Rachel Kleinfeld: What we’re seeing is women and minorities are both being targeted the most. They’re just getting intense levels of incoming, and more of them are thinking about leaving office. You see numbers at the 50 percent level for election officials who are female or who are minority thinking about leaving. A small percentage of these officials kind of double down. They think, you know, I’m going to stay here come hell or high water and fight the good fight. But even they—eventually some of the best ones do leave because it takes a toll.

Alex Lovit: Welcome to The Context, a podcast about the past, present, and future of democracy from the Charles F. Kettering Foundation. I’m your host, Alex Lovit. My guest today is Rachel Kleinfeld. Kleinfeld is a Senior Fellow in the Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She also serves on the Boards of the National Endowment for Democracy, Freedom House, and the States United Democracy Center.

She’s written three books and contributes regularly to major media outlets. She’s an expert on how democracies can improve, particularly in countries facing polarization, violence, and corruption. If you’re lucky enough not to think a lot about political violence, Rachel Kleinfeld might not be a household name. But for anybody who does study these issues, she’s one of the most frequently cited scholars in the field. I’m happy to have her join us today because promoting government accountability and countering authoritarianism are central parts of the Kettering Foundation’s mission. We can’t have accountable democratic government without understanding and addressing the problems that Kleinfeld studies—violence, corruption, and dysfunction.

Americans are pretty anxious about violence right now. One poll from “Deseret News” and HarrisX in August found that 77 percent of Americans are either very or somewhat concerned about political violence during the current election season. But that doesn’t mean that we all have an accurate understanding of what it looks like or its causes. We can’t deal with a problem unless we understand it. So if you’re among that three quarters of Americans who are worried about political violence, it’s important to listen to experts like Kleinfeld.

What I take away from this conversation is that Americans do have a reason to be concerned. But if you’re waiting for civil war to break out, you’re missing the real damage already occurring to American democracy. It’s the local election officials quitting their jobs because their families are receiving threats. It’s the increase in hate crimes, which intimidates some Americans from fully exercising their citizenship rights. It’s the ways that universities, media, and nonprofit organizations are starting to second guess their speech and activities because they fear attacks from violent extremists or from partisan government regulators.

This episode is being released on September 10th, one day shy of the 23rd anniversary of the largest terrorist attack in American history. But the greatest terrorist threat that the United States faces right now isn’t from foreign actors. It’s from ourselves. And for every dramatic violent event on the TV news, there are a thousand acts of intimidation that mostly go unnoticed.

Democracy can endure a few bad actors—extremists willing to use violence and threats to achieve their goals or political leaders acting in bad faith and spreading disinformation. The bad news is that damage has been accumulating to America’s democratic traditions of pluralism, tolerance, and forbearance. These are complex problems, and they won’t be easy to solve.

But the good news is that the vast majority of Americans of all ideologies and party allegiances abhor political violence, and we can address the problems confronting us. We can carefully consider how to preserve free speech without permitting threats. We can reject political leaders and reform political structures that encourage extremism. And Rachel Kleinfeld can help tell us how.

Alex Lovit: Rachel Kleinfeld, welcome to The Context.

Rachel Kleinfeld: So glad to be here.

Alex Lovit: You study political violence and failures of democracy, and you’re really a leading expert on those subjects. You’re much in demand, which isn’t good news for American politics right now, but it’s a privilege to have you on the show. And I wanted to ask you first of all just how you came to study that stuff. I kind of know the second half of the story about how you were studying these topics internationally and then started seeing some of the warning signs in the U.S., and that’s a sobering and important part of the story. But I don’t really know the first part. How did you get from growing up in Alaska to getting interested in these topics?

Rachel Kleinfeld: Well, no one ever asked me that kind of question. I was a young person when the Soviet Union was falling apart. And my brother ended up going to St. Petersburg in 1992 and refusing to come back and go to college. And I was pulled out of high school and told, “Find your brother in this collapsing country and make him go to college.” At that point, there was really no good phone service. There was no functioning mail service. And so I sent a note ahead with someone that I was coming and showed up and hoped my brother would be at the airport. And luckily, he was.

We discussed going to college, and I fell in love with being in a country that was really having a rough time. We were working right above the biggest Mafia casino in St. Petersburg, seeing a lot of the growth of organized crime. And it really sparked an interest in me in what makes countries structurally sound and democratic and what makes them not. Then I went on to work after college in India where I was working on international development and microcredit, stuff that was kind of trendy back then.

I saw again, working in small villages in India, how violence affected people’s life chances, how landowners were using really pretty horrific violence. And I won’t bother explaining it to your listeners here, but shocking stuff for a young woman of 22-23 on villagers to get them to have monopoly power in these small villages and cut out economic opportunity. And I thought, gosh, a lot of people study democracy. A lot of people study development. Not a whole lot of people study how violence affects those things, and it really does, and somebody had better do that. And that ended up being me.

