Addressing questions from skeptics of political depolarization and bridge-building work
A talk with Melissa Weintraub of Resetting the Table
When it comes to the work of reducing toxic polarization, I see a big part of that work as overcoming objections from people skeptical of the work. In many surveys, we can see evidence that most people, across the political spectrum, do want a lowering of toxicity. But it’s also true that many of those people don’t know what such a path looks like. Many people, even as they want a lowering of toxicity, also think something like: “The other side is so bad and harmful, so how can there be a lowering of animosity?” or “Isn’t our animosity necessary? Don’t we need it to defeat the ‘bad guys’?”
There are a whole slew of common objections, on the right and the left, that are various manifestations of these core questions. This is why overcoming such objections is key. Overcoming those mental obstacles to embracing the work of reducing polarization helps turn someone into an advocate — someone who can in turn persuade others.
In my book How Contempt Destroys Democracy (written for a liberal audience), I focused a lot on overcoming objections; I have a section near the beginning where I go through common objections and then revisit them later in the book. One of the reasons I’ve spent so much time on this work is that not many people are directly confronting these objections. We need more people doing that work, and that is the value I saw myself as bringing to the table.
And, to be clear, it’s easy to understand why this is; for one, many people, even in the bridge-building/depolarization space have some of the same objections and questions. For another, doing the work of confronting objections, even for those who see it as important, is very hard work. It’s work that risks alienating you from your own political tribe. It’s exhausting work where one will often be in uncharted territories without clear maps forged by other travelers.
The most important work is often the most difficult. We’ve only just begun, as a country and as a species, to be educated about the nature of toxic conflict and polarization.
I wanted to share a talk where Liz Joyner of The Village Square interviewed Melissa Weintraub, who is the Executive Director of Resetting The Table. In this talk, Melissa spent some time addressing some common liberal-side objections. The transcript is below.
Some topics Melissa tackles include:
Why bother engaging with people with whom I disagree?
Can’t polarization be a good thing? Isn’t polarization necessary for social progress?
Are there “red lines” for people we shouldn’t engage with? How do you draw that line?
Is what you do “both sides”-ism? Is it promoting a mushy centrism?
What’s a concrete example where you’ve seen this kind of bridge-building effort pay off? What did that look like?
The full talk with Melissa Weintraub is located here.
The transcription below that starts at about 47 minutes in and goes to about 1 hr 15 minutes. (A real person did these transcripts, not an app, but it may still contain errors; let me know if you think you see a major one.)
Consider sharing this piece with people you think would benefit from seeing these objections addressed. And, if this piece piques your interest, consider checking out my book.
TRANSCRIPT (starting ~47:00)
Liz Joyner: Putting a little bit more under some of this, let's talk about some of the questions around building bridges from skeptics. So, why bother engaging with people with whom I disagree? What's wrong with polarization anyway? Some people say it's good for our differences to be sharpened.
Melissa Weintraub: Yes, such a good question. I think, often, that the idea of polarization as good is coming from people on the left who see societal contentiousness as something that can drive important changes in society. And when we talk about toxic polarization, we're differentiating it from disagreement or just contentiousness. We're talking about the kind of whole high conflict runaway cycle of us-them dehumanization that we've been talking about tonight, in which we see others as threats and enemies, and that then act accordingly, that produces all kinds of harms. In terms of the question of why bother engaging, that's actually a question that we love to ask people when we're in an interactive format. We love to just kind of collect responses from different audiences about what they're experiencing as lost communally and personally and societally in the face of toxic polarization.
We’ve found that people actually less and less need this on some level because so many people today are experiencing the current costs and harms of polarization. They're experiencing harmed relationships and fractured communities, just this kind of brokenness. 16% of Americans- I think it's actually now more- have stopped speaking to a close friend over politics. It is just staggering. It means a loss of millions of relationships; tens of millions of relationships in this moment that we have an epidemic of loneliness in our country that's been found to cause all kinds of costs to our health and our democracy.
Polarization also just leads to cynicism and exhaustion and disengagement, with a lot of people putting their fingers in their ears and unplugging and checking out. David French had a powerful metaphor for this recently in an op-ed in the New York Times where he talked about how Americans are becoming, like jurors who've left the courtroom because they're so repelled by the lawyers' hostility, and then they have to return to make weighty decisions without any evidence.
