Divided Democracies with Tom Carothers
Ceejay Hayes:
This is CounterPol. Today we're speaking with Tom Carothers, co-director of the Democracy, Conflict, and Governance program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Tom writes frequently on democracy, democratic backsliding, and the rise of authoritarianism. His 2019 book, Democracies Divided, explores the challenges facing the governments of Brazil, India, Kenya, Poland, Turkey, and the United States. and measures taken by activists in those countries to defend their democracies. We look at the experience of polarization in democracies globally, talking through commonalities, differences, the who, what, and why of political polarization. I hope you enjoy.
Tom Carothers:
Hi, I'm Tom Carothers. I'm a researcher at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which is an international affairs research institute or think tank, as they're known. I'm a specialist in democratization around the world, how countries become democratic, how they lose democracy. I've been doing that for many years. In the recent years, I've been focusing on the topic of polarization because so many democracies are facing pretty serious polarization. I've been trying to look at that on a comparative basis, looking at the experience of countries in many different regions.
Ceejay Hayes:
So this is part of a larger initiative at Cambridge called the Cambridge Overcoming Polarization Initiative. And one of the questions we asked at the beginning of the initiative, and one of the questions I'm going to ask you, Tom, now, is what is polarization and what does it mean to be polarized?
Tom Carothers:
It's natural in a democracy that people have very different points of political view. There are different candidates, parties, and social groups that disagree with each other, often really strongly. So democracies should have a whole array of opinions and often political friction and confrontation. The polarization, the type that we're talking about a lot in the world now, becomes dangerous and really sets in when different political sides start treating each other in intolerant ways, not accepting the legitimacy of the other point of view, often becoming more extreme and pulling apart from each other, sharing no common ground, no desire to work together towards common solutions. So it's an intensification of political differences that becomes destructive. of political progress and just basic political consensus in a society.
Ceejay Hayes:
Thank you very much. So with that in mind, why are democracies trending towards becoming more polarized in ways that are producing violence, producing hostility, and making inter-party relationships really difficult to approach or even imagine?
Tom Carothers:
Something's been happening in the world in the last 10, 15, maybe 20 years, which is citizens in many democracies are increasingly frustrated with the political systems they have and angry about the political actors and the political systems they have. And this anger and frustration is fueling polarization. It's causing people to intensify their differences with each other. to take them more seriously, to be less tolerant of the opposition, it's causing them to make political choices that are more extreme. So if we think the underlying condition is this anger and frustration that people feel, sometimes it's because they feel economically cut out of the pie in their countries, they're not getting their share Sometimes it's about corruption. They feel that elites are corrupt and they feel disattached from elites. Sometimes it's about more social identity. They feel that their particular group is not being favored in ways that it should. We can talk more about the different causes, but think of anger and frustration as the bedrock. which then leads to polarizing actions and choices by citizens.
Ceejay Hayes:
Something I'm hearing, this is a word that comes up a lot when we talk about highly polarized democracies, is populism. Populist narratives that motivate voters to the polls and it riles up an electorate. Populism is often anger or frustration organized towards an elite, a public who feel that a small group of people have gotten a disproportionately large amount of power and a large amount of wealth. So is populism actually a bad thing when it's critical of a system that displaces wealth and power? Is there something to listen to in populist narratives?
Tom Carothers:
There's certainly nothing wrong with citizens having legitimate grievances against their system and saying, we want an alternative that we're not being presented by the system. That's the way a democracy should function. Now, populism at root is, in a sense, a political idea of us versus them, that there's an established in-group and then there's an out-group, the people who are not being protected or favored by that in-group. And populism is all of the people who are not represented by the system want something else. And so a populist candidate who somebody says, I stand against all of the established parties, I'm outside the system, I'm going to attack it from the outside. Again, that can be legitimate if the system really has been excluding people. But often populism feeds into an us versus them narrative, which turns destructive and says, the entire political elite are bad people, they're evil people, they should be found, they should be destroyed. And to do that, we have to override the law because the people are above the law. So if populism turns into a force which starts tearing down some of the basic institutions, not just presenting a political alternative, but becoming institutionally destructive, then you've got a problem on your hands in a democracy.
Ceejay Hayes:
As an American living in the UK, I think we can often focus our attention on polarization in the U.S., and we see the U.S. just becoming this super highly polarized democracy. But this is a feature of democracies all around the world. You've written about that in your book, Democracy is Divided. And so I'm wondering if this shift towards polarization happens to be a coincidental cluster of individual cases that are happening at the same time or the result of some causal factors such as influence from the United States that is a very highly polarized nation itself, but also positioned itself as the leader in promoting democracy around the world.
