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For the first time, the United States has been classified as a “” in a  by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, an intergovernmental research group.

One key reason the report cites is the  among Republicans of  of   in the 2020 presidential election.

But according to the organization’s secretary general, perhaps the “most concerning” aspect of American democracy is “.” One year after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, Americans’ perceptions about even the well-documented events of that day are .

Polarization   in many  of America’s current . Some  warn of an approaching “” of irreversible polarization.        partisan spectrum.

There are , as I discuss in my book . One isn’t inherently dangerous; the other can be. And together, they can be extremely destructive of democratic societies.

Two Kinds

Political polarization is the ideological distance between opposed parties. If the differences are large, it can produce logjams, standoffs, and inflexibility in Congress and state and local governments. Though it can be frustrating, political polarization is . It even can be , offering true choices for voters and policymakers alike. Deep-seated disagreement can be healthy for democracy, after all. The clash of opinions can help us find the truth. The clamor of ideological differences among political parties provides citizens with  for making political choices.

Belief polarization, also called “,” is different. Interaction with like-minded others transforms people into more . These more extreme selves are also overly confident and therefore more prepared to engage in .

Belief polarization also leads people to embrace more intensely  toward people with different views. As they shift toward extremism, they come to  primarily in terms of partisanship. Eventually, politics expands beyond policy ideas and into .

But that’s not all. As I explain in my book, as society sorts into “liberal” and “conservative” , people grow more invested in  between “us” and “them.” And as people’s alliances focus on hostility toward those who disagree, they become more  and intolerant of .

People grow less able to , eventually developing into citizens who believe that democracy is possible only when . That is a profoundly antidemocratic stance.

The Polarization Loop

Belief polarization is toxic for citizens’ relations with one another. But the large-scale political dysfunction lies in how political and belief polarization work together in a . When the citizenry is divided into two clans that are fixated on animus against the other, politicians have incentives to amplify hostility toward their partisan opponents.

And because the citizenry is , officeholders are released from the usual electoral pressure to advance a . They can gain reelection simply based on their antagonism.

As politicians escalate their rifts, citizens are cued to entrench partisan segregation. This produces additional belief polarization, which in turn rewards political intransigence. All the while, constructive political processes get submerged in the merely symbolic and tribal, while people’s capacities for  erode.

Managing Polarization

Remedies for polarization tend to focus on how it poisons citizens’ relations. Surely President Joe Biden was correct to stress in his  that Americans need to “lower the temperature” and to “see each other not as adversaries but as neighbors.”

Still, democracy presupposes political disagreement. As James Madison observed, the U.S. needs democracy precisely because self-governing citizens . The response to polarization cannot involve calls for unanimity or abandoning partisan rivalries. A democracy without political divides is no democracy at all.

The task is to render people’s political differences more civil, to reestablish the ability to respectfully disagree. But this cannot be accomplished simply by conducting political discussions differently. Research indicates that once people are polarized, exposure to even civil expressions of the other side’s viewpoint .

This is a case of the crucial difference between prevention and cure. It’s not enough to pretend polarization hasn’t happened or to behave as if it’s a minor concern. In the current situation, even sincere attempts to respectfully engage with the other side .

Yet Americans remain democratic citizens, partners in the shared project of self-government who cannot simply ignore one another.

Polarization is a problem that . It does make relations toxic among political opponents, but it also hurts relations among allies. It escalates conformity within coalitions, shrinking people’s concepts of what levels of disagreement are tolerable in like-minded groups.

It may be, then, that managing polarization could involve working to counteract conformity by engaging in respectful disagreements with people we see as allies. By taking steps to remember that politics always involves disputation, even among those who vote for the same candidates and affiliate with the same party, Americans may begin to rediscover the ability to respectfully disagree with opponents.

This article was originally published by . It has been republished here under a creative commons license. .