Why Is 'Polarization' the 2024 Word of the Year?

Polarization is a big deal, and how we address it matters

Merriam-Webster announced this week that their annual word of the year is “polarization”. I imagine this is how virologists felt when “pandemic” was named word of the year in 2020. A lighthearted reminder that our area of interest is an existential threat.

Whereas other dictionaries opted for slang words like "brain rot" or "brat", Merriam-Webster’s choice was driven by search traffic and the recognition that the "Year of Elections" was filled with rising contempt, hatred, and polarization.

Peter Sokolowski, the dictionary’s editor-at-large, described polarization as, “tending toward the extremes rather than towards the center”. A good description, but he went on to note one of the most interesting things about polarization – the degree to which we all recognize the threat. “In a little bit of an ironic twist to the word, it’s something that actually everyone agrees on,” Sokolowski said.

In fact, not only do the vast majority of Americans (87%) agree that polarization is an existential threat to America, but the vast majority (86%) also say they feel personally exhausted by the divisiveness, which is not true of any number of other existential threats like nuclear war or climate change.

If the vast majority of Americans agree that polarization is a major threat and that it’s affecting their happiness and relationships personally, why aren’t more Americans willing to work towards depolarization solutions?

As it turns out, they are. 79% of Americans say that given the chance, they’d like to play a part in reducing social division in America.

So, why aren’t Americans organizing to help reduce social division?

They are. There are hundreds (if not thousands) of organizations dedicated to reducing toxic polarization. This movement is called the depolarization or bridging movement.

Given that 260 million Americans are willing to work towards a solution for polarization, why does the depolarization movement struggle to reach a broad audience and galvanize widespread support?

I think this is one of the most interesting questions in the field of polarization. I’ve written about the disconnect between the public’s support for depolarization and the depolarization movement’s ability to engage widespread support before, but in short, the movement lacks 1) simplicity and 2) a compelling message.

Why does the movement need simplicity?

All strong mass movements involve ideas that span the full range of simple to complex. Take Christianity and Marxism – both ideologies have academics who have devoted their entire careers to understanding a small portion of their respective movement, but each movement can also be easily summed up by a single phrase, whether “Jesus loves you” or “Workers of the world, unite!”. The depolarization movement has plenty of wonky academics, but it is sorely lacking in the latter category of simple language that can galvanize tens of millions. Overly complex narratives and solutions tend to lose the interest of potential supporters, or worse, inspire hopelessness.

In what way does the movement need to be compelling?

The other key characteristic of successful mass movements is a compelling message – specifically a message that characterizes the movement as a struggle against evil. Christianity and Marxism, again, were able to galvanize hundreds of millions because of their fights against personal sin and the bourgeoisie, respectively. The modern left and right have done a good job of framing their fights in good vs. evil terms as well. For the depolarization movement to compete with the left and right, they’ll have to compete with the subconscious allure of a good vs. evil struggle of apocalyptic proportions. Niche policy solutions like voting mechanism reform and independent redistricting committees can’t compete with the narrative firepower of competing movements couched in existential terms. The current solutions offered by the depolarization movement are simply too boring.

What about focusing on bridging? Does offering a positive vision of better engagement count as compelling?

Unfortunately, no. In addition to niche policy reform, another major area of depolarization efforts is the bridging movement, which seeks to bridge partisan divides by working on building trust and engagement techniques rather than engaging on specific issues. Examples include Braver Angels, which was founded by couples therapists, and RAFT for America, which seeks to pair up Americans from different political persuasions on white water rafting expeditions in order to build trust.

While there’s definitely a need for these types of organizations, this kumbaya togetherness approach tends to predictably attract mainly left-leaning participants, and to the extent right-leaning participants are attracted, they tend to be more centrist to begin with. A movement that solely appeals to unity and togetherness will tend to attract only the small minority of people who are already predisposed to care more about unity and togetherness than they do about other hot-button issues like climate, race relations, immigration, etc. A mass movement that galvanizes tens of millions cannot run on positivity only. A mass movement needs an enemy.

What’s wrong with focusing on engagement techniques and disagreeing more civilly?

Civility is important, but the bridging movement tends to get cause and effect reversed here. Bridging campaigns such as "Disagree Better" are based on the belief that polarized Americans will lower their contempt for the other side if civility is reintroduced to their daily interactions and political conversations.

A noble sentiment, but for the most polarized Americans, extending civility to the “other side” is unthinkable. After all, how can you extend civility to literal Nazis or Communists? If the beliefs that polarized Americans have about the other side are actually true, then their contempt for the other side is completely rational and justified.

This isn’t just a hypothetical. The case against civility is what many polarized Americans are actually arguing for. The comic below has recently been making the rounds on X, and it makes the point succinctly.

If the polarized left’s views of the right are correct, and vice versa, then the bridging movement’s calls for civility and togetherness sound quaint and naïve in a charitable reading or, more cynically, sound willfully destructive to the “correct” viewpoint. Pushing for civility is fine, but it’s a nonstarter for the exact type of person the depolarization movement needs to reach – the most polarized Americans.