Tom Carothers:
This is a great question and one that researchers like me, I can tell you, we're still scratching our heads about. Because on the one hand, within North America and Europe, we see certain common trends that are leading to polarization in these societies. As I mentioned, the citizen anger against established elites, the sense of economic stagnation, the culture wars between a progressive vision and a more conservative vision. But then if we look further afield, say we go to India and say, wait a minute, why has Hindu majoritarianism arisen in India in the last 10 or 15 years and become a very divisive force in that society, leading to a polarization of Indian politics. Is that similar or different to the identity or culture wars that are occurring in the West? Or look at Turkey. Turkey has become much more polarized in the last 15 years between two visions of Turkey, more Islamist vision and a more secular vision. Is that similar? And so we have to be very careful in thinking that it's all one thing. I mean, polarization Has certain symptoms that are very similar but the underlying causes seem to be quite different in india and turkey than they are in germany or the united states or france or the UK. No one factor that is common however is the shift in all of our societies to electronic communications the fact that the information space. is now electronic because as we know there is a characteristic of an electronic information or public space that lends to a certain tendency towards extremism. People feel uninhibited in electronic spaces to find other people who gravitate to their same somewhat more angry or extreme views to express their views in a harsher way. Politicians step over traditional gatekeepers like media and talk directly to their followers. So it does seem that the electronic information and public space is a fertile ground for all of this anger and frustration that I talked about. I don't think it's the primary driver. But it's certainly a facilitating factor.
Ceejay Hayes:
That's interesting because anyone who's on the Internet on Twitter or X now, you see that sort of vitriolic conversation happen, especially around election cycles, which is where we're getting to now, especially in the US and the UK, two countries I want to get back to a little bit later. but just in terms of polarizing narratives and the way that they get bred in social media spaces, but then also are exacerbated and regurgitated by politicians. These polarizing populist narratives do motivate people to the polls. So, does being a polarizing figure come with a kind of political currency? And if it does, what would motivate a candidate to not be that polarizing figure if it ensures them an election win?
Tom Carothers:
Right. Definitely. If you've got a lot of anger and frustration in the society, if you're a politician or a political entrepreneur who wants to get into office, you're going to try to figure out a way to ride that wave of anger. You're going to speak to it. Think of what Donald Trump when he says to his followers, I am your retribution. Just think about that line. He's saying, I channel your anger. You're angry. You feel angry about the system in different ways about our society. I embody that. I carry your anger. I am your retribution. And so that is a populist who just sort of like swells up, soaking up all the anger and frustration that says I embody that. Prime Minister Modi in India is similar. He says, I speak for the Hindus in this country who say that we haven't gotten our share of the country in the sense we've been sharing it with too many other people. I am your narrator. I am your leader in this cause. And so populists do channel the anger and frustration and embody that. Now, what might lead somebody to go against that and have a different political approach? Well, as we saw in Poland recently with the recent elections there, a counter approach Is there any political entrepreneur who's channeling the frustration of a certain group of people but that's only a certain group of people i'm gonna take a big tent broad based strategy more moderate say not everybody feels that. And I want everybody who doesn't agree with that angry narrative to come over to my side. You can have choices. You can be a little more to the left, a little more to the right, but we're a big tent approach. And so the Polish opposition to the right-wing illiberal party, the Polish opposition that managed to win the election in October, took a broader approach, had a coalition of three parties that gave voters some choices among those three parties. They tried to take a broad narrative about youth issues, about women's issues, and so forth. And so the alternative to a polarizing, populist, narrow anger strategy is a Big Ten strategy of saying, look, there's a moderate alternative that has choices within it that's more reasonable. Now, that's tough to do, but that's the approach so far that has at least worked in Poland.
Ceejay Hayes:
It's interesting you mention that, because I think a feature of polarized democracies – and you can correct me if I'm wrong, because I'm thinking about this in a U.S. context. I'm not too sure if this applies to different democratic nationalist contexts – is that your political identity becomes so tied to your ideology that regardless of if a politician presenting like a big picture narrative that more embodies where you are politically, you are less inclined to vote in that direction if they have a particular political affiliation, which is something that could really happen in a two-party democracy because you're either one party or you're not, or you're the other. And so is that something that can work in all democracies? Are they better suited for multi-party democracy? Is this something that can scale to other countries?