Alex Lovit: And then you talk about how you came to turn that expertise towards the United States?

Rachel Kleinfeld: Sure. So I got my Ph.D. over at Oxford, and I was working on more national security-style issues—war and peace, the kinds of things international relations experts work in. And it became really apparent in that year—that was the early 2000s—that most violence wasn’t happening in war-torn countries, but there was still a lot of violence going on. And it brought me back to my early days and seeing actually there’s a lot of violence within democracies. And some of the most violent countries in the world were democratic. They weren’t at war, but people were living as if they were in war zones.

You might remember in the early ‘90s, we talked about parts of America as war zones. I remember that language being applied to parts of Boston, for instance, when I was growing up. And they were right—the numbers upheld that belief set. And so when I started seeing the trends overseas that lead to higher levels of political violence in particular coming to the U.S., I wasn’t alone. Many of us who worked in the international space saw those same trends and said, boy, this is looking way too much like Kenya in 2007, or other countries where there was an explosion of political violence. We’d better do something to alert folks about this.

Alex Lovit: As we’ve established here, you really are an expert in political violence. And this is something that a lot of folks have been concerned about in the United States recently. It’s something that you have concerns about as well. And often, when people start talking about violence in a political context in the United States, civil war comes up. It’s obviously something we have historical experience with in this country. But you’ve said that you do not expect a civil war in the near future. Why not?

Rachel Kleinfeld: First of all, when most people think of civil war, they think of armies amassing, massive violence like what you saw in our civil war or in Syria in the early 2010s and 2015. I don’t think we are headed for that. And that’s because civil war is highly mediated by the state. And what I mean to de-academize that is you get civil wars when a group of people think that they can overtake the state and get something from it.

And when you have really strong states, they’re very rare. It’s hard for a small group of people to think that they’re going to take down the United States government. Sometimes, you get civil wars that come from inside a military. But our military is highly, highly professional. It’s one of the most professional militaries in the world. So that kind of civil war is unlikely. The other thing that makes civil wars very likely is when governments are highly corrupt. They’ve lost the trust of their people, and especially when they’re corrupt and brutal and look weak.

Now we have problems with police brutality in this country, clearly. But that consortium of things that lets a small group of people think they can take on the government, think they can win and get the people behind them in the way we see in a country like Syria just isn’t present in the United States. We’re too strong of a country. We have too professional a military. And the government still has a lot of legitimacy among people.

Now I think it is possible that we could see the kind of militia organizing that we did see in this country in the ‘90s where people who really were disgruntled with the Federal government in particular looked for soft targets, places like the Oklahoma City Federal Building that they could attack, looked at Federal agents as people worth attacking. And you know, that was low scale. It wasn’t going to take down the United States government. But it was really not a pleasant period for political violence in our country. And I can imagine something like that recurring. But it wouldn’t be a kind of force-on-force civil war.

If you really thought through what that would look like, we’re not near it yet. That doesn’t mean we can’t get there in the next 20 or 30 years, but not now.

Alex Lovit: So you’re saying the near future isn’t going to look like we’re not all going to put on red uniforms and blue uniforms and amass armies. Some of the things you’re talking about are risks for the future. What about right now? What does political violence look like in the United States in recent years?

Rachel Kleinfeld: Right now, what we saw was a huge uptick in violence and hate crimes since 2015 really, since the campaign started in 2015. That’s not causation, but it’s a pretty strong correlation. And we’ve seen that kind of violence against minority groups go way up, all minority groups, by the way, every single kind. We’ve also seen threats against members of Congress rise tenfold between 2016 and 2020, threats against Federal judges—serious threats against Federal judges rise. Threats against election officials, which we never used to have, are now over 2,000 just since 2020 elections.

What we have now is a reduction of actual violence, except for hate crimes, but violence against members of Congress, elected officials, and so on. That’s gone down since 2020. So the real uptick was 2016 to 2020. But the threats have gone way up. And when you see that structure in other countries, what it tells you is that the threats are credible, that people who use violence often don’t want to use violence because that can land them in jail. But if they make a threat, it’s much harder. We have very strong free speech laws in this country, and it’s hard to jail people for threats alone.

And so they make the threats, and the threats do the job often in terms of scaring officials into voting a different way, leaving office. We’ve had a number of officials leave office or say that they want to leave office because of these threats, and so on.

Alex Lovit: You said a couple of things there that I want to emphasize. So one is that the scale of threats is really increasing. Part of that, I think, is members of Congress getting more threats, as you mentioned, but also different types of officials that wouldn’t have received threats in the past now receiving threats, local elections official, for example.

Rachel Kleinfeld: School board members, yeah, absolutely.