Liz: Oh, wow, that is great.
Melissa: Yeah, it's a good one. I think we've talked about this a little bit but not a lot that we get erosions of democratic norms and the conditions for political violence, and America is just seeing pretty startling leaps in acts of and acceptance of political violence and harassment and threats. We could talk much more about that. But just going back to the engine for that question and speaking more to people who see polarization as a driver for change, I think it's important to say that the work of dialogue is not meant to replace all the other tools in our toolkits. It doesn't mean we stop championing or fighting for what we believe in. It means that we engage our counterparts alongside other work, because doing so is going to make us more effective. On a micro level, because we better know how to frame issues we care about to people who aren't our natural allies, and there's no change that's created without that. And on a macro level, because polarization is like the meta threat, you know, the crisis that makes every other crisis worse, and it makes it that much harder to move any of our other agendas forward.
I'll share one more thinker and metaphor. We've had a lot of metaphors. We love the work of John Paul Lederach, who is a scholar and practitioner of conflict transformation and social change, and he has this great metaphor of how change happens. That it's like baking bread, and baking bread requires flour and yeast, right? And so the flour, he compares to mass mobilization of the like-minded. And to create change we need to mobilize like-minded people. But that's never enough on its own. Social change also requires that tiny ingredient of yeast, and often, the 40 people in a room is more important than all the people marching in the streets, especially when there's entrenched divisions. And that is about strange bedfellows coming together across their differences.
Liz: Do you have any red lines about who you won't work with to build relationships? And should I engage with people who deny my humanity, for example?
Melissa: That's a very important question. And I think, actually, there's two questions there. There's 'with whom do we have red lines,' and then, 'what would we say to people who are asking the question of should they have red lines? Should they talk to people denying their humanity?' At RTT, we don't advocate all dialogue with all people all the time, I will say. You know, there's a wide spectrum of comfort levels for whom we're each willing to engage and where we each draw our personal moral boundaries. And on one end, there's another person who I know who has spoken on UNUM, Daryl Davis. He's spoken here, a Black man whose mission in life is to engage in direct dialogue with KKK members-
Liz: And maximally, yes. He goes right to the edge, right?
Melissa: Right to the edge, and God bless him. I am drawn to that edge as well and we need people who are doing that. And we also don't expect everybody to go on that journey. If it feels that one’s humanity is at stake in a conversation, it is a lot to ask to extend oneself to achieve understanding for people on other sides of divides, and not every conversation and every table needs to be for everyone. So, we sometimes reference an idea of informed consent of those who may experience most vulnerability at a given table, like clarifying whether this is something that they want to do with their energies and for their own purposes.
At the same time, we are living in this cultural moment in which too many people are drawing their red lines very close to themselves. We live in a moment when premature dismissal of entire groups of people has become a kind of collective reflex when so many of us harbor very limited understanding of the actual motivations and concerns of significant segments of other Americans. So when that becomes a societal pattern, it leads to all the harms and patterns that we've described.
Liz: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Is what you do like both-sidesism? Mushy middle?
Melissa: Yes. All right, you're bringing in all the voices of the skeptics, and it's good. It is not both-sidesism, in the sense that we are not saying this is right and that is right or these things are equally right. What we're trying to do is name differences and just crystallize them so that we can have an accurate understanding of where our differences actually lie, and then we can push and challenge each other. This is not about singing Kumbaya and group hugs and just riding off into the sunset together and pretending we don't have real differences or setting aside our fundamental moral commitments in favor of some mushy middle ground, it is about creating the conditions in which we can figure out where we actually diverge and who our counterparts actually are and we can challenge each other and stretch each other's thinking so that we can... You want to jump in here?
Liz: Well, I was just saying you're separating the signal from the noise. So now you're really talking about what the real difference is, which is pretty important.
Melissa: Exactly. We're not just tucked in our echo chambers writing each other off. Yes.
Liz: Yeah. I can see a couple of questions that are sort of on the conversation. One from Fred: Please give an example of people being seen as they wish to be seen. And then Mark wants to know, can you describe a conversation between opposing sides? It illustrates going towards difference. An example would make this more concrete.