Instead of pushing solely for civility, any serious depolarization movement will need to actively push back on the actual ideas that cause contempt. For the cartoon above, the role of the centrist should be to push back on the left’s caricatures of the right and to also push back on the elements of the right that provide the seed of truth for the caricature. If the cartoon were reversed to show the excesses of the left and the reasonableness of the right, the centrist’s role would reverse as well – simultaneously pushing back on the right’s caricature of the left and pushing the left to hold less caricaturable beliefs.

As long as Americans are polarized, pushing for civility will seem quaint or even destructive. To change hearts and minds, the polarizing ideas themselves will have to be confronted. The bridging movement believes civility can create harmony and centrist agreement, but in reality, centrist agreement is what leads to civility.

But don’t people have a right to be angry? Aren’t many of the polarized views of the left/right (take your pick) justified?

No, not really. While there are real issues out there, virtually every hot-button political issue seems worse than it really is. Progress writers like Steven Pinker have written at length about how by virtually any metric, the world is better today than at any time in human history. Wealth, life expectancy, literacy, democracy, freedom, education, etc. have all trended in a positive direction for the past 250 years. You can take your pick from any number of graphs showing progress from Our World in Data, or here’s a good summary from

Bentham's Bulldog

. Other progress writers on Substack like

Michael Magoon

and

J.K. Lund

have incredible insights into the extent and drivers of progress as well.

Progress is occurring all around us, but the failure to recognize it is a key driver of discontent and polarization. If people don’t believe the world is getting better, they’ll blame the opposing political team, the “elites”, immigrants, Wall Street, Big Tech or any number of other boogeymen. If everything truly is bad and getting worse, then contempt and a “burn it down” mentality is justified. If everything is generally getting better due to focused and incremental reform, then a moderate incrementalist worldview rooted in civility makes more sense. Confronting polarized worldviews, therefore, starts with an appreciation for the incredible progress humanity has achieved to date.

If everything is getting better, why does everything seem so bad?

In short, Negativity Bias. I’ve argued before that our addiction to negativity is the sole driver of polarization because humans generally give more psychological weight to negative stories and narratives. Because negativity is always in greater subconscious demand, the supply of negative storylines and narratives dwarfs the supply of optimistic narratives, which creates the perception that the world is much worse off than it actually is.

This is where many progress writers go wrong. One common trope of the progress community is that they’re armed with their charts and data but can’t seem to make a dent in public discourse despite having the clear data advantage. As one commentor on an earlier post of mine put it, “Optimism sounds cheap, but pessimism sounds expensive”.

People are just less interested in optimistic takes, so for every chart that progress writers can come up with showing vast human improvement, there are 10 that show a negative takeaway instead, usually through somewhat distorted or misleading data. Confronted with these 11 pieces of data, even a completely rational person who doesn’t have the time to fact check every single datapoint would reasonably conclude that the issue in question is a net negative based on the weight of the evidence.

For the progress community to be successful in reaching tens or hundreds of millions of people, the defense of progress narratives is not enough. The progress community must also have a successful offense against the overwhelming tide of negative narratives that bombard the public daily. Progress writers need a go-to reason why most negative narratives are wrong. Otherwise, each point scored in favor of recognizing progress will continue to be drowned out by the 10 points in favor of pessimism.

While specific negative narratives each have nuance and can be refuted individually, the benefit of negativity bias is that it offers a blanket reason to heavily discount all negative narratives. Given the prevalence of negativity bias, it can be argued that the default approach to all negative narratives should be extreme skepticism, which should provide a better chance for progress-oriented narratives to win out in the marketplace of ideas.

Conclusion

As Merriam-Webster has pointed out, polarization is one of the most existential threats faced by the US today. Americans universally recognize the threat and are eager to work towards a solution, but many of the solutions currently on offer are either too complex or too boring to garner widespread support.

The benefit of identifying our addiction to negativity as the sole cause of polarization is that it is a simple answer to a complex problem, and it offers a compelling enemy to combat – pessimism.

Polarization is rooted in contempt for the “other side”, the elites, the media, Wall Street, or anyone else I can blame for my negative perceptions of the world. We know that due to negativity bias, perceptions of the world are much more negative than is justified, so by pushing back on negative and pessimistic worldviews, polarization and contempt for “the other” should decline.

The hollowing out of the political center has been in the works for decades. Reconstructing a robust center will not come about by promoting centrist ideals like civility and togetherness. Instead, the actual ideas held by the polarized left and right will need to be confronted and pushed back on. Pointing to negativity bias is a great silver bullet for undercutting polarized worldviews rooted in contempt and pessimism and to push those holding polarized worldviews back towards the center.

Polarization is the word of the year because it’s a big deal. How polarization is confronted is also a big deal. For the depolarization movement to be successful, promoting optimism and fighting negativity and pessimism will need to be a key part of the solution.