Repolarize to Depolarize

And other ways forward for America from our talk with polarization scholar Jennifer McCoy - BCB #162

What if progress in US politics won’t come from reducing polarization, but from polarizing differently?

In this episode of the Better Conflict Bulletin podcast, we speak with political scientist Jennifer McCoy about the dynamics of toxic polarization, its roots, and possible paths forward. McCoy explains how “pernicious polarization” divides societies into hostile blocs, often fueled by political entrepreneurs who exploit grievances, and describes how this process undermines democracy through gridlock and democratic backsliding. Drawing on her experiences in Venezuela and her study of cases around the world, she emphasizes that depolarization may not come from erasing divides, but from “transformative repolarization” around broad, constructive principles such as anti-corruption, abundance, or democracy—building large coalitions to strengthen democratic institutions rather than erode them.

Jonathan Stray: Hello everyone and welcome to the Better Conflict Bulletin podcast episode. I am joined today by Jennifer McCoy. Hello.

Jennifer McCoy: Hi, nice to be here.

JS: Jennifer is one of my favorite scholars of polarization. Can you introduce yourself briefly, and how you came to be working on this subject?

JM: Sure. Well, I am a political science professor at Georgia State University, but I also worked for a long time at the Carter Center with former President Carter. During that time period, I was working on Latin America. We were invited to mediate a political conflict between Hugo Chavez, who had been elected president of Venezuela and his political and social opponents. And there was a very deep political conflict that had resulted in a attempted coup against him. So after that, he invited us to mediate.

So I was watching that country pull itself apart through this very severe toxic polarization. And eventually it destroyed the economy and the democracy as well.

So I wanted to start a long-term research program looking at these processes and to see to what extent was this happening in other countries around the world, and to try and diagnose it and look at the causes and the consequences, and now I've moved to the stage of trying to look at solutions to it. What can we do? How can we overcome this kind of severe polarization.

JS: Well, that is of course exactly what we're about at the Better Conflict Bulletin.

Pernicious polarization

JS: You have written some influential papers trying to define polarization or pernicious polarization, toxic polarization. How should we think about this phenomenon?

JM: Yes. I've worked with a number of scholars from around the world looking at different cases and coming up with the solution. In particular, with my main co-author, Murat Somer from Turkey. We're looking at this at the national level, at the systemic level, the level of the whole society. And we're talking about very severe political polarization that divides the society into two blocks that become very distrustful and antagonistic toward each other.

And this happens through a particular process that we have defined, and we're calling it pernicious political polarization, because it has pernicious or harmful consequences for democracy.

JS: Right, so let's get right to that. So many Americans across the political spectrum feel that our democracy is under threat. How does polarization relate? Is it a cause or an effect or both?

JM: It can go both directions and it does in many countries. We're talking about a process that divides the society to two blocks around a single dividing line. Sometimes something can be dividing the population politically. And we say that it usually starts with a political leader exploiting what they see as anxieties or grievances within the society. So they may create a line, a dividing line around say an issue like immigration.

But what we see is that often the polarizing strategy leads to people being very dissatisfied with their government. And it can lead to the support for democratic backsliding policies. So the polarization itself, the paralysis, the gridlock it causes can create a democratic crisis and that can lead one particular political party, or a political leader, to win office based on promises that they're going to solve this problem.

But they often do so by trying to concentrate power and they may be skirting democratic principles or norms. And so with this backsliding that they engage in, that itself can create polarization.

So polarization can create democratic crisis, but also the crisis and especially democratic backsliding or erosion can create or further the polarization because people don't agree on what's happening to the democracy. And each side claims to be the democratic actors, the ones who are strengthening democracy and they accuse the other as being the one who is threatening democracy.

So we become polarized over just what is happening to the democracy itself.

JS: This has been a very abstract discussion so far. What does this mean in the American context? Who is exploiting these pre-existing divisions and what are we seeing politically?