Alex Lovit: So it’s not just a scale of threats increasing, but also kind of the targets are widening. And then the other thing you said that I think is worth emphasizing and I’d like to ask you a little bit more about is about the psychological impact and the impact on behavior of these threats because, I think, it’s pretty easy to say violence is off limits, but it might be easy for people to kind of write of threats as, okay, well, it’s just speech; they’re public figures. What are the impacts that threats are having on actual behavior?

Rachel Kleinfeld: Well, first, let me just underline, these are not threats against voters. I’ve been seeing some voters and some voting groups saying, oh, we’re scared to vote because of threats. There is no reason to be scared to vote. We’re not seeing threats against voters internationally. Very rarely is there violence on an election day, even in the worst of democracies. It tends to happen a little bit before and mostly after. So people should not be scared to vote.

The threats are mostly against people who control how the vote is counted, basically the refs. You know, if you threaten the referees, you might be able to get honest referees to leave, and you might be able to get referees that are partial to come in. And there has been a huge organizing effort led by Stephen Bannon to get new people to take very low-level county-level jobs that allow them to have roles in elections.

So we’re seeing threat against that sort of person. We’re seeing threats against local elected officials who have no security. Often, they barely get paid. They’re jobs that take you away from your family at dinner. These are not sexy jobs. And so people say, well, gosh, should I really do this job, especially people with young kids—their young kids get threatened. So that’s really about candidates and election and elected officials.

So the strategy of the threat is mostly about who can control the election and who controls the party or is running for office. Now the psychological effects are different for different groups. So what we’re seeing is women and minorities are both being targeted the most. They’re just getting intense levels of incoming. And more of them are thinking about leaving office. You see numbers at the 50 percent level for election officials who are female or who are minority thinking about leaving.

A small percentage of these officials kind of double down. They think, you know, I’m going to stay here come hell or high water and fight the good fight. But even they, eventually some of the best ones, do leave because it takes a toll, and again, especially if they’re parents because they don’t want their kids to be getting threatened, which is happening.

The other thing that we’re seeing psychologically is that it leads to turnover when you get that much massive challenge. So we’re seeing things like, in Arizona, 98 percent of Arizonans are going to vote with a brand-new election official in that job. Now some of them have moved up from other jobs, but some of them are really quite new. And elections are done at the county level. So the rules are different in different places. And even if you’re good at your job in some other state, you have to learn the ropes in this new county.

So that increases the likelihood of just innocent mistakes, nothing nefarious, just somebody not doing what’s needed for that county. And that’s dangerous, and it opens up room for challenges later on. So voters should vote. They’re not under threat. But these roles that control the rules of the game, those are roles that are under threat.

And the last thing I’ll say is that a lot of the threat is coming from the same side. So we’re seeing almost equal threats against republicans and democrats, but more of the threats are coming from the right. And that can be particularly hard to take psychologically because those are the people you have to go to get elected. You can’t void—if you’re a democrat, you can avoid a republican campaign event. That’s pretty easy. But if you’re a republican, you can’t. You have to face those people. And that can be scary when they come out and bang on your car in the parking lot and that kind of thing.

Alex Lovit: One thing I want to draw a connection here, which you’ve already done—so you’ve mentioned that women and minorities are facing increased levels of threats. And you also earlier mentioned increase in hate crimes. And there’s also some research indicating that some of the people who commit political violence are also more likely to have committed domestic violence. How do you understand the overlapping patterns here? Are these the same groups of people committing these acts? Are these separate groups of people?

Rachel Kleinfeld: That’s a great question. So in America, we seem to have different groups of people in America that are committing political violence. We have a group of people, often younger men under 35, who don’t have jobs, don’t have spouses, often are somewhat unmoored, they often have criminal histories, who commit spontaneous hate crimes. So that’s like there’s a moment of opportunity and they do something really nasty.

That is a group of people you see all over the world who commit violence. And they often grow out of it. You can actually bring people out of violence by settling them down. Saudi Arabia has an antiterrorist program that helps people get jobs and things like that. It’s the same for gang members. That group of people tends to have issues with impulse control and aggression. And so you see them committing domestic violence. You see them committing hate crimes. If they’re on drugs or drinking, it gets worse, et cetera.

Then we had January 6th. Now January 6th required people to travel often to D.C. So they had to have some means. The research on that shows that most of them had jobs. Most of them were married. Many of them are small-business owners, and totally different profile—not criminal in their histories. And those are people who were engaging in what they saw as political speech that turned into a riot. And they had been conditioned to normalize that kind of violence and think that it was okay for them to participate in that kind of violence.

And they had some instigators, like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, who were there to kind of initiate the violence and get the crowd to go along. Now we think that that group of people has not totally disappeared, although the jailing has definitely affected them quite significantly. And we’re seeing more groups like that that might see violence as a continuation of their political speech.