Tom Carothers:
The United States and the UK are somewhat unusual in being locked into two-party systems because of their electoral system, their electoral laws. They're very hard for third parties. Obviously, in the UK, you have the Dems, but in the United States, you have no viable third party. And so the United States and UK are a bit unusual in having these two-party systems. We see in many other established Western democracies, for example, that multipartyism does allow voters a wider range of choices that takes some of the pressure out of the system. Germany is a good example where you have a spectrum of parties from the Greens to the Social Democrats to the Christian Democrats and then further to the right. That allows a differentiation system, flexible coalitions, more choices, etc. So polarization in a two-party system is very dangerous, because precisely as you say, you sort of feel like either I go with those guys over there or those people who are really angry and I don't really agree with that narrative, or I have to just go with these people. Suppose I don't really line up here and I don't feel part of either of those things, which I think many British people feel about British politics and a number of Americans feel about American politics, is neither of the above is the choice they have, but they don't have a place to go. The two-party systems are not good when you have a polarized society because it locks people into a narrower range of choices.
Ceejay Hayes:
Because we're talking about the U.S. and the U.K. again, I'm going to just ask this question. It's kind of topical because it's happening in this moment. Israel's military operations in Gaza and the West's response to them are being met with There's massive protest in the US and the UK, and there's quite polarized attitudes towards if you are pro-Israel, if you're pro-Gaza. These are two sides of the market that are very highly polarized and are very highly mobilized. these attitudes are playing themselves out in these protests. Because the U.S. and the U.K. are going to have head of state elections next year, do you think that these protests and this conflict is going to present a threat to the democracies in the U.S. and the U.K. come their head of state elections in 2024?
Tom Carothers:
I don't think this division and this conflict will threaten democracy itself in the U.S. and U.K., but it could change certain voter dynamics. In the United States, there's a sharp division, even within the Democratic Party itself, between people who lean more one way and lean the other way in terms of pro-Palestine or pro-Israel. So it's actually within the Democratic Party of this division, not so much across the line between Democratic and Republican parties. And so that's going to cause tensions within the Democratic Party if people feel strongly one way and they see a presidential candidate who they feel doesn't represent their view on this issue, that might make them less inclined to vote or less inclined to support that candidate. The Gaza crisis hit at a time, as we've been talking about, many democracies are quite polarized, and it's as though our society's polarizing muscles are very developed, unfortunately. We're angry. We're often intolerant of opposition. The language of politics is just so feverish in many cases. People can't have civil discourse anymore. They go right to the maximum on any issue. So this issue, which is very intense, very emotional, very divisive. I mean, this is very, very difficult issue falls right into societies that are already in a sense in the midst of polarizing dynamics. And so therefore it just plays further into them. And so this intensification of language, unwillingness to listen to the other side, I see all of these characteristics. And I think, wow, this is a crisis designed to simply amp up the polarization still further.
Alan Jagolinzer:
What I see in the polarized society is it sort of fundamentally takes people away from actually getting engaged with real world human level global systemic crises. So we're spending more time arguing with each other than actually getting together and solving real problems, which might include climate, it might include even the pandemic and how we approach our next pandemic, things like that. So why is it that people become entrenched in these belief system bubbles when in fact doing so seems to exacerbate their problems in some way? They're like contributing to continuing problems that they really do want resolved. Why is it so powerful that entrenchment becomes the thing of focus as opposed to collaboration on actually fixing things?
Tom Carothers:
You raise a really important point, Alan. When the pandemic hit in the United States, people like myself have been studying polarization thought. Maybe this is our War of the Worlds moment. What is War of the Worlds? Famous story by H.G. Wells in the 1930s where Martians arrived on the Earth and Earthlings finally unified and fought the Martians, got over their divisions. I thought when the pandemic hit, maybe we'll put aside our differences. We've got a virus on our hands. It's going to kill millions of people. No. Guess what? We got very polarized over, should I wear a face mask? Should I not wear a face mask? Should I get a vaccine? Should I not get a vaccine? I was astonished how even a virus, what could be a more neutral actor politically, became the object of tremendous polarization. And so it was very disappointing and very frustrating. Similar with climate change. Climate change is a natural phenomenon. It's out there in nature. It's not something one can really argue with if you study the facts carefully. One can interpret the facts slightly differently, but it's a scientific phenomenon. It has become the subject of intense polarization, at least in the United States. Why is this? You know, I tend to think of it as that people have seemed to develop this need to feel part of the team. It's like I'm on this team and my membership of that team is so important to me. Whatever the team coach says, go out and attack these people. I will go out and attack these people. And if you say I'm no longer in a larger society or trying to solve problems, instead, I'm in a team sport where I wake up every day and think, how's my team doing? I check the news and think, oh, yeah, victory for my team here. somehow humans and democracies have gotten into this group, clinging to groups, rather than rising to another level and saying, we've got big problems on our hands, these societies, we've got to work together. And that's a very frustrating thing, but I don't think it's entirely alien to our understanding of human nature, that humans do like to congregate in groups, in groups and out groups. And I think we're seeing for some different reasons, an intensification of that phenomenon.
