Beyond Polarization

My Remarks at Notre Dame's "Keeping the Republic" Conference

It’s a real privilege to have been invited to be part of this conversation and the broader conference. If there were ever a time when we needed to think critically about how we rescue the republic from its current condition, that time is now. Arguably, we passed that moment some time ago, and we are now living with the consequences of collective complacency and inaction.

It is in that spirit that I want to offer remarks that may sound somewhat provocative. My intention is not simply to provoke, but to intervene in what I increasingly see as one of the dominant tendencies in political science and adjacent fields.

Over the past many years, polarization has acquired an almost singular hold over how we understand the American political condition. Increasingly, I find myself asking why polarization has such a stranglehold on our discipline and whether our growing obsession with depolarization is misguided historically and normatively.

To be clear, I am not arguing that polarization is irrelevant. Of course, intense partisan conflict can make democratic governance more difficult. It can intensify distrust and weaken institutional cooperation.

But I increasingly worry that polarization has become such a dominant lens that it obscures other questions that may be even more important. Questions about power. Questions about democratic commitment. Questions about institutional asymmetries. Questions about who is asked to bear the burden of coexistence in moments of democratic strain.

A recent piece by Felipe Vilanova and Flavio Azevedo argues that “the central problem is not polarization itself, but the tendency… to treat conflict as presumptively pathological.” I think that formulation gets at something important.

And to be fair, I do think there are scholars within the polarization literature who are beginning to wrestle with some of these tensions. Kreiss and McGregor, for example, note the extent to which polarization research often carries implicit normative assumptions about consensus, civility, and democratic health.

In fact, in my own department, arguably the founding place of affective polarization, I have increasingly found myself asking students presenting work on polarization a fairly simple question: what is the normative ideal underpinning the project, and are there alternatives worth considering?

Too often, the normative ideal implicit in depolarization discourse is one in which citizens lock arms with their neighbors, feel warmly toward those with whom they disagree, and recover a sense of civic fellowship that transcends partisan difference. To be sure, there is something admirable in that aspiration. Democracies do require coexistence and mutual toleration.

But I also think we should ask harder questions about the limits of that ideal.

Should I be expected to feel warmly toward those willing to support policies that restrict my right to marry the man I love? Toward those who support efforts to suppress the political voice of marginalized communities? Toward political actors increasingly willing to undermine democratic institutions in pursuit of partisan victory?

And if the answer is no, then I think we have to confront the possibility that not all political conflict is reducible to interpersonal animosity or failures of civic goodwill.

This is where I think some depolarization discourse becomes normatively flattening. As Vilanova and Azevedo put it, “appeals to reduce polarization risk equating resistance to authoritarianism with intolerance.”

Historically, many of the most important democratic struggles in American life were profoundly conflictual. The civil rights movement was not fundamentally a project of reducing polarization between segregationists and Black Americans. It was a struggle over citizenship, equality, and democratic inclusion. Conflict was not evidence of democratic failure in that context. Conflict was often the mechanism through which democratic claims were articulated.

One part of the piece especially resonated with me because it connects debates about polarization and depolarization to questions I have thought about in my own work on respectability politics. Vilanova and Azevedo write that “moralized expectations of composure, civility, [and] propriety are often imposed asymmetrically on marginalized groups, thereby disciplining dissent and obscuring underlying structures of domination.” They continue by suggesting that “consensus-oriented norms can function less as neutral democratic virtues than as mechanisms of political regulation.”

I think that insight is deeply relevant to contemporary conversations about polarization and depolarization. Because one of the questions we should ask is: who is most often being asked to moderate their tone, soften conflict, extend empathy, or preserve civic harmony? And who is not?

And this is why I found myself so struck by another passage from that same piece. Vilanova and Azevedo write:

“History shows that authoritarian movements flourish under conditions of depoliticization, portraying their dominance as the necessary route to social renewal. In this context, the scientific enterprise must resist becoming a depoliticizing force… What endangers democracy—and the autonomy of science—is not polarization, but the insistence that confrontation with authoritarianism can or should be transcended through consensus.”

I agree.

To me, the challenge before us is not simply whether Democrats and Republicans can feel more warmly toward one another. It is whether our institutions, political actors, and civic culture remain capable of sustaining a genuinely multiracial democracy at all.

And that, I think, requires us to ask questions that extend far beyond polarization alone.