How stance-taking hurts political depolarization efforts: Scalability requires neutrality

Thoughts on best approaches to get people to embrace depolarization and bridge-building concepts

The too-long-didn’t-read summary: I propose that optimal depolarization work (aka political conflict resolution work) requires avoiding taking specific stances and avoiding criticizing others’ stances. Stance-taking and stance-criticizing are forms of activism, and activism is a separate realm from political conflict resolution work. When we take stances or criticize stances, we will unnecessarily drive people away from the cause of depolarization. That said, it is still important to get people to consider if their stances are sources of unnecessary division and contempt, and I discuss how we can encourage people to be less divisive while avoiding being seen as doing activism.

For the past few years, I’ve been working to reduce political toxicity and contempt (aka affective polarization, aka toxic polarization, aka partisan hostility, also known by various other terms). A term I like for the work I do is political conflict resolution. My time in this space has brought me into contact with a broad range of people and organizations. I’ve learned that some people can have very different views about the nature of this work and how to approach it.

I think some people in this space are making large, foundational mistakes to how they approach the work; I think some people haven’t clearly thought through the philosophy and strategy of what they’re trying to do.

Such disagreements exist because people can disagree on what the problem of toxic polarization even is. This isn’t surprising: for any complex problem, we can have different views on what the nature of the problem is. And even when people have very similar views of a problem, they can have different views on how to approach the problem.

In mid-2023 I wrote some thoughts on optimal approaches to this work. This piece will be some additional thoughts on a specific area where I see some problems and pitfalls. I think those of us who want to reduce the toxicity of political conflict (whatever label we give to that work) must think deeply about the philosophy behind our approaches. When we take strategies that aren’t fully thought out and that are incoherent or inconsistent, we a) open ourselves up to criticism (and we know many people on both “sides” are looking for reasons to criticize this work) and b) run the risk of unnecessarily driving people away from the cause.

The truth is that this work is very hard. There are so many angry objections people in any conflict will have to the idea of de-escalating the conflict (this is why my books focus on those objections). For this reason, we must see it as important to make our appeals as friction-less and persuasive to as many people as we can.

Even if you end up disagreeing with me, I think this will help you get a more clear view of the polarization/depolarization landscape. If you do disagree with me, I’d like to hear from you. I am new enough to this work to still be very humble in these areas. I put these ideas out there knowing I may be missing various points, especially as I haven’t read that many books about conflict resolution. Any thoughts, please comment here or send me an email via www.american-anger.com/contact.

Two (rough) categories of depolarization work

When it comes to reducing toxic polarization and political contempt, I think we can separate the work people do to address that into two rough categories:

• A focus on shifting political beliefs and ideologies: This would be trying to change people’s minds on their stances on issues, their policy preferences, and their overall political or philosophical ideologies. (I’ll refer to this category as political beliefs.)

• A focus on shifting interpersonal attitudes and approaches: This would be trying to shift people’s views of their political opponents and their views of how they should engage with them. (I’ll refer to this category as interpersonal attitudes.)

These are admittedly rough categories, for a few reasons. For one thing, for some stances and behaviors, it’s hard to cleanly categorize them as being a political belief or an interpersonal attitude. For example, if you really hate and fear some group of people, that will shift your political beliefs and stances. And some ideologies involve having very negative views of certain people and lead to aggressive ways of engaging. These things connect and overlap.

And because they do overlap, we’ll find that working on one rough category will impact the other category. For example, shifting someone’s ideology and stances will often result in changing how they interact with their “enemies.” And changing how someone views their “enemies” can in turn change their stances on issues. (I focus on this a lot in my work: trying to get people to see that our contemptuous, aggressive behaviors can play a role in creating the very things that upset us.)

So, clearly, these are overlapping, ambiguous categories. This helps explain why these things are so hard to think about and talk about. The ambiguous boundaries are what I think helps create confusion among people doing this work, as they will fail to differentiate between a) trying to criticize and change people’s political beliefs, and b) trying to get people to get along better. They conflate many different kinds of things into just a bucket of “toxic stuff they think is bad.” But I think, for the people trying to this work, it’s important to try to see our approaches as mainly falling into these two buckets.

My proposal

Here’s my belief and my proposal:

I think the optimal way to work on reducing toxic polarization is to focus on changing interpersonal attitudes and approaches.

I think it’s best to avoid seeming like you’re trying to change political beliefs — as that will be seen (rightfully) as activism and unnecessarily drive people away.