Both groups are worrisome. It’s worrisome when you see violent groups of young men, and it’s worrisome when you see [as] older folks. But in some ways, the older group worries me more because, even though they’re less likely to commit hate crimes or what have you, they’re somewhat more likely, I think, to show up at representatives’ houses, armed and protesting the way Rusty Bowers in Arizona, the State Senate leader, had people showing up at his home while his daughter was dying of cancer and protesting loudly and violently outside his home.

That is the kind of thing that can affect elections and elected officials in our democracy. So they’re both serious, but they’re different.

Alex Lovit: I want to ask you about a concept you’ve written about—stochastic terrorism. can you give a brief definition of what you mean by that phrase?

Rachel Kleinfeld: Sure. So we absolutely need a better word for this because it’s a horrible word. Stochastic just means probabilistic. And what we’ve been seeing in the age of social media is people with a lot of followers, you know, millions of followers—Tucker Carlson, Libs of TikTok, Trump, things like this—if you have a lot of followers, then you can put something out there, and you’re not telling anyone to do it. You’re not directing a hit the way a crime boss would do. But you can be pretty sure that someone in that group is going to be a little more aggressive, a little more impulsive, a little more unhinged and willing to act.

And so what we’re seeing is social media sites like that saying this person is responsible for passing on a thumb drive that nefariously affected the election, and suddenly that person has people showing up at their home threatening them. Or this judge is treating me wrong, or this witness in my trial is treating me wrong, and suddenly those people are getting a lot of threats. We’re seeing this a great deal with Trump’s trials where he’ll tweet something and a day later, 12 hours later, 5 hours later, the person that he is tweeting negatively about gets swatted, on Christmas Day in one case for one of the judges, has people showing up at their home, gets doxed, things like that.

So it’s a way of directing violence without any accountability for these people because we have a lot of free speech, and you’re allowed to say that this hospital is doing something that you think of as negative. It’s happened to a number of hospitals that do transgender surgeries and so on, or this group is something I don’t like. They’re not being violent in their speech, but the effects, when you have that many followers and you know who your followers are, can tend to lead to violence. And we don’t have a way to deal with that legally really.

Alex Lovit: So how do you think about the free speech issues here? And maybe a way to get into it is I’d like to read you a quote from your own work. So this is from a report you wrote last year for the Carnegie endowment, entitled “Polarization, Democracy, and Political Violence in the United States.” And what you wrote was, “Much prodemocracy programming enhances fear that the other side poses an existential threat to democracy. The broad sweep of fear may encourage people to vote while also building support for antidemocratic behavior.”

So that’s not necessarily about encouraging terrorism or violence in any way, but it’s about how political speech might undermine democracy. Of course, in a democracy, candidates need to be able to criticize their opponents. So there are legitimate free-speech concerns. Where do you draw the line?

Rachel Kleinfeld: I think this is an incredibly hard problem. I’m a very strong free-speech advocate. I really think that it gets dangerous when you start policing speech. There are countries like Germany that have particular carveouts for dehumanizing kinds of speech, and they’ve been written very carefully to avoid the obvious history that Germany in particular has. And they call these defending democracy-types of laws.

They can be misused in the wrong hands. I work on democracy globally, and there’re certainly plenty of countries where—you know, Thailand just kicked out its largest party for breaking its law against critiquing the king. They didn’t even break the law; they just suggested it should change. So it gets really slippery really fast, and I tend to lean on the side of free speech. But I think that there could be a lot more active measures in between jailing someone for their speech and pure—being able to say whatever you want, no matter how close it comes to violence short of actually directing violence, like in America.

That space is for things like, if you can figure out who’s threatening election officials, which Reuters did—Reuters did a whole series of stories on threats against election officials, and they tracked down a bunch of the people doing the threats—it might not be possible to prosecute them because their threats might not rise to the level of true threat. But FBI can do what’s called knock-and-talks where they knock on the person’s door and they say, “Hey, you’ve been calling election officials. This is language that’s getting pretty close to the line.”

And they have a civil conversation, but the person’s been put on notice. That’s very possible, and it’s not happening enough. We could also have more of a movement of self-policing among political parties. It used to be up to strong parties to police and gate-keep against people. And when Pat Buchanan tried to run on the republican ticket, he spoke at the convention. He gave a speech that would sound fairly mild in today’s climate, and people compared him to Goebbels and said absolutely not, and he’s not going to be a republican Presidential candidate, and he had to run on a third party.

So that gatekeeping function though—there’s a lot of space between the government acting in a legal court of law and people being allowed to do anything. And that in-between space needs to be filled by civic institutions. Bar associations can disbar lawyers for speech that they think crosses the line, professional associations and so on. That’s the level at which we should be acting in order to restore norms of civility. Not enough institutions are doing their job in that space.

For instance, one of the key organizations that could be acting more are social media organizations. Social media is not free speech. Social media is private speech. You’re on a private platform that can be policed. And to say that any kind of changes to the algorithm is a reduction in free speech is just nonsense. We have all sorts of ways that shopping malls can police themselves.

