In The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway famously observed that a character went broke in two ways: gradually, then suddenly. The same dynamic has been at work in American politics. For decades, the composition of our principal political parties has been slowly shifting, without a great deal of public attention. And then the 2024 presidential election happened, and it was suddenly obvious: the Democrats, traditionally the party of the working class, had become the party of educated elites.
Matt Grossmann has been a keen observer of this transition. A professor of political science at Michigan State University, Grossmann also directs the Institute for Public Policy and Social Research and hosts the “Science of Politics” podcast for the Niskanen Center. With his co-author David A. Hopkins, Grossmann recently published Polarized by Degrees: How the Diploma Divide and the Culture War Transformed American Politics, a book that documents a remarkable shift in American society. Since 1960, we have seen a massive expansion in the number of adult Americans earning college degrees—from roughly 7 percent of the population to nearly 40 percent.
At the same time, policy has moved to the left on a number of hot-button issues, including gay rights, drug legalization, and criminal justice reform. For many Americans, these are long overdue developments – and indications that the long arc of history bends toward justice. But, of course, not everyone thinks these are signs of progress. Indeed, many Americans believe the exact opposite – that they augur a dystopian future and that every effort must be made to change course. According to Grossmann, “These transformations have polarized the nation’s political climate and ignited a perpetual culture war.”
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Grossmann spoke with Greg Berman, the distinguished fellow of practice at The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, about the current state of American politics, the potential for political violence, and strategies to reduce polarization.
This transcript has been edited for both length and clarity.
Walk me through the argument of your most recent book. Why is education, rather than race, class, geography, or ideology, the central dividing line in American life?
Well, all those dividing lines are important. The book isn’t a comparison of whether voting gaps between Black and White people are larger or smaller than between higher education and lower education voters. The argument is more that educational polarization is a big recent change that's occurring in the US and across the rich world. And this change has been associated with a significant change in our politics, which are increasingly focused on social and cultural issues rather than economic issues.
Does anything make you think that the trendline is going to reverse itself, or should we expect American educational and cultural polarization to continue to grow?
Right now, there's a lot to suggest that the process will be self-reinforcing in the days to come. That doesn't mean that we won't see changes, however. For example, it is clear that the Biden administration produced a backlash that moved social attitudes in a culturally conservative direction on several issues, including those related to race and immigration. So you can have these long-term trends in progress, but still things can go up or down during any given political cycle.
But I haven't seen anything yet that I think would break the long-term trend. And there are at least two things that would tend to perpetuate it. One is that the educational divide had previously been concentrated among white voters, but now it seems to be extending to minority voters. And second, the educational divide seems to be self-reinforcing with geography—educated places are moving in a culturally liberal direction even faster than educated people are. And the opposite is true of less educated places. So all of that would tend to keep the trend going.
Polarized by Degrees was published before Donald Trump's victory in the 2024 election. Has anything that has happened since the book came out caused you to rethink your priors?
The election itself didn't have a huge effect on my view of the trends. I believe that this is the third election in a row where the polls have overestimated Black movement toward Republicans, but underestimated Hispanic movement toward Republicans. So that's sort of an interesting quirk that we still don't quite understand. But in general, the things that have transpired since the election have been pretty consistent with our book. I do think that the idea that Republicans were turning against big business has been reshaped by the Elon Musk relationship and the rise of the tech right. That is not something that was anticipated by our book. Similarly, I don't think our book anticipated the quick action that Republicans would take in terms of going after the professional class of bureaucrats and universities.
Do you think that Trump's victory means that I should rethink my priors—that the public has essentially rejected incrementalism in favor of something more disruptive?
I certainly don't think, when given the choice of incrementalism versus disruption, that the public is always going to side with incrementalism. I think it's more the case that when the party in power moves policy quickly in a given ideological direction, then there is a backlash in the opposite direction. Generally speaking, the public is in the middle of the two political parties. But I don't think it necessarily means that the public is consciously saying, “We want things to move incrementally rather than through quick action.” Sometimes they are in favor of quick action.
