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 the seventh in a series of interviews titled "The Polarization Project."

Is polarization in the United States laying the groundwork for political violence? That is not a simple question to answer.

Affective polarization — the tendency of partisans to hate those who hold opposing political views — does seem to be growing in the United States. But as a recent report from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace makes clear, “many European countries show affective polarization at about the same level as that of the United States, but their democracies are not suffering as much, suggesting that something about the US political system, media, campaigns, or social fabric is allowing Americans’ level of emotional polarization to be particularly harmful to US democracy.”

Suzette Brooks Masters is someone whose job it is to think about threats to American democracy. The leader of the Better Futures Project at the Democracy Funders Network, Masters recently spent months studying innovations in resilient democracy from around the world. The resulting report, “Imagining Better Futures for American Democracy,” argues that one way to help protect American democracy from “authoritarian disruption” is to engage in a process of “reimagining our governance model for the future.”

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