Steven Lukes asks whether shared understandings survive in the contemporary world. Lukes notes that we live in an era of political polarization that was only beginning to emerge when Walzer wrote Spheres of Justice. Lukes suggests that polarization produces understandings that depend increasingly on party affiliation and result in what has been called ‘tribal epistemology.’ However, Lukes suggests, this polarization is asymmetrical, at least in the United States, where many Republicans oppose society’s central information-gathering institutions (such as universities and mass media), while Democrats remain reliant on them. Lukes argues that polarization need not mean no shared understandings survive. Polarization is largely driven by the mobilization of power to reassure the comfortable, while inflaming the grievances of the disadvantaged. Experiments in deliberative democracy can help enable people to discover, despite that mobilization, what interests they have in common and to realize which values they share.