Ceejay Hayes:
When you were talking, Tom, the thing I was thinking about was how in polarized societies, where you locate truth also shifts. Whether or not an expert who has decades of research and work in the field says something, irregardless of that, it doesn't really matter because they are now even arbitrarily or only imaginarily aligned with a political party. And so you can't accept that Save vaccines, you can accept that research as true or as unbiased or as untethered from some kind of larger project, because it now has a political leaning, even if that is not the case. So I wonder how you understand truth to be developed and truth to be understood in polarized societies.
Tom Carothers:
No question. I mean, one of the key concepts that Donald Trump sort of came up with and issued during his candidacy, then his presidency, was that of fake news. He would simply say, you've got a set of facts that's fake because I disagree with it. I have my own set of facts. He immediately put facts on the table and said, they're just part of the political game. The fake news concept traveled really well in the world. We tracked it a bit at Carnegie, and we found that leaders in a surprisingly wide range of countries began using this concept of fake news because it perfectly crystallized the polarizing tendency to say, it's not just about you and I disagree with each other. My facts are right. Your facts are wrong. And once facts are on the chopping table, you've got a problem on your hands. Because the polarization is the absence of consensus, the inability to work together. If facts are themselves, subject to this, then there's a serious degradation of the basic idea of consensus. And this is really a terrible thing. And it was kind of an act of political creativity on Trump's part that really caught and has become part of our lexicon now, that it's part of the polarizing mindset, which is there's a thing called fake news, as opposed to news used to be facts. Now, news is simply another contested domain.
Ceejay Hayes:
The sort of parallel crisis of polarization is our epistemological crisis. We have no consensus on how even truth is built, and I think that presents another huge obstacle in producing interventions against polarization. You know, I want to step back a little bit to just talking about something that's kind of foundational to democracies, which is differences in political ideologies. That's the bedrock of democracy, so that you and I and Alan may all have different views in how a government should run and what government should do. Does that plurality present a latent threat to democracy? Is it just in general? Or is this polarization something that's kind of unprecedented?
Tom Carothers:
The 20th century was a century of ideological battles, communism, fascism, liberal democracy, and so forth. Ideological divisions are part of human history, modern human history at least, and a natural part of politics. And democracies are supposed to contain within them at least ideological variations. Now, if you're within a democracy and there's a group of people who hold an anti-democratic ideology and are determined to advance it, you have a problem. But the polarization we're seeing within democracies isn't the embrace of fascism, communism, and so forth. Instead, it's an intolerance of the other person's point of view. It isn't that the ideological division is necessarily always so great. It's the level of intensity by which it's held in the denial of legitimacy of the alternative and saying that I simply reject your point of view. Then several things happen. You lose civil discourse. You start lurching into political violence or violence in psychological terms or in real terms. You begin to attack institutions like elections and say, you know, actually, I care so much about my version of this ideology in the country that this election came out a different way. I just don't believe that anymore. I deny the legitimacy of the elections. Start undermining the rule of law. These are the key guardrails, civil discourse, legitimacy of elections, rule of law. And this is what begins to corrode when people are so nervous about the other ideology or the other variant of ideology gaining power, that they're willing to corrupt or corrode or undermine these key institutions of democracy. That's when the warning lights start flashing in the democracy and say, we've got a problem. You know, in the 1980s in the UK, you have Margaret Thatcher, you have Michael Foote, Those two political figures are about as far apart ideologically as you could be within a liberal democracy between right and left. Yet the British system continued to function democratically. A lot of people were angry about it one way or the other. But because the guardrails held, elections were continued to be held, the rule of law was held, civil discourse largely proceeded. But it's when those three guardrails start to be attacked, when they say the warning lights flash, and you say to yourself, now our democracy is in trouble.