So there’s a lot that social media organizations can do to police themselves, even short of kicking people off. They can just demote tweets and things like that. They can put warning signs on. They can ask you if you’ve read the story before you send it on. There’re all sorts of things that they can do. And they need to be doing a lot more. They did a lot more in 2020. And then they got hit with enough blowback that they got really scared this election season. But we need them as a society to do a better job of keeping violence and hate off those platforms.

Alex Lovit: How do you think people might put pressure on the social media companies to do more of that work? I mean, it’s sort of famously expensive. So even if they’re inclined to do it, they might not want to hire the staff to review all of the material and look for hate speech.

Rachel Kleinfeld: So the social media companies are really relying on outside groups to do this policing. But as AI gets better and better, there’s an awful lot that could have a first look with AI and then a catch by a human being rather than the other way around. It’s really tough to work to do. The people who do it get really worn out. But it doesn’t need to be as people heavy moving forward as AI gets better and better.

It’s also something that the social media companies aren’t trying very hard on right now. We saw them try hard in 2020, and they actually did a much, much better job. And we’re just not seeing that attempt now, in part because when folks try to organize to ask them to do certain things, there’s now a counter organization of groups that are trying to use this sort of violence and threat within the election, and their attempts to make that space muddier is really working.

Alex Lovit: So we’ve been talking about violence and threats of violence, which is something you’ve written and studied a lot about. And another topic you’ve studied in recent years is growing polarization, particularly [affective] polarization with partisans on both sides, both republicans and democrats having increasingly negative feelings towards the other side.

One natural way of understanding this might be to connect those two phenomena together and say, okay, on the one hand, you’ve got people that are increasingly partisan and angry, and on the other side, you’ve got people acting violently, people threatening violent action. Is that the right way to think about this, about how those two are connected?

Rachel Kleinfeld: So it’s complicated. I hate to give that answer, but it is complicated. So let me try to walk you through it. We see no correlation between the actual people who support political violence and the people who are highly polarized affectively, which means they’re emotionally very, very partisan. It’s just not connected. That doesn’t mean that the partisan tone in the country is not affecting political violence. It just means that the people who are really violent in general tend to be aggressive people who have trouble controlling those impulses.

And those aggressive people have trouble controlling their impulses, they might just be yelling at the TV screen about politics, or they might be that kind of more criminal type of personality that I mentioned earlier, and they might be harming people near them or creating hate crimes. But whether they’re holding down a job and have a wife and kids and are just screaming at the television or whether they’re creating hate crimes, they’re influenced by the general tenor of what is happening around them.

And so when they see that a political party and political leaders are aggrandizing violence the way that Kyle Rittenhouse was kind of pulled out of obscurity and given internships on Capitol Hill or what  have you, and they see that that’s being heroized or they see that it’s being normalized by political leaders, then it helps that first group that might just yell at the TV say, oh, I’m going to join a rally. I’m going to go rally armed outside my statehouse this next time around. It makes them feel that’s okay when they start seeing it by their political leaders.

And for the more aggressive and criminal types, they might think that they can act out even more, and against political figures. They might think, gosh, I’m just hurting this person near me, but if I really wanted to be a big deal, I could hurt a political figure, especially if they’re having issues of grandiosity, which can be brought on by psychosis or drugs or various things like that.

So it’s not that the zeitgeist isn’t important. When people are aggrandizing violence, it gets everyone who’s willing to be violent to be more so. But the actual people who are violent are often in that second group, and they’re not that partisan. What that second group is is often people who are pretty far outside of normal society and just aren’t really attached to the democratic institutions.

We do see some increase in more polarizing violence, but some of those people are actually—they’ve been on both sides of the aisle. Like if you look at the person who attacked Paul Pelosi, Nancy Pelosi’s husband, he had been a nudist rights advocate. He had been quite far left, and then he moved quite far right. These people can be kind of—we call them salad bar extremists. They pick from everything, and they’re not the real partisans.

The real partisans are often people who are more attached to democracy. So they’re very vehement, but they’re not necessarily violent. But they’re creating that zeitgeist in which the violent people act.

Alex Lovit: So thinking about the growing polarization—and I think there’s a lot of good evidence that polarization really [is] on the increase in polls and such, but there’s some argument about the causes of it. Some people see polarization as primarily a top-down phenomenon with leaders using escalating rhetoric, and that causes supporters to see political opponents as illegitimate or even inhuman.

And then other people argue that it’s really more of a bottom-up phenomenon where followers of the most partisan, extreme supporters of a political party control the primary elections, and that means that only the most partisan, extreme candidates advance to the general election. How do you think about this? Is it top down, bottom up? Is it both?

Rachel Kleinfeld: I think it’s a flywheel, and that once it gets started, it’s both. I think it started with the elites. So if you look at the way polarization has moved through our society, American political parties were pretty unpolarized in like the ‘50s and ‘60s. There’s a famous academic paper saying, “Our parties aren’t polarized enough. Nobody can choose between them because they’re all the same,” and I think 1952 or around there.

