“Many readers and podcast listeners have been dismayed by my enduring support for Israel and now urge me to debate someone—really anyone—drawn from a growing cast of scholars, grifters, and moral lunatics who have made that beleaguered country their professional or psychiatric obsession. […] My views about the conflict in the Middle East will not fundamentally change unless my critics produce evidence that Israel has become as evil as her enemies.”
—Sam Harris

A post by Sam Harris is making the rounds, on why he won’t interview/debate critics of Israel. I’m someone interested in how we engage with opponents, and how our overly pessimistic views of “them” can amplify conflict. I think Sam makes a mistake in seeing his opponents on this topic as more dumb and/or malicious than they are, and therefore as unworthy of engagement as equals—which is just a common dynamic in toxic conflict in general.

The mistake, as I see it, is in thinking that one shouldn’t be able to be harshly critical of Israel because Israel has, the argument goes, done much less horrible things than their opponents have done. Leaving aside entirely the question of who has done more horrible things, I think this argument is weak because: it’s possible to believe that Palestinian people have done much more barbaric/uncivilized things than Israeli people have, WHILE STILL BEING harshly critical of Israel. One way that can be is that people can “expect more” from Israel, in the same way that people can “expect more” from the United States when the U.S. is in combat with enemies many view as less modern/civilized/enlightened (again, I’m talking perceptions here).

One could also be harshly critical of Israel while still being highly pro-Israel. For example, a person can believe that Netanyahu and camp have acted in unreasonable ways that will only amplify conflict and lead to hurting Israel in the long run.

Also, Sam’s view that one can’t criticize a group/nation until they are doing things that are as horrible and degraded as their enemies doesn’t make much sense to me. It doesn’t seem a view that we, as a society, would want to promote. If everyone held that view, there would be little to no incentive for a country/group to “take the high road” and do the right thing; there would be perverse incentives for a group to simply aim to be perceived as just-slightly-morally-better than one’s enemies, which isn’t a great motivator for morally good conduct.

Again, I’m not interested in who is right or wrong on these topics (meaning with the public work/writing I do); what I am interested in is how people in conflict can view their opponents and perceived enemies in overly pessimistic and insulting ways, and how that can amplify toxicity.

I think if Sam Harris were a little more removed from this topic, emotionally, he might be more willing to examine how there can be conflict-amplifying behavior on the part of pro-Israel people. One of the more obvious examples of this, to me, is the frequent labeling of a wide range of Israel-criticism, no matter how reasoned and defensible, as representing “antisemitism.“ I think it’s obvious that one can be both pro-Israel WHILE ALSO seeing that this excessive-filtering-for-antisemitism is a real phenomenon, and a conflict-amplifying one. I wish Sam Harris were up for examining that; that would be a good thing; and it wouldn’t weaken his other stances on Israel (although I think he likely thinks it would).

One could make an analogy here to how some antiracism activists are overly quick to see disagreement with antiracism ideas as representing racism (something I write about in Defusing American Anger). But this is how toxic conflict works: we will often do the mental work necessary to show (to others and to ourselves) why our opponents/enemies are morally bankrupt and/or stupid, and thus not worth engaging with.

To be clear, also, none of this is to argue that there are not extremely unreasonable people and “moral lunatics” on the anti-Israel side. We’re focusing here on Sam’s apparent contention that there is no one worth engaging with, at all, amongst Israel-critical people.

This is also something that happens amongst Israel critics. As I talk about in this piece, there are some on that “side” who do what Sam does: speak as if their opponents are moral lunatics who aren’t worth engaging with.

One of the more enlightening episodes of my podcast (for me, personally) was this talk I had with Yakov Hirsch, who walks through the historical/philosophical reasons for why Jewish and pro-Israel people are so quick to perceive and label things as “antisemitism.” This goes back to philosophical views on what the nature of Nazis and the Holocaust were (e.g., the “banality of evil” causal views vs. deep-and-entrenched-antisemitism causal views). Yakov is a critic of Israel (who I do not believe is a grifter, moral lunatic, deranged, or irrationally obsessed) and someone who I think seeks to understand different points of views, including those of his opponents, and I liked talking to him for that reason. That talk is here:

At the core of my writings on conflict is the idea that it is simply easy for smart and compassionate people to reach dramatically different conclusions about all sorts of things. The more we act as if wide swaths of our fellow citizens are stupid and/or morally-bankrupt, and thus not worth engaging with (basically, the definition of contempt), the more we’ll amplify conflict.

And note that one can do this while lobbying hard for one’s views and, in fact, I think the ability to acknowledge others’ have defensible points actually makes you better able to persuade others of your point of view (when our social instincts lead us to wrongly think the opposite; that treating opponents’ views with more respect will hurt our position).

Some people will dislike me and be angry at me for this post; they will think that I’m morally bad for defending people and ideas they see as morally bad. But the truth is that I’m used to that; that is the same kind of criticism I’ve gotten on many topics from both “sides” of the American political conflict. For example, my writing about the above dynamics in the realm of antiracism activism has led to people calling me a fascist, a racist, and much more. Just as my attempt to help pro-Trump Americans see how Trump and their “side” has contributed to our societal/political toxicity — which is necessary for understanding the “other side” — has gotten me much grief and insults. But hopefully you can see that my goal in these areas is not to argue for a specific stance; it is to discuss the meta-level stance of how-we-engage-with-opponents… to help people see that we can act in conflict-amplifying ways and even self-harming/defeating ways when we’re overly pessimistic about others.

When it comes to political depolarization/bridge-building efforts, I think many people are skeptical about, if not downright hostile to, such efforts. And this is entirely understandable: serious conflict inevitably leads to many people being skeptical about attempts to reduce the intensity of that conflict. When you perceive many bad, immoral, harmful things being done by the “other side,” attempts to reduce the intensity of the conflict are easily seen as a defense of the “bad guys,” a failure to be as judgmental and critical as the moment demands.

This is how many people in America, on “the left” and “the right,” perceive polarization-reduction efforts. A few years ago I would have had the same objections.

I’ll share the full message below (taken from this post by ). And because this comes from an anti-Trump perspective, I think it’s important to try to imagine a version of this coming from a Trump voter/supporter, but focused on their sources of anger. I’ve read plenty of those types of messages, too. And if your instinct is to scoff at the other side’s anger and dismiss it as largely silly and stupid (or worse), I’d recommend my book Defusing American Anger, in which I try to help people better understand the “other side” (and to understand why that’s important in the first place).

The message:

I’ll be honest, when I first came across your page in I’d like to say February 2025 I rolled my eyes.

“How quaint. We have a group of wanna be authoritarians running roughshod over the government and promising to abuse its citizens. One of the first acts of this government was to pardon the rioters and insurrectionists of January 6, and here’s another liberal leaning ‘both sides bad!’ guy who just wants liberals to make nice with people who spit in our faces and relish using the government to harm us. Just another Charlie Brown who’s absolutely sure that this is the time that Lucy won’t pull the football away.”

(I swear this is not me being a paragraph guy full of insults, I think it’s important to let you know where I’ve started to see where I have arrived)

I will admit that the more I have thought about your thesis, the more interesting it is to me.

I started to think about my own journey. In law school in 2009-2012, I used to attend conservative legal organization events not because I agreed with them, but because I found people who could exchange ideas in an intelligent way that helped me think better about my own views. I had friends who were committed conservatives, but we had basic respect for each other’s views and intelligence.

I didn’t start to walk around with contempt for Republicans until about 2015 when the leading candidate for the Republican nomination rode his way to the top by telling everyone how much he hated people like me (aka people from California), how people like me (ie anyone left of Mitt Romney) hated America and we basically weren’t even people.

After years of a political movement not only telling me they hated me, but they wanted to use the government to make life worse for people they disagree with politically (and when in government did just that), then yes, the contempt that didn’t used to be there suddenly came out. I found myself less patient with people with different political views, and yes, more contemptuous of them. I was much more likely since then to judge someone for a handful of views I disagree with rather than view them as a complete person.

To me, it didn’t matter if someone was reluctantly supporting Maga as a lesser of two evils or strongly disagreed with how Trump behaves publicly, they in my view were still complicit in his worst abuses and deserving of the contempt others have showed even if they were only halfway in.

So to a certain extent, I have started to see the thesis of your argument play out in real time: that the cycle of contempt is self sustaining, and it makes people not want to make peace because they’re so angry at the contempt being thrown at them

Basically, I had been of the view that I don’t want to make the first move for peace because I don’t think it will accomplish anything, and yes, I’m aggrieved at the decade of contempt and disrespect from the political movement that controls all levels of government

For me, what I would like is for the other side to come to me first and say I’m sorry, and then I would be more amenable to a dialogue. But what I don’t want to do is apologize for the sake of apologizing and then get nothing back, because then it feels like contrition is treated as a punch line rather than as something that everyone needs to do

I see that in the comments a lot, you have people say that it’s the other side’s fault and they don’t want to be the first to say sorry and they are “tired of doing the work and getting nothing in return”

Anyhow, as much as I retain skepticism about whether this project would work, I’ve come around to the view that I could probably stand to explore this topic further

It seems like there might be something to the idea that you don’t seek to lower the temperature because you demand the other person apologize back, or even first, there is a value inherent in not walking around hating millions of strangers based on your own assumptions of who they are as people. Because you cannot run a government or a society with this high level of societal hatred or distrust, and what we’re doing obviously is making things worse.

Which leads me to ask: do you have any hard copies of your book for sale or is it only on Kindle?

A few related follow-up reads:

• Thoughts on the sources of anger on both “sides.”

• For anti-Trump Americans: thoughts on how contempt for and anger at Trump and his supporters can coincide with a desire to reduce polarization

  • That includes a link to a three-time-Trump-voter’s thoughts on what he’s angry about and his attempt to avoid excessive us-vs-them thinking

• Thoughts on how groups in conflict always have major differences, and both groups will use those differences as ways to blame the other side. Recognizing this basic fact can help us understand the angry narratives of the “other side.”

• 8 tips for activists who want to reduce toxic polarization

Again, if you find it hard to understand the other side’s sources of anger, I recommend my book Defusing American Anger. It attempts to walk through various hot-button topics and sources of anger (including views of Trump himself) and explain how rational, well meaning people can come to very different stances.

When you’re outraged by and contemptuous of your political opponents, you probably won’t be motivated to work on reducing us-vs-them polarization. At the very least, you’ll have a hard time seeing how you could be part of such work.

With Trump in his second term, I know this is the case for many anti-Trump Americans. Many look at the depolarization-aimed work I and others do and have a response like, “That’s nice and all, but you should focus on beating the bad guys. A focus now on reducing political toxicity is naive; it can wait.”

And of course many Trump supporters have the same reaction: “We need to defeat the bad guys; that’s what matters now.”

But you can be outraged by and contemptuous of your political opponents (of whatever sort) and still work on bridge-building and reducing polarization. I know that because I myself have contempt and anger for Trump and his most gung-ho supporters — and I’ve spent years working on this problem.

That may be a surprising admission. You might think I’m being hypocritical — or perhaps just bad at this work. But I’m just being honest; I’m only human. And I think it’s vitally important to see how our anger and contempt and fear (at any political leader or group) can co-exist with efforts to reduce toxic polarization. Getting more people to see how that is not a contradiction is, I think, what will help shift the societal tides of polarization. That is a major way we build a big-tent approach to depolarization: a philosophy that is robust and not fragile. (And that’s what I’ve tried to do in my books and articles.)

Because, let’s face it: many of us are angry. That is, after all, what toxic polarization does to us, with its various feedback cycles. No matter which “side” you think is crazier and more dangerous, you can’t deny that many of us, on both “sides,” have a lot of contempt and fear these days. And those emotions in turn lead to more support for antagonistic team-based approaches — and leaders who take them. That is just the state of things; we should be mature and acknowledge that that’s where we are.

And many of us, on both “sides,” have anger that can be rationally understood; there are many real and defensible sources for our concerns. Antagonistic, team-based approaches, on both “sides,” provide evidence to us for why our contempt and anger are justified.

To reduce toxic polarization in America, we need to show angry Americans how you can be outraged and still be a part of reducing political toxicity.

We also need more people to have empathy and understanding for other people’s anger: to not immediately jump to hate and blame when we hear opposing views and opposing narratives. We need to be mature in facing the fact that many of us will be angry at and contemptuous of each other. Often, the views and frustrations on the “other side” are much more rational and understandable than we may think (understanding each others’ stances has also been a big part of my focus).

If you have immense anger at one “side” or the other — whether you voted for Trump or hate him — I hope you read this piece and consider how it might apply to your anger.

And if you’re a Trump voter, I especially hope you read this. I hope you see it as worthwhile to try to understand the sources of my anger — just as I think it’s a good thing to try to understand the sources of your anger.

A note about my contempt

When I say I have contempt for Trump and his most gung-ho supporters, I mean I often feel immensely angry toward and morally judgmental towards them. I’ll admit that I’m frequently disgusted by them. I think they have made major moral mistakes in embracing highly us-vs-them, toxic, and antagonistic ways of thinking and acting.

Trump is the epitome of a psychologically polarized leader: even minor disagreements seem to be an opportunity for him to insult the “other side” — to turn disagreement into a grand good-versus-evil, with-us-or-against-us war. (I thought about linking to some examples but is that really necessary at this point?) Trump’s inability to accept the 2020 election, and his instinct to stoke election disbelief, is par for the course for a highly polarized, us-vs-them-mindset leader.