The main reasons I think this are:

• This approach maps over to traditional ideas of conflict resolution and mediation, where one tries to stay as neutral-seeming as possible. Being perceived as biased or as “taking a side” will hurt conflict resolution.

• When someone doing this work communicates that certain political beliefs and ideologies are bad and “extreme,” it will unnecessarily drive some valuable (and also some not-that-extreme) people away from embracing these ideas and goals. Labeling some ideas as bad/extreme will make it seem to people like you’re simply doing political activism and not conflict resolution work, and they’ll be turned off.

• The “low hanging fruit” in any serious conflict is to get people to see each other more clearly (to reduce overly pessimistic views of “them”) and to get them to see that less polarizing, less us-vs-them approaches are wise and what, in the end, will help them, no matter their beliefs. Getting many people to embrace these ideas is difficult enough, and would have huge benefits if even a relatively small number of people embraced those ideas. I see that as the core work.

As I wrote this piece, I realized that probably the best term for my own approach is political conflict resolution work. I don’t view myself as trying to direct society in a specific way. If I were trying to direct society in a specific way, I think most people would rightly call that activism (that’s what I’d call it).

I see myself as giving people knowledge and tools that will help them engage in political disagreement and combat their adversaries in more healthy, less toxic ways. This includes a range of things, from helping people understand the “other side” better, to helping them understand how people can view their own views and approaches as bad and divisive, to helping people see how toxicity and contempt leads to more toxicity and contempt, to helping people see the nature of conflict more clearly, and so on.

One interesting point about this work: people could take these ideas and use them as resources and approaches that would help their own activism. That is something I often emphasize, to show that these ideas can be absorbed by people with any political beliefs; that the goals of reducing toxicity and engaging in activism are actually aligned and are not opposed (despite what many people believe).

For all the work I do in this space, I try to make it as scalable and consumable to everyone as I can, and that requires making it as unbiased and non-judgmental as possible.

The main objection: “But we need to push back on these extreme and harmful ideologies!”

Some people at this point would have an objection that goes like this: “But so many people have bad, extreme, and divisive ideas and ideologies, and those things are tearing us apart. How can we overcome our toxic divides if we don’t criticize and work against extremity and radicalism?”

Some people may view my approach as weak, overly nice, and overly afraid of criticism. I think those are mistakes, due to misunderstanding the philosophy behind the approach. I think my proposal is the strongest method of all, in terms of scalability and effect.

Some responses to the objection:

• Almost everyone wishes to reduce beliefs and approaches they see as bad, divisive, and “extreme.” But we have to face the fact that rational, compassionate people can disagree about which beliefs and ideologies are “extreme,” “divisive,” and “unreasonable.” The core challenge of conflict is that it’s easy for us to arrive at polarized, divergent narratives. These disagreements can create discord between those who are otherwise aligned on the work and goal of lowering toxicity and contempt.

• People who hugely disagree on stances and who hold views many would consider “extreme” can play an important role in detoxifying our politics and culture. This is because much of our toxicity and chaos (I’d say most) does not stem from people’s political beliefs but rather stems from the manner in which people engage (their interpersonal attitudes and approaches).

• A country being highly polarized means that many people will have stances that can be seen as divisive and unreasonable. That’s just what toxic polarization does to us: more and more people become more extreme and binary in their views. This means that a focus on shifting people’s political views will be at risk of alienating an increasing number of people from the primary work (as I see it).

• The important part: Doing the work of political conflict resolution will tend to indirectly make people’s views more nuanced: less binary and less us-vs-them. This is because conflict resolution naturally involves getting people to think about other perspectives, and to consider if their ideas and approaches are faulty and divisive.

We can indirectly influence people to be less divisive and unreasonable

Let’s talk more about that last bulletpoint. That point means that we can indirectly influence people to be more reasonable and less divisive by sharing how other people (not you and not your organization) view various beliefs and ideologies as unreasonable and divisive. In other words, you can point to criticisms people have made without making it seem like you or your organization have those views.

