How to depolarize
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What Could Go Right? is a free weekly newsletter from?The Progress Network?written by our executive director,?Emma Varvaloucas. In addition to this newsletter, which collects substantive progress news from around the world, The Progress Network is also home to the anti-apocalypse conversational podcast also called?What Could Go Right?.
How to depolarize
On Monday, the day that former president Donald Trump was indicted in Georgia for efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, I got into an argument with a close friend who is considering voting for him again.
This friend is patriotic, a true lover of the United States. I told him I didn’t understand why he would vote for someone who so clearly doesn’t have the US’ best interests at heart. He told me that his vote is none of my business. Emotions rose. Eventually, he said, “It’s not right that you wouldn’t be friends with me anymore if I vote for Trump.”
I was taken aback. “I never said that,” I responded. “Of course we would still be friends.”
So much has been written about polarization in the US that writing about it again feels passé. I’m uncertain how much the US has passed through the trend of cutting off people we disagree with. But since the 2024 election looks, at least for now, like it will be a Trump-Biden rematch, it also feels necessary to continue to talk about?depolarization.
The Progress Network (TPN) Member David Brooks recently wrote a piece in?The Atlantic?asking why Americans are so much?meaner to each other nowadays. I’m not sure I agree with that premise, but I don’t think it’s controversial to say that American political dysfunction has bled into our private lives in ways that are damaging to social health. Americans increasingly view people affiliated with the opposing party as?dumb and immoral.?Partisan identification?now supersedes that of race, religion, or ethnicity.?
One thing I find oddly encouraging when it comes to polarization is that fixing it includes a lot of normal activities that humans generally like to do and that ordinary people can easily participate in. There’s not much most of us can do about Trump’s legal woes, unless we happen to be?Jack Smith or Fani T. Willis. But there is a lot we can do to depolarize.
Like hanging out with “Democracks,” as a friend of a friend refers to me. Or Republicans or libertarians or progressives. Or simply having some conversations with people you might not normally speak with, without the goal of trying to change their mind on a topic. If you’re not sure how to go about doing either of those things, the depolarization organization?Braver Angels?is a great go-to.?
More specifically, Substacker John Halpin, the writer at the helm of?The Liberal Patriot, had?four suggestions?in his recent piece on how to recreate space for the “live and let live” ethos he sees at the heart of the American project. I see them as essential depolarization guidelines:
Numbers one and two should come as a relief. Go to yoga class, join a bowling league, become a LARPer, bring your kid to Gymboree. Do whatever you’d like. Just keep it nonpolitical! Voila: you’re already making?America depolarized again.
If you're an actively political person, this doesn't mean that you have to change anything about your efforts, whether those are campaigning for a cause, signing people up to vote, or community organizing. It's simply creating some space where those efforts are not the primary relationship glue.
Number?three is trickier. I personally manage it by staying silent when people in my social circle disparage others for political views or by bringing up a nugget of information that challenges what is being shared. I also try not to assume that knowing X about a person means that they also think Y. People are complicated creatures, and the motivations each side tends to place?upon the other are often wrong, or at the very least, simplified.
Number four has been particularly useful?to me when it comes to?navigating relationships in which you?do?talk about political issues. In a 2017 Stanford study, researchers found that one reason, as I wrote above, that partisan identification supersedes that of race, religion, or ethnicity is because it’s viewed as voluntary. Therefore, “it is a much more informative measure of attitudes and beliefs structures than, for example, knowing what skin color someone has,”?says the study. In other words, I never chose to be Greek-American. I did choose to register as a “Democrack.” Others thus hold me responsible for that decision, as I hold them responsible for theirs.
But I do wonder how much control we really exercise over our political opinions and social stances, since what shapes them is often the product of environment—our neighborhoods and communities, our families and friends and coworkers, our cultural heritage, our educations, our social media algorithms. Random events, even, that happened to happen to us.
With my maybe-voting-for-Trump-again friend, for example, many of our viewpoint disagreements come from vastly different life experiences. He’s blue collar; I’m white collar. He’s a veteran; I’m not. He grew up very poor; I didn’t. Is it such a surprise that we don’t see eye to eye? And if one of our viewpoints shifts, is it because that person suddenly became a more responsible moral agent, or because their?environment?shifted?
Thinking in this way, we can still disagree with people's decisions and positions, of course. We can still try to persuade them to change their minds. But it helps take apart the unconscious mental equation of?"decision I think is bad" =?"person I think is bad."
With the presidential election looming, I believe turning toward each other is more important now than ever. Whether it’s Trump or Biden in 2024, and whatever comes next, we Americans will all still have to live with one?another.
I'm curious to hear from our readers about this. Do you have any cross-partisan relationships? Is depolarization important to you? Any thoughts are welcome. Comment below or email [email protected].
—Emma Varvaloucas
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