I should also clarify that I don’t feel contempt for all Trump voters. I’ve disagreed with enough liberal/Democrat stances and approaches to understand how rational, compassionate Americans voted for Trump simply because they thought that was a better choice than the alternative — and how they could even do that even while actively disliking many aspects of his personality. I also understand that many voters are one-issue or several-issue voters, and that these people might vote for Trump regardless of how they feel about him.

I’m talking here about the most enthusiastic Trump supporters: the ones who can hear Trump say insulting, demeaning, clearly conflict-amplifying things and think “That’s great; I like that!” I’m disgusted by Trump supporters who dedicate a lot of time insulting and demeaning and mocking the entire “other side” — and this includes highly polarized people who Trump has granted power to; people like Elon Musk, Dan Bongino, Kash Patel, and many others, whose main qualification in Trump’s eyes seems to be their commitment to antagonistic approaches.

I’m disgusted by the childish and often just-plain-creepy behavior that such toxicity leads to: a desire to trigger and “own” one’s opponents — the reflexive instincts to always defend one’s team and denigrate the other team, often before details about a new event are even known.

The reason I am frequently disgusted by these people can be summarized simply: We know they’d be disgusted and outraged if a Democratic leader spoke and acted in the insulting, deeply contemptuous, and conflict-amplifying ways that Trump so often does. And they would be entirely right to be disgusted!

Trump and his most gung-ho supporters are, in a word, hypocritical; they embrace approaches that would obviously make them apoplectic if their opponents took them. Toxic conflict inevitably leads to more people justifying and gleefully embracing hypocrisy. (Robert Talisse’s book Sustaining Democracy has a good section on why it’s easy for us to not see our own hypocrisy.)

Put another way: I don’t think you can be a highly enthusiastic supporter of Trump AND want to reduce us-vs-them contempt in America. (Do you think I’m wrong about that? I’d love to hear your thoughts if you disagree.)

And, if it matters: I’ve also felt contempt for and been deeply judgmental of various liberal/Democrat leaders, activists, and citizens, based on the highly insulting, maximally pessimistic ways in which they speak about their opponents and their refusal to see or admit that there can be a lot of team-based thinking on “their side.” I wrote a whole book aimed at helping liberals see how contemptuous approaches on “their side” helped amplify our divides, and even helped create more support for highly antagonistic opponents, like Trump. I devoted an episode of my podcast to trying to persuade anti-Trump people why they should have cognitive empathy for Trump and for his supporters, and their sources of anger. This is just to say that I’m disappointed in a lot of people.

It might also be worth clarifying that my disappointment with Trump and other Republicans is mostly not about their political stances (even as it’s true that intense animosity inevitably leads to more extreme and unreasonable positions). For some issues, I agree more with your average Republican than I do with your average Democrat. I am judgmental of how Trump and gung-ho Trump supporters engage with their opponents. (And that’s an important point about depolarization work: it’s important to separate what we disagree about from how we disagree, as we are largely suffering from problems with how we disagree.)

The other side’s antagonism can justify our antagonism

If you’re a Trump voter and your response to this is, “But many Democrats/liberals have spoken and acted in deeply contemptuous, antagonistic ways; Trump and Republicans are just fighting back,” I think that reaction means that you probably are not a gung-ho Trump supporter. If you’re able to see that antagonistic approaches are bad and unhelpful, no matter who takes them, then by definition you aren’t that enthusiastic about a key aspect of Trump.

In fact, I think most Trump voters wish Trump were less antagonistic and toxic: I have heard that sentiment from many Trump voters — including some highly enthusiastic supporters. I remember one fairly gung-ho Trump supporter telling me he thought Trump’s personality was like “gasoline on the fire” of our divides.

Anti-Trump people may wonder: but how can Trump voters be both enthusiastic about Trump and also critical of him? The answer lies in understanding the nature of toxic conflict: most people are largely fighting against the“other side,” not for “their side.” And for some, Trump represents a pushback against liberal/Democrat leaders, activists, and everyday citizens who they see as treating them with great antagonism and unfairness. Anti-Trump people should be curious about and empathetic to those views (if you are curious, maybe check out my book How Contempt Destroys Democracy).

And to clarify even further: my admitting I feel contempt doesn’t mean I think contempt is a worthwhile or logical emotion. Logically, I know it makes no sense and does no good. I’m someone who doubts free will exists, which means I’m someone who doesn’t see much point in righteous moral judgment. I’m just being honest about the emotions I feel. Yes, I work on depolarization and, I guess in some ideal world, I would have more of a Zen Buddhist calm and have zero feelings of contempt and moral disgust. But that’s not the case; I’m only human. And I’m a human living during deeply polarized times — as you are — and it’s only natural that we’ll have scorn for some people, of one sort or another.

We can be angry and still have empathy for our opponents’ anger

If Trump supporters/voters genuinely want to reduce toxic polarization (and, to be sure, some people, on both “sides,” have zero interest in that), they must try to understand what bothers anti-Trump Americans. I think it should be very easy for you to see what bothers people — even as you disagree about issues and priorities. If you refuse to acknowledge other people’s frustrations as making some sense, and if your instinct is to respond with something like, “You’re crazy to complain about Trump; you’re the toxic one for your criticisms; you have Trump Derangement Syndrome,” or similar, you should be brave enough to consider that that makes you a contributor to our toxicity problem — just as are liberal/progressive activists who speak as if there is no contribution to toxic polarization from “their side.”

I think our toxic conflict causes a lot of cognitive dissonance. I think there are many people who voted for Trump in 2016 simply because he was the Republican candidate, but as time went on, and his contemptuous, high-conflict traits became more apparent, they sought to defend their choice as a “normal” one, one that couldn’t be faulted — even as it might have never been a choice they would have been faced with or had to make in a less polarized time. There was an internal and external pressure to want to see Trump as a normal president, even as Trump’s way of engaging with opponents clearly makes him abnormal. (And sorry, I know I’m doing this a lot, but I see this dynamic for liberal-associated stances, also; there are many liberals/Democrats who embrace new liberal-associated stances as “normal” that they otherwise wouldn’t, simply because those things are associated with “the good guys.” The emotions that result from conflict easily shift our stances without us being aware of it.)

Our previous decisions and public proclamations can lead to a cascading series of events, where our views and allegiances become more and more entrenched. Simply put: we can feel an internal and external pressure to normalize our own actions and behaviors, and the behaviors of people on “our team.” And, as a conflict intensifies and becomes more toxic, this instinct can make us behave in irrational ways: e.g., speaking as if “our side has done nothing wrong and has nothing to answer for.”

I’ve seen a lot of behavior on “the right”¹ that I see as a result of these team-based psychological pressures. I’ve seen a lot of simply narcissistic behavior, where people lash out and refuse to do any self- or in-group examination. (More polarization leads to more narcissistic behaviors — which in turn ramps up anger on the “other side,” and so on.) I’ve seen this from Trump-supporting people I personally know; a new willingness and a desire to lash out and insult and villify, and refuse to try to see others’ views. (And, again, I see this on “the left”¹ also; I’ve lost friends and strained relationships due to that dynamic.)

I’ve even seen this dynamic in the depolarization/bridge-building space. I once attended a Braver Angels conference where a gung-ho Trump supporter insulted me and others who attempted to calmly tell him the rational reasons for our serious concerns about Trump: he just kept emotionally repeating statements like, “You’re blinded by hate!” and so on, refusing to engage in a calm discussion. To make a comparison: I would try, and I have tried, to understand the frustrations and views of people who have voted for Trump; that person seemed unwilling to examine other people’s views and frustrations. I see this as a type of narcissism; and I think toxic conflict makes more of us behave in narcissistic, low-empathy ways. (The fact that such reactions are present even amongst people who see themselves as trying to build bridges and reduce toxicity highlights the difficulty of this work!)

There will be contempt

We should be mature and recognize that America is emotionally polarized. There will be anger. There will be contempt. There will even sometimes be blood. These things are certainties. Recognizing this truth is the first step of us approaching the problem maturely. We must try to see the problem from a birds’ eye view — and not have our view of the true nature of the problem occluded by the hills and valleys of the various outrages and offenses of the day. Seeing the maze of toxic conflict clearly is the first step in escaping.

The goal isn’t to eliminate our anger and contempt; that’s not feasible. The goal is to have those feelings and still, somehow, engage in ways that work to lower societal contempt — or, at the very least, don’t unnecessarily amplify us-vs-them contempt. The goal is to see how, when we aren’t careful, when we let our anger and contempt rule our emotions and approaches, we inevitably act in ways that amplify the conflict — and even help our most polarized enemies.

If you dislike Trump (or any prominent leader you see as highly toxic), I think it’s important to view the power attained by such people as the result of our toxic polarization, not as the cause. This is not to say that polarized, polarizing leaders don’t contribute to our divides (they do; it’s a self-reinforcing cycle), but it’s to argue for seeing our conflict in a more true and helpful way. Broad support for more hostile, us-vs-them approaches, like those taken by Trump, doesn’t appear overnight; many surveys show how us-vs-them animosity and contempt have grown over the last few decades.

Even as I have anger toward Trump and his most enthusiastic supporters, I also see that how I and others express ourselves can either a) drum up more us-vs-them rage (leading to more support for the very people I’m angry at) OR b) reduce or avoid amplifying us-vs-them rage. Even as I have many negative feelings, I have choices about what to do with those feelings.

The many ways all of us, us millions of citizens, interact every day bubbles up to form the political culture. How we treat each other, in-person and online. What we allow our political allies to say about the “other side.” What we push back on, and what we don’t push back on. Us millions of citizens are the people who put the wind in the sails for either more polarized approaches, or less polarized approaches.

Tips for angry citizens who want to reduce anger

The simple fact is that many leaders and many activists, on both “sides,” make easily avoidable mistakes in communication. For example, it’s common to hear leaders and activists, on both sides, speak in ways that insult the entire “other side,” when they could instead focus their criticism on specific people.

For example, it’s common to hear anti-Trump leaders and activists speak about Trump supporters/voters being “in a cult,” or being motivated solely or largely by racism and/or authoritarianism. These are unforced errors, and hugely costly errors; they are gifts to Trump. (And I’d say the same to Trump voters: speaking in “they’re all the same” ways about “the left” aids your most polarized opponents.)

This group-aimed insult pattern is so prevalent, and so powerful in sparking us-vs-them outrage, that I think if you eliminated this pattern alone, we’d see a huge reduction in societal rage. Another way to put this: simply cutting down on the immense amount of ongoing contributions to toxicity would, in itself, lower our overall polarization. To make an analogy: maybe the “forest fire” of toxic polarization would die down substantially on its own if there weren’t so many people constantly lighting small fires all over the place.

There’s a lot more to say here (I have a whole section on this at the end of my books) but I’ll list a few more ideas for depolarizing approaches that activists can take:

Remember the “other side” is not a monolith

You should keep in mind that the “other side” is not a monolith. The out-group homogeneity effect means that we’ll often perceive the “other side” as all-the-same. This means anti-Trump people will be prone to imagining all Trump voters/supporters as the most enthusiastic, gung-ho types — even as we know that many Trump supporters don’t support his personality and approach, and are largely pushing back on liberal-associated stances. This also means that pro-Trump people see liberals/Democrats as being more extreme and contemptuous than they are — even as we know that many Democrat voters have a lot of nuance and variation on specific issues but are largely concerned with Trump’s antagonistic, aggressive personality and approaches.

Both sides will imagine the “other side” to be more hateful than they are. Both sides are largely focused on the threats and insults they see on the “other side,” not so much the positives of “their side.”

Try to speak respectfully; try to persuade

You should focus on trying to speak as respectfully as possible to opponents and focus as much as possible on persuading people who disagree.

A highly polarized society is one in which many people simply give up on persuasion. To try to persuade means thinking that your opponents are normal, thinking people who can be persuaded. The more polarized we grow, the fewer people actually believe their opponents can be persuaded. Also, when we’re angry, we may not even actually care about persuading people; we may mainly care about venting and signaling our alliegiences. And when we give up on persuasion, we amplify contempt and polarization.

When I interviewed group psychology researcher Matthew Hornsey for my podcast, he said the following:

That’s another thing I’ve had to let go of… I always thought that when people were arguing about ideas, they were trying to persuade the other group… It took me a while to realize that actually that’s not true either. Because if they actually thought they were trying to persuade the group, they’d do it differently. I think often what they’re doing is that they’re just enjoying the tribalism and they’re enjoying marinating in their own kind of virtuousness and they’re enjoying signaling into their own side their credentials as an in-group member.

We need more people to recognize the importance of trying to persuade others. The act of seeking to persuade others isn’t just about winning an argument. There is a meta-level benefit to it. When we try to persuade others, we show them our best ideas and best selves. Even when we fail to persuade, we may show them aspects of ourselves and our ideas that are more logical and understandable than they believed. This can lower their contempt and anger, even when they still disagree with us. In a very real sense, the toxicity we see around us is a result of many angry people simply giving up on trying to persuade; of many people embracing narcissistic views that “my view of things is obviously right; other people are bad and/or dumb.”

Leaders and activists who want to reduce polarization must try to speak in ways that keep in mind that the “other side” is more reasonable than they believe. They should aim their speech to those people who are more “in the middle” than they may instinctually think they are. They should avoid speaking as if the “other side” is some hateful, unreasonable monolith. And they should trust that those approaches are not only right — but may win them more support and votes than their instincts lead them to believe.