That is what I do. In my own books, I try to get people to examine how some views common on “their side” can be seen as simplistic and divisive by other people. I often do this by including criticisms that people on “their side” have made of those ideas (because in-group criticism is the most persuasive). I don’t do that with the goal of showing them why they’re wrong or to persuade them, though; I do that with the goal of helping them understand the “other side” and their frustrations. Being willing to put one’s self in one’s opponents’ shoes can result in getting a new vantage point of one’s own approaches; one might see how one’s approaches might possibly be more divisive than was previously thought. This is a scalable approach that doesn’t involve me having to have a stance or opinion on what the bad/dangerous ideas are: I can select for examination the most often-levied charges of divisiveness and team-based thinking that naturally arise.

I want to keep as many people in the “movement” as possible, so even getting people to better understand their “enemies” and consider less contemptuous, aggressive approaches is a huge win — no matter if their political beliefs remain largely unchanged. If their political views do change and become more nuanced, that’s great; but I think there is enough “low hanging fruit” in terms of understanding and engagement that that’s not a requirement.

Someone who gets interested in lowering toxicity and contempt (for whatever reason, be it for personal benefit, to help their activism, or just for societal stability reasons) will in turn be motivated to understand their “enemies” (their enemies’ views and their enemies’ views of they and their group). This will usually in turn lead, in an indirect way, to more nuanced views.

This gets back to how both of the categories (political beliefs and interpersonal attitudes and approaches) are intertwined. Getting someone invested in reducing contempt and toxicity will usually always shift their political views and ideologies in some way. Another way to put this is that:

Improving how we disagree will in turn improve the issues and stances we disagree about.

In other words: By disagreeing better, we’ll eventually make our political debates and fights better, also.

That is why I see my proposal as optimal. It is optimal in these ways:

• It doesn’t judge people for their views, and keeps the maximum number of people in the “cause”/“movement.”

• At the same time, it provides subtle but non-judgmental encouragement to consider if one’s political beliefs and approaches are simplistic and divisive and may be doing more harm than good.

To be clear: there’s nothing wrong with activism

Some might think that I’m saying that it’s bad to criticize ideas and ideologies — that it’s bad to engage in what I’m referring to as activism. But that’s not what I’m saying. I myself sometimes criticize specific ideas and “do activism.” My point is only that that should be seen as a separate endeavor from the work of political conflict resolution — that if you do engage in judgment of political beliefs and attempts to persuade people to shift those beliefs, that you should consider it something separate from political conflict resolution.

I’m saying that the more you make it seem like our toxicity problem can be pinned on specific people who have specific bad ideas, the more people you’ll be at risk of driving away. We must remember that the “low hanging fruit” is getting a significant number of people onboard the “disagree better” train. That would be a huge win, in itself.

For a real-world example of how these things apply in my work: In my own books and writings, I try to follow the advice I’ve written in this piece. When I do give my opinion on something, in the context of this work, (for example, in my books I shared some of my views on contentious topics) I make it clear that I’m not trying to persuade people or change minds, but to help explain views and perspectives. My goal is increased understanding and also empathy — not to persuade.

Then, occasionally, I may also just share an opinion where I am just debating an issue and trying to persuade people. But in those cases, because I’m concerned about how people view that related to my main work, I will also try to separate that opinion-sharing from my depolarization-aimed work. For example, I may say something like, “I’m going to give you my opinion on this, but I want to emphasize that my views on this are not related to my polarization-related work; one could have completely different views from me on this but we could still agree about all things polarization-related and what to do about it.”

Some specifics about the problems I see in this space

It might be helpful to get more granular about the problems I see and what I’m talking about. That might give it some real-world impact.

Some people who say their goal is to reduce political toxicity focus too much on changing beliefs and ideologies. Some specific examples I’ve seen:

• Some liberal-leaning people in the polarization/pluralism space think that fixing polarization is largely a matter of making Republicans into Democrats. This comes from the view that Republican stances on hot button topics are largely about bigotry and intolerance. In this framing, “toxic polarization” can be a way to indirectly refer to “Republican extremity.” This view is also held by liberal-leaning people who criticize the entire framing of polarization because it implies that liberals contribute in a significant way to toxicity. (I discuss these views and what they get wrong here.) This is the biggest source of confusion and lack of alignment I’ve seen in depolarization/pluralism spaces — even as few people openly discuss these divergences.

• Similarly, as in any conflict, there are some Republican-leaning people who do a similar thing: focus on liberals/Democrats as the main instigators and causes of our toxic divides. They focus on the rapid shifts in liberal-side views; they focus on liberal-side toxicity and insults and condescension. This “it’s all their fault” view is I think less of a problem in the depolarization space only because there are less conservatives doing depolarization work in general (there are many views on why that is but at the very least we can see that the heavy liberal-lean in academia is a major factor there).