Ceejay Hayes:
It's interesting because when I think of the tension that exists in polarization, you have a right, a conservative party, that is creating policies against transgender-affirming healthcare, that is reducing access to critical race theory, that wants to see bans on abortion care, And so within those sort of polarized tensions, there is a version that if we go in one direction of the world, there are swaths of populations that can lose access to life-affirming care, to things that make their life livable. You know, there's a certain coming together that needs to happen. But also, I wonder, how can that coming together happen when one view of the world counters the lived existence of another?
Tom Carothers:
Well, you're putting your finger on a nerve point that's really, really important, and that in a democracy, people have to feel that the range and policy choices is within a certain set of boundaries. that are kind of acceptable to all. Every democracy struggles with abortion, for example. There's just very strong disagreements over abortion. That's a life or death issue in some people's minds, so that people see it somewhat differently. And you have to say, can we as a society tolerate these two different points of view and come to a compromise on this? there has to be a sense that some consensus is possible or that a process for making the policy decision is legitimate. So like in Ohio and the election there that happened yesterday, voters had the chance to say, do we want our constitution to protect abortion rights or not? Voters felt they had a legitimate choice. It was a legitimate process. And they made that, and the other side has to live with that because it was a democratic process. So you have to resolve the core policy decisions in a way that people who lose out feel like, okay, that was a decision that was made. Not that majority always rules, but that the process was legitimate, there was real participation. and so forth, because democracies have to be able to contain very different policies. Citizens are very, very divided over these things, and there has to be, again, a certain level of tolerance of the other side, civil discourse, and a willingness to compromise that unfortunately is absent in very polarized democracies.
Ceejay Hayes:
Pro-choice legislation allows for people to opt out of having abortion and allows people to still say, hey, this is part of my values where I don't believe in that. So me and my family, we don't welcome abortion as an option in the case of an unplanned pregnancy. Banning abortion does not allow people who are pro-choice to opt in. So it takes a very sort of hard line on how people can exercise their view on a particular issue.
Alan Jagolinzer:
From my perspective as a business professor, I sense that there's a lot of people who have both legitimate power and influential power who are fundamentally grifting off of the polarization. They're either extracting money or power increases and influence increases probably both in many settings. So if we're trying to get to a situation where we want to resolve these problems and bring communities back together, I sense that they are going to try to get in the way and intervene and be very angry to intervene because we're basically taking away their livelihoods. Do you have any sense for how we can get around it when, if we need to fix the problem to try and bring communities back together, they're in the way?
Tom Carothers:
Well, I can tell you all around the democratic world, at least, people are really struggling with the idea of how do we walk backward from where we are? How do we ease this problem? How do we begin, as you say, to reduce the political entrepreneurship around these issues? I mean that in a negative sense of entrepreneurship, as you say, people grifting off of the anger and frustration for really very narrow and selfish purposes. But how can we de-escalate the political anger, de-escalate the hyperbole, de-escalate the violence, and so forth? You attack a problem from both ends. You hope at the national level there are politicians who will emerge. You see this in the Republican primary process in the United States. can the Republican Party make a choice between some candidates who say, well, if there's a certain set of values our party stands for, but we don't have to do so in a way that is so divisive and so destructive of certain institutions, well, the Republican voters are going to make a choice about that. So you can do it at the national level to do that. Unfortunately, when people get to a certain agreed state, they are apparently willing to keep going down a certain road. You can also attack it at the local level, which is happening in many places in the United States. There are a tremendous number of community dialogue efforts, efforts to bridge different groups, social groups and political groups at the local and state level. A lot of the most exciting work is being done within communities or within states, in some cases governors, who often try to govern in somewhat more central ways than national politicians. So there's some hope you create a base in society of greater communication at that level that starts to filter up. But, you know, polarization is some kind of disease, which is very hard to cure. Because think of yourself, your own experience. Once you start hating, once you get really angry, it's very hard to go back from that because you create a narrative in your mind where those people have wronged you. Those people are terrible people. I am not going to forgive them. It's very, very hard to walk back from that. OK, OK, OK. They do have a point of view. Maybe I misinterpreted that. Maybe I'm being a little too extreme. It's like letting go of a clenched muscle. And I think of the United States now as an overly clenched muscle. Our society with a lot of people who are too angry and too divisive. Letting go of those feelings turns out to be very difficult to do. I don't think it's impossible. We're doing some studies at Carnegie of experiences in different countries that have managed to walk away from polarization. A lot of countries had civil wars, but got over civil wars. And it's, of course, had one a long time ago, still having trouble getting over it. But other countries who had civil wars and gotten over them. So it's not impossible, but it's a very gradual iterative process that takes work at both the national and local level.
