The Fire of Rage

Talking with Columbia professor Peter Coleman about Donald Trump

For the past year or so, I’ve been studying political polarization for the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation. The topic is so vast, and there are so many smart people thinking and writing about it, that it can feel overwhelming at times. I’ve been writing quick reviews of some of the stuff I’ve been reading:

Sustaining Democracy (Robert Talisse)

A Great Disorder (Richard Slotkin)

Where Have All the Democrats Gone? (John Judis and Ruy Teixeira)

How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement (Freddie deBoer)

The Identity Trap (Yascha Mounk)

Culture War?: The Myth of a Polarized America (Morris Fiorina, Samuel Abrams & Jeremy Pope)

High Conflict (Amanda Ripley)

The Way Out: How to Overcome Toxic Polarization (Peter Coleman)

I’ve also been talking with a number of experts in the field. These conversations are being released to the world via the Guggenheim Foundation’s website and The Fulcrum.

This week sees the publication of an edited transcript of my conversation with Peter Coleman, a professor of psychology at Columbia University. This one proved very difficult to whittle down to a manageable size — Coleman and I spoke for more than an hour and he had interesting stuff to say on a wide variety of topics.

So I’m posting here an excerpt that I ended up cutting from the final transcript. In this part of our conversation, I asked Coleman to help me think through a question that I have been struggling with: How much is Donald Trump a cause of American polarization and how much is he a symptom? Based on Coleman’s response, I think the answer is probably “some of both.”

Me: I wanted to start with a story that was recently in the New York Times about threats made against public officials by Donald Trump’s supporters. Do you think that Trump is guilty of stochastic terrorism?

Coleman: I think he's guilty of fomenting stochastic terrorism. He’s not directly himself committing terrorist acts, but he is increasing the probabilities that those who are in positions to commit political violence or anti-government violence will do so. When influential leaders like Trump use rhetoric to directly go after people like General Milley, then they are essentially fomenting political violence. And it does increase the probability that that will happen.

In my book on political polarization, I start with a story that happened in 1994, when a series of shootings by an anti-abortion activist destabilized Boston. In the wake of that, six women -- three pro-life, three pro-choice -- who were very active in the community came together in secret for a long period of time and dialogued about it. And part of what they came to realize is that how they did their activism, both the pro-life group and the pro-choice group, created conditions where the chances of this kind of violence were far more likely. And so they started to understand their own responsibility. Again, they still believed in their activism, they both believed in the rightness of their cause, but they also came to be aware of the fact that their rhetoric had created conditions where this kind of violence was more likely.

So I guess I am saying yes, I think Trump is responsible for fomenting political violence, but obviously he has not been implicated in any kind of direct actions around terrorism.

You are basically making the case that leadership matters. Rachel Kleinfeld has similarly argued that as we've become more and more tribalized, people are increasingly looking to politicians to get a sense of what's normal and acceptable. But to what extent is Trump leading and to what extent is he following? My sense is that there's a lot of anger and resentment out there. Trump may be exploiting that, but I don't think he created that situation.

That's definitely true. I mean, the partisan animosity in this country has been growing since the late 1970s, and that was before Trump was in the conversation. So definitely, he is tapping into an ethos, into grievances and resentments. But he has done that intentionally. Trump, as you probably know, hired a couple of lawyers to listen to right wing radio for a couple of years before he launched his campaign and really identify the issues in America that people are outraged by. And those continue to be the levers that he pulls. So there's an intentionality to leveraging outrage, grievance, frustration. He clearly understands what half of America is irate about and is weaponizing that for a political gain.

How do you balance the need to combat Trump’s authoritarian tendencies with the need to combat polarization? Do you worry that in calling out Trump, you're just feeding polarization?

What I've tried to be clear about in most of my writing is that Trump is not the problem. If Trump goes away, Trumpism and the resentment and anger and frustration he taps into, will still be alive and well and will be taken up by others. So it's not necessarily Trump. He definitely has thrown gasoline on the fire of rage in this country and continues to do that daily. And in fact, the more legal trouble he gets into, the more he tends to do that. So he definitely is playing a pivotal role, but he is not causing political polarization in America. He's just leveraging it for his own political gain.

Instead of focusing on Trump, I really try to appeal to the exhausted majority, those people in the middle that are increasingly disengaged, and to try to encourage them to reengage in political discourse in a more constructive way. Because what happens in times like this is that the extremists on the wings dominate the conversation. Eighty percent of the content on X or Twitter comes from about ten percent of the people that are on the platform.  The rest of us are sort of passive consumers of this content. But that leads to misperceptions about how big the gap is between left and right, how crazy the other side is. And when we perceive our opponents to be a threat, we are mobilized to act in more coercive ways and more contentious ways, and it further fuels the dynamic of polarization.

So I try to appeal to those in the middle that are, I wouldn't call them moderate because there are different kinds of people in the middle, different subgroups. The group More In Common has done a good job documenting what they call the seven hidden tribes in America. Something like 70% of us comprise what they call the exhausted middle. We’re the majority. We're fed up. We want to have a different kind of politics. We realize we need functional leadership and problem solving in Washington and it's not happening. So that's who I am really trying to speak to.

Listen, I understand the grievances. I grew up in Dubuque, Iowa. That's largely a working-class town. I understand how angry people are about inequality, about being left behind, about the elitism of the Democratic Party and the left. So I get it. I understand the frustration and anger, and I think we have to take that seriously and we have to appeal to that. But again, I think Trump weaponizes that rage and doesn't really offer solutions for their concerns.

There's a fair amount of hand wringing about the role of racial animus in our politics at the moment, with some people claiming that the Republican Party is increasingly embracing white nationalism. Against that, one sees polling that suggests that Trump improved his performance among Black voters and Hispanic voters from 2016 to 2020. I'm curious what you make of those crosscurrents. Do you think racial polarization is getting worse, better, something in between?

What the data tells us is that there are fewer Black Republicans and fewer White Southern conservatives. So there is a relationship between our racial divisions and the politics of today.

Look, we're a country based on white supremacy.  That’s our history.  And now we're in this period of demographic transformation. The white working class is extremely anxious about that. Not only do they see that the economy is not supporting them and the elites in government not supporting them, but then they see immigrants and people of color rising in numbers in their communities. So there's definitely a role that racism and xenophobia play in all of this. It's another vulnerability that I believe Trump and politicians like him play into and leverage.

At the same time, it's complicated. If you look at, for example, Hispanics, Trump is doing well with Hispanics in this country, so it's a more complicated picture than just race. I think it's an oversimplification to understand this in terms of any one dimension, whether it be race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, whatever. I think these things cluster on the left and the right.

The rest of my conversation with Peter Coleman can be found here.