Acknowledgments
Although this book was written under conditions of social distancing, I incurred many debts in writing it. I thank the following friends and colleagues for reading chapters, offering advice, and providing encouragement: Kristoffer Ahlstrom-Vij, Scott Aikin, Theano Apostolou, Donna Baker, Elizabeth Barnes, Joe Biehl, William J. Booth, Oliver Burkeman, Ann Cacoullos, Steven Cahn, Michael Calamari, Gregg Caruso, Myisha Cherry, Martin Cohen, Matthew Cotter, John Danaher, Boudewijn de Bruin, Jeroen de Ridder, Catarina Dutilh Novaes, Elizabeth Edenberg, Carrie Figdor, Elizabeth Fiss, Georgi Gardiner, Sandy Goldberg, Dwight Goodyear, Michael Hannon, Nicole Hassoun, Nicole Heller, Diana Heney, D. Micah Hester, David Hildebrand, Julie Hwang, Tziporah Kasachkoff, David Kaspar, Dan Kaufman, John Lachs, Lauren Leydon-Hardy, Katherine Loevy, Michael Lynch, Lisa Madura, Mason Marshall, Chris C. Martin, Takunda Matose, Dave McCullough, Amy McKiernan, Josh Miller, Cheryl Misak, Jonathan Neufeld, Jon Olafsson, Phil Oliver, Jeanne Palomino, John Peterman, David Reidy, Peter Reiner, Peter Simpson, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Justin Snedegar, Matthew Stanley, Patricia Talisse, Paul Taylor, Rob Tempio, Miram Thalos, Jeffrey Tlumak, Larry Torcello, Rebecca Tuvel, Sarah Tyson, Kevin Vallier, Brendan Warmke, Leif Wenar, and Julian Wuerth.
I also thank those who attended presentations of this material at Dickinson College, University of Binghamton, University of Canberra, University of Colorado Denver, University of Connecticut Law School, George Mason University, Georgetown
University, University of Iceland, Pacific University, Pepperdine University, Rhodes College, Rochester Institute of Technology, Royal Holloway University, University of St. Andrews, University of Tennessee Knoxville, Wageningen University, Frist Museum of the Arts, CUNY Academy for the Humanities and Sciences, Institute for Humane Studies, and National Humanities Center.
I am especially appreciative of the continuing support and enthusiasm of Lucy Randall, Hannah Doyle, and Gabriella Baldassin of Oxford University Press. My greatest debt is to Joanne Billett. Her love, camaraderie, humor, and good sense made this book possible.
Introduction
The Big Picture
In 2018, I delivered a public lecture about democracy. My presentation focused on how our partisan divides have spilled over into nearly all areas of our social life, often creating rifts among friends and family members. I argued that even though these local tensions might look insignificant from the perspective of national politics, they nonetheless are dangerous for democracy. My overriding message was that we must strive to keep politics in its proper place, and we can do this by staying mindful of the fact that people are not defined by their partisan affiliation. Although the talk was about democracy, it was not an expression of any particular partisan viewpoint. I was talking about democracy, not politics.
The presentation was well received. Many approached me to convey appreciation, discuss particular details of what I had said, or ask for further information about my research. One attendee, however, stuck out from the others. An older man wearing a cowboy hat waited until most of the others had walked away. He shook my hand vigorously before saying, “I want you to know I agree with everything you just said up there.” I thanked him for attending the event. He then got closer and added, “It was a surprise, you know.” Intrigued, I asked him what was surprising. He replied, “Well, before coming here I looked you up. I saw that you’re a philosophy professor, so I figured you’d be a Democrat.” Even though he pronounced the word “Democrat” with a mild sneer that indicated his meaning, he paused for a moment and clarified, “I figured I was going to have to fight you from the audience.” I honestly didn’t
know what to say, so I again thanked him for attending, adding that I was pleased to hear that he found the presentation interesting.
I look back on this interaction often. I’m not sure what the man meant by saying he expected to have to fight. Given his age, I doubt that the man was seriously anticipating a physical altercation. But who knows? I’m sure that he had, indeed, inferred from my profession that I would have more liberal political commitments than his own. His surprise came from the fact that, despite taking me to be a political opponent, he found himself agreeing with what I had to say about democracy. His assumption apparently had been that a Democrat would not be able to say anything worthwhile about democracy. In supposing that we embraced opposing partisan affiliations, he expected that our disagreement would be all-encompassing, total. What’s more, even though I doubt he would have protested from the audience had I said something that he found objectionable, he still expected our disagreements to be worth wrangling over.