A Trump-voter perspective

I shared this piece with Kelly Johnston, a three-time Trump voter, and he wrote something similar about his own anger and contempt and how that ties into his views on polarization.

Learn more

If you liked this piece, and want to learn more:

• Read 8 Tips for activists who want to reduce polarization (this was one of my most popular recent pieces on Substack)

• Check out my books: they both include sections on practical, everyday approaches we can all take

¹ I put “the right” and “the left” in quotes because I think the idea of an overarching political spectrum is an illusion – and an illusion that unintentionally creates more animosity and polarization.

No matter your politics, if you’re interested in reducing toxic polarization and politics-based contempt, I recommend signing up to Aemula. If you’re curious what the “big idea” is, and want to see why I say Aemula is revolutionary in concept, you can watch this visual walkthrough of Aemula and its principles that I did with Templeman recently. Templeman shows how Aemula uses social network analysis (SNA) to map the relationships between readers and content creators, and the idea behind how he uses that information to reduce content/audience fracturing/polarization. I think it’s a fun and educational exploration of his idea, and you’ll also learn about SNA, which is used by many social media platforms to understand their users/audience.

For a transcript of this talk and links to the episode on audio platforms, go here.

This piece contains an idea I think is powerful but that I've rarely seen discussed: the idea that groups in conflict will inevitably be different in major ways, and that these differences will affect how each group perceives the “other side” and also how each group manifests its out-group animosity/contempt/fear. For example, a predominantly blue-collar group will manifest its anger much differently than a predominantly college-educated group. These differences lead to people in both groups filtering for and focusing on the "bad things they do that we don’t do.” (e.g., “there is no Democratic equivalent to Trump,” or “you don’t see Republicans attacking people on campuses”), and that in turn aids in justifying high-contempt, low-empathy approaches. I think recognizing this truth helps us unlock more willingness to reduce toxicity (even as one may also think “one group is worse than the other”).

Here’s the piece:

Americans today live inside competing moral universes, each with its own villains, heroes, and storylines about who’s destroying the country. Scroll through your feed, talk to your friends, or turn on any partisan outlet, and you’ll find a familiar refrain: “we’re not the problem—they are.” It’s often accompanied by angry, self-assured takes that if you don’t see the obvious threat the “other side” poses—and haven’t chosen correctly—there’s something wrong with you.

The truth is that there are defensible grievances in these opposing stories. Both sides can point to real injustices, real threats, and real patterns of objectionable behavior from their opponents. But regardless of whose grievances are more valid, the deeper problem for us as a country is how easily we come to harshly judge people who’ve reached different conclusions—seeing them as naïve, immoral, or even evil and dangerous.

This sense of moral clarity—of knowing that the “good people” are on our side—feels good. It gives us coherence and purpose in confusing times. But it also blinds us. Because in politics—as in most human conflicts—each side’s story about “who started it,” who’s acting in bad faith, and who’s just defending themselves often contains various truths.

If we hope to cool our national conflict—and avert a continued slide into chaos and dysfunction—we first have to understand how both sides come to believe their side is the obviously right one. We need to see how our arrogance and refusal to listen to others’ concerns keep us locked in a cycle of contempt.

Can Both Sides Be Right?

So many of us see our political opponents as clearly the “bad guys” on a slew of important issues. This was the case before 2015 but, since then, toxic polarization has increased greatly, with a steadily increasing number of people viewing the “other side” as immoral, extreme, and dangerous, and even more hateful.

It’s important to note that both “sides” can have defensible justifications for their core narratives.

Let’s take Republican¹-associated grievances. Many Republicans point to Democrats’ large and rapid attitudinal shifts on issues like immigration, abortion, gender, policing, and more, shifts they argue haven’t been mirrored in scale on the right. These changes, compounded by what they perceive as harsh moral judgment from the left, have led many to conclude the left caused this toxic conflict we’re in; it’s their fault.

On the other side, Democrats are concerned about Trump’s contemptuous and aggressive behavior, and his seeming enjoyment of bending and breaking rules. For them, Trump’s refusal to accept the 2020 election represents, in a nutshell, the dangers of having a leader with Trump’s temperament. Democrats see no Democratic version of someone with Trump’s divisive personality and penchant for defying democratic norms, and this leads many to conclude Republicans are the aggressors; they caused this mess.

People in both groups focus on the grievances that alarm them most but often struggle to understand what bothers their adversaries. From the outside, our opponents’ complaints can look minor, silly, or misinformed compared to our concerns, which we (naturally) see as legitimate and based in reality. The more partisan and team-based our view of things becomes, the more we risk becoming arrogant, convinced that “you’d have to be an idiot” not to see which group is worse and more at fault for all the chaos and division around us. All this serves to fan the flames of toxic polarization.

Regardless of which group’s grievances are more defensible, it’s important to note that each group’s grievances about the other can rest on logically defensible foundations. Admitting that this is the case doesn’t mean agreeing with the “other side,” and it doesn’t mean one is saying “both sides are the same.” It just means acknowledging that there are some truths involved in each group’s primary narratives.

It’s also worth considering how complex our world is. There are myriad data points and so many events unfolding around us on a daily basis that nobody can accurately process all of it—at least not in any objective, unbiased way. We thus rely on stories, stereotypes, and heuristics to help us make sense of things. Even when we agree on the same facts, our different moral framing and prioritization can lead us to entirely different views of what those facts mean—and what they portend for the future.

These points help explain how rational, well-meaning people can reason their way to polar opposite views that they believe are good and righteous—a dynamic philosopher Kevin Dorst calls “rational polarization.” If we can lower our own arrogance, we might develop greater understanding of people who possess very different values and beliefs and perhaps act in ways that persuade instead of inflame—even as we still push for the causes we believe in.

To be clear: toxic conflict does lead to us becoming more team-based and unreasonable in our thinking. We grow to have overly pessimistic, distorted, and catastrophizing views of “them.” Conflict makes us more dumb, basically. But both things can be true: our opponents are often more reasonable than we assume, AND the most angry, polarized people can be highly unreasonable.

The Fog of Conflict

Part of the difficulty in recognizing that the “other side” is more rational than we think is that the nature of the conflict can feel so simple to us. Conflict rarely feels complicated when we’re in it. Many of us simply perceive so many bad people on the other side that it’s easy to conclude: they are the aggressors; we are just defending ourselves.

But these simple, black-and-white stories blind us to the complexity of the world and the people in it. As historian Geoffrey Blainey has observed, each side in a war tends to see history through its own eyes. Most serious conflicts have many causes, cross-currents, and feedback loops, which makes it hard for the parties involved to ever get a clear view of the conflict. He writes that “the distinction between warmaker and peacemaker is often a mirage.”

One well-known aspect of conflict that obscures our view of people on the “other side” is the tendency to see them as all the same—as a monolithic, homogeneous mass. This leads to all sorts of misunderstandings, including “perception gaps,” which convince people that the other side is much more extreme than they actually are.

Another confusing aspect of conflict is that people in large groups always possess different traits and exhibit different behaviors. In the US, Democrats and Republicans differ—on average—in background, life experience, values, and moral priorities. This leads to differences in how each group manifests its anger and anxiety. For example, a mostly working-class, blue-collar community is likely to interact in conflict differently than a mostly college-educated group would. Each group will apply different types of social pressures on its members when it comes to their behavior and how those members approach the conflict.

And because these differences are usually substantial, each side can point to “bad things they do that we don’t do” and then treat these things as definitive proof that their opponents are the problem.

But the causes of conflict are often complex, and two groups in conflict will always contribute to it in different ways.² It’s therefore worth examining some of the ways in which Republicans and Democrats can both arrive at the view that “it’s all the other side’s fault,” depending on which events and group traits they focus on.

1. Perceived support for violence

Many people believe it’s the “other side” that’s more violent—that they are the ones whose supporters are more likely to endorse political violence, or at least seem more tolerant of such violence.

Many on the left believe that right-wing extremism is by far a much more serious threat than liberal-side extremism. They point to events like the Charlottesville Unite the Right march, the assault on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, murders by far-right extremists (like the 2022 Buffalo, NY, mass murder and the 2019 El Paso, TX, mass murder), and, perhaps most prominently, January 6—the event that, to them, most embodies the violent threat posed by Trump and his diehard supporters.

On the right, many see liberals as the violent ones. Conservatives focus on different events and different manifestations of social disruptions, including things like violence during the 2020 George Floyd protests, aggressive tactics by progressive activists, and, most recently, the assassination of Charlie Kirk. They believe too many liberals either support or tacitly condone militancy and violence.

Sometimes, both groups even find evidence of the other side’s violent nature in the same event. For example, following the assassination attempt on Trump in Pennsylvania, some of his supporters cast blame on liberals, while some liberals pointed to the shooter’s past political activity to score points against Republicans.

Some people react in cruel and callous ways to violence aimed at the “other side,” which their opponents interpret as proof of pervasive sickness and immorality. The result of all this filtering is that both groups can end up genuinely wondering, “Why is the other side so violent? Why do so many of them support violence?”

Influencing these views is an instinct many of us have to downplay the significance of violence associated with our group, even as we consider violence associated with the other side hugely consequential. If someone kills a political figure on the other side, we might be quick to imagine a deranged, mentally unwell individual. But if someone kills a political figure on our side, there can be a strong temptation to give it great meaning and quickly designate “them” as all culpable.

The number of people who have committed politically motivated murder in recent decades is extremely small relative to the size of our population. We should recognize that even in the most unified country, there will always be some people drawn to hate and violence. Moreover, many in the media and political realm vastly overstate the number of Americans who actually support political violence.

It’s natural for violent events to upset and scare us. But we should consider whether we’re overreacting to what are rare incidents of violence, statistically speaking, in an otherwise very peaceful country, and how our tendency to cherry-pick bad behaviors and see the worst in each other can amplify divides—and even lead to self-fulfilling prophecies.

2. Class and cultural stereotypes

The divide is also heavily influenced by education and class. Democrats tend to have higher levels of formal education and are more concentrated in high-income, professional sectors and urban areas. Republicans, by contrast, are overrepresented in working-class, rural, and religious communities and are less likely to hold advanced degrees.

These differences help each side create negative, oversimplified stories about the other.

On the left, it’s common to hear that Republicans and Trump supporters are “anti-science,” easily manipulated, or even in a cult. They’re willfully ignorant, duped by conspiracy theories, or too intellectually backward to see what’s obvious to “smarter,” more educated people. You’ll find liberals saying things like, “Of course education makes you more politically liberal; that’s because conservatism is backwards.”

On the right, it’s often the inverse: liberals are “out-of-touch elites” captured by academic jargon and niche activist ideas. They’re arrogant, disconnected from the lives of “normal” Americans, and smugly dismissive of, or even hostile toward, people who aren’t like them.

Again, some of these narratives may contain elements of truth—but in the hands of highly angry political actors, they will often involve worst-case interpretations and excessive contempt. What’s missing is empathy and nuance: understanding that, by and large, people on the “other side” have real, defensible fears and frustrations—and that each group’s fears influence the other’s.

3. Accusations of hate

Democrats and Republicans both believe that people on the other side hate them much more than they do. This is one of many self-reinforcing elements of our conflict. When we think, “They hate us,” we are naturally inclined to act in more hostile ways towards “them.” This in turn encourages “them” to treat “us” worse, which makes us treat them worse, and on and on we continue down a doom spiral of toxic conflict.

Diagram from my book Defusing American Anger:

In the course of working on reducing polarization, I’ve talked to many Republicans who focus on the toxicity they’ve seen and personally experienced from liberals. It’s true that there are many pieces of evidence one can find to support that narrative. For example, surveys show that Democrats are more likely to cut off friendships—or even family members—for political reasons. Some Republicans are tempted to use this as another building block for the “this is all Democrats’ fault” narrative.

However, another way of interpreting that statistic is that many Democrats (and others, too) are turned off by Trump’s divisive personality and by those who support him even in the face of it (or who even emulate his confrontational and even dehumanizing rhetoric).

Group differences can leave many of us concluding with certainty, “See, this shows this is all their fault!” In these moments, we should try our best to strive for humility and to remember that the complexity of the world, and of conflict, makes it easy for us to see what we seek to find but harder to see the best in our adversaries.

4. Cultural vs. political power

Over at least the past few decades, politically liberal people and ideas have come to dominate key cultural institutions like academia, journalism, and the entertainment industry. This imbalance in cultural power has led to an abundance of insults and provocations aimed at conservatives, intentionally or unintentionally, generated by the people in those institutions.

That cultural power imbalance sometimes augments other group differences. For example, many conservatives believe there exists a powerful politically liberal establishment—one that at best misunderstands them and at worst disdains them. Feeling like an underdog fighting a vast, culturally dominant adversary can generate more support for an aggressive, contemptuous personality like Trump’s. For many of his supporters, his belligerence isn’t necessarily a flaw but rather a justified form of defiance against an establishment that is entirely against them.

But while liberals have dominated the culture for at least the past decade, they control few levers of political power at this moment. Consider America’s key institutions: the presidency, U.S. Senate, U.S. House, Supreme Court, governorships, and state legislatures. Republicans have more power than Democrats in every single one, and many Democrats fear they may be essentially locked out of power in key institutions in the near future.