Alan Jagolinzer:
In the information science field, we have colleagues at Stanford and at Washington who are doing work on information and the degree to which it kind of exacerbates this problem with disinformation and misinformation. But then to my point, they're being called to testify in front of the House of Representatives, for example. Are you being challenged because you're threatening in your research or they perceive you as being threatening?
Tom Carothers:
No, our work isn't that prominent. Yeah, I've watched the process by which, you know, what you described, the challenge to these researchers. I found it very disturbing, the idea that research itself should be seen as dangerous. I mean, I feel that this is just another example of excessive polarization. The work we're doing is looking more at the comparative experience of other countries and trying to say, where are there good examples where people were able to walk back? Was it reforms of some of the institutional features of the system? that changed the political rules of the game that led to a less polarizing context? Was it instead, as I mentioned, the local level work that managed to spread up? Look at a case like Sri Lanka and its struggles with civil conflict, many efforts at the local level to overcome that. So our work isn't as visible because it hasn't directly touched on this sort of nerve issue of disinformation by certain sources in the information sphere and then the feeling that the government's making choices about who gets So because we haven't gone down that road, I think our work hasn't attracted the kind of political flock that the work you're describing has.
Ceejay Hayes:
Society became more polarized to me, in my opinion, right as we were having a national call for accountability and understanding the sort of violently racist origins of the founding of the country. So we're talking about these Black Lives Matter movements, but then also understanding the origins shifting from Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples Day and understanding that the country might actually have some pretty problematic foundings. And then also calling for white people to hold themselves accountable for understanding what racism and white privilege gets them. But I think at the same time, white people, especially since like the 1980s, when the U.S. is deindustrializing, we've seen less social mobility and less chances to actually go from a lower social class to a higher social class. White people today are feeling like, whoa, I'm not rich, I am not privileged, and I'm being told that I am the cause of this issue. That does not feel real. I wonder if you wanted to share one or two words where accountability and understanding the painful origins of the founding of the U.S. or its own issues with the democracy, like how can we maybe get over that and maybe have difficult conversations so that we can get to a more healthier foundation for interpersonal relationships and interpolitical relationships?
Tom Carothers:
You know, you're absolutely right that race in the United States, particularly the division between black Americans and white Americans, or the divisions in our society, is one of what we political scientists call founding rifts. It's something that goes back deep in American history, you know, back to slavery and the legacy of slavery. And in a way, it's an undercurrent in American society, a division that is there, that when we try to come to terms with it, and sort of advance, it provokes polarization. Think of the civil rights movement in the 1960s and think of those scenes in Alabama and elsewhere of people yelling at Black protesters and screaming at Black kids trying to go to school and majority white school and so forth. It produces a reaction because they say, accountability, people saying, hey, let's move forward. Let's recognize the vision of our society. Let's move forward to the civil rights movement. The George Floyd protests were another moment of accountability. People said, look at the system. Look how it's mistreating people. We need to do something about this. These moments of pushing for positive change produce counter-reactions and produce moments of polarization. But progress has got to push in a sense because you're not making progress if you're not challenging certain vested interests and practices. There are social critics who say, let's not think of polarization as the problem because social change always involves some people being a bit angry about the change and other people pushing for change. But I think a polarization is a deeper systemic quality of a political system rather than just the immediate social reaction to an event. But you're right, the demand for accountability, which is a moment of progress where you're trying to address a fundamental rift, is going to create counter reactions. But for that, you have to push ahead.
Ceejay Hayes:
Let's add some hope to the conversation because, you know, I think it's easy to talk about, oh, God, we are just polarized democracies. We're never going to see eye to eye. But you've written recently about bright spots throughout the world that sort of show us a way forward. So if you could talk to us about some bright spots you're seeing in terms of democracies around the world and how these shifts in these countries happened.