JM: Well, look, this has been a process that's been developing for at least three decades and perhaps five decades. And we can see this coming from anxiety stemming back from the 1960s, from the civil rights movement, from the women's movement, from major changes in the society that created some anxieties. But the kind of polarization that we call pernicious is a political strategy that is using three principles.

It is demonizing or vilifying the other as they create this binary choice. It's a black-and-white us versus them. And it's accusing and blaming someone else for the problems of the country. And it is calling them an enemy.

It is destroying the ties that we share, the cross-cutting ties that we share, breaking down communication between people and their interactions with others, and certainly breaking down the willingness to compromise between the political parties.

And it's striving to create permanent blocs in the society.

We saw that kind of language starting in the 1990s, particularly when Newt Gingrich, who's from my state of Georgia, was a congressman. He had ambitions for the Republican Party to take over the Congress for the first time in many, many years. And he wrote a memo about language that Republicans could use against their opponents. And so he really advocated for using this vilifying, insulting kind of language.

This has mushroomed since then, till we get up to today. And I would say Donald Trump is a master polarizer by reading the grievances or the anxieties in the society and exploiting those and really exaggerating those grievances and identifying enemies to blame for that.

So I think we can see it's a long process and we can see many people involved in it. But we see similar processes in other countries. So that's an example of how it works and where we see it.

Polarization takes two

JS: I wouldn't disagree that Trump is a polarizing figure. You use the phrase in one of your papers, a “political entrepreneur.” We've also discussed the phrase “conflict entrepreneur,” Amanda Ripley and others have used that. There are of course, many people in the country who feel that is entirely Trump's fault or maybe entirely the Republicans’ fault or conservatives’ fault.

But of course, those who voted for Trump would say, well, this is all a reaction to the authoritarian tendencies of the left. Do you see such tendencies on the left? Or more generally, how do we untangle this issue where both sides are putting all the blame on the other?

When you have one actor who is polarizing then their opposition has to decide how to react.

JM: Polarization usually is a two-way street, and it takes two sides. But when you have one actor, particularly one who's in the government already, who is polarizing then their opposition has to decide how to react. So they can reciprocate that polarization, they can use the same kinds of language. They can also blame them for the problems and they can continue to separate people, to eliminate and forget those other shared identities and interests that we have.

Or they can choose a different strategy and not reciprocate that kind of polarization. So we can look through and we can see at different points in time when the two parties have reciprocated and when they haven't.

I would give an example of the filibuster, getting rid of the filibuster, going back to 2010 when the Democrats were in the Senate but couldn't get their judges through and couldn't get their legislation passed because Republicans were refusing to cooperate, and using the filibuster. So the Democrats said, okay, we're going to get rid of the filibuster, which removes the Republican ability as a minority to block, in this case, judges. And that was a pretty drastic movement to do that. They did that for normal judges, below the Supreme Court.

But then the Republicans came back later when they were in charge and they were trying to get their Supreme Court justices in and were having Democratic opposition. So they then eliminated the filibuster for the Supreme Court. So it was a tit for tat kind of process.

Now, in terms of your question of the accusations of the left as authoritarian. I think the accusations of the left in some cases—and I really hate using just single words like this to talk about an entire group of people with many different positions—but we saw language that was both kind of purist and dogmatic, demanding that people follow their prescriptions among a number of different issues, or they would be considered out of the group and considered as enemies to be strongly opposed.

There was the feeling also, whether it was intentional or not, a lot of Trump supporters legitimately felt that they were being looked down upon. And certainly there was language after Trump's first election that he and his supporters were racist. That is a perniciously polarizing strategy to insult or to attribute negative characteristics to the entire group of people. And so you're creating a stereotype about an entire group of people. And so I think that did happen, in fact, and then that creates even a stronger reaction than from the conservatives or from the Trump base.

There was language after Trump's first election that he and his supporters were racist. That is a perniciously polarizing strategy, to attribute negative characteristics to an entire group of people.