So, although they continue to hold immense cultural power, many Democrats likely feel powerless in the face of Trump’s second term, especially when he has the support of Congress and, often, the Supreme Court too.

Again, regardless of whose views and concerns are more correct, the point is that it’s easy for people to build vastly different narratives depending on what facts and moral weightings they use.

If we continue to treat each other with great arrogance and contempt, we’ll continue to make missteps, convinced that we’re helping extinguish the danger when in fact we’re feeding it with more kindling.

To address this threat we face, we must first understand how it spreads: in the warped stories we tell ourselves about our opponents. Humans are skilled storytellers. We’re good at taking new tidbits of information and fitting them into our existing narratives. In the age of the internet, it is easier than ever before to use these bits to construct and bolster our preferred narratives. Decent people build stories from various facts and ideas that make sense to them—and many come to view those who have different stories with contempt, accelerating the blaze.

This is how we so easily fall for the “it’s obviously all their fault” framings that keep us mired in toxicity and contempt. Almost everyone believes they are on the side of good, but it’s often hard to see that simple fact in our adversaries. Only when we understand them as people who also believe their views to be good and righteous, the same as ourselves, will we be better positioned to combat our opponents³ without dehumanizing, to work to persuade others instead of provoke, and to stop feeding the dangerous blaze the vast majority of us wish to contain.

Zachary Elwood is the host of the psychology podcast People Who Read People and the author of Defusing American Anger.

¹ Our political divides clearly are complex and can’t cleanly be broken down into concepts of ‘Republican’ vs ‘Democrat,’ or even ‘left’ versus ‘right.’ (I myself don’t believe in the left-right spectrum.) I use ‘Republican’ and ‘Democrat’ in this and other work as simple stand-ins for our polarized divides. This is defensible because our toxic conflict largely boils down to whether someone feels drawn to supporting Republican or Democrat leaders.

² The biggest objection I hear to depolarization efforts is that people think it means embracing what they see as a false equivalency—a stance that “both sides are equally bad.” But it’s possible to reject the idea that both sides have contributed equally while acknowledging that both Democrats and Republicans have played some role in perpetuating our current conflict. If you doubt that that’s true, I’d invite you to read my book Defusing American Anger.

³ If you’d like tips for doing activism in less polarizing ways, see 8 Tips for Activists Who Want to Reduce Polarization

• Seeing the ease with which rational, caring people can disagree

• Seeing how common it is for our views of the “other side” to be distorted and overly pessimistic

• (Due to above points): Seeing that intellectual arrogance and contempt toward others’ views are seldom called for, and will always amplify conflict toxicity

• Seeing the self-reinforcing nature of toxic conflict: how unreasonable contempt and fear leads to more contempt and fear—and to more extreme, uncompromising stances

I believe if someone fails to understand these very important aspects of conflict, they’ll often act in ways (often unintentionally) that add to toxicity and contempt. And that risk is present even for those who fully believe they are helping reduce toxicity.

For this piece, I’ve added a few people’s Substack links.

Feel free to use/borrow this curriculum (e.g., feel free to borrow the structure and switch out specific resources that you like).

Do you have short-form pieces, books, or resources you think would make for strong, persuasive additions to this course? Please mention them in the comments.

Okay here’s the course…

A Short Course for Navigating and Defusing Toxic Conflict

Objective: The objective of this short course is to provide you with some basic skills and information that will help you a) navigate toxic conflict and polarization, b) work across emotionally charged differences, and c) be a leader in high-conflict environments.

More on the course philosophy: A fundamental human challenge is that we seem to be easily drawn into toxic conflict dynamics, and overly certain and team-based ways of seeing the world and people around us. To build a healthier, more functional, more peaceful future, we need more people to recognize the importance of engaging with others in more respectful, collaborative, and optimistic ways.

Course sections and objectives:

• Section 1: The Ease With Which We Can Disagree

  • You’ll learn about the ease with which rational, caring people can disagree, and why it’s good to aim for humility and avoid arrogance

• Section 2: How Conflict Degrades our Thinking and Interactions

  • You’ll learn how contempt, anger, and fear can create a self-reinforcing conflict cycle, and how that can weaken and derange our thinking and interactions with the “other side”

• Section 3: Navigating and Resolving Toxic Conflict

  • You’ll learn some strategies for engaging with those on the “other side,” or helping others navigate their disagreement

Section 1: The Ease With Which We Can Disagree

Overview: It’s natural and expected for people to disagree. The world is a complex place: determining the truth can be difficult. Also, even when we do agree on facts, we’ll often have different moral views on what constitutes harm, and different views about which harms are most important. It’s simply easy for rational and kind people to passionately disagree with each other. Seeing the ease with which people can disagree in turn helps us see the importance of aiming for intellectual humility and at minimally contemptuous ways of engaging.

Recommended short resources:

• “How Do Reasonable People Disagree?” about Kevin Dorst’s work on polarization (his Substack)

• “What Does Intellectual Humility Look Like?” by Mark Leary

• “Why We Fight About Morality and Politics,” a TEDx Talk by psychologist Kurt Gray (his Substack)

• “11 Questions About the Certainty Trap,” by sociologist Ilana Redstone (her Substack)

Go deeper with these resources about the temptation and pitfalls of highly certain and arrogant ways of thinking and approaching disagreement:

• Ilana Redstone’s book The Certainty Trap

• Taylor Dotson’s book The Divide (his Substack)

• Kevin Dorst’s Substack on “rational polarization”

Section 2: How Conflict Degrades our Thinking and Interactions

Overview: In the first section, we focused on the ease with which rational people can disagree and the importance of intellectual humility. But it’s also true that toxic conflict skews our thinking and leads us to behave in irrational, team-based ways. The perception that we’re fighting a high-stakes war with a morally faulty “other side” can distort and harden our beliefs (for example, we can see the whole “other side” as much more extreme and malicious than they are). We can be unknowingly caught in a self-reinforcing feedback loop where contempt amplifies contempt, and more extreme views lead to more extreme views on the “other side.”

This section will help you understand how conflict can degrade our ability to think clearly, and make us more extreme and unwilling to compromise.

Recommended short readings:

• “Why We Get so Angry When People Disagree with Us,” by Elizabeth Niedbala

• “Polarization: One Reason Groups Fail,” by Reid Hastie and Cass R. Sunstein

• “Undue Hate: Why Disagreement Tends to be Overly Disagreeable,” by Daniel F. Stone

• “How Animosity Helps Create the Very Behaviors That Upset Us,” by Zachary Elwood

Go deeper with these resources on how toxic conflict can weaken our thinking and lead to a self-reinforcing conflict cycle:

• Daniel F. Stone’s book Undue Hate

• Amanda Ripley’s book High Conflict (her Substack)

• Zachary Elwood’s book Defusing American Anger

Section 3: Navigating and Resolving Toxic Conflict

Overview: So far, you’ve learned about a) the ease with which we can disagree, and b) how our disagreement can lead to toxic, dysfunctional ways of thinking and engagement. Now you’ll learn some tips for engaging and collaborating across strong differences, or for helping mediate such disagreement. A major part of navigating and healing a toxic conflict is learning to avoid arrogant, contemptuous, us-vs-them language and approaches.

Recommended short readings:

• A summary of the book “Conflicted,” by Ian Leslie

• A summary of the book “Getting To Yes,” by Roger Fisher and William Ury

• 8 Tips for Activists Who Want to Reduce Polarization, by Zachary Elwood

Go deeper with these books on navigating and resolving toxic conflict:

• Adam Kahane’s book Collaborating with the Enemy: How to Work with People You Don’t Agree with or Like or Trust

• Ian Leslie’s book Conflicted: Why Arguments Are Tearing Us Apart and How They Can Bring Us Together, by Ian Leslie

• Roger Fisher and William Ury’s book Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In

• Robert Talisse’s book Civic Solitude: Why Democracy Needs Distance

Notes on course creation: This was created by Zachary Elwood with help from polarization researcher Daniel F. Stone, author of the book Undue Hate. Please let me know what you liked or didn’t like about it in the comments. Feel free to give input on resources you think are highly valuable on this topic, and are worthy of inclusion.

If you’ve liked what I’ve been doing with my work on reducing toxic polarization, do me a favor and vote for my essay in this contest that ends at midnight tonight (night of October 31). This will only take you a minute!

Voting for my article requires signing up for Aemula, a new paradigm-shifting news/journalism platform. Completely apart from my ask, if you are down for the cause of reducing polarization, I think you should sign for Aemula: reducing toxic polarization is one of their goals (more on Aemula below).

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• Go to my article; if you don’t have an Aemula subscription, you’ll be prompted to sign up; it’s free and easy.

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Why sign up for Aemula?

I think you should sign up for Aemula, regardless of doing me a favor. The founder of Aemula, Don Templeman, has an impressive vision for how decentralized, self-regulating technology can create a news/journalism platform with incentives for healthier, less biased, less team-based, less polarizing approaches baked into it. I am a believer in Don’s vision; I interviewed him for my podcast about his vision for Aemula. Don is just getting started with Aemula; he’s currently seeking funding and such (and I myself wanted to invest in him but I didn’t meet the investor criteria). There’s a chance Aemula is the future of how news is done; you might consider signing up just to be in at the start of something that could truly be revolutionary.

• How conflict leads us to overreact to what are rare violent events in a very peaceful nation

• Our desire to try to prove “the other side are the violent ones” and how we go about doing that

• The childishness and unhelpfulness of engaging in team-based scorekeeping

A nation of 340 million people should not be at risk of being destabilized and thrown into chaos by the actions of a single person. But a polarized nation is an unwell nation, prone to overly emotional reactions. Toxic polarization leads to many people putting great significance on events that they see as aligning with their fears and anger. Many people place great meaning on events that prove to them that the situation is horrible and untenable, that there is a high-stakes battle between good and evil going on.

I think that’s happening now, after Charlie Kirk’s death. There are many pro-Trump people now filtering for evidence that liberals/Democrats are evil, that Charlie Kirk’s murder tells them something deeply meaningful about our country and about the “other side.” On the dumpster fire of social media, we can find many people playing score-keeping games, tallying murders and violence, trying to prove “the other side is worse.” This includes scorekeeping not just the violence itself, but reactions to the violence.

I think all this team-based scorekeeping is childish behavior. But it’s also very human behavior: it’s just common in a conflict. It’s what we do.

I wrote a piece for The Liberal Patriot titled “It’s All the Other Side’s Fault: How we convince ourselves our opponents are dumb and evil—and we’re blameless.” (You can also read an updated, edited version of this on Aemula.com, a new revolutionary journalism platform that I recommend signing up for.)

The comments on that piece are interesting, also. You can find people playing the “blame game” there, too: trotting out examples of violence they see as from “the left,” others trotting out examples of violence from “the right.”

As we grow more polarized, we become increasingly unstable—more prone to being destabilized and thrown into us-vs-them frenzies by one-off events and the actions of single individuals. By granting “lone wolf” individuals more power to agitate and destabilize us, we ironically encourage more violence. Unwell people see that doing something violent will indeed grant them great power: the power to get attention, the power to be seen as significant. They see, rightly, that their actions will set the world on edge, and so they can be more drawn to it. (Can you imagine the societal reaction now if another prominent conservative political person was killed?) As a society grows more polarized, it seems to grow to have more in common with these unwell people, in embracing such events as deeply significant. (Conflict has many self-reinforcing aspects.)

Regarding people who compile cruel comments about Charlie Kirk’s death to prove “liberals are crazy” (lot of that going on). Back in my much more polarized days, when I took pleasure in mocking Trump supporters, I kept a Twitter thread of unhinged comments I found from people in pro-Trump Facebook groups. This included a lot of comments wishing for or threatening violence. Honestly, those pro-Trump Facebook groups were very scary: just a lot of rabid, nutty stuff. (I haven’t been back to them in years; they may still be that way.) This is just to point out that it’s quite easy to find online comments to create a persuasive narrative of how crazy a group is. And we should remember that the internet itself is a medium that brings out the worst in us—and also aids us in finding unhinged behavior on the “other side.”

While we’re at it, we should also consider that foreign powers might be posting some of these inflammatory comments to rile us up: creating such accounts and comments would yield a great ROI for anyone who wanted to hurt America. If I were Russia and seeking to sow discord, that’d be an obvious place to invest.

(I think that our country’s response to George Floyd’s death also had this highly overreactive and team-based quality to it, and that that reaction amplified toxic polarization. If that observation bothers you, and you’d like to better understand why many people saw that as an illogical and dangerous over-reaction, you might enjoy reading the section titled George Floyd in this excerpt from my book. You may not agree with it, but I think it will help you understand such views better and improve empathy.)

Group differences play a role

That piece also focuses on the idea that group differences—the things the “other side” does that “our side” doesn’t do—play a big role in the conflict cycle. Group differences aid us in filtering for evidence that “it’s all their fault” and that we are essentially blameless.

This point about group differences has increasingly seemed to me a very important point about conflict, and yet it’s an idea I basically haven’t seen discussed at all. One version of this idea that I have seen discussed is in the book Asymmetric Politics, which discusses some key differences between Republicans and Democrats that make the groups hard to compare (there’s some info about this in this piece of mine). But after reading that book years ago, I started thinking about all sorts of other ways that Republicans and Democrats (or pro-Trump and anti-Trump Americans) differ from each other. These differences lead to differences in how their anger and fear manifest.

One way to see this point: the contempt and rage of a more working-class, lower-income group will manifest differently—show up in different forms–-compared to the contempt and rage of a more educated, higher-income group.

