The complexity of American polarization

And why that complexity should make us question our certitude about the nature of our divides and our "enemies"

The following is an excerpt from my book “Defusing American Anger,” which is written for all Americans. Learn more about my work at www.american-anger.com.

This excerpt follows a section about our distorted perceptions of each other, which is a major way that people on either side of a conflict contribute to a conflict, often without knowing it. Many people speak in overly pessimistic, insulting ways about the “other side,” amplifying the toxicity and stakes of the conflict.

The complexity of conflict

To reduce toxic polarization, it’s important to see that people in both political groups contribute to our divides — even as we may disagree as to what extent they do. 

In a polarized society, many people will have blind spots for seeing how their group may be contributing to our divides. When the other side seems so horrible, the bad behaviors of people on our side can seem minor by comparison. Either that, or we genuinely don’t see how our group contributes. 

Human conflicts are complex. But the nature of conflict is that it makes the people involved see things as pretty simple. It makes them see the conflict as an open-and-shut case of, “They’re bad, and we’re good.” 

Recognizing the complexity of the conflict helps us embrace some humility about what exactly is going on. It can be hard for us to wrap our minds around even fairly simple conflicts between two people, let alone long-running ones involving many people. 

In almost every major human conflict, we can find various ways that people on both sides of the conflict contributed to it. Even in the case of Nazi Germany, a situation where one group ended up being clearly very bad (to put it lightly), there was significant violence and aggression from across the political spectrum that contributed to many people’s us-versus-them anger and narratives. 

Following Germany’s defeat in World War I, the country was in disarray. There were uprisings and attempts at coups by far-left groups. (Some of these were supported or aided by Russia, which was trying to spread its communist revolution to other countries.) For example, there was the Spartacist uprising in 1919, in which about 50,000 communists attempted to overthrow the Weimar government. There was also the Hamburg uprising in 1923, in which communists stormed 24 police stations and set up barricades around the city. The new government of Germany lacked authority, so it relied on private armies called Friekorps to fight its battles. This led to increasing polarization between left-wing and right-wing groups, and more and more street violence.

To be clear, there were far-right, nationalist groups too, doing all sorts of bad and violent things. But the point is that it was a chaotic landscape where the bad, aggressive things people saw their political opponents doing were major factors in amplifying extremism and us-versus-them mindsets. The violence and aggression Germans saw around them made them more willing to support divisive, aggressive, and violent ideas and leaders.

Historian Laurie Marhoefer has written about the chaos in post-World War I Germany, and also about how Hitler and the Nazis used it to their advantage:  

We know now that many Germans supported the fascists because they were terrified of leftist violence in the streets. Germans opened their morning newspapers and saw reports of clashes [...]. It looked like a bloody tide of civil war was rising in their cities. Voters and opposition politicians alike came to believe the government needed special police powers to stop violent leftists. Dictatorship grew attractive. [...]

One of Hitler’s biggest steps to dictatorial power was to gain emergency police powers, which he claimed he needed to suppress leftist violence.

Some might perceive the point I’m making as akin to victim-blaming or making excuses for horrible behaviors, but hopefully you can see that’s not my intent. I’m drawing attention to how human conflicts almost always work — the ways in which people build their us-versus-them narratives and how they can end up supporting (or being apathetic about) escalations of conflict.

(And to be clear, my use of a Nazi analogy is not meant to be a comparison of our political groups to the political groups of that time.) 

Geoffrey Blainey is the author of the classic The Causes of War. In that book, he makes the point that, even in cases where many people later judged one country as being an unreasonable aggressor, one could find various ways that other nations contributed to escalating the conflict. Blainey writes about wars but his points are applicable to conflict dynamics in general. For example, he examines the decisions of Japan leading up to World War II, and how the Allied nations’ actions could be seen as being insultingly dismissive of both Japan’s grievances and its military power. In ignoring Japan’s requests for respect and negotiation, they could be seen as painting Japan into a corner where Japan increasingly felt their only choice was to take aggressive action. 

Again, this is not making excuses for Japan’s conduct during World War II. Blainey’s point is that, if we want to avoid war, we should be willing to examine all the factors that contribute to a conflict, no matter how simple and clear-cut things may seem to us. He writes: 

Each nation sees history through its own eyes. The weight of war-time propaganda and national emotion makes a people see a war as simply a fight between good and evil or between warmakers and peacelovers. [...]

The moral contrast between war and peace is not simply black and white, and the distinction between warmaker and peacemaker is often a mirage.

