Pernicious Polarization and Democratic Resilience: Analyzing the United States in Comparative Perspective

This chapter unpacks and critically discusses the idea of democratic resilience vis-à-vis polarization that becomes “pernicious,” that is, it divides societies into mutually distrustful Us vs. Them camps. Democratic resilience, we argue, is a polity’s ability to produce electoral, programmatic, discursive, and organizational behavior that can jointly contain and reverse pernicious polarization and its democracy-eroding consequences. We apply comparative lessons to assess US resilience and vulnerability to such consequences, focusing on three factors: institutional constraints, formative rifts, and opposition capacities and strategies.