Melissa: Yes. I'm going to take people into work that we're doing right now in greater Buffalo. This takes a little bit of contextualizing, but we are working to build lines of communication and collaboration across strong ideological and racial divides in greater Buffalo. Buffalo is a kind of microcosm for dynamics that go to the core of pain and division in the US. It's a meeting of red and blue America, it's a rust belt industrial city with strong working-class roots with a narrative of being down on its luck and the hope of making a comeback, and it's a city that is operating under the shadow of identity-based violence and political violence, a racially motivated grocery store massacre that shook the city to its core that left the Black community in massive trauma and grief, and a lesser known firebombing of a pro-life pregnancy clinic, and there is just a history of political violence in Western New York. So we are doing work in Western New York that began working in affinity groups because we thought that with the exceptional diversity of people that we were working with, it would be harmful to throw everybody together. Initially, we were doing work... I'll describe three different rooms and then bring them together, and that's the context for the moment that I'll share. So, one room consisted of Black and Brown community leaders and activists confronting their own differences around 'where does money go when it's invested in our community' and the generational divides that they have around those questions. We have another room of conservative evangelicals that goes right and righter, and they're talking about what role Christianity should be playing in American life, and homeschooling their kids, and whether homeschooling is required to shelter their kids from harmful ideologies. Right? These are very different rooms. Another room is multi-racial and multi-faith -- Muslim-Jewish, mainline Protestant smaller lines of difference -- and they're talking about differences about cancel culture and policing and guns and immigration. And now, we're bringing everybody together. So that's the context for the moment that I'll share. I think that there were two questions, one of which was about seeing people as they wished to be seen, and one of which was about going towards the heat. Right? I'm going to try to get at both of them in this example.
Liz: Yeah.
Melissa: So, this is a moment that I think shows both of those things and also the ripples of doing so, which is why I want to share it. There's a conservative evangelical White pastor, we'll call him Brett, and a Black progressive community leader, we'll call her Nicole. And they are doing an exercise in which they're practicing giving what we call a bull's eye reflection, which means they are trying to reconstruct each other's thinking until they get to the point that they would both lean forward in their chair and say, "Yes, exactly. That's it. You get me. You see what I think about what we're talking about." And what they're talking about is not the sexiest topic, they're talking about forgiveness of student loans. For various reasons, that's what surfaced. So, Nicole is listening to Brett talk about how student loans prioritize people who attend universities and get advanced degrees, rather than people who attend trade schools. And he's saying, "How can we be talking about forgiving loans for grad students when there's all these working people working their butts off?" I think he probably said asses off, I don't know if I can say that in this setting, right? But he said, "You know, there's all these people who are working their butts off going to trade school and getting saddled with debt." And Nicole is saying to Brett, "You know, because of my grad student debt, I'm never going to be a homeowner. I will raise my kids in poverty. And I am a public figure in this county with a six-figure salary. Because of accrued debt through grad student loans, there's always going to be a ceiling to my ability to lift my kids out of poverty. And that kind of debt disproportionately impacts communities of color." And they're going at it for a while, and eventually, he is like, "I had no idea," and she is like, "I've never thought about the thing that you're saying." And there are kind of tears in their eyes and tears of many people in the room. It was emotional to see them achieving that kind of recognition. These are two people who were actually very resistant to having come on this journey with us, which is kind of part of the story.
But really what really struck us about this moment- and I think it's good to talk about the bigger significance of it- Brett does work in workforce development for a living, a lot of which happens in communities of color. And he kind of says out loud, "I have never actually taken seriously enough intergenerational poverty in black communities and its causes." And Nicole is the Director for Health Equity for the county, and she says, "I've trained my staff who work in multiple communities but a big part of that work is in White rural communities, and I have never before this moment really taken seriously the economic impact of inherited poverty on poor White folks who are stuck and unable to achieve economic mobility." And they kind of just realize how each of them is missing huge things about populations they directly impact and how they have these gaps in what they saw and understood that have real implications for the work that they're doing in the world and how there's no way for that gap to be filled without relationship and difficult dialogue. They see how their communities have been invisible to each other and how they're not able to achieve their vision or the work with which they've been entrusted as leaders without this moment of pushing and challenging each other, and how that's going to make their work better and it's going to help their teams work better, it's going to help their organizations systematically become better, and it's going to make their community better.
