Transcript: America’s Big Political Problem Isn’t Polarization

Academics and journalists do the far right favors when they describe American politics as polarized and desperately seek to seem neutral, says professor Shannon McGregor.

This is a lightly edited transcript of the September 11 episode of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.

Perry Bacon: Welcome to another episode of Right Now, The New Republic’s twice weekly video podcast about politics and policy. I’m Perry Bacon, the host. I have a great guest. Shannon McGregor is a professor at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill School of Journalism and Mass Media. So Shannon, welcome.

Shannon McGregor: Hi. Thanks for having me.

Bacon: We’re going to talk about two ideas. You write a lot about politics and media and communication and the intersection of those concepts. We’re going to talk about two kind of ideas that I think are at the core of—we have a lot of episodes here about media and higher education and politics, and I think there are two ideas that are at the core of those fields. They’re polarization and neutrality. They’re two concepts that have become these defining concepts.

And polarization, I’m going to admit to having fallen into that myself a lot. But I want to talk about—I don’t think people were using the word polarization that often in 1995 or what have you, but it’s become this sort of, over the last decade, if you read an article about politics, or particularly a book, you’ll almost always see “Americans are polarized,” “Politics is polarized.”

It’s a word you don’t see in many other contexts beyond politics. And I want you to talk about the roots of that first. Where did this sort of polarization discourse come from, as far as you can tell?

McGregor: Yeah. At least some of the earliest roots of it trace back to—I can’t remember what year it was, but sometime earlier in the 1900s, actually, the American political scientists said the problem is the parties aren’t polarized enough, and Americans don’t know how to make decisions because they can’t tell the differences between the parties. That’s like the—not that the word didn’t exist before.

But I think where it has come up, within more recent memory, is this idea of, how do we explain how divided people are? Why are politics so fraught? Why does it seem like people hate each other? It’s clear that is true. And so polarization has captured the mind, I think, of both, like you said, scholars, but also journalists, philanthropists—the Carnegie Organization, who said for the three years, like, all Carnegie grants will go to projects focused on solving for polarization.

But to my mind, one of the reasons that it’s become so popular as a way to diagnose what’s going on in our world is because it’s a way to talk about politics, but without really talking about politics. It’s a very power neutral way of diagnosing something, and it has a sort of ingrained both sides. I’m just going to go like this, but you can’t see. Two sides of the poles. And so it’s everyone’s problem and everyone’s responsible for it.

Bacon: And so what is the problem with the polarization frame? Because you’ve written about this eloquently. A few years ago, I’ve read a few—you were the first person I saw that really, within academia—there were certainly people on the left who were writers, but I think you were the first person who has a PhD, who really said maybe we should—you and Daniel, is it Crease or Kreiss?

McGregor: Kreiss. Yeah.

Bacon: Daniel Kreiss, another—I guess he has moved, but another colleague of yours—wrote a piece arguing this polarization frame was wrong. Talk about what the problem is with that frame.

McGregor: So there’s a couple problems with it. First of all is what I mentioned, it has no analysis of power. And what it means is, like, why are we polarized? What are we polarized over? Why is this actually this huge problem? And that sort of obscures what’s actually happening, which is that we have this sort of extremism coming, at this point in our country, although in many countries around the world, from the right, that has a very anti-democratic streak to it.

And if we are solving for things like polarization, and there’s two poles, that sort of makes it seem like the answer then is if both sides move together. But should we move together to reach consensus on whether people should have human and civil rights if they are trans or not white? That doesn’t seem like the small-D democratic answer, right? And so it allows journalists, academics to have this sort of conversation that isn’t really a conversation about politics and power.

And I think one of the other points that we make that I think is really important is that there’s this whole idea that polarization is bad. Certainly there are parts of it that can be bad, and people have looked at that. But also what that does is obscures the fact that polarization has always happened when we have had movements in this country towards greater equality, right? So there’s all this sort of hand-wringing against the polarization of Americans after the Black Lives Matter movement at its peak in 2020.

First of all, if you dig into the public opinion data, it’s actually that liberal white Americans moved more in favor of supporting the right of Black Americans to not be murdered by police. So that polarization obscures that. But the argument is polarization might in fact be necessary for democracy. People in power will always hold on to that power, but if that means we’re polarized against movements towards democracy, towards equality, then that doesn’t really seem like the right diagnosis for the problem.

Bacon: Let me dig in a little bit. So it is fair to say that, like, Bull Connor and Martin Luther King were probably polarized against each other, to use a very reductive example. In a very silly way. And I think Bull Connor and Martin Luther King probably may have voted for the Democratic candidate in whatever year. But I think we’re now saying there’s more division by party than there used to be.

Like, in the 1960s, there were conservative Democrats and conservative Republicans, and liberal Republicans, and right now, the two parties are more—I think the more accurate term might be, the parties are more sorted now. If you are, like, pro-choice, you’re likely to be a Democrat, and if you’re anti-choice, to be Republican. We can go through a bunch of these. So the parties are sorted.

So people who maybe—I live in Kentucky, so people who maybe used to vote for a conservative Democrat, or an anti-choice Democrat, now vote for a Republican. I think the sorting is correct.

McGregor: 100 percent.

Bacon: So we have fewer people who are swinging from one party to another. There’s still some swing voters. There’s a little fewer of these voters. I think the sorting is a true thing. The difference between saying something is sorted and saying something is polarized is a little bit different. Can you talk about why?

McGregor: Yeah. One of the things that’s different about it is polarized means that there’s some equidistant relationship, is what it sounds like, right? I’m not a mathematician, but I think neither are most people, right? So when we use that word, it sounds like then these two poles are equidistant from some mythical and idealized center, which is where we should all be moving, both maybe at the political level, but even at the sort of individual level, right?

And even to relate this to the sorting—in some ways that’s what these political scientists in the 1900s were arguing, which was, like, People can’t sort themselves correctly into parties because the parties aren’t different enough. Now we’ve gone—I wouldn’t say the parties are different enough, but in some ways we’ve gone to the other end of these things, right? But the problem is, as far as it relates to polarization, the parties have not sorted along similar........

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