Conversations on the importance of pluralism, and the ability of Americans to co-exist and productively work to solve our collective challenges, often assume that America’s democratic crisis is fundamentally one of polarization. Calls to reduce contempt, encourage dialogue, and foster empathy are sometimes made with the assumption that democratic cooperation can and must become possible again. Important bridge-building efforts across the country are built precisely on the premise that individuals of divergent backgrounds and ideological stripes must learn how to work together. These efforts matter, and at some level they have made a difference, but not enough to actually move the needle in strengthening pluralism efforts at scale. Research demonstrates that they can reduce hostilities in the short term, but impactful long-term efforts to promote real cooperation have been more difficult to find.
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To this end, many efforts to promote liberalism and pluralism fail to appreciate the full scale of the differences that currently exist in the country. What if Americans increasingly disagree not only about politics, but about the moral foundations on which politics itself is understood? Indeed, these differences go beyond policy preferences (what political scientists refer to as ideological polarization) and even beyond partisan hostility based around identity (what they call affective polarization).
At a deeper level, many Americans increasingly appear to be operating from divergent moral foundations, and, just as importantly, they increasingly believe their political opponents lack any coherent moral foundation at all. Research we recently conducted at SNF Agora found that over 50% of partisans believe that members of the opposite political party are not just bad for politics, but downright evil. This dynamic helps explain the intensity of affective polarization throughout the country. It also presents a deeper challenge for liberal pluralism: how can democratic institutions earn legitimacy among citizens who judge them according to fundamentally different moral standards?
The very concept of liberal pluralism becomes much harder when individuals disagree not only about policy solutions, partisan identities, and the efficacy of public institutions, but about the very standards used to judge them. And currently, neither side seems willing to ask what it would take to build institutions that people across this divide could actually trust.
ReD Associates and the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins recently engaged in a comprehensive ethnographic study to explore conservative attitudes toward democracy and broader public institutions. We initially set out to understand why many conservatives appeared willing to question democracy itself and tolerate democratic norm deviations—from election denialism to the perceived weaponization of government. But two weeks on the ground in each of three diverse locations, and hundreds of hours worth of interviews and community immersions, showed us that participants didn’t consider their attitudes to be anti-democratic. Instead, they understood themselves to be defending democracy’s original designs from hostile government institutions and, from their perspective, arbitrary norms enforced by self-interested political elites.
This understanding was based on a deep moral framework organized around four pillars—faith (the belief that moral authority precedes political authority), family (the primary unit of social life and obligation), freedom (from government overreach into local and personal decisions), and place (the priority of community and rootedness over national abstraction)—that preceded politics itself.
These pillars matter to conservatives for two primary reasons. First, for these individuals, democratic institutions and norms are not inherently sacred and worth defending for their own sake. They earn legitimacy only insofar as they protect and serve these pillars. And second, the democratic institutions that do earn legitimacy not only protect and serve these pillars, they also reflect them. For example, the pillar of place also includes the often deeply personal flavor of social interaction that holds community life together in many conservative communities. What builds trust is knowing who concretely is on the other side of the table, which many of our participants used to explain their relatively high levels of trust in the Supreme Court as an institution, compared to, say, government agencies or Congress. The Court’s small size makes it feel far less like a distant bureaucracy, and more like an identifiable collection of individuals—the opposite of a typical large, sprawling, faceless organization such as the Centers for Disease Control.
We did not conduct parallel research among liberals, so we cannot claim to have identified an equivalent moral framework on the left. We do feel that this research is merited in the near future. Progressive political discourse often appears to emphasize values such as equality, inclusion, institutional accountability, and individual rights. Whether those constitute a comparable underlying moral framework remains an open empirical question. But this would seem to suggest that liberals trust institutions they perceive as embodying these values, like higher education, while distrusting those that do not, like the Supreme Court itself.
The challenge, then, is not simply that conservatives and progressives hold different values. It is that they often interpret one another’s moral language through their own foundational frameworks, policy prescriptions, and beliefs. When conservatives invoke faith, family, or freedom, many liberals might suspect that more troubling values also play a role, like exclusion or hierarchy. When progressives speak of equity, inclusion, or accountability, many conservatives hear an assault on tradition, merit, or community. Each side assumes the other is disguising its true motives because each struggles to recognize the other’s moral vocabulary as authentic, or even valid.
When these values become less theoretical and more practical, the challenges increase. For example, conservatives may justify a policy preference for more immigration restriction as guided by a love of place and protection of its associated history, tradition, and social fabric. Progressives may similarly value and love the concept of place, but argue that this love serves as an argument for pursuing equity through expanded immigration. The result is deeper than a policy disagreement, but a differentiation about the type of stewardship that place requires. This disagreement can lead to, at worst, both sides believing the other not only has a different moral foundation from their own, but perhaps lacks one altogether.
We experienced this moral disconnect throughout our research. For example, when one of our researchers asked Sarah, a participant in Wyoming, whether morality was captured by the term “Republican” or “conservative,” she shot back: “Well, do Democrats have morality? Tell me.” When gently pressed, she allowed that “some of them do, but not all of them”—before immediately pivoting to explain that any morality that exists in America exists because of Judeo-Christian foundations, not the left. Similarly, Thomas, a participant in South Carolina, told us: “Democrats, I believe, have the end justifies the means… They see government as their God, in a sense. While conservatives see their God as God, and government as sort of secondary.”