It’s not clear to me what the man concluded from the fact that he found my presentation agreeable. I’d like to think he emerged from it with a renewed sense of how significant partisan divides can exist alongside an even more important consensus regarding the value of democracy itself, and why we mustn’t allow our partisanship to dissolve this common ground. I hope he drew the conclusion that he could share deep political commitments with those who affiliate with an opposing party.
But there was something in the way he lingered on his statement about my being a Democrat that leads me to a different hypothesis about what he had concluded. He was prompting me to affirm a partisan identity, to state my political affiliation. I didn’t oblige, but I also did not react negatively to the man’s implicit affirmation that he’s a Republican. I think the man may have concluded from this that I’m not a Democrat after all. I suspect he reasoned from the fact that I had spoken sensibly about democracy that we must share
a political affiliation. He took our agreement about democracy to entail a consensus about politics as such. The common ground between us served as proof that we stood in the same place.
In a way, this man embodied the problem my presentation had aimed to address. He regarded my partisan affiliation as my defining feature, not only as a citizen but as a person. He thus had allowed politics to get inside his head, to colonize his thinking about all of his social interactions. He seemed, moreover, not to be fully aware that he had adopted this stance. After all, he was ascribing a partisan identity to me while also expressing agreement with a presentation that had focused on the democratic perils of seeing people strictly through the lens of partisan affiliation. While working under the assumption that I’m a Democrat, he was expecting my message to be objectionable, something to be fought against. He said he expected to have to oppose me as I was speaking, in real time. He must have walked into the lecture hall confident that he already had a good idea of what I was going to say.
This interaction is what got me thinking about the difficulty of upholding the values and ideals of democratic citizenship while confronting political opponents. Democracy requires that citizens recognize one another as political equals, partners in the shared enterprise of self-government. Recognizing others as our fellow citizens is partly a matter of conducting ourselves in ways that manifest a due regard for their perspectives, concerns, and ideas. Citizenship thus calls us to adopt a moral stance. However, in certain cases, upholding this stance strikes us as naive and irresponsible. We typically see our opponents’ political opinions as flawed and misguided. Moreover, it often seems to us that our opposition’s commitment to democracy is itself disingenuous, at best strategic. When we uphold the norms of proper democratic citizenship that they flout, we provide them with a tactical advantage in pursuing their flawed political objectives. Why supply them with an easy route to success?
Thus, the democrat’s dilemma. That’s the term I use to capture the tension between the moral requirement to recognize the equality of political opponents and the moral directive to pursue and promote political justice. Note the lowercase d in the word “democrat.” The democrat’s dilemma does not emerge out of a partisan affiliation or political agenda. It’s not the Democrat’s dilemma. Instead, the democrat’s dilemma arises for democratic citizens as such, regardless of these other features of their politics. Note also that it’s a dilemma for democratic citizens. Although this book aims to give the democrat’s dilemma a theoretical articulation and resolution, the dilemma itself emerges in the course of a citizen’s political engagement. When confronting it, citizens are torn between two democratic edicts. They must find a way to navigate the conflict between them.
A common reaction to the democrat’s dilemma needs to be addressed straightaway. It might seem that the dilemma admits of an easy response. One might contend that democracy is for authentic citizens who uphold democratic norms in a reciprocal spirit. Thus, when we are dealing with opponents whose democratic commitments are only nominal, we should suspend our own democratic commitments, striving instead to prevail so that democracy might be preserved. Anything less is itself a kind of betrayal of democracy. Consequently, when it comes to high-stakes politics, it seems that we have sufficient reason to suspend democratic relations with our opponents, to treat them not as fellow citizens but instead as obstacles. The dilemma hence resolves in favor of justice.
This looks like a simple but decisive resolution to the democrat’s dilemma. However, there is less to it than meets the eye. The ordinary and otherwise praiseworthy activities of democratic citizenship expose us to forces that systematically distort our conception of our political opposition. These forces lead us to over-ascribe extreme views, sinister dispositions, and corrupt intentions to rivals.
Our opponents, of course, are driven by similar forces. They thus see us and our allies in a similar light.