• On the Middle East conflict front, I’ve seen people on both “sides” of the debate speak in ways that implies that it’s the other side’s beliefs and ideologies that are mostly the cause of toxicity and unnecessary violence. For example, some talk about the “neoMarxist” or “antisemitic” or oppressed/oppressor-framework views they see on the left and how those contribute to toxicity. I’ve also seen many Palestine-defending people speak as if Israel defenders have no valid or defensible views ways: as if it’s inconceivable that people could arrive at such views. (Personally, I see a lot of conflation of Israel-criticism and antisemitism and see that as a major amplifier of contempt, and also a problem that’s scarcely discussed.) For this, as for many issues, we should see that it’s just easy for people to wind up on different sides of that debate, depending on what they filter for.

There are many examples I could give, but hopefully you get the idea: There are many people who want to reduce political toxicity and who see the goal as fixing people’s bad ideas. Also, often, people won’t even know they’re doing that; it will just be an instinctual view that x/y/z beliefs are bad and “extreme” and increase division. Conflict gives many of us faulty instincts and many unknown blind spots; to combat conflict, we must be willing to doubt our instincts and examine potential blind spots.

Now reading those things, you might have had various arguments spring to mind about why the perspectives I mentioned were wrong; what they were missing. You may have even gotten angry about one or more of those things. But that’s related to my point: When we see how easy it is to disagree about some of these things — when we see how easy it is for us to anger each other and drive each other away — we can also see why it’s important to try to avoid giving the perception that “x/y/z views are extreme and those who hold them are the problem and they can’t be part of the work of reducing toxicity.”

It’s one thing to have those beliefs (that’s fine; we all have beliefs) but it’s another thing to associate those beliefs with the work of political conflict resolution.

The more you make it seem like “these specific stances are extreme and are the problem” the more you’ll alienate the people with those stances — even though those people could in fact be valuable contributors to the cause of reducing toxicity.

When it comes to real-world problems in this area, the problems I most often see aren’t direct “We believe these views are extreme and part of the problem,” but more of an indirect expression of that. For example, it often comes via language that can easily be seen as biased in one direction or the other, or by the resources one includes and promotes, or by a conspicuous absence of examining certain beliefs or approaches as potentially contributing to division.

To take a specific example I’ve seen: some people/organizations working on conflict resolution and peacebuilding would be very unlikely to share the idea that conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism can be a conflict-amplfying problem — while sharing many ideas about how criticisms of Israel may be unreasonable and divisive. This also happens the other way: there are some people and organizations who seem unwilling to share ideas that help us understand pro-Israel and Israel-supportive views. If we’re going to encourage people to examine how they might be contributing to toxic conflict, we must be willing to examine a wide range of ways people may be contributing to toxicity — even if we personally disagree with some of those observations (and as we also seek to avoid communicating “We ourselves are saying this is a problem.”) Trying to remove bias — and perceptions of bias — is hard work. But it is what you must do if you want to reach the most people and be fully scalable.

Trying to combat specific political beliefs is harder than it looks

Trying to reduce toxicity by criticizing specific stances is harder than it looks. For one thing, we know that criticism can lead to backlash; there can be a risk of creating more of the very beliefs you want to reduce. This can especially be the case if the people with the stances being criticized perceive the critics as part of a biased, unjust “establishment,” which the most angry, passionate people will often perceive. (For example, some research suggests that far-right groups in Europe have done best in countries where they are ostracized and outlawed the most.)

Also, it can be hard work to precisely define the harmful stances. An organization that attempts to combat specific political views as extreme and unreasonable then must decide exactly what political views they are criticizing. They must formally describe their stances in some way to the public. Because people will naturally wonder, “Where are you drawing the boundaries for your criticisms? What views exactly are you calling extreme and unreasonable? What stances do you see as disqualifying to be a part of this movement?”

This leads to a difficult challenge. Someone will then have to do the work of clearly delineating what political stances and ideologies they are calling out as harmful and as adding to toxicity. This will be hard, as anyone who’s thought about politics a little bit can probably easily see. Even for stances that might be considered on the same “side” of an issue, there will be a gradation from more reasonable and open-to-compromise to less reasonable and more extreme (however one judges those things). For every political belief one wishes to criticize and work against, one will have to be clear where along that spectrum a stance dips into “extreme” and unreasonable territory.