We now don’t have that problem. What we’ve seen is that, since about the ‘70s, political leaders have been getting more and more ideologically polarized, polarized on different policies. And so where the parties once had a lot of ideological overlap, they now have none, no ideological overlap at all. That happened in a 50-year timespan. And we know that our elected leaders have been far more ideologically polarized than their followers.

So I think it started with them. And as those elected leaders became more polarized, the futures that voters saw were more and more different. You weren’t choosing between an Eisenhower and LBJ, who had a number of things in common. You were choosing between Trump and Harris, very, very different futures for the country.

And as that change started happening, then people got more affectively polarized, more emotionally polarized because that fear that the regular voter was like a J. D. Vance or that regular voter was like an AOC, people conflated the two, even though it’s not true. Regular voters are much more in the muddy middle than the political leaders. But because people didn’t know a lot of people in other parties as we geographically separated, they would conflate the two. And that made them hate and fear the other side. And they also disliked and feared the policies of the other side.

So I think it started there. But once it started with the leaders, leaders who didn’t want to play into that, leaders who were not what we call conflict entrepreneurs, who just wanted to be a normal republican or a normal democrat, but it is happening much more no the right, like a Rob Portman or a Jeff Flake. They might be—or Liz Cheney. They could be quite conservative, but this was not the kind of tenor they wanted for their party.

Then they started to face primary voters who had normalized the kind of speech and anger and vitriol and dehumanization from other political leaders and wanted that from everyone. And so then those leaders couldn’t keep winning elections without going through this primary process that was kicking them out. It happened a little bit with the democrats in the mid-2000s with the Iraq War and so on where they were getting a lot of primary challengers. But it’s been much more on the side of the right. And then that primary voter mechanism has played a significant role in continuing that affective polarization by picking really loud, angry leaders.

The other part of this cycle that we often lead out are the media. The media don’t need to give Lauren Bobert or Marjorie Taylor Green or AOC for that matter so much coverage. These are very minor players—a representative of a single district who doesn’t sit on a major committee or doesn’t have a leadership role in a major congressional committee, has one vote of a couple of hundred on the legislation that happens to pass, which is not a whole lot of power.

So why should their remarks about somebody be covered in the national media? Maybe they should be covered in their local media so their voters know. But they’re not really national stories. The media make these people national stories. And then they can get money from small-dollar donors, and then other leaders see that that’s how you raise money and how you make a profile for yourself, and they copy. So the media have been playing a very significant role in making that kind of leadership attractive and more salient to our polity.

Alex Lovit: So you’re talking about a pretty complicated problem that’s in part structural there. The media are part of it, but also the primary system is part of it. The fundraising system is part of it, that there’s a pathway to raise funds for local, more extreme candidates to raise funds nationally rather than just in their local district. I want to touch on a couple of other maybe structural problems of American democracy that might be increasing some of these problems of polarization that we’re talking about.

So one argument that I’ve seen you make—or anyway, I think this is the argument I’ve seen you make [laughs], so correct me if I’m wrong—is that one problem is that the U.S. [a system of district based, first past the post elections], means that the difference between getting 49.9 percent of the vote and 50.1 percent of the vote is just that the outcome is so different. That kind of really raises the temperature on how any given election goes, and that kind of increases the polarization, makes people more tempted to engage in antidemocratic actions. Do I have that right?

Rachel Kleinfeld: Yeah, that is correct.

Alex Lovit: Okay [laughs]. And then another argument that I think I’ve seen you make is that the American political system now at the Federal level is pretty partisan. We’re a closely divided country. We’re pretty gridlocked. Not a whole lot of legislation is getting through Congress right now. So it’s very difficult to pass substantive legislation, which means that a lot of problems aren’t getting addressed. Even pretty popular things aren’t getting done. And that also increases kind of antidemocratic temptations.

Rachel Kleinfeld: You don’t get a complicated problem like 333 million people being upset about their system of government—you know, some of them are babies, but some large percentage of that being upset about their system of government without a couple of reasons for it. But you’d asked about what started the polarization. And I think what started it is more extreme elites with more ideological extremes, pushing people to be more afraid of their other side winning, and then primary elections becoming the crucible whereby more extreme candidates were being selected. That was the flywheel for getting it started.

Now that it’s here, what we see is that, in various countries, you can have systems that tamp down polarization, or you can have systems that amplify it. And our system has a whole series of factors that amplify the polarization that we’re having. So if you have these kinds of elections where you move a hundred voters in a particularly small district, you might win the whole district, and you have a Congress that has mostly safe seats because we’ve geographically separated ourselves so much and because of gerrymandering, but not only, so that only a couple of seats are really even in play, even a couple of states are even really in play.