As a result, the citizenry segregates into opposed partisan camps, with those in each camp regarding the members of the others as insufficiently invested in democracy and therefore undeserving of the kind of treatment appropriate among democratic citizens. In the end, when we adopt the simple resolution of the democrat’s dilemma, we are driven into the stance that democracy is not possible among citizens who disagree about politics. Yet that’s to say that democracy simply is not possible, full stop. The simple resolution is a surrender.
This book is about the challenge of upholding the kind of political relations appropriate among democratic citizens amid political struggles involving opponents whose views strike us as misguided, ignorant, and even repugnant. I call this the challenge of sustaining democracy. I take it that the challenge is familiar among politically active democratic citizens. Observe, however, that the challenge has at least two dimensions. The first can be captured in a question about our obligations: why should we sustain democracy with our foes? The second reflects a more practical question of what steps we can take to preserve within ourselves the necessary attitudes and dispositions: how can we sustain democracy with them? One aim of this book is to show that sustaining democracy is more challenging than it seems.
The challenge owes partly to the fact that under the political circumstances where citizens are most likely to feel the pinch of the democrat’s dilemma, they often have compelling reasons to suspend democracy rather than sustain it. I will argue that although these reasons are indeed weighty, they are not as decisive as they typically appear. Showing this will require a careful inspection of certain features of democratic citizenship. Before launching into this kind of detailed examination, though, we need to see the big picture.
1. Common Ground and Its Erosion
Let’s take the matter up from square one. Democracy’s success depends upon an active citizenry. Yet when citizens engage together in politics, they quickly discover that they disagree with one another. These disagreements tend to run deep. They can reflect opposing ideas about the nature and purposes of democracy itself. Consequently, political disagreements are persistent and often unpleasant. Yet they are to be expected. Political disagreements are the upshots of the freedom and equality that democracy secures for its citizens. In order for democracy to function well, then, citizens must work together amid their political differences. We might say that we need to partner in the shared task of democracy despite those differences.
Much of the architecture of democracy is designed to manage political divisions. Open and frequent elections, freedom of expression, accountable representatives, transparent government, and equality under the law all are institutions that make it possible for citizens to live together peacefully even though they are divided over how the political world ought to be. The fairness and transparency of these democratic mechanisms enable citizens to lose an election without thereby losing their status as equal participants in the collective endeavor of democracy.
Democracy is rooted in a hard truth: when it comes to politics, you can’t always get what you want. If society is going to be relatively just and stable, we have to live alongside others who espouse opposing viewpoints about what’s best. More than this, we have to recognize that they are our fellow citizens, each entitled to an equal say despite their flawed political views. The hope—and it is only a hope—is that when citizens’ political disputes are conducted by means of democratic processes, our equality is preserved, and politics goes better for everyone.
I suspect that this depiction of democracy will strike my reader as agreeable, perhaps even obvious. The idea that democracy
thrives when it is driven by the energetic participation of citizens embracing a broad and inclusive variety of conflicting viewpoints is popular across the political spectrum. So, too, is the claim that democracy founders when political differences are suppressed, marginalized, or disallowed. Despite our deep political divides, all sides tend to agree that democracy runs on open and honest political engagement across differences. We grant that there needs to be political exchange if democratic government is to be accountable to its citizens. Moreover, properly democratic engagement among proponents of conflicting ideas is a fundamental way in which citizens recognize one another as equal partners in democracy. This much is common ground for a democracy.1
Yet in the United States and elsewhere, citizens are growing more disposed to regard their political opponents not only as mistaken or misguided, but also as positively threatening and dangerous.2 We increasingly tend to see political ideas that oppose our own as inconsistent with the basic commitments of democracy. Even minor deviations from what we regard as politically proper are frequently amplified into wholesale violations of democracy itself. Although we hold our beliefs about our opponents—their ideas, values, and lifestyles—with intensifying confidence, we actually don’t understand them well.3 And, as one might expect, we misunderstand our opponents in ways that exaggerate their flaws. We over-ascribe to them extreme views, intolerant attitudes, crooked dispositions, inept thinking habits, and malevolent intentions.