Being vague (referring vaguely to “extreme beliefs” and such) won’t work, not for the observant. The vagueness will only make people wonder, “What extreme stances exactly are they fighting against? What are their beliefs exactly?” (Here are some thoughts on extremist and moderate language and how those terms can be applied to either stances/ideologies or to how we engage.)

Again, I’d say criticizing specific beliefs/stances are the work of political activism, not political conflict resolution.

There’s another reason taking such an approach will be harder than it looks and prone to driving away more people than it seems at first. Many people who seem to believe specific political views and ideologies don’t actually believe them that strongly. Some might be vaguely aware of the concepts and, because “their team” supports them, may view them positively. But they might, if they were to learn specifics about what was involved in those beliefs, disagree with them.

We must remember that many of us are largely focused on the badness of our opponents and aren’t that well informed about what the committed activists on “our side” believe. (Consider Bernie Sanders seeming confused about what “equity” meant, which struck some Republicans as ludicrous but, to me, was unsurprising and in keeping with how conflict generally works. You can also, similarly, find Republican leaders who don’t understand the lingo and stances of their more “extreme” and passionate brethren; this would similarly surprise some Democrats.)

This means that even if you’re 100% correct in your criticism that a stance/ideology is bad and divisive, sometimes criticizing it will drive away people who may actually largely agree with you.

Another type of objection: Depolarization without stance-taking isn’t genuine or persuasive

Another form of objection I’ve seen can go something like, “But without taking a stance, people will distrust you because they don’t see you as genuine; to be effective at reducing polarization, we should try to reach like-minded people and draw them in, and through that alliance we can work to reduce polarization.”

These are okay ideas, but in practice I think a lot of those approaches can promote overly pessimistic and condescending views of the “other side” and, ironically, be a source of polarization. For example, I see Ezra Klein’s book Why We’re Polarized as a contributor to polarization by its popularizing of worst-case views of Republican-side motivations and failure to examine liberal-side contributions. I’ve seen some depolarization-aimed liberal people speak as if Trump support had a lot to do with cult dynamics, with a tone of “to reduce toxic polarization, we’ll need to reach these poor people who’ve been brainwashed.” I’ve seen similar approaches by depolarization-aimed people who criticize liberal-associated ideas.

This is just to say: there are risks when we inject our views in bridge-building/depolarization work, and often we won’t see those risks. I think we need more people trying to show people how these ideas can be scalable to people, regardless of their politics. My attempt to make my work as scalable as possible and speak to as wide an audience as possible is what people on the right and left have appreciated about my work. (Again, though, this isn’t to say you can’t do activism and work on depolarization, I’m just trying to expose potential risks.)

Taking it to the extreme: What about racist or violent ideologies?

One could take my argument here to the extreme and object, “Are you saying that those of us working on bridge-building and depolarization shouldn’t call out even clearly hateful and extremist ideologies?”

In theory, that would be what my stance calls for, yes (more on that in a second). But in practice, there are reasons why we we can feel fine criticizing the most clearly hateful ideologies.

For one thing, despite some perceptions, very few people in America support overtly racist or violent ideologies. (If you’re skeptical of that, I invite you to dig into the wealth of data on our highly pessimistic views of each other; those are the foundations on which our toxicity is built. Specifically I recommend Musa Al Gharbi’s paper Race and the Race for the White House.) For that reason, criticizing the most clearly hateful views won’t much matter as you’ll largely be preaching to the choir of people who already agree with you on that.

But, let’s take my argument to the extreme: I would propose that you could do this work effectively without ever criticizing the most dehumanizing ideologies. The main reason for that is: Criticizing such things implies that you’d be able to persuade someone with those beliefs to align with this cause. But people with the most hateful and intolerant beliefs are not going to get onboard the “disagree better” train no matter how you approach it. The most we can do is appeal to the people who are open to the work of reducing toxicity and contempt and violence, however they come to that view of things. And that is most people: getting back to the importance of taking a big-tent approach to this work and keeping as many people in this cause as we can.

These are some reasons why I see my proposal holding even for extreme examples.

Sometimes it’s the approach that upsets us, not just the beliefs

There’s another reason why I think focusing on changing political beliefs is misguided, from a depolarization standpoint. It’s because sometimes what actually bugs us as “extreme” and “divisive” isn’t about someone’s political beliefs but about their interpersonal attitudes. Put another way: it’s not what they believe, but how they approach disagreement.