Then what you end up with is a huge amount of pressure on a handful of voters in a couple of seats in districts, and that could swing all of Congress. That’s a huge amount of power, or even the Presidency. Well, gosh, it’s pretty hard to imagine that two parties that hate each other wouldn’t do some dirty tricks and so on to try to win that kind of election.

Contrast that with an incentive system like ranked choice voting where you’re trying to vie for being the second-place vote on someone’s ticket so that all your first- and second-place votes might add up to putting you in first place overall versus someone else being a highly polarized candidate who gets a lot of first votes but nobody’s second vote because you either love him or you hate him. That system we know tamps down polarization. It causes people to try to campaign for that second vote and to be more friendly, less negative campaigning, and to distinguish themselves in other ways.

We also see in Europe this kind of system that Northern Ireland adopted at the end of its trouble during its Good Friday Peace Agreements to reduce its polarization called Proportional Representation where there’s a list of candidates. If you win 30 percent of your district, you get 30 percent of the positions in your parliament or what have you. If you win 30.1 percent, you’re still going to get 30.1 percent of the position, so you don’t gain a whole lot. There’s not a whole lot of reason to put that much pressure on candidates and voters in small places.

So that also is a system that tamps down polarization. Ours just, unfortunately, has a number of features that bring it up. And I should add, these are not written by the Founding Fathers. We’ve had proportional representation in our country. We’ve had ranked choice voting, and we have it in a couple of states. We’ve had all sorts of different experiments with how we vote over the years. The parties didn’t even exist when the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution. They didn’t want political parties.

So none of these things is time immemorial, and it’s perfectly fine for states to experiment with what might make a better environment for everybody in their state.

Alex Lovit: Well, and that’s what I want to ask about. So if part of the problem is the structures of how the American election systems work and that ramps up the rhetoric and kind of contributes to a lot of these problems we’ve been talking about, are there structural fixes that can help to make the problem better? And of course, that’s tough because if it’s tough to pass substantive legislation, it’s pretty tough to pass substantive reform as well. And our Constitution is among the hardest constitutions to amend in the world.

So do you see paths for structural reform that might help prevent some of these problems we’ve been talking about?

Rachel Kleinfeld: Absolutely. I mean, the nice thing about America’s political polarization is that it is imminently fixable. It’s not easy, but it’s not as if we don’t know what we might do to help it. For instance, Alaska passed ranked choice voting with an instant runoff. And that has done a number of really fabulous things in Alaska. Now it’s up for a referendum now. People who win in the old system never like changes to the system because, you know, you’re winning in the old system. And so it’s really hard to get these things through.

But what you saw in Alaska is, first of all, it broke the two-party structure. One of the reasons we’re so polarized is that either you’re us or you’re them. It’s not like you could be a green or a liberal democrat or a social democrat or a Christian democrat, which is mildly conservative, or a far-right conservative. Like we don’t have a whole lot of flavors. You’re either a republican or a democrat, left or right.

But by having ranked choice voting, they had a number of republicans running. They had a number of democrats running. You could choose that you were against Sarah Palin—I’m from Alaska; lots of Alaskans hate Sarah Palin, for personal reasons—it’s a small state, and she was a bad governor, by many people’s standards. But they’re still republican, and they want to vote for a republican candidate. If she was the only republican candidate, they would be stuck voting for someone who is their flavor, but they didn’t like her.

Instead, they could vote for other republican candidates because the ranked choice system allowed that. It allowed republicans to run against republicans, and the same for democrats. So they ended up with a democratic senator and a conservative and a republican governor and so on, just kind of a mélange of different choices. That’s what you want. That’s a system that is being really responsive to its voters and still preserving political parties but letting people be different flavors of party.

And that kind of change is being pushed in all sorts of states and cities, usually by citizen referendum because sitting leaders don’t want to change the system they won in. But in places where you can have referenda, it’s happening because voting systems are set by states. You don’t need a Constitutional amendment. They’re all set by their own states.

Alex Lovit: Well, I think that is a hopeful message. I want to ask you about another report you’ve written recently for the Carnegie Endowment called “Closing Civic Space in the United States.” I think a lot of people have a kind of binary understanding of democracy and autocracy—you’re either one or the other. In reality, that’s more of a continuum, and you’ve spent your career looking at a lot of situations that are somewhere on that continuum.

I’m wondering if you could help us understand this concept of closing civic space and how it might be not suddenly turning the United States into an autocracy but pushing us along that continuum away from democracy.

Rachel Kleinfeld: Yes, that’s absolutely right. I spent most of my career in the messy middle of places that are not strong democracies but are not autocracies either. You’re not in North Korea or in its totalitarian system. And that’s actually a large number of countries, and it’s a growing number of countries. And one of the things that’s worrisome to those of us who do international democracy is that it’s been growing from quite strong democracies, like India. Even Hungary and Poland were moving in this direction. And some have become full authoritarian countries, as Turkey did. Some get more and more like that.