The 2006 book The Anatomy of Peace: Resolving the Heart of Conflict examines the hidden emotional forces that drive conflicts. It explains how, in a conflict — whether a marital fight or a major conflict like that between Israel and Palestine — people on both sides can contribute, often without even realizing it. That’s because when we’re in a conflict, we stop seeing the opposing side’s humanity and see them instead as objects. Even if we’re confident that “our side” is only trying to achieve morally correct and rational goals, if our “hearts are at war” with the people on the other side, our negative emotions affect how we speak and behave. And soon, that animosity and contempt can play a bigger role than the issues that initially sparked the conflict. 

And even if we’re 100% sure we’re on the right side of a fight, we can be wrong in how we treat our opponents. The way in which we engage with our enemies is hugely important. If we aren’t careful, our ways of engaging will prolong and amplify the conflict. To quote from The Anatomy of Peace: “If I don’t remain open to how I might be mistaken in this deeper way, I might live out my life convinced I was on the right side of a given conflict, but I won’t have found lasting solutions."

Conflict is complex. The truth about our American conflict — all the various ways that people’s grievances and hurt feelings and fears have grown and progressed — will never be fully known or comprehended by anyone. That’s because so many aspects of this conflict are hidden from our view — hidden inside human hearts and minds. 

Even the most passionate and angry people in a conflict won’t be aware of all the factors underlying their behavior. For one thing, it can be hard for all of us to recognize our biases and our blind spots. And we can have various psychological factors motivating us that we’re not aware of. (For example, conflict can give us a sense of meaning and purpose, and this can help explain some people’s attraction to it.)

The complexity of conflict helps explain why it’s so easy for rational people to see a conflict in such different ways. Take the Israel-Palestine conflict again. There are many people who speak in confident ways about the nature of that conflict — which people are to blame and what should be done to fix it. Regardless of which arguments are right or wrong, the one thing we can say for sure is that it’s easy for smart and compassionate people to disagree about the nature of that conflict. 

We know smart and compassionate people can easily disagree about all sorts of complex issues. And human conflict itself is a complex issue. So it shouldn’t be surprising that we’ll so often disagree about the nature of it. 

If we’re able to embrace some humility about the nature of our American conflict, this can help us see the wisdom of working on resolving it — even while we may believe, or largely suspect, that “it’s mostly the other side’s fault.” 

Group asymmetries: this is not a chess game 

Human conflict is not like chess, where each side has the same exact pieces and follows the exact same rules. Human groups are messy. Human groups can have very different traits, motivations, and methods of engagement.

Another way to put this is that human groups in conflict are asymmetrical: they don’t match up exactly. 

When in conflict, people on both sides will try to compare the groups, often in order to build a case for why “the other side is much worse.” But the asymmetrical aspects of the two groups means that they’ll often be making bad and biased comparisons. 

Let’s take the Israel-Palestine conflict again. It’s possible to make true pro-Israel points like, “It’s rare for Israeli citizens to commit terrorist bombings in Palestine,” or “There is no Israeli equivalent of the 2023 attack by Hamas, where hundreds of Palestinians killed hundreds of innocent Israelis,” or “There is no Jewish equivalent to fundamentalist Islam.”

If one were making pro-Palestinian arguments, one might focus on points like: “Israel has killed many more Palestinian civilians than vice versa,” or “Israel is a modern society with much money and resources; we have much higher moral expectations from Israel than we do from people in Palestine.”

Similarly, in America, there are asymmetries between liberals and conservatives. And people in both groups will focus on things that are true of one side but not the other to build their case of the other side’s badness. 

On the liberal side, there can be a focus on far-right extremist mass murderers, or a focus on the fact that there is no major Democrat leader who behaves as badly as Trump. And on the conservative side, there can be a focus on liberal-side militant protest and rioting behaviors and intellectual support for such behaviors, or the fact that there’s more mental unwellness among liberals, or the intolerance of disagreement in liberal-leaning academia.

Rachel Kleinfeld is a senior fellow in Carnegie’s Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program who writes a lot about polarization and democracy. She has also examined the asymmetrical nature of our political divides. In a 2024 piece titled “The Coming Attacks on Nonprofits,” she wrote: 

Since illiberals on the right wield more political power than those on the left, they are more likely to use governmental regulatory, legal, and oversight agencies to silence their critics. Illiberals on the left exercise more power in universities, schools, and cultural institutions; they are largely working through private regulation of speech and funding. 

Even if you think “one side is much worse” (and again, I’m not saying it’s bad to think that), hopefully you can see that group asymmetries can make it harder to understand a conflict. Group asymmetries help us understand why even smart people can arrive at such different views of who the “bad guys” are. It’s just a matter of which things someone focuses on. It’s easy to find negative aspects about the other side where someone can truthfully say, “Well, our group doesn’t do that!” 