On the opposite side, responses to the study from some progressive commentators reinforced this dynamic. Rather than engaging the participants’ stated values, some dismissed them as lacking values altogether or as fundamentally incapable of democratic citizenship or antagonistic to the concept of living in a liberal democracy generally. Whether representative or not, these reactions illustrate how easily each side comes to see the other as morally vacant rather than morally different. For example, a Bulwark article called the participants in the study “politically illiterate” and “not interested in creating a majority coalition. They want minority rule.” We heard similarly dismissive comments from other individuals and commenters.
At face value, listening to the conservatives in our study, and to some of the reactions from those on the left, it may be tempting to conclude that the discrepancies between the moral foundations of the left and right are too vast to bridge. Perhaps, in some cases, and on some policies, they are. Liberal and conservative political ideologies do make fundamentally different, and sometimes divergent, claims about the true sources of moral authority and political obligation. Thus, the task is not to attempt to erase or paper over those differences, but to cultivate a capacity and curiosity to engage with the goal of understanding them accurately, communicating with them in good faith, and disagreeing with respect.
Doing so requires a recognition that the left and right often use the same moral language, but attach different meanings and interpretations. Consider the language of freedom itself: both conservatives and liberals invoke “freedom” as a core moral principle. On both sides of the aisle, people express freedom through themes of bodily autonomy: the ability to make choices about oneself without state interference. But conservatives and liberals contextually apply and interpret bodily autonomy through different value-based frameworks. Debates over abortion and COVID-era vaccine mandates illustrate this tension—many on the left hold pro-choice stances while criticizing anti-vaccine sentiments, and many on the right support prohibition or increased regulation of abortion while denouncing any requirements for vaccinations. Both sides indicate that individuals should be able to make decisions about their own bodies, but they have fundamentally divergent understandings of what that means in practice.
This divergence indicates that the well-documented decline of trust in institutions may in part be driven by a perception that institutions are not politically neutral, but in fact reflect deeply ingrained moral values. What those values are, and whether an individual is aligned with those values, may be a big driver for whether or not they trust that institution. And whether or not an institution is trusted, of course, has a big impact on whether it can be seen as an arbitrator or forum for otherwise civil disagreements about policy matters. It may be impossible, especially in the present partisan context, for any arbitrator or institution to remain fully neutral. Attempting to be transparent about this reality, and potential bias, is a road towards trust.
Despite the hyper-partisan political context of today, there may actually be overlap between the moral foundations of the left and the right. However, the meaning attached to those concepts—and how they believe institutions embody and practice those values—differs. In the absence of rigorous investigation, and without exploring the values of the left in more empirical depth, it’s difficult to say declaratively. This knowledge gap matters for two reasons. First, if there are overlaps, it could indicate a strategy to meaningfully find bridge-building opportunities between liberals and conservatives. And, just as importantly, little to no overlap would necessitate different strategies, focused more on understanding and curiosity and less on bridging itself.
Liberalism has long aspired to create institutions capable of accommodating profound moral disagreement. But that aspiration becomes more demanding when disagreement extends beyond competing policy preferences or social identities, and to different understandings of the foundations of a good society, and the types of moral obligations we owe each other. The challenge is no longer simply helping citizens tolerate opposing policy preferences. It is constructing institutions that people standing on genuinely different moral foundations can nevertheless recognize as legitimate.
If that diagnosis is correct, the future of liberalism depends not only on reducing polarization, but on building institutions capable of earning legitimacy across competing moral worlds. That is a far more demanding task—but it may also be the one our moment requires.
So what does this mean in practice? It may start with individual behavior, rather than expecting trusted institutions to be constructed in a way that can solve these challenges on their own. We do not pretend to have all of the answers, and bridge-building and pluralism organizations are already doing good, necessary, if insufficient work. The deeper problem may not be that Americans disagree about right and wrong. It may be that they’ve stopped believing they’re having the same argument at all.
This problem is solvable. Understanding a fellow citizen’s moral value structure and commitments is necessary, but it’s only the beginning. Of course, this foundational belief system cannot explain every action people make or every political preference they hold. Every human being is complex, influenced by their background, identities, communities, and self-interest—alongside their learned value system. Taking another person’s moral commitments seriously does not mean accepting them without criticism. But it is possible to affirm these basic foundations without reducing people to vast generalizations.
That is a harder problem than polarization, because it can’t be solved by better manners or more dialogue alone. It does require designing institutions that can be recognized as legitimate by people who will never share a moral vocabulary—courts, agencies, and civic bodies that earn trust not by claiming neutrality, but by being visibly accountable to more than one moral world at once. But this starts with people, and with a question institution-builders rarely ask: legitimate to whom, exactly, and on what terms?
But institutions are built and sustained by people, and that same question applies closer to home. It is one thing to grant, in the abstract, that a stranger in an ethnographic study might be reasoning from a coherent moral foundation you don’t share, or from a foundation that you may value, but that you understand very differently. It is much harder to grant a coherent foundation to the people you actually argue with—a colleague, a relative, a fellow citizen down the street. If liberal democracy is going to survive its current moment, that may be the test it has to pass: rebuilding trust both in its institutions, and in its citizens, regardless of their moral framework.