So it’s a trajectory we’ve seen, and we tend to see it because leaders who are in control of the government start making it harder and harder for people to oppose them. And they might, at first, restrict who can receive funding from certain sources, often in other countries foreign sources. Well, that sounds legitimate. What political party should get foreign funding? And then they might expand that—organizations that receive foreign funding to do their work.

Well, that maybe sounds legitimate, too. We don’t want some kind of back door into our political system. But what if those are—you know, a human rights organization that’s trying to help women overseas and they’re getting their funding from another country. Well, what you start seeing is these very legitimate-sounding reasons being used to make it harder and harder to organize against leaders, to come up with language or information that would undermine them. Like anticorruption groups have trouble getting registered as nonprofit organizations, or groups that do investigative journalism suddenly find themselves getting harassed by the tax police.

And so gradually, gradually, what sounded like very legitimate reasons to be worried about these other organizations become, 10 years later, 15 years later, a much smaller space where the media is largely controlled by cronies or people who know that they can only say certain things. There might not be laws passed that changed the media, but the ownership has changed. You see a much smaller civic space, so people aren’t talking about certain topics. They’re not discussing corruption issues. The statistical agencies are more hemmed in.

And what we’ve seen over the last 15 years is that this trend started in Russia. Putin really started the whole thing. But it spread very quickly because a lot of elected leaders don’t like to be criticized. And at first, it spread to kind of near autocracies—Ethiopia and so on. But then it became quite popular. So we’ve seen it grow very strong in India. Lots of respected nonprofit organizations that did just good, solid, nonpartisan work have been closed down in India. Ten thousand NGOs just lost their registration, just weren’t allowed to function.

We’ve seen it in a whole series of democracies now where it just becomes harder to make the other side’s case. And what that does is it tilts the whole playing field. So the elections stay free and fair. They can maybe even be extremely free and fair. There might be no problem with the elections. In some countries there are, but in some countries there’re not. But the other side can’t make its case because the organizations that provide the statistics, the organizations that do the information gathering on opposition research or talk about misinformation, they’re all closed down. None of them can function.

And what we’re starting to see is this happening in America. And it’s the exact same playbook we’ve seen from overseas. And so in that paper, I bring—I don’t remember—seven or eight pages of examples of environmental organizations that are being dinged for foreign funding when some Scandinavian country gave an environmental organization money to go work on deforestation in Brazil, and suddenly, it’s facing a loss of its nonprofit status or being called up in front of Congress.

We’re seeing lawsuits against churches that do migrant aid, saying that they’re breaking immigration laws by giving food and water to migrants that cross the border. And they say, “We’ve been doing this ministry for 50 years, but suddenly it’s illegal?” And it’s closing the space, closing the space. We’ve seen lawsuits launched against these missing disinformation researchers on grounds that they were using censorship when, in fact, they were just saying, “Hey, Russia’s sending this information into our political system. We should know about that,” or “Iran is interfering in this way.”

This has really metastasized through our system, largely at the state level, not at the Federal level, although you could easily see it at the Federal level. Certainly, the IRS has been misused by Presidents in the past to go after political enemies. It could happen again. And so the paper really talks about what we’ve seen and what we’re seeing. Right now, we’re seeing foundations being threatened by political figures, and defamation laws being—threatened to be used by political figures to close down the space, to criticize them, or to fund things that these leaders don’t like.

And in a country like ours that really has a lot of different opinions, it’s a very worrisome trend. And I’ll close with this: One reason it’s a worrisome trend is that we have seen this in our country before. In the South in 11 states that were the former Confederacy particularly, but also in some other states, we had a series of Jim Crow laws. And some of those laws did this kind of thing. Mississippi banned newspapers from talking about anything really positive that mixed the relationships between blacks and whites. And you weren’t allowed to have a mixed-race checkers league in I think it was Alabama.

So that sort of law that makes it hard to express some viewpoint made it very hard for civil rights organizers to organize in the South. And it doesn’t look like autocracy, but what it did was allow a one-party state in those states. Only the democratic party could win in those states. And so these laws closed the space for organizing by other parties and other idea sets, and we don’t want that to happen again on another set of issues.

Alex Lovit: Well, thank you for helping our listeners understand some of the warning signs that they might not already be looking for and for helping us understand a lot of the problems happening in our country right now. And thank you for joining me on The Context.

Rachel Kleinfeld: So glad to be here.

Alex Lovit: The Context is a production of the Charles F. Kettering Foundation. I’m Alex Lovit. I’m a Senior Program Officer and Historian with the Foundation. Melinda Gilmore is our Director of Communications. George Drake, Jr., is the Episode Producer of this show. If you’re interested in learning more about the Kettering Foundation, visit Kettering.org and sign up for our newsletter. If you want to get in touch with the show, email us at TheContext@Kettering.org.

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