Keep up with everything happening in The Commons by signing up for the Chronicle’s Philanthropy Today newsletter or our weekly Commons LinkedIn newsletter.
Few dispute the fact that America is polarized. A September 2024 Gallup poll found that a record 80 percent of U.S. adults believe Americans are greatly divided on the most important values, while just 18 percent believe the country is united. Not only is the percentage of those who believe the country to be divided higher than ever before, but the view is held broadly consistently across gender, age, race, political affiliation, and educational attainment.
Returning to the United States after living in the United Kingdom for 14 years, I have been struck by the extent and the pace of political polarization. I am no stranger to political polarization: As vice-chancellor (president) of the University of St Andrews and then the University of Oxford, I lived through the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence and the 2016 Brexit referendum. One would think that there is nothing more polarizing than a national referendum that reduces complex, long-term, economic, political, and symbolic issues to a binary choice, with a clear winner and loser. But the United States, by any measure, is more politically polarized than either Scotland or England pre- or post-referendum.
Successful democracy requires give and take, compromise around policy, accepting gains and losses, respecting rules, peaceful transfer of power. All this is more difficult if you believe the other side is morally compromised, a threat to democracy, and that your side has a monopoly on virtue. When political polarization cripples legislative compromise and leads to gridlock, it both impedes progress on important legislative matters and engenders distrust in the efficacy of democratic institutions. In more extreme cases, as in Hungary and Turkey, democratic institutions themselves are hijacked. At its worst, polarization can create the conditions for political violence and ultimately cause democratic institutions to collapse, as we are seeing in Venezuela.
Optimism Amid Gloom
Carnegie Corporation of New York has long committed to a program called Strengthening Democracy. Recently, we refocused this program to support efforts to understand and mitigate political polarization in the United States. We are supporting short-, medium-, and long-term approaches to what is a deeply complex issue, and we are detecting some grounds for optimism amidst the gloom.
Preliminary research and polling that we have supported suggest that the population at large is less polarized than our political leaders and that smaller communities are less polarized than larger ones. Moreover, they demonstrate that there is actually a strong convergence of opinion among Americans on many core issues, but widespread misunderstanding of the views of those on the other side of the political spectrum
One of our grantees, the Dartmouth Polarization Research Lab, finds that politicians drive polarization by intentionally creating and amplifying divisions. One of our fellows, Chris Tausanovitch, has demonstrated that the U.S. Senate has long been more polarized than the electorate, and his current research seeks to explain why. He suggests that this is due to “party sorting,” that our parties have become much more homogenous while the ideology of the public as a whole has not changed very much.
A CivicPulse survey of local government officials that we commissioned found that while the overwhelming majority — 87 percent — believe political polarization has a negative effect on the country as a whole, less than a third — 31 percent — see the same within their own communities. This implies a direct correlation between the size of the community and the extent of polarization, with communities under 50,000 being least polarized. The findings were consistent across Republicans and Democrats and confirm the intuitive sense of those of us who grew up in small communities: knowing your neighbors and fellow community members can mitigate polarization.
Respondents explained the relative lack of polarization as a consequence of their focus on practical matters. One leader of a large Southern town put it this way: “State and federal elected officials are stoking these divisions. At the local level, we have our hands full simply providing basic services.” A Republican governing board member of a large town in the Midwest put it best: “There is not a Democratic or Republican way to put in a sewer.”
These findings are consistent with those of other surveys indicating that we may not be quite as polarized as we think, or as our national politics would suggest. A 2024 AP-NORC poll found that nine out of 10 Americans agree on core beliefs about what it means to be American. A 2023 Walton Family Foundation report found that broad agreement on the importance of compromise for successful collaboration (88 percent), and Americans are far more likely to say that it is important to compromise to get things done (75 percent) than they are to say that it is important to fight for your values even if it means not finding a solution (15 percent).