Asymmetric polarization

JS: So if it's harming our democracy and we don't agree on what to do, how do we back down from this? How do we depolarize and have better relationships and more functional government?

JM: I think first we need to do another kind of analytical exercise. One is how do we perceive each other and what are we saying about each other? And those are perceptions. And we have very strong levels of resentment and fear.

Particularly, surveys have shown that both sides equally feel that the other is an existential threat to their way of life or to the country. So that is symmetrical. But then we also have to as much as possible, try to objectively look at what is the basis of the fear. Is there an objective basis to the fear? Is there something actually happening?

And here I would say we have an asymmetry in that the Republican Party has for many years—again, going back to that 2010 period with Obama, when Mitch McConnell was saying explicitly the strategy was to stop him from winning again, so that Republicans could come back in power. So obstructing everything. So refusing to govern, basically, refusing to do the job of governing.

And then we can get into the Trump years, Trump one, especially now in Trump two, with very objective measures of an attempt to concentrate power in the presidency, which we call democratic backsliding or erosion and have measured around the world. So political scientists measure this. And so we can say that there's an asymmetry in the attack on democracy.

All right, so if we're trying to get out of the situation, we have some people who are seeing this asymmetry and believe that that is the case, that there is a threat to democracy. We have others who are perceiving that the threat is equal on both sides. And so it's going to be very difficult to get an agreement on how to preserve the democracy.

But I think that the challenge right now is those who do see the threat have got to present that analysis in a way that is not creating the idea that anyone who is supporting President Trump is themselves an enemy and is unworthy of engaging with, or that all Republicans are illegitimate and should never hold power. That is not correct, first of all, that's not factual, and it's a very bad strategy because the need is to build a large coalition of people who may not agree or identify with the Democratic Party either, but who do want democracy and the rule of law and who do want to preserve it.

The only way to do that is to listen to people and to talk to people and to agree on the main value here, which is how to protect democracy and the rule of law, regardless of which political party or no party at all that you might have been identifying with.

JS: Well, we have certainly said that you want to fight authoritarian politicians, not the people who voted for them, because you can't win against the other half of the country, right? There's no political fantasy in which one side completely excludes the other from political participation. So that's kind of a non-starter.

Measuring democratic backsliding

JS: What's an objective measure of democratic backsliding? How would we even get agreement on that?

JM: Well, looking at which laws are being followed and which are not, compliance with court orders is another. Trying to intimidate organizations by threatening legal actions, financial, tax investigations, lawsuits against them to try to break them or bankrupt them. So we've seen a lot of threats against organizations such as law firms, universities and media organizations.

Looking at due process, is due process followed, are civil rights followed? And these are all observable actions.

JS: Are there actual measures on these things? Like are there data sets that curious readers can go look up? I mean somebody must be actually trying to quantify the asymmetry, right?

JM: Yes. There certainly are. Many people are now trying to quantify it now during the Trump administration on different measures. With the law, the legal side, threats to freedom of speech, with what's happening with immigrants. There are different organizations doing that.

Freedom House over the years tries to quantify this as one nonprofit organization that does this for countries all around the world. And another is based on expert survey. So asking experts in countries to give their analysis about how democracy is going. And that one is called Varieties of Democracy. It's an institute based in Sweden. So there are several databases about this and then specific efforts to measure what's happening in the United States right now. Those others are all global. The Economist does one, the Economist democracy index, so there are multiple ones.

JS: And you're saying that all of these external evaluations would say that the quality of democracy is degrading under Trump?

JM: Yes, yes, they all say that.

JS: Yeah, so I talk to a lot of Trump supporters and it's a difficult conversation because many of the things you mentioned—threatening to remove federal funding from universities, issuing executive orders, flouting court decisions, unilaterally trying to make law through presidential privilege—are things where you can find instances of Democratic presidents doing that, as you surely know.

So they point to things like DACA essentially tried to create immigration law through an executive order. During the civil rights movement, there were threats to remove federal funding from universities that didn't integrate. So it seems to me that perhaps the quantitative measures are a way out of this, because when I've argued specific historical instances, it just sort of ends up being a back and forth.