This didn't come from them, this is more us at Resetting the Table reflecting on this moment afterwards. But we were thinking about how in America today, entire populations are missing each other's perspectives as we've been talking about.
Economic strain in particular impacts so many different communities and is often very invisible. You know, it doesn't make front-page news, it's not as sexy as a lot of other issues. And the communities that each of them, Nicole and Brett and what they represent, they've been pitted against each other and they largely don't see each other's pain, and there's a whole political apparatus that says, "It's you or it's you," right? It's not both of you, it's not all of you. These kind of zero-sum games at play. And the simple act of fearlessly surfacing, "Here's where we have a difference on student loans and not shrinking from the issues, and we're going to work at it and work at it till we reconstruct each other's thinking," witnessed by others in community got them to see how they need each other's perspectives to make their community better.
Liz: That is a beautiful story. That's wonderful. You and I have talked a fair amount about a common challenge that we've looked at, which is getting Conservatives engaged in this work. This is a field-wide challenge- what you referred to a little bit earlier- that a lot of Liberals show up to do this work, and it's harder to get Conservatives in involved. So, why should we do that? Why should we spend some extra time focusing on that goal?
Melissa: Great question. Well, I'll say that we see the scarcity of Conservatives in the bridging sector as one of the greatest obstacles to our field achieving its goals. It's really in the way of our work being successful. We just won't mend the fabric of America with 50% of America. And it's not really just a numbers game. We can get to a tipping point without reaching everyone, but we won't get there by mobilizing relatively like-minded people. The way that we think about this is not only about Conservatives, it's about a lot of groups. It's about rural people and working-class people and BIPOC people. And even it's about activists, right? Activists are underrepresented in our field for good reason. There's a lot of talk about mobilizing the reasonable middle or the exhausted majority or the hopeful majority or the in-group moderates and isolating the extremes, and from what we have seen and observed, that strategy writes off too many people who are would-be partners and the very people that we need. Because we need the most engaged and most passionate voices who are going to have outsized influence on our political culture involved. And that was, for me, one of the hard-won lessons of years of work in Israel-Palestine. That world became a shrinking subculture because it didn't speak enough to the concerns and struggles of so many people who are passionately convicted.
Liz: And you'd said something when we were chatting before that very often things are set up in a way and in a language and with framing that is actually sending a clear message to some of the harder people to reach. This is actually not for you. You have to agree with us first about a bunch of things to even walk in the room.
Melissa: Yes, that is very true. So now we're getting at the 'how', right? Not just the 'why'. Sometimes I think people are very aware of this and they're really trying, but we fixate too much on individual words. Right? Like, "Oh, I'll avoid saying that word because that word isn't going to resonate." And it's really so much bigger than that. And we've actually been reflecting on the question of how to engage Conservatives much more. Just in the last month. It's something that we haven't really talked about much publicly, but I'll try in this moment. Because I think it's been a kind of underacknowledged ingredient in our sauce and in our work that we haven't crystallized enough. So I think it is very much-
Liz: And it is important maybe to say that you've had tremendous success in this regard.
Melissa: We have had success in this regard. And so we've been asking ourselves, "How can we explain how we're doing that better, and even understand it for ourselves?" So I think the first step is deciding to do it. It goes back to what you were just asking about the 'why'. It's like there's a book called The Answer to How Is Yes. And the reason I say that is because it's hard, actually. It's not something that is easy or quick. It takes real investment and trust building and relationship building, and it's much easier and faster to create a self-selecting group. So first of all, we have to decide that it's worth it. And we're going to slow down in order to speed up in order to ultimately produce more impactful outcomes. We have to identify and engage trusted messengers in the communities that we want to reach. This is just absolutely essential. We start with people with social capital in those communities who are looked to as exemplars. They don't need to be in positions of formal leadership, they do need to be respected and influential with their constituencies. This is how our work in Buffalo began. We began by cold calling a very Conservative White evangelical pastor and cold calling a very progressive Black pastor and community organizer who were connected to communities that were directly impacted by political and hate-fueled violence in greater Buffalo and they became the kernels of everything else that we did.