Other research has pointed to the misunderstanding of the views of those on the other side. The Polarization Research Lab survey reveals a wide gap between respondents’ beliefs and how their beliefs are perceived by members of the other party. Bryony Payne of King’s College and his colleagues have found similar results, while Michael Pasek at the University of Illinois, Chicago, has reviewed surveys that demonstrate both Democrats and Republicans personally value core democratic characteristics but severely underestimate opposing party members’ support for the same characteristics.
Such evidence appears to suggest that we are not actually as polarized as we think, or as our political leaders or media moguls would like us to believe, notwithstanding a deeply polarized media and an ever-increasing reliance on highly unreliable social media for information and analysis.
There can be little doubt that social media, with its emphasis on binary reactions — like/dislike, thumbs up/thumbs down, swipe left/swipe right, follow/unfollow — contributes to societal polarization. The proliferation of misinformation and conspiracy theories, and the speed with which they can traverse the globe, undermines evidence-based analysis and fuels distrust. It was Tacitus who said long ago: “Truth is confirmed by inspection and delay; falsehood by haste and uncertainty,” and he was not thinking of the internet or the 24-hour news cycle.
Lancing the Boil
It has taken us a long time to get to this point, and it is likely to take us a long time to get out of it. I was a student of Bob Putnam in the early ’80s when he was working on the link between social and political developments in the Italian regions — research that led him to publication of the now famous Bowling Alone in 2000. More than anyone else, he has cataloged the collapse of social capital in America today — but as the perennial optimist that he is, he also points in his 2021 book, The Upswing, to the reformers who turned the Gilded Age into the Progressive Era as an inspirational example of how American society can change.
As political philosopher Michael Sandel and author David Brooks have reminded us, it is impossible to understand polarization without examining the social and economic developments of the past 40 to 50 years. Market-driven globalization has led to an extraordinary growth in inequality. In 1978, the average CEO made roughly 30 times what the average worker made. In 2023, that ratio was 290 to 1. The divide between winners and losers has deepened, breeding resentment and poisoning politics. The American idea of meritocracy has also led those who are the winners to believe on some level that they deserve their success, and conversely, that those who haven’t taken advantage of their opportunities are somehow less worthy, while completely forgetting how advantage and opportunity are passed from generation to generation via our educational system and social networks.
I believe that philanthropy has a role in lancing this boil of polarization; indeed, I see it as our responsibility. It will take a long-term, multifaceted approach that supports hands-on societal efforts to bridge divides while also supporting reforms to the features of our political system that encourage partisanship. It will require support for academic research that helps us to understand the nature, depth, and likely trajectory of polarization. It will require collaboration across philanthropy, and across sectors, working with educational institutions, business, and government. It will require working with those of different ideological backgrounds, and critically, it will require a robust, free, independent media environment that is trusted to provide objective information as an antidote to the Wild West of social media.
At Carnegie, we make no claim to having the answers, and we hope foundations with a range of missions will see that they can play a role. There are any number of opportunities for grant makers to get involved. In addition to supporting researchers exploring the phenomenon of polarization, we are backing those testing the efficacy of policy options such as open primaries, ranked choice voting, and citizen assemblies. We are supporting states, such as Utah and Maryland, that are introducing national service initiatives to create opportunities for meaningful interaction across race, region, and class, and to inculcate a sense of commitment to one’s community. We are also supporting the teaching of civics in schools, as well as opportunities for students from across the country to learn about, and visit with, one another. We also fund efforts to teach media literacy and combat disinformation, and we support a robust free press. Finally, we are returning to our roots with support of free public libraries, which Andrew Carnegie described as the “cradle of democracy.”
There is so much more to be done, but the stakes have never been higher.
The Commons is financed in part with philanthropic support from the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation, Einhorn Collaborative, the Freedom Together Foundation (formerly the JPB Foundation), and the Walton Family Foundation. None of our supporters have any control over or input into story selection, reporting, or editing, and they do not review articles before publication. See more about the Chronicle, the grants, how our foundation-supported journalism works, and our gift-acceptance policy.