That’s bad news for democracy. Productive political interaction across differences calls for citizens to recognize one another as fellow democratic participants, rather than as threats to democracy as such. This means that citizens need to be able to recognize a field of good-faith political disagreement, a range of views that oppose their own but are nonetheless consistent with democracy’s fundamental principles. Moreover, citizens must be able to recognize that at least some of their opponents hold political views of that kind: wrong, yet not antidemocratic; misguided, but consistent
with democratic values. And, of course, citizens need to be able to treat those whom they take to be in the wrong as their fellow citizens. Amid political division, citizens must uphold the democratic common ground. Otherwise, democracy is jeopardized.
Here’s some more bad news: the troubling attitudes mentioned a moment ago thrive among citizens who regard themselves as politically active. In fact, these attitudes are stimulated by political engagement.4 The more politically active we are, the more prone we become to seeing our opponents as threats to be neutralized rather than as fellow citizens to be cooperated with. Still, democracy flourishes only when citizens are active participants. Thus, a puzzle: a politically active citizenry is necessary for democracy’s success and yet can subvert it. Engaged citizenship makes democracy work but also can erode the common ground that makes democracy possible. When politics gets inside our heads, we can grow less capable of democratic citizenship. The democrat’s dilemma is an occupational hazard, so to speak. It’s baked into our job as citizens.
2. Is Democracy Self-Defeating?
Democracy can be imperiled by our earnest acts of citizenship. Really? The thought may strike you as absurd. This is because we tend to think that democracy’s troubles almost always stem from a failure on the part of citizens to live up to democracy’s demands. For example, many say that political corruption is possible because citizens don’t pay enough attention to what elected officials do. We also commonly attribute bad electoral outcomes to citizens’ ignorance, selfishness, or shortsightedness. “Special interests” rush in where citizens can’t be bothered to tread. When citizens fall short, democracy suffers.
Yes, a good deal of what goes wrong in democratic politics owes to failures of proper citizenship. Democratic citizens indeed
must take responsibility for their politics. However, it is common to infer from this that all of democracy’s dysfunctions owe to citizens’ falling down on the job. Many conclude that every one of democracy’s problems is best addressed by enhanced citizen participation. Two of the greatest democratic thinkers of the twentieth century, Jane Addams and John Dewey, put it well: the cure for democracy’s ills is always more democracy. Here more means better and more authentic. Accordingly, the thought at the heart of this book, that democratic participation itself could give rise to a distinctive kind of political pathology, seems confused.
But it’s not at all confused. Instead, the Addams/Dewey slogan is wrong. Democracy can break down even when every citizen is an active, sincere, and conscientious participant. There are unique dysfunctions that befall democracy because citizens are authentically engaged in politics. Democracy can be endangered from within by citizens who are taking the enterprise of self-government seriously and acting roughly, as they should. In a nutshell, some of democracy’s ills are caused by citizens’ sincere and earnest political activity. More democratic participation can’t cure those ills.
It might seem obvious that more participation makes for better democratic politics. Yet I will argue that earnest democratic participation exposes citizens to forces that can subvert their capacity to recognize the political equality of their opponents. The dissolution of this capacity leads to a breakdown of democracy itself. There’s something of a paradox afoot. One might say that democratic citizenship could be self-defeating.
The possibility that democratic citizenship is self-defeating has been underappreciated among democratic theorists. Consequently, the opening two chapters aim to formulate the problem precisely. As I see it, the difficulty emerges from the conflict between two moral requirements of democratic citizenship: the requirement to pursue justice and the requirement to acknowledge the political equality of one’s fellow citizens. When caught in the democrat’s dilemma, the citizen looks for reasons to uphold her commitment
to regarding her foes as her equals. She seeks a reason to sustain democracy.
We can grasp the democrat’s dilemma more clearly by considering a conceptual point that will be emphasized in Chapter 1. Democracy is an ideal of political equality, a vision of politics as self-government among equals. In this sense, democracy is centrally a moral proposal and aspiration. As is commonly observed, in a democracy the government must treat its people as political equals, as properly citizens rather than merely its subjects. It is somewhat less frequently noted, however, that this requirement applies among citizens as well. As democratic citizens, we are required to recognize our fellow citizens as our political equals. They’re to be regarded as equal partners in the collective project of self-government. Among other things, their equality means that they do not merely get an equal say in political decision-making, but are entitled to one. Democracy demands that we acknowledge that entitlement.
