Take back the public square: Why silence won’t slow polarization 

Are you among the silent majority? I once was. With polarization plaguing public discourse, I saw no point in engaging. But then I began to wonder if my silence was part of the problem.  

Polarization is ripping through the country. With increasing frequency, we fear, loathe and dehumanize those with different views. We view political adversaries not as fellow human beings warranting respect and engagement but as enemies warranting ridicule and defeat. The problem is not just that we are unkind to one another but that our fear could threaten the very foundation of our country.   

How did we get here? While forces such as loneliness, technology, geographic sorting and our primary systems have all played a role, studies point to one more cause: A loud minority distorting our perceptions of one another. A small fraction of Americans, for example, produces nearly all the country’s political posts on social media. And the views they espouse are shared by few.

The wings of the political spectrum — what one study calls “faith and flag conservatives” and “progressive activists” — together make up less than a fifth of the country. Yet, with their voices magnified by media incentives that reward nastiness, the tribes of the loud minority dominate public discourse, pitching a narrative that divides us. 

If such a small number of people are making discourse so toxic, why are the rest of us letting it happen? One reason may be futility. For many, fights without hope of resolution hold no appeal. Another reason is the spiral of silence, political scientist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann’s term for what happens when we avoid expressing views for fear of public response. The tribes of the loud minority police allegiance with threats of shame or worse. Veer off message, and they will come for you, especially after moderate voices expressing even a hint of empathy for the enemy tribe. We reward their attacks with our silence, which then incentivizes more attacks, and so on. 

But by vacating the public square to the tribes of the loud minority, we have let them define our politics. Their outsized volume creates the illusion that their views are widespread. When they depict our adversaries as enemies, we believe them. There’s no one to say otherwise. 

This has created what some call the perception gap: the gap between what we believe about our adversaries and how they really are. Heaps of data illustrate it. A survey by Beyond Conflict, for example, posed a 100-point scale for positions on immigration and gun control. For immigration, 1 meant completely open borders and 100 meant completely closed. For gun control, 1 was outlawing guns and 100 was no gun restrictions at all. The results showed that Democrats and Republicans overlap more than they realize, while vastly overestimating the extremity of the other party’s positions. When guessing the other side’s average ratings on the scales, Republicans missed by an average of 25 and Democrats missed by 19.     

It’s not just positions we have wrong, but how our adversaries feel about us. In a survey by Polarization Research Lab, Democrats and Republicans said they thought more than half of the opposing party would support physically assaulting a member of their party. In reality, just 4 percent of Democrats and 3 percent of Republicans would approve. Similar results come from surveys on humanization, showing that Democrats and Republicans are not as dehumanized by their adversaries as they think. 

Groups fighting polarization see hope in this data. More Like Us, for example, is an organization whose mission is to narrow the perception gap by educating the public that we are more similar than we perceive. To More Like Us, if polarization rests on misperceptions, depolarization requires correcting those misperceptions. 

What does this mean for the silent majority? Though a loud minority spreads polarization with false stereotypes, we are complicit by failing to correct them. We can slow polarization’s spread not with silence, but by reclaiming the public square as a place to seek truth and understanding. When others want a fight, we don’t have to give it to them. We can engage not with fear and loathing, but with respect and empathy. Not with animosity, but with curiosity. Not to prove we are right but to discover we are wrong, as it is only then that we learn.  

The forces driving polarization will not be easy to surmount. In our national crisis of loneliness, many find solace in the illusion of connection that tribalism and technology provide. Mocking other tribes can boost our sense of belonging to our own. For some, this balm may be too soothing to quit. For the rest of us, there is still hope. The more we engage, the more we will see that the bad guys are not so bad. They are more like us.  

Simon Davidson was the longtime author of the Roll Call column “A Question of Ethics” and now works as an in-house attorney.