Unwillingness to Balance Partisan and Societal Interests

3. Factors That Make Conflict Intractable

This introductory article was written by ChatGPT at the direction of Heidi Burgess, who reviewed, edited, and approved the final content.
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Partisanship is not inherently bad. Democratic societies need parties, movements, advocacy groups, and organized constituencies to represent different values, interests, identities, and policy preferences. The problem arises when partisan loyalty becomes so intense that people stop asking whether a tactic, claim, or policy is good for the larger society and ask only whether it helps their side win.

This unwillingness to balance partisan and societal interests is one of the central drivers of hyper-polarization. When conflicts become intense enough, people may come to see the other side not as legitimate opponents, but as enemies whose defeat matters more than fair process, truthful information, institutional legitimacy, or long-term social trust. Under those conditions, tactics that would once have seemed unacceptable—spreading lies, attacking neutral institutions, excusing corruption, demonizing opponents, intimidating dissenters, or changing rules for short-term advantage—can begin to look justified.

This dynamic is especially dangerous because both sides can usually point to real grievances. Each side sees the other as breaking norms, manipulating procedures, misusing institutions, or threatening the country’s future. As a result, people may tell themselves that extraordinary tactics are regrettable but necessary, because "the other side does it, so if we don't, we will forever lose." The problem is that once each side adopts this reasoning, the conflict becomes self-reinforcing. One side’s hardball tactics become the other side’s justification for retaliation, and the shared norms that make democratic competition possible begin to erode.

A healthy democracy requires citizens and leaders to defend their own interests while also preserving the system that allows everyone’s interests to be heard. That means asking questions that go beyond partisan advantage: Would this tactic still seem legitimate if the other side used it? Does this claim help citizens understand reality, or does it merely inflame fear? Does this policy solve a real problem, or does it just punish an opponent? Does this strategy strengthen trust in fair procedures, or does it weaken the institutions we will all need when power changes hands?

The goal is not to eliminate partisanship or suppress passionate disagreement. The goal is to restore a sense of shared responsibility for the society in which those disagreements take place. In constructive conflict terms, this means replacing “win at any cost” politics with a commitment to pursue one’s own values in ways that do not destroy the relationships, institutions, facts, and democratic processes needed for future problem solving. Societies can survive intense conflict. They have a much harder time surviving when citizens and leaders decide that partisan victory matters more than the common good.

We have developed an exercise which allows you to think through such partisan dilemmas, which we wrote about in a newsletter entitled "Thinking about What Democracy's Winners and Losers Owe One Another"

This page was created by ChatGPT in response to this prompt. It was then reviewed, edited, supplemented and approved by Heidi Burgess. More information about how and why we are using AI in this way, and about the growing number of ways in which Beyond Intractability is using ChatGPT, Claude and other AI systems to generate content and build out the BI system, is available on our BI/AI Overview Page.