Now here’s the rub. It’s easy to regard our political allies as our equals. But this requirement applies also to those citizens whom we count as our political adversaries. They are our political equals, too. We are required to treat them as such, even though we may also despise their views and perhaps consider them to be advocates of injustice. What’s more, when they prevail politically, we must acknowledge that legitimate government is required to enact their will, despite the fact that we see their views as inconsistent with justice. And even when they fail at the polls, we must regard it as legitimate for them to continue to campaign, critique, protest, and lobby on behalf of a political agenda that we may regard as unconscionable, even unjust. In short, recognizing the political equality of our fellow citizens calls us not only to sometimes assess it as legitimate for our government to implement what we see as injustice, but also to regard it as right for government to protect the voices and political efforts of those who advocate for policies that we regard as unjust.
This formulation is too rough. As it stands, it lacks crucial details. For one thing, there are limits to what democratic citizens must respect and tolerate, just as there are limits to what democratic government can enact. There are also limits to what citizens may do in protesting policies they find objectionable. Furthermore, democracy never requires us to simply acquiesce in or accede to the views of our opposition; recognizing their equality is consistent with abhorring their political views. More generally, though, the requirement as stated does not adequately spell out what it means to regard our fellow citizens as our equals. What kind of political conduct is required of us, given that we must recognize the political equality of our fellow citizens?
These nuances will be introduced in Chapter 2. For now, be assured that even once the necessary distinctions are included, regarding our political opponents as our equals will still be a challenge. Democracy asks a lot.
Note that this demand is moral. Democracy says that we owe to our fellow citizens a certain kind of regard, and a corresponding manner of conduct, even when we see their political views as severely misguided and possibly unjust. As indicated earlier, part of recognizing our opponents’ political equality involves acknowledging their entitlement to an equal share of political power. Hence democracy requires us to embrace a political order that, within certain broad constraints, gives equal power to truth and error, justice and injustice.
In other contexts, we say that the prescribed arrangement demands moral complicity . In a democracy, however, even though citizens are called upon to take responsibility for their government by standing up for justice as they see it, they must also recognize the political equality of those who would enact injustice. Such is the oddly conflicted moral stance that constitutes a central virtue of the democratic citizen. We might say that democracy not only is demanding, but also foists upon citizens a moral burden . This burden lies at the heart of the
democrat’s dilemma. It’s what makes sustaining democracy such a challenge.
I recognize that this depiction remains too blunt. The account will be sharpened in the chapters to come. Thus far, my point simply has been that, even at its best, democracy is not easy. Its difficulty owes partly to the moral burden of recognizing the equality of our political opponents, even when we assess them as advocating injustice.
That democracy is difficult in this way is old news. Recall, however, that this book is addressed to a problem having to do with self-defeat. To repeat, my claim is that authentic democratic participation can imperil democracy by eroding our capacity to regard our opponents in the required way. To get a better sense of how this might be so, we will need to examine the cognitive phenomenon known as belief polarization. This is the focus of Chapter 3.
Belief polarization is uncommonly robust. It drives members of like-minded groups to shift into more extreme versions of themselves. When belief is polarized, group members become more fervent and more confident advocates of the group’s identity and ideas. They also become more dismissive of opposing views, as well as more disposed to demean and distrust those who hold them. In severe cases, belief polarization leads us to regard those outside of our group as irrational, inscrutable, depraved, and threatening. Belief polarization thus undermines our ability to regard our political opponents as our equals.
Yet that’s not all. Belief polarization also negatively impacts our relations with our allies. As like-minded groups undergo belief polarization, their members not only become more extreme, but also become more alike to one another. This is because belief polarization intensifies pressures to conform to group expectations. As a group polarizes, its members also come to adopt more exacting standards of authentic group membership. Consequently, strategies for detecting poseurs and fakers multiply. Minor deviations from group norms are magnified into signals of sweeping betrayal, while
doctrinal purity is valorized. Moreover, as belief-polarized groups become more invested in conformity among their membership, they also become less tolerant of deviation, less self-critical, and increasingly hierarchical. In short, belief polarization leads likeminded groups to expel members and thus to shrink. This naturally serves to undercut the democratic efficacy of our political coalitions.
Now for the crucial point. As was mentioned earlier, otherwise laudable forms of democratic engagement heighten our exposure to belief polarization. Hence the problem of self-defeat: earnest democratic participation can lead us to fail at responsible democratic citizenship. It can make us worse citizens and less effective political agents, which in turn leads us to become unwitting contributors to broader political dysfunctions. Sustaining democracy may be even harder than we normally recognize.