We have extreme status quo bias in our political institutions. It's especially large when you are trying to reduce the size and scope of government through congressional action. And so that's why you have the conservative movement saying, “Well, let's try to do it all at once through the executive branch and see if that works.” I'm skeptical that executive actions will achieve those ends, but I think this strategy is born of a basic understanding that working through Congress almost always entails incrementalism.
I am drawn to the idea that, notwithstanding our political debates, which seem to gravitate toward extremes right now, most American voters are still in the muddled middle, broadly defined. Do you think that's an accurate depiction of the American electorate?
On almost any measure, if you ask the public a bunch of policy questions, they would fall in between Democratic and Republican elites. That is, if you give people five policy choices in a spectrum, they tend to choose the ones in the middle. But the big thing that has changed is that people tend to have more positions that are consistently on the left or the right. In other words, there aren't as many people who are culturally liberal but economically conservative, or the reverse, as there have been in the past. And so that can look like everybody's lining up on the two sides.
You've argued that our current era of polarization and nationalized politics favors the Republicans more than the Democrats. Why is that?
The last time we had a long-term, majority party in the United States was the Democrats. It was a strange majority party. It included segregationists in the South and African-Americans in the North. Republicans understood that they did not have the advantage in partisanship, but they did have the advantage in ideological identification—there were more people who identified as conservatives than liberals. So they sought to remake the party system along more ideological lines. In doing so, they had allies among many liberals who believed that their ideas were being blocked by a conservative coalition in Congress.
Today, we have parties that are much more internally cohesive in terms of ideology. I don't think it's inherently true that this dynamic will always favor the right or the left. I just think we moved from a system where the Democratic party was a coalition that wasn't very ideologically defined. That was why it was able to be a majority party. We don't have that anymore.
Do you have a prescription for what ails the Democratic party? I realize you aren’t a Democratic strategist, but what would you do if you were in charge of the party?
Well, first of all, I think the challenge is always overestimated in the wake of losing a presidential election. The average shift away from the party that won the presidential election in the following midterm is five points. And so, absent any other information, you would expect that Democrats would regain the majority in the House and have a substantial gain in the popular vote in two years. Further, the more that the party in power moves policy, the bigger the backlash you would expect. If your goal is to build Democratic majorities, it doesn't feel great at the moment because you're losing a bunch of policy battles, and it looks like Trump is doing a lot. But all of this suggests that the public will move in the Democrats’ direction before too long.
In general, everything people are saying right now about moderation in elections is true: moderate candidates do better than extreme candidates. Candidates who can successfully distinguish themselves from the national Democratic Party's liberal orientation do better. That kind of thing is necessary for Democrats to win elections. But the effect size is small compared to the likely shift from Republicans to Democrats just on the basis of there being a Republican president.
You've characterized our current moment as being defined by hyperbolic political conflict, combined with very minimal policymaking achievements. I think that combination has driven a lot of frustration with our political system. But many would argue that this is actually a case of the system functioning the way it should. Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats have been able to cobble together a sizable majority. In that environment, our government is set up to essentially stymie big policy change.
Well, our system was certainly designed to have a large status quo bias, and it is achieving that. But of course, that comes with problems. Republicans aren't making it up when they say that we don’t do a very good job of looking at the programs that we have already implemented to see if they are actually achieving good results. And Democrats are right that we tend to produce systems that are built on top of previous systems, which may not function at all well. And that means that our healthcare system or our education system don't necessarily achieve their goals. So I think the system is achieving status quo bias, but it is not necessarily achieving our broader policy aims.
Many of my friends are concerned that the Trump administration is going to reshape society over the next four years, but I am pretty skeptical that political actors can change the culture. I'm curious to hear what you think about that.
In general, I would say that the specific policy aims of liberals are popular, but the broader ideological goal of liberalism is unpopular. So people can simultaneously say, “Yes, we should extend rights to this particular population which is facing this particular problem,” and also say, “Things are changing too fast.” People can maintain a conservative predisposition about cultural change even while, over time, they continue to accept more and more cultural change.