There are many differences we might point to and examine. That Liberal Patriot piece of mine mentions some, but there are many others. Some other areas that come to mind:

• Liberal/progressive activists are often trying to change society and move it in new, often uncharted areas, while conservative activists are often seen as trying to maintain things, or revert things. This can lead to differences in how politically associated anger and frustration play out.

• Young people are prone to more emotional disturbances and struggles. If younger people, as a group, skew a certain way politically, that can be a factor in how politically associated violence manifests.

• Trump is an extremely provocative, attention-grabbing, exuberant personality. He is a “star,” much more so than any Democratic politicians. Leaving all else of a political nature aside, this aspect alone means that he’ll be more likely to be the focus on unwell obsessions, just as other celebrities often gain the attention of various unwell people.

• How passionate and emotionally invested a group is, on the whole, can be a factor in how political rage plays out. How politically passionate, on the whole, are Republicans compared to Democrats? I don’t know, but I’m just saying that there can be many non-obvious group-level factors and traits that play a role.

I don’t mean to say that the above ideas are all highly thought-out points (nor were the ones in the Liberal Patriot piece I wrote). I don’t mean to say that I know what all the factors are or how they work. But I do think that the idea of group differences playing a role in how we form narratives is an important one, and one that hardly anyone has talked about.

What other group differences can you think of that might affect how conflict behavior manifests? Feel free to send me a message.

More on power imbalance perceptions

As I wrote in the piece, perceived power dynamics play a role in group behavior. In a situation where one group is widely perceived to have much more power, the less dominant group can feel more justified embracing aggressive approaches.

I think this is a factor in many Republicans condoning or engaging in highly aggressive approaches (e.g., defending or mimicking Trump’s highly contemptuous us-vs-them approaches, ranging up to more aggressive, extreme, or violent behaviors). They see themselves as fighting a powerful, disdainful liberal establishment.

And I think this is a factor in some militant/extreme liberal-associated behaviors now that Trump is back in power.

Some Republican voters seek to downplay this as a factor (just as both sides naturally seek to deprive their opponents of explanatory factors behind their actions). They will say things like, “But there are more far left attacks now then there were far right attacks during Biden’s term.” But this misses that our polarization is on an upward trajectory; both sides were poised to be especially angry and scared if “their side” lost in 2024. The stakes always seem to be increasing. Is it possible (or probable) that if Harris had won in 2024, that there’d be some extremely angry and scared pro-Trump people ready to “unleash hell”? If a Democrat wins in 2028, might we see quite a few examples of conservative-associated violence? I don’t pretend to know; all I know is that these things are complex, and I think we are prone to confidently filter for evidence supporting our existing biases and narratives.

Many on the right point to the oppressed-oppressor frame on the left as a factor in producing rage and violence. That may be a factor, yes. But one could counter this by pointing out the extreme anti-government, anti-establishment ideologies found on the right, and the numerous cases of far right extremism that spring from that.

I think such attempts at score-keeping are childish and unhelpful, especially when they are basically extremely rare anomalies in a very, very peaceful country. We run the risk of driving ourselves crazy based on the actions of a few people.

Here’s a comment I left on the Liberal Patriot piece summing up my response to such scorekeeping instincts:

A general response that might apply to a wide range of criticisms/response to this piece: When talking about these topics, I often get people responding to me who want to debate “who’s actually right” or “who’s actually more at fault” or "what group is actually worse." In my work, I make no claims about that (as I don’t think it’s productive; and it’s just not relevant to conflict resolution type work). What IS important to me is seeing how easy it is for rational, compassionate people to reach different conclusions about such matters, which I think is just very clearly the case. And I think it's important to see how reaching for team-based, us-vs-them approaches and contempt and anger (searching for definitive proof that "it's all their fault" or "see, they are worse, this proves it"), only ends up amplifying toxicity — and even ends up contributing to the very things about which we’re so angry/contemptuous.

We'll all believe what we believe about who's more at fault (that is natural and fine) -- but I think it's clear that you can continue thinking "one side is worse" (if that's what you believe) while also believing that it's extremely important to reduce toxicity and contempt and team-based thinking, because it's a self-reinforcing cycle.

Humans are storytellers. In a sense, you could say that we are the stories we tell: the stories we tell about ourselves, our place in the world, how the world works, and the people around us. When we’re in toxic conflict, we are prone to believing highly pessimistic stories about our adversaries: narratives that align with our already pessimistic views of “them.” We are also prone to believing stories that put us and our allies in a highly positive, noble light.

These stories we craft and embrace, internally and externally, can then in turn lead us deeper into conflict. Our pessimistic stories about our adversaries will serve as just more proof to them that we are the toxic aggressors: more proof that our hate for them is the problem. Righteous stories we craft about the obvious rightness of stances on “our side” can be obstacles to empathy and understanding.

This also points to the important role that storytellers and artists can play in reducing toxic polarization. Because a society’s storytellers and artists are usually highly politically involved, they’ll often (unintentionally) play a role in amplifying polarization. They will do this by building and promoting narratives that are simplistic, overly pessimistic, and insulting to the “other side.” Storytellers are drawn to dramatic framings — grand, exciting framings of good versus evil, of revolutions, of clashes of ideas — and those dramatic framings, in their Manichaean simplicity, can end up being just more fuel on the fire of our us-vs-them contempt.

The following is an excerpt from my ebook Defusing American Anger (written for all Americans). There is an equivalent section in my book How Contempt Destroys Democracy (written for a liberal, anti-Trump audience) but the version of this is longer in my first book.

The excerpt…

We create elaborate negative stories about “them”

Often, we look for dramatic, historical narratives to explain the beliefs of the people around us.

For example, a liberal person might weave a dramatic and elaborate narrative about how America’s history of slavery and racism is directly linked to various Republican stances today (and many people have weaved those stories). Or a conservative person might weave a dramatic and elaborate story about how today’s liberal activism is directly linked to various Marxist or American-hating ideologies of the past.

These dramatic historical narratives about our political opponents can be tempting to us because they make us feel we’ve finally understood why they are so wrong and misguided. Reaching a seeming understanding of what motivates the “bad guys” can make us feel smart and superior — can make us feel like we possess rare and powerful knowledge.

And these stories can have some valid points. After all, the past does affect the present, and many ideas and events can be found to be related in various ways.

But it’s also true that our biases and animosity can lead us to create distorted and overly pessimistic stories about the nature of our political opponents.

For example, it’s common to find liberals espousing the view that Republicans’ animosity toward current liberal-side race-related stances is directly related to conservative racism in the 1960s: the pushback to the Civil Rights Movement and to desegregation. There can be some connections to be found there, but it’s also true that the people around us today can have rational, understandable reasons for thinking liberal ideas are wrong that have nothing to do with what happened decades ago.

On the right, some conservatives today weave elaborate stories about the dark Marxist underpinnings of leftist activism. The conservative activist Chris Rufo has a book titled America's Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything, that claims to expose “the hidden history of left-wing intellectuals and activists who systematically took control of America’s institutions to undermine them from within.” The book asks, “Has the goal of the left, for a century, actually been the destruction of every Western institution?”

Similarly, here, there can be threads of truth: clearly we can find a through-line between various bad, extreme, and strange far-left ideas in the past and far-left ideas in the present. One can find connections between some ideas implemented in dangerous, authoritarian communist regimes and some modern progressive ideas (just as one can find connections between various far-right, authoritarian regimes and conservatives ideas). One big factor explaining the popularity of liberal-side ideas is that successful societies seem to grow more socially permissive and tradition-questioning over time. It’s also true that progressivism, whatever one thinks of it, is a movement that always seeks to question conceptual structures that society has largely taken for granted. These are societal patterns that one can see as sometimes going too far without requiring creeping Marxist plots to explain them.

The truth is that, just as on the “other side,” a person can believe liberals are more right than conservatives on a variety of issues for reasons that have nothing to do with what happened decades ago. But people on both “sides” will seek to find sinister, long-running reasons and factors for why their opponents are now acting the way they are.

A 2018 piece by Geoffrey Kabaservice was titled “Liberals don’t know much about conservative history: And both sides suffer for it.” His main point was that many of the books written about the history of conservatism in America were written by liberal people with biased perspectives. He writes:

Some of the new works on conservatism have been excellent, others awful. But nearly all reveal the pitfalls for liberals writing about a movement with which they have no personal experience. If you’re a historian who has not a single conservative colleague — and perhaps not even one conservative friend — chances are you’ll approach conservatism as anthropologists once approached tribes they considered remote, exotic, and quite possibly dangerous.

One mistake he saw liberal writers frequently make was that they wrote as if some of the extreme fringes of the conservative movement throughout American history were more powerful and popular than they were; they wrote as though those views represented the overall conservative movement. He argued that such reductionist takes were the “mirror image of the sloppy right-wing canard that liberalism is no different from socialism, or even communism.”

Let’s imagine a young person who’s just starting to become politically aware. They’ll perceive a bunch of competing ideas around them, and sometimes it will just be a few factors that convince them that one political group or another is right or wrong. They might, for example, see Trump’s behavior and think, “Any political party that supports this, I want no part of.” Or maybe they’ll see liberal stances on race as misguided and divisive, and that might be one of the main reasons they lean Republican. Or someone may be hugely influenced by the abortion issue, in one direction or another. And of course we’ll also be highly influenced by our peer group and surroundings: that’s another major factor that supersedes much else.

So even as we may see political party stances as being affected by the past, it’s also true that the people around us are making judgments that, from their point of view, are about the issues and ideas around them now — issues and ideas that have little to do with the past.

Scary narratives about the origins of the other side’s badness are persuasive because we’re primed to see that group’s badness. We can try to keep in mind that we can be suckers for simplistic stories that confirm our existing beliefs. We should try to keep in mind how complex the world around us and the people in it really are.

Simplistic stories obscure huge complexity

As a way to examine this dynamic in more detail, let’s look at abortion. In the early 1970s, being pro-life or pro-choice wasn’t yet associated with one political party or the other. It just wasn’t yet a topic most people thought much about. For quite a few reasons, which we’ll examine in a bit, it’s possible to imagine the abortion issue going either way. In fact, it’s possible to imagine Democrats and Republicans being reversed on their abortion stances.

One piece of supporting evidence for this was that, before the 1970s, being against abortion was primarily associated with the Catholics — and Catholics were mostly Democrat voters. You may recall that John F. Kennedy, a Democrat, was a Catholic.

Another piece of supporting evidence: in many other countries, where religion doesn’t play as much of a role as it does in America, the conservative party is the more pro-choice party because that view aligns more with a more libertarian, “keep government out of our lives” philosophy.

Dan Williams has written several books about the history of the abortion issue in America. Besides being an expert on the abortion issue, he’s also a pro-life activist. Via personal correspondence, Williams wrote the following:

It’s plausible that the Republican Party would be a pro-choice party. The party’s leadership in the 1970s was heavily pro-choice, and Republicans in that era were more likely than Democrats to favor abortion rights. In nearly every other industrialized democracy in the Western world, the leading conservative party in a country is pro-choice on libertarian grounds. This is the case in Canada, Britain, and Australia, for instance, and it’s also true of most of Western Europe.

In the 1970s, it appeared that the same situation was developing in the United States. Indeed, throughout the 1980s, the US Senate’s Republican leadership included a strongly pro-choice element. It was not until the end of the 1990s that pro-choice influence in the Republican Party began to rapidly decline.

If the Christian Right had not become such a strong influence in the GOP—and if the Supreme Court had not become a battleground over the future of abortion rights—it is not difficult to imagine a scenario in which both the Democratic and Republican parties would be moderately pro-choice parties, but with the Democratic Party more likely than the GOP to attract a sizeable minority of Catholic and conservative evangelical voters who wanted to restrict abortion. This was the case in the mid-1970s, and perhaps it could have remained the case for decades afterwards if the Christian Right had not developed the partisan alliance that it did.

To be clear: this is not to say that there aren’t rational, understandable reasons for being either pro-life or pro-choice. It’s not to say that our beliefs on abortion, or anything else, are formed only by peer pressure. The point is that we tend to create stories—and associated meaning—about a party’s overall grouping of stances.

We form stories about what such things mean, such as:

“My pro-life stance is connected to my wanting a small government,” or…

“My pro-choice stance is connected to me being pro-immigration.”

But it’s possible some of these stories we tell ourselves about our group—or about the other group—can be based on somewhat arbitrary events that could have ended up in different ways.

Michael Macy has researched how the stances associated with each political party may form at random. He wrote a paper about his work called Opinion Cascades and the Unpredictability of Partisan Polarization. In that research, they asked self-described Democrats and Republicans to guess how their political party would feel about “future controversies.” These were issues where stances weren’t associated with either political party—questions about artificial intelligence or about stances on classic literature—but that one day might be a point of conflict. This would be similar to asking people back in the 1960s which way they thought the political parties would go on abortion.

This is from a 2019 article about this study in the Cornell Chronicle:

The researchers split more than 2,000 Democratic and Republican volunteers into 10 “parallel worlds,” each isolated from the others. Within each world, participants took turns filling out an online survey to indicate whether they agreed or disagreed with a series of unfamiliar political and cultural issues. In two of the 10 “worlds,” the survey was private, but in the other eight, whenever a partisan took a position on a given issue, all other participants in their “world” saw a real-time update of how each party was leaning.