We need to meet people where they are. And that's not just actually about framing, it's not about what words we use in our fliers. I'll bring in some of the work that we did in rural Wisconsin now. So in that work, which involved bringing 36 facilitators and interns with it- us most of them (most of whom were coming from deep-blue enclaves, they were coming from schools like Brown and UC Berkeley and Oberlin- into a context that if you look at the map of the counties that swung Obama to Trump in the 2016 election, almost all of them are concentrated in this area. Really almost all of them. And we trained the people who came with us to do our first two skills; following the meaning and demonstrating understanding. Right? Which means asking questions that draw what's meaningful to people and capturing it, and to do it by meeting people where they are. We call this being in the mix. And I'll make this very concrete. We found out what bars and what churches and hunting clubs and gun shops and farming organizations and community events that people that we wanted to reach frequent, and at what times of day they were there. And we listened and we built relationships. We cold-called 285 pastors and priests in 13 counties and we asked them- we don't always have the luxury of doing this- but we asked them, you know, many of them took our calls and we asked them how polarization was impacting them and was impacting their communities. Many of them not just took a call from a stranger across the country, they invited us into their churches and they lined up their congregants for us to sit and listen to them. And they were just so hungry to actually tell their story and have their flocks tell their story and be accurately heard, because they have felt enormously misrepresented and maligned. So, listening well is a crucial part of this, asking people questions about what they care about and what they're afraid of.
Liz: And most of us do not listen well. Correct?
Melissa: It is another crucial part of our sauce. It's really like where we often start, it's by teaching listening skills. Whether we're working with people who are coming together across ideological differences or working with TV writers, we start by teaching them how to listen to other people in the room. Because that is how we unlock a lens, essentially, of being able to step into a different viewpoint and not just fill in all of our perception gaps with our implicit bias, essentially.
Liz: Which is what we humans do, right?
Melissa: It's what we're hardwired for.
Liz: It's just a human thing.
Melissa: Yeah.
Liz: I have got to read this question from Paul just as he wrote it, because it's good.
Melissa: Okay.
Liz: Does transformative mediation require that participants enter the room with a heaping helping of goodwill already present in their hearts?
Melissa: He's asking if it does require that goodwill?
Liz: Yes. Yes.
Melissa: Transformative mediation is actually like a very studied way of helping people who did not enter a room with goodwill get back to goodwill. That's how I would put it. One of the things that transformative mediation observed is that when people are in conflict and they turn to a mediator for help, they're turning to a mediator for help more often because they want to get out of the ugly experience of being in conflict and how horrible it is, not because they want the mediator to help them get to shared interests. And when the mediator can help them relax and lower their defenses and be in their best selves and be as generous and receptive to each other as possible, they're going to be able to get to the outcomes that they themselves seek, rather than the mediator pushing them there.
Liz: Yeah, that's great. We touched on this, I guess I just want to see if there's anything else that you want to say. Regarding it as, you know, are there specific lessons that sort of came directly from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that you see playing out in the United States now?
Melissa: That's a big one. Yes. I think that the first thing that comes to mind to say... When we pivoted, we saw a lot of indicators, as I said earlier, of intractable conflict here. One of those was this kind of secessionist fantasy that happened after the 2016 election in liberal America, this kind of fantasy of "Could we just get a Red state Blue state divorce?" Like, "Would we be better off if they just went away?" So I think that one of the lessons of working on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the danger and fallacy of pro-Israel or pro-Palestinian "We win, or they do," zero-sum thinking. Like, we are all here to stay, Republicans and Democrats and everybody else, and there's no total defeat in a true democracy by definition, and that means we are each other's only possible partners in building a better future. And we have to act as if that's the case. Right? As the great Dr. King put it, we're going to live and rise together or perish as fools. I would say that's lesson one.
There's a lot I could say here, but one way to look at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is as a tragic dance of cause and effect of actions and reactions between two parties who believe that the other is kind of single-mindedly out to get them, and who as a result, create a lot of harm and escalation in the name of self-protection that feed right into each other's worst perceptions. And it's less about borders and Jerusalem and water and refugees and all these technical issues that it looks like it's about. It is much more about trust and recognition. Like, do I believe that they will recognize my legitimacy or my historical dispossession? Will they stop at nothing until they've taken all we have? Will they never accept our right to be here? Will they only listen to force? Will they give with one hand and take with the other? And would they destroy us if they could? And if so, then how could I trust enough to contemplate giving an inch that would weaken my position or be used against me?