The second thing I would say is that a lot of times, policy is really an exercise in codifying a social change that has already been achieved. Take gay marriage, for example. What moved opinions slowly over time appears to have been things like more gay characters on television and movies, and more people coming out in real life. It's not like campaigns for gay marriage successfully convinced people. In fact, when it became a political issue, that's the only time that we moved backward in public support of gay marriage.
How do you think about the relationship between polarization and political violence? How worried are you that our heightened state of partisanship could lead to violence?
Comparative research suggests that polarization is one factor that drives political violence. It has also certainly played a role in leading to some things that are intermediary factors in political violence, like political officials who contest election results. But of course, there are tons of other factors, and you wouldn't want to just draw two lines going up and say there's a relationship.
How much do you blame social media for where we're at?
Certainly, the media environment is a big factor. There's evidence that the rise of faster internet access and the rise of mobile cell phones are associated with polarization. It’s part of a broader pattern. The rise of cable television was also associated with more polarization. One of the things that I think people underestimate is the divide between people who care about politics and people who do not. Part of what our increasingly individualized media environment is doing is allowing a lot of people to tune out politics completely until they absolutely have to. I think that’s what is happening more than they're getting fed a bunch of misinformation that's pushing them to one side or the other.
The institutions that I care about the most—our media organizations, universities, and nonprofits— tend to be controlled by elite actors who are more liberal than the general public. I think in recent years, many of those institutions have been drivers of polarization. Do you accept that many nonprofits, many media outlets, and many universities have helped fuel polarization? And how can we change that?
I agree with all of that, but I would add two caveats. Caveat number one is that I don't think people in these institutions thought that was what they were doing. They thought they were standing up for fundamental values that were under attack. It's also true that social and cultural issues have become more important in our political debate in recent years. Educated people in these institutions have always had more liberal views on these issues. It just wasn't always the case that these issues were the focus of our political debates. Now they are.
The other caveat is that when it comes to the erosion of public trust, a lot of that has been driven by conservatives actively turning against these institutions and attacking them. Without that, you
would still have a decline in public trust, but nowhere near the level that you had once people actively started saying these institutions are liberally biased, they are intervening in the culture wars, and they're actively harmful. So those are just the two caveats that I would add.
In terms of how we get out of it, I guess I would say that we sometimes underestimate our capacity to build bridges with those who are skeptical of institutions. I work at a state university that runs a bipartisan training program for newly elected state legislators in Michigan. I have done this orientation for a while now, and I have certainly seen rising skepticism among Republican legislators. But that does not mean that they don't think that they have something to learn from the university. There are plenty of assets that universities and nonprofits have that are of value to people on both sides of the aisle. You just have to be a little strategic about highlighting those things that can be most helpful. And you also have to go into the relationship knowing that you're going to be perceived as liberal and out of touch. But you can still have a useful relationship once you acknowledge that basic starting point.
Are there other things we should be doing to try to advance depolarization?
We need to have institutions and programs that are designed to reveal things like the fact that we aren't actually as far apart as we're portrayed to be, that the two sides aren't as socially distinct as people believe them to be, and that we share lots of values in addition to the ones that we disagree on.
There are a bunch of things that we know work with the public in terms of reducing polarization. When people spend time together, they are less inclined to see each other as the enemy. And when people feel that their opponents at least understand where they're coming from, they're less likely to be hostile to the political system as a whole. I don't know if these things are scalable, especially when you compare them to a national presidential political campaign, which is going to polarize people, but they at least move things in the right direction
I actually think that there hasn’t been enough effort to put these kinds of ideas to work with elite audiences. On the one hand, you would expect these kinds of interventions to work less well with elite audiences because they are more polarized than the general public. On the other hand, you might expect them to work better because elites often know that they can get along with people on the other side. So we are about to launch an exchange program that will send Republican and Democratic state legislators to one another's districts to learn about a policy issue. That’s the kind of thing I’m working on.
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This article originally appeared on HFG.org and has been republished with permission.
Greg Berman is a distinguished fellow of practice at The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, co-editor of Vital City, and co-author of "Gradual: The Case for Incremental Change in a Radical Age." This is part of a series of interviews titled "The Polarization Project."