The results showed how a handful of “early movers” can trigger a cascade in which later partisans pile on to their party’s newly emerging position, leading eventually to large political differences. The big surprise was that the party that supported the issue in one world was just as likely to oppose the issue in another world.

“Sometimes the same party’s early movers would go one way, and sometimes the other,” Macy said.

And in each world, participants followed these early movers – often in opposite directions.

“In one world, it was Democrats who favored using [artificial intelligence] to spot online criminals, and in another world it was Republicans,” he said. “In one world, Democrats favored classic books, and in another world, Republicans favored the classics. In one world, Democrats were more optimistic about the future and in another world, it was Republicans.”

This unpredictability has a surprising implication for our world, Macy said.

“Deep political divisions between Democrats and Republicans—which seem like they must have some philosophical or ideological foundation—may turn out to be arbitrary, in that the two sides could have switched but for the luck of the draw among the early movers,” he said. [emphasis added]

[I talked to Michael Macy on my podcast about his work.]

To reduce anger, it can help to imagine how different issue stances might have gone different ways and how, no matter what happens, people are able to create a story about how those stances ended up. Let’s examine a world where our political parties’ stances on abortion were largely reversed (and this is more plausible a scenario than you might think, and something we’ll examine later in the section on abortion):

Suppose you’re a pro-choice Democrat who views Republican pro-life views as representative of Republicans’ overall meanness. Imagine an alternate world where Democrats were the more pro-life-friendly party: If you lived in that world, you might perceive Democrats’ anti-abortion stances as relating to other ways liberals typically care for defenseless and downtrodden groups, people, and animals.

If you’re a pro-life Republican, you might imagine an alternate world where Republicans were the more pro-choice party. In that world, you might see that stance as being aligned with other small-government, “keep the government out of our lives” stances.

Whichever “world” we find ourselves in, we’ll form stories about how each side’s stances fit together. We humans are very good storytellers: telling stories is what sets us apart from animals and makes us human. We tell stories to make sense of the things around us, and we create those stories even if some of the things around us are arbitrary and random. So it can be valuable to question those narratives we have about what the other group’s stances tell us about them—or what our group’s views tell us about us. This can help us lower our anger.

And again, this isn’t to say that one can’t have logical and examined reasons for being either pro-life or pro-choice. Clearly, we can have many reasons for our beliefs. But these points can help us see how the stories we tell ourselves about our group and the other group can be biased and simplistic, and can contribute to our anger.

Thanks to our highly polarized environment, political parties form some of their unpredictable viewpoints in a chaotic and seemingly random way. The more polarized we are, the more emotions are at play, and the more quickly and randomly a group’s stances might shift.

As discussed, when we see the other group’s stances as so uniformly bad, we often have the emotional instinct to take the opposite views of the other group when any new issues arise. “If the bad people believe x,” we may instinctively think, “then good people believe the opposite of x.”

Is it possible to imagine a scenario where Trump initially implemented very strict lockdowns in response to covid? Maybe he would do this because his advisors told him it would help him avoid crashing the economy. Or maybe he’d do that to help build a case for why we need stricter immigration rules. To better imagine this scenario, it helps to remember that Republicans wanted strict policies to combat the 2014 Ebola outbreak.

In that alternate world, it’s possible to imagine liberals taking a stand against those policies (at least initially). In that world, some liberals would complain that strict covid lockdown policies were an overly oppressive authoritarian action. Some liberals would say that too-strict lockdowns hurt poor communities financially and psychologically, especially communities of color.

We saw some of this in our world. For example, in a September 2020 piece in the socialist magazine Jacobin, Swedish biostatistician Martin Kulldorff said, “I think the lockdown is the worst assault on the working class in half a century, and especially on the urban working class,” and “There have been studies, for example in Toronto, that show that lockdowns have primarily protected high-income, low-minority neighborhoods, but not low-income or high-minority neighborhoods.” It’s possible to imagine that, if Trump had implemented strict lockdowns, we’d see much more of that kind of sentiment.

To take another covid-related example: When I interviewed Matthew Hornsey, a group-psychology researcher, he shared an anecdote: Early on in the pandemic, Trump mentioned hydroxychloroquine as a promising treatment. Hornsey was surprised how that led many liberals to associate the drug with Trump and, therefore, to mock it—despite the ongoing research on its usefulness for treating covid. This could be seen as another example of people reflexively taking an opposite stance of the people they dislike.

We’ve become polarized across a surprising number of recent issues, yet it’s possible to imagine things going differently if members of each group had done different things. Often, all that’s needed is an influential, polarizing person to take a firm stance on something and the other side will feel motivated to push back against them. If we’re willing to examine how those kinds of emotional dynamics can factor into our divides, it will help us lower our anger. For some of the recent issues that people have been surprised we’ve become polarized on, it’s possible to imagine things going a different way if some people in each group had done different things.

Our great story-telling abilities also helps explain why human divides can be so long-lasting and so entrenched. It helps explains why us-vs-them feuds can last decades, and even centuries, even as the issues being fought over might dramatically shift.

The role of storytellers and artists in reducing polarization

That was the end of that excerpt from my book Defusing American Anger. Because the above deals so much with storytelling, I thought I’d include another excerpt about the role storytellers and artists can play in reducing toxic polarization and contempt. This excerpt is present in different forms in both my books:

This excerpt comes from the final chapter of both books, which is about what we can all do to help reduce polarization:

If you’re a writer, artist, social media influencer, or other creator, you might look for ways to incorporate depolarization-aimed ideas in your work. Political messages in creative projects are often aimed at denigrating the other side in various ways. We have no shortage of that kind of thing. A lot of this art, even when it comes from a place of compassion, communicates a message that liberals are nice and wise and conservatives are backwards and mean. As such, much of this content is an accelerant of polarization.

Creative people are skilled at weaving dramatic and eloquent narratives about the “good” and “bad” people. In their desire to create art that contains moral lessons, they can be unintentional contributors to our divides. We should remember that just because something is eloquent and capable of arousing exciting emotions it isn’t necessarily true. We may see an artistic message as meaningful simply because it aligns with our biases and distorted views.

If you’re a creative person who wants to reduce toxic polarization, perhaps you can brainstorm projects that would include these ideas and have a cultural impact. I can imagine all sorts of novels, TV shows, movies, and online media projects that could incorporate these ideas in ways that would keep people entertained while communicating lessons about the nature of our divides.

For those aspiring to be artists, writers, and creators, maybe you can see how that desire doesn’t need to be about making the things we traditionally think of as art: paintings, fiction, movies, and such. Maybe that’s a limited view of what art is and can be. The underlying point of art, after all, is to communicate, to influence, and to change people’s perceptions. That can be done in many ways, including creating projects aimed at bridge-building, empathy-building, and reducing polarization.

Maybe part of our problem is that so much of our artistic energy, as a culture, is devoted to the more popular and ego-boosting forms of art rather than art that is difficult, that challenges us, that brings us together, and that tries to solve real-world problems. Perhaps we should try to expand our idea of what art is and can be.

If enough people start believing in and promoting these ideas, that will start a feedback cycle where influential people — journalists, politicians, pundits — start talking more about these ideas, which in turn will get other citizens talking about them. Polarization grows via a vicious feedback cycle and we can try to combat it with a virtuous feedback cycle.

Conflict resolution specialists Guy and Heidi Burgess, in a 2022 paper, made the case that we need to take a “massively parallel” approach to reducing polarization. In other words, we need to try to get as many people and organizations as possible to work on this problem. As they say, “We will need a new generation of conflict professionals willing to commit to doing for the conflict field what a previous generation did (and is still trying to do) for the climate.”

All of our efforts, big and small, will ripple out in various ways. The people you pass these ideas to will pass them to other people, who will pass them to other people. In a highly connected society, change can happen quickly.

To learn more about my books and read reviews, go to www.american-anger.com

Below is an excerpt that appears in different forms in my books Defusing American Anger (Amazon link) and How Contempt Destroys Democracy (Amazon link) (learn more about my books).

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Excerpt from chapter “Animosity makes us paranoid and conspiracy-minded”

Earlier, we discussed how the out-group homogeneity effect makes us see the “other side” as all the same. This can in turn make us more conspiracy-minded and paranoid. We’ll be more likely to perceive connections between the actions of people on the “other side” that aren’t really there.

For example, a liberal person might see similarities in thinking between a far-right extremist group and conservative Supreme Court justices. They may have a feeling that these things are connected; that these assorted people and groups are working together in some malicious and underhanded way to achieve some aligned, coherent goal.

Or a conservative person might see similarities between the things a militant antifa person has said and things a Democrat leader has said, and feel that these things are connected. They may suspect that powerful liberal forces are collaborating and working toward some sinister outcome.

The more polarized we become, the more paranoid we become.

And people’s conspiracy-minded thinking will be mocked and derided by their political opponents. When we can’t even understand the more rational beliefs of the other side, their more paranoid and conspiracy-minded beliefs will of course strike us as even more dangerous and scary.

And because we view the other side as largely all-the-same, we’ll tend to view their wacky and conspiratorial beliefs as being more prevalent than they really are, increasing our fear and anger (that old polarization feedback cycle).

For example, when a Democrat sees a Trump voter saying that Satanic pedophiles are running the government, it’s easy for liberals to see Trump voters, as a group, as deranged and hysterical. And similarly, when a Republican sees a Democrat say something like, “Trump is purposefully downplaying Covid to kill minorities,” it’s easy for them to see liberals, as a group, as deranged and hysterical.

But most of us don’t believe in the most extreme and outlandish conspiracy theories. During my research, I talked to a Trump voter who said he thought liberals made too much of a deal about nutty right-wing conspiracies, and that he personally knew no Republican who believed in QAnon-like things. (I did point out to him that such beliefs seemed to be more prevalent than he thought they were.) A few weeks later he emailed to tell me he’d met a right-wing QAnon believer in person. He said, “Now I get why people think Trump supporters are nuts!” The point is that it’s easy for us to be oblivious about why the other side thinks we’re so crazy.

And for the purposes of reducing political contempt, it helps to see that there’s a good amount of conspiracy-minded thinking across the political spectrum. In a 2021 interview with Matthew Grossman, conspiracy theory researcher said the following:

There’s always been this view that the right does it more than the left. But in surveys, when we measure generalized conspiracy thinking, we don’t find that it’s more the right than the left. When we look at large groups of conspiracy theories, we find that the left is just as likely to buy in as people on the right. [...]

What a lot of this comes down to is what’s the media paying attention to, and given the biases in the media, oftentimes they’re going to pay more attention to the conspiracy theories that the other guy believes, that the other side buys into, and they’ll ignore the ones on their own side, right?

And there are psychological reasons for that. Our conspiracy theories aren’t conspiracy theories, they’re conspiracy facts. It’s the other guys’ conspiracy theories that are conspiracy theories.

Uscinski and his colleagues wrote the paper “American politics in two dimensions,” which examined how conspiracy theory beliefs were highly correlated with anti-establishment beliefs. And there are a lot of people across the political spectrum who have anti-establishment beliefs.

To reduce our own team-based animosity, it’s helpful to see that conspiracy-minded thinking is a human problem, and that no group holds a monopoly on overly pessimistic and fearful ways of thinking (even as we may think that one side is worse).

A 2021 YouGov survey found that many people believe that “no matter who’s elected or officially in charge, there’s a secret group of people who control events and rule the world.” This included 52% of Republicans and 31% of Democrats.

It’s also true that there can be some common liberal-side beliefs that are paranoid and conspiracy-minded but that are seldom categorized as such in liberal-leaning spaces.

For example, there are many liberals who believe that Trump is a Russian asset: that he’s controlled by Russia. Could such a thing be possible? Sure, it could be. If it came out that Russia had compromising material on Trump and had influenced his actions, it wouldn’t surprise me. But there’s no convincing evidence for that. Paranoid, conspiracy-minded thinking is defined by high levels of certainty where certainty isn’t warranted. And in this case there’s much reasonable doubt.

There are many liberals who believe that conservative TV host Laura Ingraham purposefully performed a Nazi salute. Quite a few influential people and outlets stated that as if it were a fact. An influential author, A.R. Moxon, posted in 2022, “It truly is wild that nobody talks about the indisputable fact that Laura Ingraham gave a Nazi salute at the Republican National Convention.”

What had happened was that Ingraham had given a wave to the crowd that, for a moment, looked like a Nazi salute. People pointed out that you can find various clips and still shots of other politicians waving (including Hillary Clinton) that also looked like Nazi salutes. Slate.com concluded that odds were high it was a random action without any meaning.

Again: is it possible Laura Ingraham performed a Nazi salute? Yes, it is. But does it make sense to believe that with high certainty? The hallmark of paranoid thinking is perceiving there to be dark, malicious motives and plots lurking behind behaviors and events for which there are much more mundane explanations. Our animosity towards our perceived enemies will often bend our beliefs about them, leading us to embrace dark interpretations of the things they do and say. Can you see how those beliefs in turn amplify tensions?

My point isn’t to argue that conspiracy-minded thinking is equally present or equally harmful on the left and the right. We’ll all have our own takes on that topic. My point is that we tend to focus on the conspiracy-minded thinking of our adversaries, while we tend to avoid focusing on such things when they’re “on our side.” Seeing that this is a human problem — that fear and animosity makes us more pessimistic and paranoid — can help us engage in better, less polarizing ways with our adversaries.