Tom Carothers:
I wish I had a lot more. The bright spots that we wrote about in a paper back in the spring, my colleague Benjamin Feldman and I did a paper called Understanding and Supporting Democratic Bright Spots, was about the fact that, as you say, amidst all the democratic gloom in the world, good things are happening. Sometimes in places we're not paying a lot of attention, like in Zambia, you had a ruling party that was going down a bad road democratically, and voters said, hey, we want a more democratic party, and they voted in a better party. In Guatemala recently, people voted in a new leader whose stance for anti-corruption is going to try to challenge some of the illiberal vested interests in that country. In Moldova, you have a government that is sincerely trying to reform the country and get over some of the legacy of post-Soviet politics, very corrupt and very democratically destructive. So there are dots around in the map of the world. There's 10, 20 of them at any one time. Countries where Voters, as Alan was kind of implying, voters think a bit more about the broader issue and say our country needs to move ahead and the exclusive politics, the narrow politics, the self-interested politics of the people who are leading us are not leading us down that road. Think of Brazil last year and the elections between Bolsonaro and Lula. Very angry, illiberal, right-wing figure, challenging democracy. Brazilians made a better choice. And so it's not that we say, oh, just leave it to the voters. Voters also get manipulated. Voters make angry choices. They make illiberal choices themselves. But you've got to protect the guardrails of democracy, as I mentioned, in order to allow democratic processes to continue to try to refresh themselves, holding on to the legitimacy of elections, holding on to the rule of law and fighting against efforts to corrupt that. hanging on to the idea of civil discourse and that political violence has no place in a democracy. These are the things we have to strengthen in order to allow the natural regenerative elements of democracy to exercise.
Ceejay Hayes:
My final question, how do you keep optimistic in this environment that can be quite intensely doom trodden? And what countries, what people, what organizations are doing good work on undoing polarization? And what are they doing specifically? And how can we scale that to other parts of the country and other parts of the world?
Tom Carothers:
First, I keep a certain level of state psychologically because I say, you know, this is really troubling in democracies. But let's not forget that people are frustrated and angry with their political systems in non-democracies, but they have no way of expressing it other than just erupting in protests and then getting beaten and often killed. Think of Iran, you know, exploding into national protests over citizen anger over how they're being treated by the authorities in Iran. That's a level of polarization that's much angrier, much more destructive in a way, but then repressed in just terrible ways, hundreds of people being killed. And so we've got to keep a bit of perspective here. Democracies are struggling, but a lot of non-democracies with very angry citizens and really harsh repression of Belarus, Iran, elsewhere. So first, keep a bit of perspective. Yes, democracies are struggling, but actually they're still better off than non-democracies in how they treat their citizens. And then second, the United States, it's been a long road. We did have a civil war 160 or so years ago. The country has struggled to get over it, but it has. We have not reverted to civil war. Yes, we've been through these contesting visions of America and so forth. Yes, we've had some politicians who were manipulative and destructive in some ways, but we've come through it so far. So, a bit of the longer term perspective. Groups that are doing good work, as I say, there are a lot of different kinds of groups. There are really interesting research organizations. I think of like More in Common is a terrific organization, several different countries doing work on what it is people have in common in societies and how can they cultivate that. There are a lot of local level initiatives that work both within countries and across borders, interfaith efforts. as well as interfaith politically efforts to bring people together, the Bridge Alliance in the United States, which is a huge collection of organizations that work together on these issues. There are a lot of good responses going on. A lot of funders are supporting work on polarization, the Ford Foundation, many other funders are supporting really good work to address polarization. So you have to take encouragement from comparison of other democracies, the non-democracies, the long-term view, the fact that there are a lot of responses. No simple, no miracle solution, but we can't give up hope. These are our countries. These are political systems we have. It's up to us to make them better. And it is possible.
Ceejay Hayes:
Tom Carothers, thank you so much for participating.
Tom Carothers:
My pleasure to be with you. Thanks for the discussion today.
Ceejay Hayes:
Thanks again to Tom Carothers for his insights. You can find more of his research at the website for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and his book, Democracies Divided, is available for purchase. We will hear from Tom's colleague, Jennifer McCoy, in the second episode, where we get into a conversation on how individual democracies experience polarization in a way that reveals interesting commonalities and differences. Please do join us for that. If you enjoyed this episode of CounterPol, please share it with your network and join us for future episodes. This podcast was produced and hosted by me, Ceejay Hayes. Dr. Alan Jagolinzer is my co-host, with editing by Jac Boothe from Neon Siren Studios. Thanks for listening.