For example, let’s say someone believes in an oppressed/oppressor framework (which is easy to criticize as simplistic and inherently divisive). There are many ways that belief might play out in terms of how they act in the real world:

• They might recognize that rational, compassionate people can disagree with that framework. They might recognize that aggressive, contemptuous approaches are self-defeating. If they thought in those ways, they’d be more likely to engage in respectful, civil, and de-escalating ways with people.

• Or, on the other side of the interpersonal-attitude spectrum, they might see anyone who disagrees with the oppressed/oppressor framework as a morally bankrupt, evil enemy, who must be stopped at any cost — militantly and/or violently if necessary.

Some of the approaches on college campuses (and outside them) that have angered so many people are about interpersonal attitudes: about how we disagree. To be clear, the underlying ideas also may be faulty and may be conducive to us-vs-them ways of engaging with others: My point is only that when people engage in civil, respectful ways, while holding any beliefs, there will generally be a lot less anger and concern and a lot less talk of “extremity” and “radicalism.”

To make another analogy: if the people who broke into the Capitol Building on January 6th and engaged in violence were able to instead calmly discuss their beliefs about the election and restrict their “fight” to discussions and legal battles, that would have scared a lot fewer people. How we approach disagreement is hugely important: toxic, extreme approaches to disagreement will easily be conflated with beliefs.

For my podcast, I talked to Guy Burgess, a conflict resolution professional who, with his wife, runs Beyond Intractability. Here’s something he said related to the approaches activists take:

“The idea is to see yourself as others see you. Once you do that, then you get a sense of what makes others so mad at you and willing to fight so hard. And you can then start asking questions about, well, do I really need to do those things? Or maybe if we did it this way, I wouldn’t provoke so much opposition but I’d still get the things that I really care about.”

All this is to emphasize my point that there’s a lot of room for improving how we disagree even as people’s beliefs may be various degrees of simplistic, unreasonable, or divisive. That is the “low hanging fruit” of conflict resolution work I refer to that we’ve scarcely worked on, as a society (or as a species).

Objection “Staying neutral is wrong”

A common objection heard, especially on the left, is that “staying neutral is wrong.” You’ll often hear this in context of the Desmond Tutu quote: “If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.”

This objection is related to the core objection I’ve noted in this piece: that people think “We need to defeat these bad and extreme ideas around us.” It’s just a variation of the core objection people in conflict, in general, will have to ideas of conflict resolution. It’s the constant and eternal obstacle to conflict resolution.

Politically conservative people have their versions of this objection, too, just worded in different ways. They’ll talk about the need for fighting against destructive left-associated ideas, and the importance of fighting against clearly bad societal changes. There are just many iterations of this same idea: “one must pick a side.”

If you’re liberal/Democrat-leaning, you might like this piece of mine examining what such objections miss. Otherwise, I invite you to read one of my books, which address these objections.

We should cut each other some slack in how we approach this work

I don’t mean to imply with this piece that I am highly critical of those who take different approaches, or that I think “my way is the only right way.” I just spend a good deal of time thinking about optimal approaches to this work, and I wanted to share how I see things, as it may be helpful to others in this space. I think it’s important to cut each other some slack in how we approach this work, (just as we ask people to cut others slack on political disagreements). Even when we have disagreements about granular questions of how to approach this work, we know that most of us are on the same page about the “big picture.”

But, at the same time, it’s important to be consistent with how we approach this work. It’s important to think through how people will criticize and attack our work – as we know that many people on both “sides” are skeptical of it and our intentions.

I’ll end with saying that I think my thoughts here apply much more to organizations than they do to individuals. This is because organizations are trying to cast a wide net and draw people into the work. They are often trying to build “a movement” and build social momentum; they want their community to be as big as possible (both for maximum social impact and because it can also help them financially). Individuals, on the other hand, don’t have to think about those things as much. They can just criticize things they see as bad and divisive, as they see fit. They’ll find some audiences with some content/projects and other audiences with other content/projects.

But, having said that, I think my points will still apply to anyone hoping to create a scalable and far-reaching argument. Even individuals should want to think about how to make their beliefs and goals persuasive to the maximum amount of people; the more friction and obstacles their ideas create, the less those ideas will spread.

I hope this was helpful in making the terrain of polarization-reduction more clear to see and traverse. Thanks for reading.