Defining the term
Bob Zadek opens the topic by distinguishing two things that share a name. Polarization as disagreement on political solutions, he says, is healthy — that is how a better political product is produced. Polarization becomes unhealthy when it creeps over to the personal: ad hominem attacks, vindictiveness, and the splitting of friendships and families. He notes that politicians, pundits and media figures prosper on polarization, which he calls the fertilizer in which they grow money, attention and influence Popping the Filter Bubble (2019).
Joan Blades, a co-founder of MoveOn.org and a mediator by origin and inclination, offers a related definition. When she says polarization she means the team sport of disagreeing with the other side because they are the other side — magnets that push each other away even when the parties may agree in many ways. She describes this as a dysfunctional way of failing to work with each other Popping the Filter Bubble (2019).
Ilya Somin separates the political-science category of affective polarization — people not wanting their children to marry someone from the other party, holding negative opinions about the out-party — from what his report actually measures. He and his co-authors do not look at inter-party hatred; they look at how partisan changes at the state level affect freedom Ranking Freedom in the 50 States (2022).
Is it worse than ever?
Zadek raises the measurement problem directly. Many observers say polarization is worse than it has ever been; he does not know if that is true, does not know how to measure it, and doubts it if one looks across the span of American history — though he grants it may be, and says whether it is the worst or second worst is hardly the issue, because it is nevertheless bad Popping the Filter Bubble (2019).
Blades answers the same question on narrower ground: “ever” she does not know, but in her lifetime she would say it is, and she finds it something citizens have to address Popping the Filter Bubble (2019).
Somin gives the most specific answer. There has always been some degree of polarization, he says, but by just about any measure — distance between the parties on policy issues, or how supporters of the two parties feel about each other — the amount is higher now than in at least several decades, perhaps throughout the entire time it has been measurable with modern survey data. The share of people who think the opposing party is not just wrong but a menace to America or a threat to democracy is much higher than in the past. On whether people would be angry if a friend or relative married a member of the opposing party, the numbers are at record highs, around 40% or more — higher than the share who would object to a marriage across religion or race. By almost any metric used by political scientists, he concludes, polarization has been rising for several decades and is likely higher today than at any time in the post-World War II era. He concedes that no data of that kind exists for the Civil War period, so it is possible polarization was greater then, but he rejects the argument that it is therefore not that bad The Libertarian Dream Team - Ilya Somin (2022).
Zadek presses him on the choice of starting point, noting that a speaker seeking to prove a point can pick a starting point more or less at random. He recalls the Vietnam War era — polarization, assassinations, cities burned — and says he could not find a clear trend of increase, seeing polarization as a constant with occasional dips. Somin’s reply is that the comparison to the Civil War is not a great historical comparison, and that the level is higher than in many decades, perhaps ever in the last 70 or 80 years The Libertarian Dream Team - Ilya Somin (2022).
Polarization and freedom in the states
Jason Sorens reports a statistical finding from his work on state freedom: states that move toward the Republicans subsequently see their economic freedom go up, and states that move toward the Democrats see their economic freedom go down. He describes himself as a pure independent with no dog in the fight and presents this as what the data show. With personal freedom, by contrast, he finds no such relationship. More progressive states tend to have more freedom for drugs, marijuana and a few other things, and may be a little less likely to regulate gambling or alcohol; more conservative states tend to have more educational freedom — school choice, homeschooling — and more freedom to own and carry guns. These effects, he says, kind of cancel out and wash out in the index: a state good on guns and school choice but bad on criminal justice ends up in the middle of the pack, and vice versa Ranking Freedom in the 50 States (2022).
The states that do better on personal freedom tend to be more rural, and may be conservative or liberal — Sorens names Nevada, New Hampshire, Maine, Vermont, New Mexico, Arizona and Colorado as near the top, a mix of red and blue. At the bottom of the personal freedom scale he places New York, Texas, New Jersey, Delaware, Hawaii and Kentucky, states that tend to be more urbanized. On the conservative side, the more Deep South states tend to have lower personal freedom, while the Mountain West and upper New England tend to have more Ranking Freedom in the 50 States (2022).