JM: There's a dilemma that quantitative measures, statistics, numbers often do not convince people. And people believe in stories and they are receptive to stories and they hear stories better. But of course, anecdotes are not representative and can lead you quite astray, but we still need to have stories.

So what I have tried to do, and a number of political scientists have tried to do, is tell stories about other countries and the experiences that we've seen or had in other countries and where this can go. That these are early signs and show this can turn pretty dire, like the Venezuela example that I started out with. This can turn pretty dire if we're not careful and if we don't stop it now.

Repolarize to depolarize

JM: But I think that the main thing is shifting what I call the axis of polarization. So we're divided on certain lines. Right now, the main divide is really Democrat versus Republican. It's a partisan divide. That's how it's characterized. And the enemy is the other party or the other party's leader. Sometimes it's personalized in terms of leaders. Is it Nancy Pelosi versus Trump or whatever.

We need to shift it and say, okay, for example, we could shift it to a democracy versus authoritarian divide and say, we want to build a large coalition to protect democracy. Now the problem with that is democracy itself is too abstract of a term. Democracy itself doesn't necessarily convince that many people because what they need to see is how it affects their daily lives in concrete terms. And that is a more winning strategy.

But another part of this strategy is to even get in the door to talk with someone and have them be receptive to hearing the stories or the numbers that we want to show requires acknowledging our own past mistakes. So the Democratic party needs to acknowledge its own mistakes. And it has not been doing that. It's not been doing a good job at that.

So acknowledging past mistakes and then showing where do you want to go? Where do you want to go in the future? You can't just be, I'm anti-Trump. Well, what are you for? What else are you going to offer?

So that's at the level of the political leaders. At the level of individuals, it's really talking about personal values, personal experiences, personal stories, personal fears, hearing theirs, asking to hear theirs, asking if they would be open to hearing yours, and then trying to say, okay, look, we both seem to have this fear about losing jobs or our kids losing their jobs if the economy goes south or whatever the fear is, the fear for our children's future or the safety and gun violence and the assassinations we're seeing now.

So I think that's the way to build the conversation. But to make political change, we have to build a large majority of people who want change. And whether that is to fight corruption, to fight billionaires taking over, to ensure that we do have due process and rule of law, to ensure that democracy stays, to ensure that the economy stays safe, it needs to be building a coalition on something. And we can talk about past successful examples of that in the United States.

JS: So that's very interesting. You have talked previously, rather than depolarization, what we need is repolarization, but with the sides standing for something other than Republican versus Democrat. What does repolarization mean and how would we get there?

JM: Yeah, so that's something that we're calling transformative repolarization. And that is saying, if we're in such a crisis, which I believe we are in now in the United States, we've got to do something big, we've got to do something transformative to get out of this. I also say that crisis is an opportunity for reform. This is a moment when we can change and we can decide what direction we want to go.

Now, I think Donald Trump and his government and his allies are trying to make transformative change. They are trying to make big change. They're using pernicious strategies though. They're using those three things that I said: vilifying the opponents or anybody who goes against them, anyone who dissents, they become an enemy; cutting our cross-cutting ties or our shared interest; and really trying to create a permanent bloc.

Just look at the redistricting fight now when Trump basically said, okay, change it so that we win Congress again in 2026, trying to create a permanent bloc. And so they're trying to create transformation as well, big change, but with a pernicious polarizing strategy.

A transformative, constructive polarizing strategy would change the line and say, this is not about Democrats versus Republicans. This is for example, about corruption or making the government work for everybody and not just the billionaires. Or this is about democracy versus losing our democracy.

So change the line and then it is polarizing because you're saying there's two options here. We either fight for democracy, fight for honest government, however you define it, or we lose it. But the difference is we're not vilifying people. We're not saying people are the enemy. We're saying ideas are the enemy and ideas are the solution. So it's focusing ideas and principles or justice.

