Articles to help overcome objections to depolarization/bridge-building work

Some articles about our divides I wrote for Builders (formerly Starts With Us)

When it comes to reducing toxic polarization, the most common objection goes something like, “But they’re horrible; we need our anger, maybe even our contempt; we need to be polarized; maybe we should be even more polarized; maybe that would help us finally defeat ‘them.’”

This objection, that “they’re horrible and dangerous, so we don’t need your conflict resolution ideas” will take many forms and iterations, but it is at the heart of most objections to this work. It’s at the heart of objections to conflict resolution ideas in general: people in conflict often have little desire to work on lessening the toxicity of the conflict, because they often see the problem as being the “other side.”

Just yesterday someone sent me a message criticizing my work, telling me, “There’s nothing wrong with contempt; it can be a valuable thing.” I disagree and believe contempt is always a bad, toxic thing — but even if you believe contempt can be a good thing, you should be curious about whether your contempt is overstated and based on distorted views. You should be curious if you have “undue hate” (to reference Dan Stone’s book). You should be curious if your undue hate is causing you to contribute to a self-reinforcing cycle of contempt — and even helping create the very things you’re upset by.

If you aren’t curious about these things, you run the risk of being not much different from the highly contemptuous people on the “other side” whom you likely judge.

A. B. C.! Always Be Confronting (Objections)

In my work, I’ve focused on tackling these objections. In my books Defusing American Anger (written for all Americans) and How Contempt Destroys Democracy (written for anti-Trump audience), I lead with a list of common objections and then, later, review how I’ve overcome those objections. I see overcoming objections as key to this work: it’s those objections that are the obstacles that prevent these ideas from spreading throughout society.

We need to remove these obstacles — these sources of friction — so that more activists, leaders, pundits, and regular citizens see the path for how they can pursue their political goals while also seeking to reduce toxicity and contempt.

Resources to help overcome objections

Below I’ll include some pieces I wrote for the Builders Movement (formerly known as Starts With Us) over the last 1.5 years.

If you’re passionate about this cause, you might find these articles useful for sharing with people to overcome various forms of “they’re horrible so why should I care about this work?” objections. You can play a valuable role in the effort to reduce toxic polarization by helping overcome objections — by helping people better understand what the path to a less polarized, less dysfunctional future looks like.

Okay, here are some of those articles from Builders…

Objection: “Are things really so bad? Isn’t it normal for us to disagree?”

Some people don’t see this time period as much different than our divides a couple decades ago, or back in the 1960s. People with this objection can be prone to not caring much about the problem of toxic polarization, due to seeing it as a standard situation.

But there are a number of ways where we’re at now is extraordinary and dangerous:

Objection: “But they’re horrible and dangerous”

To overcome this objection, we can try to get people to see how distorted and overly pessimistic their views of the “other side” are. Once you start seeing how distorted our views of each other can be, you can also see how there’s a self-reinforcing-cycle aspect to all this hostility, with insults and contempt leading to more fear and anger, which leads to more insults and threats, and so on. This can help show that all of us, for the sake of the country and even for the sake of our own goals, should want to lower toxicity and foster better, more healthier disagreement.

Some articles to help people see how their views of the “other side” may be way too dark and pessimistic:

For an overview of the highly pessimistic views both groups can arrive at, including views that “they’re the violent ones,” see this piece of mine “It’s all the other side’s fault.”

Objection: “Depolarization and bridge-building work is just ‘both-sides-ism’; you’re helping the bad guys.”

One objection goes like this: “Trying to get both political groups to reduce toxicity is making a false equivalency; you’re engaging in ‘both sides’-ism.” The “both sides” wording is heard mostly from liberal people, but conservatives make the same arguments using different language.

This is another form of the “they’re bad so we should be polarized” core objection. If you view the toxic conflict as entirely the fault of the “other side,” there is nothing for “your side” to work on, and therefore talking about what all of us can do to help with this is a waste of time — even worse than a waste of time because you’re not assigning the blame correctly.

My response to that would be: “Encouraging people to see how they might be amplifying toxicity, and encouraging them to think about better ways of engaging, does not imply that both ‘sides’ contribute equally. You can work on reducing toxic polarization even while thinking ‘my opponents contribute more to this problem.’”

Read more:

Objection: “You’re trying to reduce our political passion; you want everyone to be centrists.”

This objection misses a number of things. For one thing, we can be passionate, even angry, and work on reducing toxicity. Also, we can have views that some would label as “extreme” while still working on reducing toxicity; this is because our toxicity problem, by and large, is about how people engage with their opponents.

Some objections:

Objection: “We need our anger to beat the bad guys.”

Some political activists and operators believe that you need righteous anger and judgment to rally support and beat the bad guys. This is an understandable view: this is why so many political operators use fear and anger to try to gain support and raise funds.

But that is not the only way. And often, polarized, high-contempt approaches only drive people away; they can hurt one’s activism. If we’re going to reduce toxicity and contempt, as a society, we need to think about how we can pursue our goals and do activism in ways that don’t arouse more us-vs-them contempt. And often we’ll find that such approaches are more persuasive and end up gaining more support.

Some pieces on this:

An appeal to understand each other

I’ll leave you with a couple of Builders pieces I thought were more important and high-level about this work.