Be assured that this is not an antidemocracy book. The upshot is not that democracy requires so much of us that it should be replaced with some alternative arrangement. The lesson instead is that one of democracy’s underappreciated strengths is that it calls upon citizens to scrutinize their own political thinking. Democracy requires us specifically to reflect on our vulnerabilities as citizens—to recognize our (and our allies’) susceptibility to belief polarization and to take steps to try to mitigate it.
More generally, the positive message of this book is that democracy requires maintenance. In one sense, that’s old news, too. It is commonplace to acknowledge that democratic institutions need regular assessment, revision, expansion, and reform. According to many well-developed theories, democracy simply is the ongoing project of revitalizing democracy’s institutions and practices.
But I will propose that democracy also calls for a different sort of maintenance. Democracy requires us to manage belief polarization, the force within ourselves that is activated by earnest political engagement and that dismantles our ability to behave as citizens should. Given this, we must work hard to preserve within
ourselves the attitudes and dispositions that are proper for democratic citizens. In short, sustaining democracy is not only a matter of upholding proper civic relations with our political opponents; it also involves inward-looking self-regulation, and thus self-critique.
Although this is a philosophy book about democratic citizenship, it also is a book for democratic citizens. It articulates a view of how we should conduct ourselves politically, especially when we are dealing with political foes. But it does this with eyes wide open. For one thing, the argument recognizes that political conflict is endemic to democracy. I will not be arguing that proper citizenship demands that we learn to love our political opponents or set aside our political rivalries. Rather, I will argue that we should sustain democracy, even when the stakes are high. Even in the pinch, so to speak.
In my view, the democrat’s dilemma is well-motivated. We often have good reason to suspend our commitment to the political equality of our opponents. There are cases where treating our foes as our equals reduces the chance of achieving our political aims. Insofar as we see our aims as just and those of our opposition as unjust, it is reasonable to raise the question of why we should sustain democracy. Why not simply forget about the standard of regard and conduct that democracy requires of us, and fight for what’s right? Why should we strive to uphold democratic relations with our opposition, given the moral stakes and their apparent cravenness?
In other words, this book treats sustaining democracy as more than a difficult practical assignment. It recognizes that the democrat’s dilemma is a moral problem that emerges out of the endeavor to take democratic citizenship seriously. My contention is that although there are indeed instances in which the political stakes are such that we have compelling moral reasons to suspend our democratic commitments for the sake of achieving our ends, these reasons are very rarely conclusive. In fact, I will argue that the phenomenon of belief polarization leads us to overestimate
the weight of the reasons we have to suspend our democratic commitments. More positively, my view is that insofar as we care about achieving justice, we generally ought to sustain democracy, even when the moral stakes are high.
However, as I have already suggested, the argument does not rest solely upon an account of what we owe to our political foes. To be clear, we ordinarily do owe them the kind of regard that is appropriate among equals. Yet, again, this is not a “love your enemies” book. I will argue that we also owe it to our political allies to treat our political opponents as our equals. This is because, due to belief polarization, when we decline to sustain democracy in the case of our foes, we also damage our ability to regard our allies as our equals. This in turn often undermines our political objectives. In other words, when we decline to sustain democracy with our adversaries, we imperil our political alliances and disserve our political ends. The result is that we should sustain democracy, even when the chips are down.
By the close of Chapter 3, we will have seen that belief polarization both supplies an account of a central mechanism driving the democrat’s dilemma and points us in the direction of distinctive reasons for sustaining democracy. The argument for why we should sustain democracy with our political opponents thus will be complete at that point. However, sustaining our capacity to regard our opponents as our equals remains a tall order. Are we up to the task?
Chapter 4 takes up the question of how we can sustain democracy. There, I will explore some strategies for productive political engagement across sharp partisan divides. I will argue that although these may be helpful as far as they go, they are ultimately insufficient. The defect with these strategies is that they’re too tightly focused on face-to-face engagement organized around pro-andcon discussion of the policies over which political foes are divided. Interaction of this kind might be suitable for political exchange among citizens who are not yet in the grip of belief polarization. But in the case of polarized citizens, this format can exacerbate