Matt Grossman and David Hopkins wrote the book Asymmetric Politics: Ideological Republicans and Group Interest Democrats. In that book, they examine what they see as a fundamental difference between the two parties. They argue that Republicans are more ideological, believing in specific philosophies about the role of government (for example, that government should be small, and that the debt should be balanced) — whereas Democrats are largely not ideological but are instead mostly focused on meeting the demands of various groups in their coalition. One way they make that point is by contrasting the messaging on the websites of the Republican Party and the Democratic Party. The Republican site is focused on specific philosophies (like small government and financial prosperity) while the Democrats’ site doesn’t mention philosophical goals but is focused on the ways in which they serve groups that are in their coalition (like women, minorities, and gay people). 

One way to see this point is to see how the Democratic Party can face pressures to shift its stances based on various demands from groups in its coalition. For example, in 2024 President Biden faced harsh criticism from some liberal quarters for his administration’s support of Israel’s aggressive military campaign in Palestine. There was a pressure on Biden and Democrats to try to arrive at a stance that would maximize support among the various factions in the Democratic coalition. In other words, the pressure was to keep people happy; it wasn’t based on specific ideological principles. 

This is not to say that Republicans don’t also face similar pressures to keep their constituents happy, or that their stances don’t shift. Those pressures are of course present for Republicans, too — just as there can be ideologies present on the left. It’s just to say that the groups seem to have some significant differences in these areas.

The authors of Asymmetric Politics argue that in this asymmetry there’s a lot of room for misunderstanding. Each group will tend to assume the other group is in some sense symmetrical to them, and this assumption can make people reach more pessimistic views of the other group. Because Republicans are largely ideological, they may assume that Democrats must also be ideological; this can account for some conservative-side fears that liberals are trying to achieve some specific far-left ideological vision for America. And because Democrats are more likely to see the point of a political party as being to help the people in its coalition, they’re more likely to view the Republican approach as being cold and lacking compassion.

Another area of asymmetry is that liberals are the ones trying to change society. The progress in the word “progressive” refers to an attempt to improve society, whereas conservatives can be seen as trying to conserve aspects of society they see as good and useful. This dynamic can help us better understand conservative-side views that liberals are the aggressors in our divides — that liberals are the ones who “can’t leave well enough alone” and whose ideas about how to change society are often extreme, divisive, and harmful. 

Another area of asymmetry is that conservatives are more likely to be working-class and blue-collar people, while liberals are more likely to be college-educated. Some liberals will use this asymmetry to score points; for example, saying things like, “See? Liberals are smart and conservatives are stupid.” But the fact is that polarization in countries will often involve educational polarization: It makes sense that two groups, when in conflict, will likely grow apart when it comes to socioeconomic class and educational levels. Also, if the situation were reversed and Democrats were predominantly working-class, I think many of us would agree that Democrats would see things quite differently; many would take pride in being a “party of the people.” 

Also, it’s clear that being highly educated doesn’t prevent someone from being wrong about things, especially when it comes to politically polarized views. In their 2018 research, the organization More In Common found that “while Republicans’ misperceptions of Democrats do not improve with higher levels of education, Democrats’ understanding of Republicans actually gets worse with every additional degree they earn. This effect is so strong that Democrats without a high school diploma are three times more accurate [at understanding Republican motivations] than those with a postgraduate degree.” When it comes to conflict, we often use our intellectual powers in service of our emotions and biases. (I’ll also say that, for me personally, I’m often much more frustrated with highly educated people who behave in divisive and insulting ways than I am with non-educated people who take similar approaches, simply because I expect more from them.)

Another area of asymmetry is that liberals dominate our major cultural institutions. Liberal-leaning ideas and people dominate entertainment media, news media, and academia — places where conservative-associated ideas are often either denigrated or ignored. This power imbalance can help account for some Republicans being more okay with aggressive, belligerent approaches. When you feel like you’re an underdog fighting a powerful and dismissive establishment, you’ll be more willing to consider and condone aggressive approaches. (And again, this is not a defense of belligerent, insulting approaches — but we can criticize and work against those behaviors while trying to understand the factors and dynamics that make those behaviors more likely.)

Republicans and Democrats have many group asymmetries that have been and could be examined. But hopefully this is enough for now to make the case that those asymmetries can make our conflict harder to understand and can affect our perceptions of that conflict. 

We regularly see people arguing over which political group has grown more extreme. Elon Musk, for example, got some attention for saying that the left had grown more extreme, and liberals in turn respond with their views of how conservatives are clearly the ones who’ve grown more extreme. 

But of course, there’s no single measure of extremity that we’ll all agree on. (Let’s leave aside that it’s often impossible to even agree on what makes a stance “extreme” in the first place.) The complexity of the conflict, and the asymmetry of the groups involved, means that it’s easy for people to see their political opponents as the more extreme and unreasonable ones, and they’ll have various pieces of evidence to back up that claim.

This was an excerpt from my book Defusing American Anger. Learn more at www.american-anger.com.