” (a professed liberal who nonetheless endorses capitalist markets and protects corporate interests) serve this purpose.
9 This is often called affective polarization, but this term is not ideal in the present context for reasons that will become clear below. See Iyengar, Lelkes, Levendusky, Malhotra, and Westwood Citation2019 for a review.
10 It may come as no surprise, then, that in the United States popular disapproval of inter-partisan marriage is now more pronounced than disapproval of inter-faith and inter-racial marriage (Iyengar and Westwood Citation2015, 691). Perhaps this is for good reason: co-partisanship is the most reliable predictor of long-term relationship success among those paired on online dating platforms (Huber and Malhotra Citation2017; Iyengar and Konitzer Citation2017).
11 See also the “perception gap” data presented in Beyond Conflict Citation2020 and by More in Common: https://perceptiongap.us/.
12 Or the public expressions associated with these forms of polarization. In the United States, the parties and party members are not as divided over political policies as they present themselves as being.
13 Hence Lamm and Myers (Citation1978, 146), “Seldom in the history of social psychology has a nonobvious phenomenon been so firmly grounded in data from across a variety of cultures and dependent measures.”
14 The appendix in Sunstein Citation2009 summarizes the most important findings.
15 The phenomenon is often called “group polarization.” Here, this more common name is misleading. I am distinguishing political polarization and belief polarization, and both have to do with groups. Also, it should be noted that I’m using the word “doxastic” broadly to refer to all matters concerning belief.
16 I deploy the Rawlsian terminology with trepidation. My point is that any conception of democracy needs to countenance a category of political views that are normatively incorrect, but nonetheless not beyond the pale. I take it that Rawls’s term “reasonable doctrine” captures this.
17 I am not asserting that belief polarization is in fact more pronounced among American conservatives. The empirical work is ambivalent on this point. I’m only noting that even were one to adopt the view that belief polarization is more prominent among conservatives, there’s still reason to think that citizens’ vulnerability to belief polarization does not vary significantly with the content of one’s political commitments.
18 Hence Rawls’s remark about unreasonable citizens, they must be “contained like war and disease” (Rawls Citation2005, 64n19).