Us vs. them: Understanding the roots of political polarization and what you can do about it

July 13, 2024, Butler, PA: Former president and current presidential candidate Donald Trump survives an assassination attempt at an election rally; the gunman and a bystander are killed, with two others critically wounded. 

May 16, 2024, Handlova, Slovakia: Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico is seriously wounded in a politically motivated assassination attempt.

May 3, 2024, Dresden, Germany: Matthias Ecke, a leading socialist member of the European Parliament, is brutally attacked and seriously injured while putting up campaign posters. This follows other recent physical assaults on German politicians.

January 8, 2024, Guayaquil, Ecuador: masked men invade the set of a live broadcast on a public television channel waving guns and explosives; the president issues a decree declaring that the country has entered an “internal armed conflict.” 

There are nearly 200 countries in the world, and there’s seemingly always political conflict in at least one of them. So, a few examples don’t necessarily indicate a general trend. However, experts say political violence is tied to polarization—the divergence of political attitudes away from the center and toward ideological extremes. And poll-based studies show that politics are becoming more polarized worldwide.

One measure of polarization is the annual Edelman Trust Barometer; in its most recent poll of more than 32,000 respondents across 28 countries, most respondents (53 percent) said their countries are more divided today than in the past.

The U.S., Colombia, South Africa, Argentina, Spain, and Sweden are considered severely polarized, according to the Edelman data. Brazil, Mexico, France, the U.K., Japan, Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands are in danger of severe polarization.

In this article, we’ll explore why societies become polarized. We’ll unpack the dangers of polarization and the ways it tears societies apart. We’ll trace the causes and history of polarization in the U.S. And we’ll see what can be done to reverse polarization. In a separate article, I’ll discuss the global factors that make the current era especially polarizing, and explore the question of whether democracy can survive these trying circumstances.

Polarization Drivers: The Findings of Sociologists and Historians

The most comprehensive recent book-length discussion of political polarization worldwide is Democracies Divided: The Global Challenge of Political Polarization, by Thomas Carothers and Andrew O’Donohue. A certain amount of polarization is normal and healthy in a modern democracy, in the authors’ view. Extreme polarization occurs when the usual spectrum of political opinion coalesces into just two primary ideologies that harden into identities adopted by opposing blocs of people, each regarding the other with contempt and fear. Extreme polarization is also typically sustained beyond a specific election, and it “reverberates throughout the society as whole, poisoning everyday interactions and relationships.”

According to Carothers and O’Donohue, the drivers of extreme polarization include religion, tribal or ethnic identity, political ideology, economic transformation, changes in the media landscape, and the design of political systems (for example, two-party systems are more prone to polarization than systems with three or more parties). 

These drivers can set the stage for the rise of polarizing leaders, who demonize a political or ethnic group in order to build a base of highly motivated followers. Recent examples include Narendra Modi in India and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey; both gained electoral success by inflaming and entrenching divisions in their societies. Polarizing leaders often crash against political and legal guardrails, such as by prosecuting political rivals, attacking the judiciary, banning or limiting opposition media, and passing laws to criminalize dissent (Modi’s chief political rival was prosecuted and imprisoned, while Erdoğan shut down an opposition party).