Polarization as one problem among several
Somin situates polarization inside a cluster of interrelated problems that have come to a head in recent years, though most have previous origins. First, efforts to overturn elections and monkey around with them, as seen with Trump and his supporters in the last election, with precursors in previous elections. Second, growing polarization and hostility between the parties and their supporters, which he says is part of the reason Trump was able to try what he did. Third, a growing sense, and in some ways the reality, that individual voters — ordinary people as opposed to political elites — find it very difficult to have a meaningful say in the policies they live under: the chance any one vote makes a difference is about one in 60 million in a presidential election, somewhat higher in other elections but still low. Closely related, most voters have very little idea of the issues they are voting on and therefore often make poor decisions 3 Libertarian Ideas to Strengthen Democracy (2022).
His report proposes different solutions to each problem, some distinctly libertarian and others shareable by people of widely differing persuasions. On the electoral machinery, it proposes plugging holes revealed in the Electoral College system and in how Electoral College votes are counted and certified — measures he says are embodied in the Electoral Count Reform Act, which was likely to pass Congress soon. A second set of recommendations addresses the deeper structural problems of political ignorance and polarization. On ignorance, the fundamental problem is that most voters have little incentive to become well-informed because the chance their vote matters is extremely low, unless they happen to enjoy following politics 3 Libertarian Ideas to Strengthen Democracy (2022).
Zadek raises a prior question: whether the country has allowed too much democracy, citing the 17th Amendment as an example of increased democracy and the disappearance of an effective Electoral College as another movement toward more popular democracy. Somin does not accept the premise that more democracy is always better. He recognizes that too much can be done through the democratic process, and that doing it in a very centralized way, with the federal government having more and more power, can be dysfunctional and can even help undermine democracy itself. There is somewhere an optimal amount of democracy, hard to locate exactly, and trying to have too much produces serious problems. His report devotes a section to expanding other decision-making mechanisms, including voting with your feet and the jury system, which he says has some commonalities with democracy but is also different The Libertarian Dream Team - Ilya Somin (2022).
Proposed remedies: conversation and balanced news
Zadek frames the 2019 episode around what he calls the first really sensible solution to polarization, though he allows it may not be the ultimate solution. He describes his guests as an odd couple politically and says their approach is one everybody in America who cares can participate in — a way to turn down the rhetoric and the heat and get people with differing or profoundly opposite beliefs to still, in Rodney King’s words, all get along. The two concepts he asks them to explain are Living Room Conversations and AllSides.com Popping the Filter Bubble (2019).
Blades supplies the origin story. MoveOn, when it started in 1998, was midway through the Clinton impeachment scandal. She and her husband put out a one-sentence petition: Congress must immediately censure the president and move on to pressing issues facing the nation. They were astounded when 100,000 people signed within a week — extraordinary for 1998, and the point at which she started really learning about politics. Asked whether signers were drawn by the censure or the move-on half, she says both, but particularly move on: it was a petition one could sign whether one loved or hated Clinton, and the underlying feeling was that enough was enough and the country had to get back to the important work of being functional. She notes that at the time she thought polarization was really, really bad Popping the Filter Bubble (2019).
Across episodes
The topic recurs across four episodes, and the treatment shifts with the guest. In 2019 Blades and Gable frame polarization as a personal and informational problem and offer interpersonal and media remedies; Blades dates her own concern to the 1998 petition and says that in her lifetime polarization is now at its worst. In 2022 Sorens treats polarization as a variable to be measured against state-level freedom outcomes, separating economic from personal freedom and finding offsetting effects. In the two 2022 Somin episodes, polarization becomes one item in a three-part diagnosis alongside electoral subversion and voter ignorance, and the proposed fixes are structural — Electoral College counting and certification, and expanded foot voting. The clearest development is the argument over measurement: Zadek’s historical skepticism, voiced in both the 2019 and 2022 conversations, is answered by Somin with survey data on partisan hostility and by Blades with the narrower claim about her own lifetime.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not establish the founding dates, membership or funding of Living Room Conversations, AllSides.com or Mismatch.org, nor the contents of the report Somin discusses beyond the measures he names. They do not give the text or legislative history of the Electoral Count Reform Act, the holding of any case, or the amendment on which any case turned. John Gable’s own account of Netscape and of AllSides is absent — his section of the 2019 transcript breaks off before he speaks. The state-level statistics are reported only as Sorens states them, without the underlying index methodology.