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Wrongly labeling people as “conspiracy theorists”

We’re sometimes too quick to label our political opponents as “conspiracy theorists,” and this can be a driver of polarization. For example, the story of Jeffrey Epstein is a disturbing one that seems to involve a lot of rich and powerful people doing very bad things. It’s understandable that people who learn about the details of Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes may think there’s something to the idea that a network of powerful people are sexually exploiting young people — that if Epstein and his enablers can get away with such things for quite a while, maybe other powerful people are doing similar things.

And there are many creepy stories around us that can make us more conspiracy-minded. Another example: Hollywood director Bryan Singer has been accused by several young men of sexual assault. A 2019 Atlantic article detailed the accusations against Singer, with one lawsuit alleging that he was part of a group of powerful entertainment executives who “maintained and exploited boys in a sordid sex ring.”

No matter the truth of that specific allegation, the point is that stories and allegations like these can help us understand why people across the political spectrum can believe or suspect that powerful people are doing very bad things.

There’s also a difference between a suspicion that something very bad may be happening and a confident belief in it; it’s a spectrum. We can sometimes make the mistake of hearing someone say, “I think x might be true” and thinking that that’s no different from them saying, “I think x is true.”

The more we can see the understandable reasons why people find big, secret plots plausible — even if we think they’re very wrong — the more we’ll treat them with respect, and the more we’ll lower animosity. Likewise, the more we avoid inaccurately calling others conspiracy theorists, the more we’ll lower animosity.

This was an abridged version of an essay included in an early version of Defusing American Anger. To read that longer version, see american-anger.com/conspiracy-theories. To see other essays from Defusing American Anger on other contentious topics related to our divides, see american-anger.com/book-excerpts.

One objection to these ideas will go something like, “But sometimes paranoia makes sense; sometimes there actually are very bad things happening.” To be clear: nothing I’ve written here is meant to say that there are never reasons to be concerned about malicious behaviors; after all, the reason toxic polarization is so harmful is that it makes malicious, antisocial behaviors more likely. My goal is just to examine how our tendency to be overly pessimistic can be part of a self-reinforcing cycle. Our tendency to be drawn to overly negative and pessimistic views can actually help manifest the very things we’re most afraid of.

Even a single death can be seen as a highly significant event; some may perceive that death as telling us many important things about our society and the threats we face from various societal aspects or various subsets of people. On the other hand, even many deaths of a specific type can be seen by some people as fairly minor or unavoidable, especially when placed in the context of a country of 340 million people.

The conclusions and meanings we take from a tragic or violent event will depend on how we parse that event, and clearly the significance we can assign to all sorts of things can and will vary widely. Much will depend on our experiences: our personal narratives, our personal fears, our political preferences, how we weigh different outcomes, and so on. If there’s one thing you can say about humans, it’s that it’s easy for us to disagree about morality and the nature of harm.

When violent or tragic events happen that makes your blood boil, and make you instinctively feel “This is all their fault,” you should consider if you’re filtering for worst-case interpretations. You should consider if that is also what’s happening on the “other side”: you should consider if people on the “other side” are also interpreting violent, tragic events in ways that build their us-vs-them anger and fear? This of course isn’t to say that all anger and judgment are uncalled for: it’s just to provoke more curiosity about the dynamic we find ourselves in and the processes by which toxicity and contempt build.

This will be a compilation of several excerpts from my book Defusing American Anger, touching on some contentious topics (Covid, gun violence, George Floyd) and how our polarized, divergent views can be influenced by whether we decide to take a “this is highly significant” view or a “this is bad but a small thing in the big scheme of things” view. As we grow more toxically polarized as a society, more of us will filter tragic events in ways that align with our preferred narratives and fears; our reactions to those events will confirm to us the badness and contemptibility of our opponents.

Our different parsings of tragic events can help us understand how both “sides” in a conflict can have rational reasons for their polarization.

(Some of the following excerpts come from an early version of Defusing American Anger. All original essays on specific issues can be found here.)

Excerpt from Covid chapter: How tragedy can skew perceptions

“Living with covid” and other language

It doesn’t seem likely that covid is going away, barring some huge and very unlikely worldwide shutdown, so in some sense it seems like we might agree that, in some sense, we’ll be forced to learn to “live with covid.”

But that fairly simple phrase has been the source of a lot of anger. For some people, the phrase is offensive: it’s interpreted as someone being okay with a large number of covid deaths, and therefore lacking compassion. But some people aren’t using it in that way: they’re using it to describe the goal of trying to manage covid in such a way so that it becomes something more like the flu.

Here, we can see how polarization can make people perceive the same phrase in vastly different ways, which often happens with language in a polarized environment.

Elizabeth Stokoe works on conversation analysis, which is the scientific study of how we talk. A 2022 piece she helped write was titled What can we learn from the language of “living with covid”? Here’s an excerpt describing some of the different ways in which that phrase was interpreted in the United Kingdom:

The start of 2022 saw a heavy emphasis on “living with it” in media and political discourse, with the different stances clear.

For example, on 1 January 2022, in an article focused on medical solutions (vaccine, testing, anti-viral treatments) and the need to avoid “curbs on our freedom,” the secretary of state for health and social care, Sajid Javid said, “we must try to live with covid.” Three days later in the Financial Times, another article focused more on learning: “Planning for a permanent pandemic, rather than pretending it does not exist, is what learning to live with the virus really means.” Illustrating the different positions together, the secretary of state for levelling up, housing and communities, Michael Gove, said on 11 January that “the country had to learn to ‘live with covid’” and “admitted he was wrong to advocate within government for further restrictions.”

Last week, on 21 February 2022, the prime minister turned the “living with covid” phrase into the title of a formal statement to the House of Commons to articulate the UK government’s current strategy. The two positions in the rhetorical battle over what “living with covid” means—politically, personally, and practically—are further apart than ever (e.g., two articles in The Telegraph on 18 February 2022: “‘Gung-ho’ living with covid strategy could backfire…”; “Time to move on from covid for good: The point of living with covid is that individuals should make their own minds up…” 6).

We argue that we need to move past clichéd phrases if we are to achieve a less binary and more productive point of connection. [emphasis added]

I talked to Elizabeth Stokoe for my podcast, and she talked about some of the ways we might be more persuasive and less polarizing with our language. For example, she talked about how unhelpful and polarizing it was to lump a broad range of vaccine-hesitant people, or people critical of vaccine mandates, into a category of “anti-vax” or “vaccine deniers” or “covid deniers.”

The more simplistic and insulting our language is, the more we’ll amplify polarization and add to the very problems we’re angry about.

Death and tragedy can skew our perceptions

One of the obstacles to having nuanced and non-angry conversations about covid is that most of us are just simply bad at thinking about and talking about risk. We can easily live in fear of terrifying but very rare scenarios that only affect a few people a year, like terrorist attacks or plane crashes or school shootings, while thinking hardly at all about the common and numerous risks around us that are far more likely to harm us, like car crashes, or obesity-linked health risks, or pollution-caused illness, or whatever.

And not all ways we might die are equally scary to us. The more suffering and violence is involved, and the more preventable the method of death seems, the more we’ll likely find it scary.

And when death and heartbreak are involved, it’s easy for us to use those things to form pessimistic, polarized narratives about the world around us. And we can see this playing a role with covid.

On social media, there are occasionally posts from people about their relatives or friends who have died from covid. These posts are sometimes shared with emotional and angry messages about America’s failures in handling covid, or Republicans’ failures. Sometimes immense anger is directed even at the Biden administration for their perceived failures at handling covid.

Someone dying from covid is of course a tragic thing, and it’s not surprising that such stories are capable of evoking a lot of emotion and anger. But it’s worth seeing that stories of people dying from covid are not evidence, on their own, that covid-related laws should be more strict. In the same way, flu-related deaths are not evidence, on their own, that we need more strict flu-related laws.

Many people will continue to die from covid each year, just as tens of thousands of people have been dying from the flu each year. And we’ll need to “live with” that reality, unless our stance is that we need to go into extensive societal lockdown to prevent almost all covid-caused deaths. And clearly, we can’t do that. Even if that were a policy you’d advocate for, it would never be politically feasible. And it’s not even clear that such an approach would solve things: it might only delay us facing reality a bit longer.

Put another way: if your stance is that, because covid deaths are still happening, we need to enact very strict covid-related rules, then would you feel a similar approach should be taken for the flu? If not, why are those things different? Is it possible to see how some people view such deaths as unfortunate but necessary costs of having a functioning society—similar to how most people in America had probably previously viewed flu-related deaths?

To be clear: this is not to say that we can’t work towards minimizing covid cases and covid-caused deaths. But it’s to examine our collective weakness at thinking about risk. For some people even a small amount of harm will be seen as unacceptable, as horrible, even though the reality is that it’s nearly impossible for us to avoid some amount of harm.

A tweet from 2019 about a young girl’s death from the flu. Covid-related deaths are capable of causing highly emotional takes about whether our response to covid is good enough, but it’s worth recognizing that, no matter our response to covid, it would be almost impossible for us to avoid a significant number of covid-related deaths.

Conservative-side covid skepticism

If you’re someone who thinks we’ve over-reacted to covid, is it possible to see that much of the world reacted in a similar way?

One way to see how real the concerns were is to examine the way so many countries reacted to covid, and see the covid deaths they reported. Even Russia, by the end of 2021, reported 300,000 covid deaths. Researchers estimated that Russia was undercounting and that its true numbers were probably closer to 1 million. But the point is that even Russia, not a country likely to follow blindly along with American or Western trends, reported hundreds of thousands of covid deaths.

A January 2022 article on Nature.com was titled The pandemic’s true death toll: millions more than official counts. It examined covid-related deaths from multiple countries. Here’s an excerpt from that:

For countries covered by the WMD, official figures suggest that 4.1 million deaths since the start of the pandemic are down to COVID-19—around 10% of all deaths during that time. But the duo’s calculations suggest that, when excess mortality is taken into account, deaths related to COVID-19 are 1.6 times greater, at around 6.5 million deaths (or 16% of the total). In some countries, the relative impact of the virus is even higher. One-third of all deaths in Mexico can be attributed to the virus, Karlinsky and Kobak’s data suggest.

Some countries enacted much more strict lockdowns than America did. I personally knew people in Barcelona, Spain, who, at the height of their lockdowns, weren’t allowed to leave their apartments without having an approved reason.

Is it possible to see why people and organizations responded the way they did? Is it possible to see that many people were genuinely scared, and that many people genuinely wanted to minimize deaths as much as they could?

Even if you think some covid responses were unnecessary and harmful, is it at least possible to see why people were worried and why they believed strict measures were necessary?

Is it possible to view some conservative-side pushback to covid policies as being at least partly due to those policies being associated with liberals?

When we’re polarized, we’re prone to confidently embracing us-versus-them narratives, like thinking someone who is pro-mask-mandate is “pure evil.”

Some people have beliefs that organizations requiring masks or vaccines are limiting their freedom in problematic ways. But every country has a multitude of laws and private-company policies that people must abide by. Our freedom is limited in many fairly arbitrary ways. When it comes to, for example, a cruise ship requiring proof of vaccine to travel; that’s not any more a violation of your freedom than is the multitude of other restrictions we face from private companies or from governments, like the fact that you can’t give blood if you’ve been to certain countries recently, or that you can’t vote in some states if you’ve committed a felony, or that airlines limit the types of things you can bring on airlines.

If you’re someone angry about perceived restrictions to your freedom, is it possible you’re being overly entitled in thinking that your perceptions of the world must be everyone else’s perception? Is it possible that you’re over-reacting to what are completely comprehensible precautions being taken by concerned and rational people and organizations just trying to do what they think is the right thing? If you believe liberals sometimes over-react to perceived infringements of their rights, can you see how you might also be seen as over-reacting?

Is it possible that a lot of the anger around covid and other issues are due to more and more people, on both sides, who simply can’t bear not getting their way?

Is it possible to see how some conservative-side conspiracy-minded theories about covid make conservatives seem very unreasonable? For my podcast, I interviewed Peter Wood, who believed the 2020 election was illegitimate. One thing he wrote on this subject was: “Progressives manipulated the Wuhan virus epidemic by turning a manageable health crisis into a major economic disaster, an excuse for stripping Americans of their civil liberties, and an incitement of mass hysteria.”

To Peter’s way of thinking, America’s covid responses were part of a huge malicious plot. It doesn’t seem to matter to him that many countries across the world reacted in similar ways: that many countries tried hard to contain covid. No, American reactions to covid were part of a big secret plot by liberals. Hopefully you can see how strange and paranoid that seems to many people.

And Trump has done his part in promoting these conspiracy-minded theories. This was one email sent from the Trump team in mid 2020: “They want you to be AFRAID of the coronavirus, because that's how they MANIPULATE you into voting for their liberal puppets. FIGHT BACK. We can't beat the Liberal Billionaires trying to steal this Election unless every Patriot takes action.”

Can you see how such extreme views taint the perception people have of conservatives? If you’re someone who believes that liberals are responsible for a lot of bad decisions about covid, are you able to see that conservative leaders have a lot to answer for, too, in promoting divisive and unproven narratives?

For a longer version of this essay online, see american-anger.com/covid.

If your response to this was something like “okay but I still think strict covid responses were part of a big plan,” you might enjoy this piece of mine on conspiracies and polarization.