Liz: Also, I'm going to do anything necessary to protect myself if that's how it feels, which then becomes part of the escalation. Right? I think one of the things that's frustrated me through these years of this work is how often we fail to recognize a cycle we're stuck in, and where our behavior then creates behavior on the other side- us behavior then them behavior- and then it just keeps spiraling in a destructive cycle.
Melissa: Yes, and that is the tragedy, the attack and defend cycle. We're not at that level of escalation and entrenchment and violence, obviously here, and I do hesitate to make comparisons too closely but I think that there's something illuminating about looking at polarization in the US as a conflict cycle in the same way. And looking at issues of trust and distrust and misrecognition, like we've been saying, is more at play than differences in interests and policies. 80% I think of Americans now say that leaders and members of the other party are a threat to the country, right? And there's just this belief that they're going to take away my rights and freedoms. And there's valid reasons and histories for these beliefs, as in all conflict cycles. Our differences in the US are real, but more than policy differences, we just have these fundamental issues of distrust and contempt that mean that we're fighting the boogeyman version of our counterparts, which in turn feeds bunker mentalities and arms race mentalities and escalation.
Liz: Well, it seems like it's easy to assume that the dangerous, serious escalations that we see in the Middle East are an 'other' problem, right? It's something that happens somewhere else between other people. And so, to me, part of what's instructive is that it's important to know that these are human conditions that can exist between any us and them anywhere and to be able to understand and study it so that we know some of the right things to do instead of... It seems like we are pretty good at doing the wrong thing sometimes.
Melissa: Yes, absolutely. Yeah.
Liz: I'm looking at some of the other questions. I'll grab a couple of them. So Kamy Akhavan is a colleague of ours at USC Center for the Political Future. Of all the solutions to deep social division that you think work best, which ones do you think are the most important and impactful at scale and the most likely to be achieved in the United States? And how can we support your recommendation for the most impactful and realistically achievable solution to polarization in America?
Melissa: Oh, that's a doozy.
Liz: Big question.
Melissa: Yes, big question. We try to steer clear of kind of most important because... I said earlier we don't think there's a silver bullet, there are so many interventions that are needed. I will say that one of the things that is really needed, we talked about the scale of what was achieved in Northern Ireland, $44 a person, and I think philanthropists in the US kind of balk at that, like what that would mean to invest at that level in the US in intergroup contact and intra-group norm building. And that may be what we need to get to a tipping point. We just need massive investment on that level, which probably will require also government investment. Some of my friends in the Israeli-Palestinian peacebuilding field worked for years to get Congress to invest $250 million in Israeli-Palestinian peacebuilding. And tragically, a lot of that work was just kind of coming to fruition before October 7th. But that meant that just incredible initiatives were being funded at the level at which it will be needed to move the needle there, right? You know, people or bereaved families who've lost immediate loved ones to the conflict getting the funding that they need to help amplify their incredible voices that can model and shift consciousness. And Israeli and Palestinian surgeons who are working together, Gazan surgeons and surgeons in Southern Israel that are working together also modeling the voices that we need. So, that work is being invested in from the US government and we need that level of investment here. I'll say one other thing that's coming to mind, this is kind of nerdy but we'll geek out for a moment. One of the things that I think will help get to that investment is building an evidence base around our field. But when we talk about evidence base, a lot of what tends to be talked about is practitioners implementing researchers' principles and assumptions. And I think that we're at a point in which practice has outstripped the ability to measure it, and that part of what we need is for researchers to be researching what's working well among practitioners and learning how to measure it. It's kind of like in the medical field when people finally started taking seriously that acupuncture and meditation and things like that work, and measuring it and trying to understand it and understand its mechanism. So I think we need researcher-practitioner partnership, and that's part of the picture.
Liz: Wow, that's incredibly smart. We've been doing a lot of work in the measurement space, and actually, we've got our SCIM tool and everything, but that makes so much sense. We only have so much time, we need to zero in on what is actually working.