So past examples would be a justice movement like a civil rights movement, which was fighting for justice, for racial justice, for example, civil rights for everybody. We saw this in South Africa as well with the end of apartheid, a movement to end outright discrimination. So it's around a principle, but neither of those were vilifying. And the civil rights movement in the United States was not accusing others of being horrible people, evil enemy people. They were talking about the ideas.

Another example goes back to the early part of the 20th century, at the end of the 19th century, 1890s, 1900. We had a period very similar to today and it was called the Gilded Age when we had huge ultra billionaires back at that time, huge income inequality, a few families running things in the government. We also had a lot of corruption.

So we had a reform movement that started not by the political parties, it was started by people, civic groups, women's groups, grassroots groups. They built this progressive movement and they brought in the political parties and their calling cry wasn’t democracy so much, but it was major reform and using the government as a solution, actually, to combat this huge income inequality and corruption. Bringing back honest relations.

So that was polarizing in this constructive way, but they eventually got enough reforms and then it kind of carries through a second stage with Roosevelt, with Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s, carrying out major reforms to deal with the depression. They became so popular that by the end of World War II and getting into the 1950s, the Republican presidents who followed, Eisenhower who followed, were coming in adopting the same policies, continuing the same policies. So the reforms became so popular that it became depolarizing.

So we say it's an indirect depolarization. First you polarize around an idea or a value. You implement the policies that will benefit many, many people, and then that will be depolarizing eventually.

JS: Okay, so we need to shift the line of division around something that everyone can get behind, or at least lots of people, some sort of broad-based principle. So you've proposed corruption, you've proposed economic issues and inequality, you've proposed democracy. I've also heard freedom as a value that resonates with everybody. Now people have different ideas what that means, but everybody wants to be free. Are there any organizations who you think are working towards this effectively today?

JM: I think there are many organizations trying and searching for how to do it. And just what you said about the word freedom, there are organizations trying to figure out what are the values that do unite people? What are the words that resonate with people? So there are several different nonprofit groups working on that.

And then there are many groups defending democracy itself, many who are carrying out the lawsuits or the legal strategy to try to defend the groups who are being attacked, whether that's media organizations or universities or individual people who are being attacked or who are being intimidated in some way. ACLU, Democracy Forward, Mark Elias's organization, many of them carrying out the lawsuits to try to protect people, and to protect the civil rights of people.

And then we have others who are really trying to think about this longer-term strategy and build the coalitions. And part of that is coming up with new ideas. We need new ideas. Democracy wasn't working very well. Government wasn't working very well. A lot of people were just not satisfied. And so we need new ideas. How to improve.

And so there's a lot of work going on there. I think there's a division of labor that we have to look at. Academics, intellectuals, think tanks, anybody who is working on ideas. [see also: 53 Roles that Make Democracy Work ]

So we have all these ideas about what can artificial intelligence do? What can technology do for us? There are many ideas about that, different groups. But at the same time, we've also got, okay, but also how are we going to make sure it's safe and that our officials think about the positive side and guard against the negative side. So we've got some divisions over that. We don't have unanimity over how to do that.

We've got a group of people who are talking about the abundance thesis as another potential idea. How do we actually make government work better and how do we provide all the goods, the housing, the health care, that we should have? The food, the clean air, the protection of the climate? How should we do that?

So I think it's happening, there's a lot happening, but this is such a big and complex country that it's still not coordinated sufficiently, but I think it's moving in that direction.

JS: Well, that is an optimistic note to end on. I want to thank you again for joining us. Again, I really enjoyed reading your work over the years and it's really influenced my thinking. So I'm hopeful that my readers will also look you up and learn from all the incredible work that you and your colleagues have been doing.

JM: Thank you so much. And hopefully by 2026, there will be a book to read about this, about how to depolarize politics.

JS: Fantastic. Well, let me know when that's coming out and we'll have you back.

JM: Great. Thank you so much.