Dr. Jane Kamensky on the Founders, Polarization, and Relearning Civic Friendship

Dr. Jane Kamensky is a historian of early America and the president of Monticello, where she oversees public history initiatives at Thomas Jefferson’s home. Her work focuses on how the founding era can illuminate our own fractured politics. In this conversation, Kamensky discusses what Jefferson, Adams, and Madison can teach us about faction and disagreement, how changes in media and civic education helped fuel today’s hyperpolarization, and why she still sees grounds for hope in younger generations. She also reflects on social media, identity politics, and concrete practices that might help Americans rebuild a culture of “civic friendship.”
Note: This version trims a bit of repetition and tightens language while preserving the substance of the original exchange.
This transcript has been edited for clarity and length.

What the Founders Can Teach Us About Parties and Disagreement
BW: Thank you so much for speaking with me, Professor Kamensky. I’ve been thinking a lot about how political parties have evolved in the U.S.—how they both reflect and shape our civic culture. I’m especially curious how the founding generation thought about political division. Do their experiences offer any lessons for dealing with today’s polarization?
JK: That’s exactly the kind of question we’re asking at Monticello.
Parties in the early republic were, in many ways, an attempt to manage disagreement—to bring people together around broad visions so they didn’t fracture along more immediate, potentially dangerous lines. We’re launching a tour called Founding Friends, Founding Foes that looks at James Madison’s fear of faction and how parties emerged partly as a way to build broad coalitions.
We look at alliances like Southern Whigs and Northern Democrats, but the emotional center of the story is the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. You could focus on Jefferson and Hamilton, whose visions were very far apart, but Jefferson and Adams had something different: a deep civic friendship.
They rose together in the Revolution, then fell out—so far that Adams didn’t attend Jefferson’s inauguration. After eleven years of silence, they began writing to each other again in 1813 and exchanged more than a hundred letters. Those letters are a model for engaging across difference: honest, clear about disagreements, but grounded in mutual respect and a shared belief that both were working for the good of the American people.
That’s the core lesson: history isn’t just content; it’s also a set of skills. If we can show visitors how Jefferson and Adams rebuild their relationship—by asking questions, presuming goodwill, and finding limited areas of agreement—maybe people will feel more able to do the same today.

How We Got to “Winner-Take-All” Politics
BW: One of the case studies in my capstone is the Great Compromise and how it emerged from deep disagreement. It feels like polarization has always been with us, but something about today seems different. Over your lifetime, how have American political ideologies evolved? What’s driving the current hyperpolarization?
JK: I’d say I’ve watched the change more across my life than just my career.
Starting in the late 20th century—especially the early 1990s—American politics shifted toward a winner-take-all mindset. The goal of politics became less “let’s come together to make change” and more “let’s stop them, even if it means we don’t move forward either.”
There are many ingredients. One is the media landscape. The end of the Fairness Doctrine in the late 1980s opened the door to talk radio and cable news that no longer had to present opposing viewpoints. When I was your age, there were four major channels. During something like Watergate, people of all political stripes saw the same coverage and heard the same trusted anchors. There was more shared factual ground, even with political disagreement.
Now, media outlets can survive—and even thrive—by feeding their audiences only what they already believe. That’s a powerful accelerant for polarization.

The Nationalization of Politics and Decline of Local News
BW: That resonates with what I’ve been reading. How has the decline of local news changed our political culture?
JK: The loss of local journalism has been devastating for civic life.
Local papers have been shuttering at an alarming rate. When people lose local reporting, they lose trusted sources who cover school boards, city councils, zoning—everything that shapes their immediate lives.
Instead, they end up getting most of their political information from national outlets, which are often highly partisan or geared toward outrage. That “nationalization” of our discourse makes it harder to say, “I disagree with you on this issue, but we agree on that one, so let’s work together.” Nuance gets crowded out.
On top of that, civic education has eroded. In the 1960s and afterward, many civics courses were dropped, sometimes by people on the left who worried those classes were just patriotic indoctrination. The unintended result is generations who know less about how government actually works. Where knowledge declines, trust usually follows.

Social Media and Identity Politics
BW: You’ve mentioned media changes and civic education. What about social media? Platforms today seem to reward outrage and performative behavior. How do you see that shaping polarization?
JK: Social media is the most extreme expression of trends that began with cable. It’s a business model built on neuropsychology.
I find Jonathan Haidt’s work persuasive: these platforms are designed to be addictive. They rewire our brains, even absent bad actors. Add in disinformation campaigns, and you get an environment that’s very poor for civil conversation. People are placed into echo chambers where their identity gets bound up with what they “like” and what they “hate.” That’s not fertile ground for dialogue.
BW: And how do you think identity politics fits into all this?
JK: We all have multiple, overlapping identities—but modern politics and social media often flatten us down to one or two.
You might be a young white man. I’m an aging white woman. Someone else might choose one of dozens of gender identifiers. None of that captures the fullness of who we are or what we care about.
What gives me some hope is that, in the 2024 election, voting behavior didn’t always follow the identity lines people predicted. That suggests identity doesn’t entirely dictate belief. I’m a big fan of the research group More in Common; they focus on what unites Americans, and it turns out that’s still quite a lot.
The American “genius” has been to build an incredibly diverse, pluralistic society around a shared set of ideals: that all people are created equal and have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Identity politics can make us forget that North Star—but it doesn’t erase it.

Bowling Alone, Marrying Apart, and Reasons for Hope
BW: One study I came across found that in 2020, less than a third of marriages were between people of different political affiliations—down from nearly half in the early 1970s. How do you think about statistics like that?
JK: That ties directly into Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone.
Putnam shows how we’ve lost “middle spaces” of association—bowling leagues are his famous example—where people of different backgrounds and beliefs came together for reasons unrelated to politics. Those spaces created cross-cutting ties that made it harder to demonize one another.
Now, even dating is algorithmic; people can sort potential partners by political label. Neighborhoods are more ideologically sorted, too. You used to see opposing yard signs on the same street. Now people move to enclaves of the like-minded.
But let me end on a hopeful note. Your generation is, in some ways, more skeptical than mine—polls show young Americans less likely to say democracy is essential. That’s worrying. At the same time, you’re also more aware of how social media manipulates us, and less willing to let corporations or political machines dictate your beliefs.
These trends are not destiny. They’re patterns. And patterns can be changed.
BW: Thank you again for taking the time to talk with me. I’m really excited to share my capstone with you when it’s finished.
JK: I’m looking forward to reading it. And please keep me posted on your college decisions—you’ve got an exciting path ahead.