Polarization and Political Violence: When Polarization Turns Violent

Abstract: This essay challenges the assumption that political polarization leads naturally to political violence. Surveying cases from ancient Alexandria and the Russian pogroms to lynching in the American South, Hindu-Muslim riots in India, and the 2017 "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, the essay argues that polarization turns deadly only when several forces converge: when affective hostility fuses with fears of demographic change and political displacement, when groups come to see control of the polity as a matter of collective survival, and when the state retreats from enforcing equal protection. Mass democracy heightens the danger by translating demographic difference into political power. Yet fatalism is unwarranted—most polarized societies remain peaceful, and Charlottesville did not become a pogrom because institutions held. The United States, the essay concludes, is not on an inevitable path to violence so long as its civic order and sense of common membership endure.