Polarized views on gun violence

The following is an excerpt from Defusing American Anger on our polarized views of gun violence…

One conservative-side argument is that we’re overreacting to relatively rare events. To take school shootings, for example: school shootings are of course horrifying, but all the mass shootings we’ve had at schools represent dozens of children’s deaths out of 100s of millions of school-attending children over several decades.

And gun-related deaths at schools have actually gone down over the last few decades. Here’s an excerpt from a 2018 Northeastern University article:

[...] while certain policies may help decrease gun violence in general, it’s unlikely that any of them will prevent mass school shootings, according to James Alan Fox, the Lipman Family Professor of Criminology, Law, and Public Policy at Northeastern. [...]

Four times the number of children were killed in schools in the early 1990s than today, Fox said. “There is not an epidemic of school shootings,” he said, adding that more kids are killed each year from pool drownings or bicycle accidents. There are around 55 million school children in the United States, and on average over the past 25 years, about 10 students per year were killed by gunfire at school, according to Fox and Fridel’s research.

And mass shootings in general, while they get a lot of our attention due to their uniquely horrifying nature, are a small part of our overall gun deaths. To quote from a 2022 Time article:

“In general mass shootings account for less than 1% of all firearms deaths in the United States, that’s for all ages,” Dr. Los Lee, an associate professor of Pediatrics and Emergency Medicine at Harvard Medical School says. “When you look at it for children, it’s also less than 1%. So they account for a very small number.”

This is not to downplay the horror of mass shootings, especially mass shootings at schools, but to help explain the views of Second Amendment supporters. It’s possible to view our nation’s gun deaths as being somewhat similar to the nature of automobile deaths in this country (which are actually quite close in number): as unfortunate and tragic, but also as something that may be one of the many costs of living in a free society—especially a society with a tradition of respecting gun rights.

To make an analogy: Conservatives are very concerned about Islamic terrorism, and some liberals would criticize their fears as being illogical and exaggerated, considering how relatively rare such terroristic events are. Some conservatives see liberals’ concerns about guns in a similar light.

In a country as big as ours, there’s almost always a way to view any problem as either very serious, or as relatively small in context. How we perceive the seriousness of a problem will be influenced by our preferred narratives and our preferred outcomes. This is not to argue the rightness or wrongness of these various perceptions, but just to examine how it is that people are able to see a problem as either very serious or as not that serious.

From the other side, though: if you’re someone who thinks that liberals have exaggerated concerns about gun violence, is it possible to see the point of view that gun deaths are much too common in the U.S.? Roughly 40,000 people die from firearms in the United States every year. Our rate of deaths by gun is 100 times that of the U.K. Hopefully it’s possible to see why that concerns people.

The argument that we need to just accept our high rate of murder and suicide can seem callous and even barbaric, considering many other comparable countries don’t have to deal with this level of violence and anxiety.

For the full chapter on our polarized stances on gun violence, go here.

Team-based reactions to the assassination attempt on Trump

An op-ed I got in Newsweek on team-based reactions to the assassination attempt on Trump: www.newsweek.com/us-vs-them-narratives-are-wrong-response-trump-shooting-opinion-1925274.

Our divergent views on the Middle East conflict

Here’s a piece I wrote about the very different ways we can perceive tragedy and violence related to the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Polarized reactions to George Floyd’s death

The following comes from a section on race and racism in Defusing American Anger. (I purposefully use the word ‘death’ here, instead of ‘murder’, to intentionally try to speak to a maximally wide audience, which includes some people who don’t believe Derek Chauvin was guilty of murder.)

The death of George Floyd in 2020 played a big role in amplifying our divides. To many American liberals, and to many people across the world, the death of George Floyd was a story about racism. It was a demonstration of how the racism of America, in its policing systems and other systems, leads to uncaring and cruel and deadly results for black people and other minorities. To many people, Derek Chauvin, who was convicted of killing George Floyd, was perceived as a racist cop, or of representing racist cops.

To quote from the United Nations website: “The death of George Floyd in May 2020 galvanized people worldwide to protest racism and discrimination and prompted global discussions on racial justice [...].”

Here are some examples of how people perceived George Floyd’s death and its connection to racism in America:

“...the disrespect that the children of Eric Garner or George Floyd experienced as they watched their respective fathers choked to death at the hands of the callous, racially insensitive police who found it hard to see any thread of humanity embedded in those men’s Blackness.” – Kenneth Hardy, from The Enduring, Invisible, and Ubiquitous Centrality of Whiteness

“Those racist cops who killed George Floyd really fucked things up for racists everywhere.” – tweet from 2020

“There is no justice for Jacob Blake, Trayford Pellerin, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, or any other Black victim of police violence. They are victims of a brutal, racist system that cannot be salvaged or reformed.” – tweet from 2020

“The Arab Spring was a wave of uprisings and rebellions that swept the Arab starting in 2010. It was sparked by the suicide of a frustrated Tunisian youth. May the unjust death of George Floyd in the hands of a racist system spark our own Black Spring.” – tweet from 2020

For many people, George Floyd’s death contained a deep meaning about racism in America and in American policing.

But many people do not agree with these framings. Many people find them illogical and divisive. And if our goal is understanding our fellow Americans, we must be willing to see what they see.

So I’ll start by asking a couple questions that I’d ask you to give a little thought to:

What evidence is there that George Floyd’s death actually had anything to do with racism?

What evidence is there that his death tells us anything significant about the United States and race?

If these questions anger you, I’d like you to pause a moment and examine your anger. You may feel angry because you’re entirely certain about what George Floyd’s death means, and this certainty leads you to be angry that someone would dare question something so blatantly obvious.

I’d suggest that, if my posing of these questions makes you angry, your anger can be seen as one of the primary ways us-versus-them polarization works. Us-versus-them polarization is often built upon narratives that it angers us to even hear questioned. And the liberal-side narrative about George Floyd’s death is one that goes almost unquestioned for many people, so engrained is it in liberal-side narratives about America and racism and policing. To question it at all can seem taboo and unthinkable.

But the process of questioning narratives is important and necessary for reducing our collective anger. If we’re going to reduce our anger, we must be willing to question the narratives many of us are certain about, on both the left and the right. And the very different perspectives one can have about George Floyd’s death, and the emotion that can be associated with those narratives, make it an important topic to examine.

There are some people who look at George Floyd’s death and see no good evidence that it was related to racism. And that includes some progressive people, and it includes some black people.

Why would someone believe there’s no evidence George Floyd’s death was related to racism? One reason is that there are white people who have died under police custody in similar ways.

One example of a white person who died in a similar way to George Floyd was Tony Timpa. The following is from a 2019 Dallas Morning News article:

Tony Timpa wailed and pleaded for help more than 30 times as Dallas police officers pinned his shoulders, knees and neck to the ground.

“You’re gonna kill me! You’re gonna kill me! You’re gonna kill me!”

After Timpa fell unconscious, the officers who had him in handcuffs assumed he was asleep and didn’t confirm that he was breathing or feel for a pulse.

As precious minutes passed, the officers laughed and joked about waking Timpa up for school and making him waffles for breakfast.

Body camera footage obtained Tuesday by The Dallas Morning News shows first responders waited at least four minutes after Timpa became unresponsive to begin CPR. His nose was buried in the grass while officers claimed to hear him snoring -- apparently unaware that the unarmed man was drawing his last breaths.

The officers pinned his handcuffed arms behind his back for nearly 14 minutes and zip-tied his legs together. By the time he was loaded onto a gurney and put into an ambulance, the 32-year-old was dead.

Let’s imagine that a white man had died that day in Minneapolis in May of 2020, instead of George Floyd, in exactly the same circumstances. I think most of us would likely agree that if that had happened, few of us would know that man’s name. Clearly, no one would argue that his death was caused by racism. There might be other examinations of factors involved, such as the bad training and callousness of police, or the impacts of being poor in America, but racism wouldn’t be mentioned as a factor.

If we can see how there can be two incidents entirely the same except for race, and they can result in such vastly different narratives and emotions, then we’re in a better position to understand our divides on this issue.

One incident that springs to mind for me was a story I saw around 2015 or so, that involved a young white man in the Southeast who had a psychotic episode in the car while his family was driving. The police were called by the man’s family. In an attempt to prevent the man from hurting himself and others, the police ended up piling on top of the man in the back seat and asphyxiating him.

It was a tragic story, and it was thought that the police might have acted badly. As part of my research for this book, I’ve searched online for that case several times and haven’t been able to find it.

Do you think if he’d been a black man, it’s possible you and I and many other people would know that man’s name? Do you think it’s possible, if he’d been black, that incident would’ve been held up by some antiracist activists as another example of racism?

This hopefully helps show how it is that a rational and non-racist person can be perplexed by the common liberal-side framing about George Floyd’s death. This hopefully helps show how one can see the liberal-side narrative as not just unfounded but also divisive, in how it seeks to arouse a righteous anger at racism for an event that’s not clearly about racism.

There’s also no evidence that Derek Chauvin, the man convicted of killing George Floyd, was racist or that his actions were influenced by racism. In other words, it’s possible that he might have made the same decisions if George Floyd were white. You might disagree and think that, obviously, if George Floyd were white, things would have gone differently. But that’s only speculation. We can see that cops have done similar things to white people. And we can see that kind of speculation as being common these days—for example, speculation like “If Kyle Rittenhouse had been black, he would have been found guilty of murder.”

We can see this as similar to speculation that some conservatives make. For example, some conservatives, in an attempt to make a case about anti-white racism in America, speculated that if George Floyd had been white, Derek Chauvin would’ve never been punished because society doesn’t care much about white people.

There are other aspects of George Floyd’s death that can be seen to show that the event had more nuance and complexity than is often included in the mainstream liberal narrative. To name a few of these things:

• George Floyd was saying that he couldn’t breath several times even before he was placed on the ground. This can help explain why the officers might have been skeptical that he actually couldn’t breathe.

• The knee-on-neck maneuver that Chauvin used was a legal and approved method of restraint in Minneapolis, which only involved light pressure on the neck. This maneuver was often described in the media as if it involved heavy pressure on the neck, or as if it were something Chauvin himself decided to do and not a technique recommended by his police department. To be clear, the technique can still be criticized, and it has been—very few police departments use it—but there’s nothing inherently malicious or racist about the technique.

• The crowd of people who were gathered and yelling at the police could have been a source of confusion and distraction for the police. The officers might have even believed the crowd posed a physical threat to them—an idea presented by Derek Chauvin’s defense team at his trial.

[Some of my learnings about this case came from my talk with a politically liberal police captain on the topic of George Floyd and police violence. You can hear that here.]

And to be clear: one can find nuance in this situation and still believe Chauvin deserved punishment. One of the most objectively damning things Chauvin did was that, apparently, when a pulse wasn’t found on Floyd by one of his fellow officers, Chauvin, the most senior cop present, did not do CPR or order it to be done, and instead waited for the medics to arrive.

There’s no evidence I’ve seen that Derek Chauvin is racist but let’s suppose, for argument’s sake, that he was clearly a racist. Let’s suppose that it was discovered that he was a neo-Nazi and had even written about wanting to kill a black person. Even in that scenario, it begs the question: What do the actions of a single person tell us about a nation of 330 million people?

Or, for that matter, what do the actions of even quite a few bad or racist people tell us about the nature of our country? In a country of our size, with so many bad, dumb, or just unlucky people, and so many unfortunate and violent events, won’t it always be possible for someone to pick and choose various things to form any sort of narrative they want? A large nation has millions of stories, and those stories can be assembled to form larger narratives in all sorts of ways.

It’s possible to bring these same types of questions to the death of Michael Brown, who in 2015 was shot and killed by a cop in Ferguson, Missouri. After Brown’s death, there was much protesting and rioting and property destruction, and the National Guard was called. These reactions could be seen as a kind of precursor to and template for the later reactions to George Floyd’s death.

The shooting of Michael Brown was explained by many people as being a result of racism and use of excessive force. But when you look at the details of the incident, you’ll find that witnesses said that Michael Brown had fought once with the police officer, attempting to take his gun, and then shortly after that, despite being told several times to stop, he had charged back at the cop, who then shot him. Based on this evidence, a grand jury did not indict the police officer.

Also, a Department of Justice investigation led by Obama’s Attorney General, Eric Holder, who happens to be black, also failed to find a reason to charge the police officer. To quote from a press release by Holder: they “released a comprehensive, 87-page report documenting our findings and conclusions that the facts do not support the filing of criminal charges against Officer Darren Wilson in this case. Michael Brown’s death, though a tragedy, did not involve prosecutable conduct on the part of Officer Wilson.”

In 2020, a new investigation by St. Louis County was opened and again they found no reason to charge the police officer.

Shelby Steele is a black conservative writer who made a documentary titled What Killed Michael Brown? Regarding the narrative that Brown’s death was due to racism and police brutality, Steele calls this a poetic truth, meaning a truth that appeals to people’s vision of the world but doesn’t reflect objective reality. (If you’re politically liberal, I recommend watching his documentary. Besides the specifics about the Michael Brown case, the movie can help a liberal audience reach a better understanding of some conservative views, and how those views can co-exist alongside compassion for struggling people.)

When looked at in this light, we can see how the immense public anger in response to George Floyd’s death would strike many people as illogical—as a dangerous overreaction. It’s possible to perceive Floyd’s death as containing no more meaning about our country than the many other tragic events that happen frequently in our country.

Not only can the liberal-side narrative be seen as causing problems in the form of us-versus-them anger and associated rioting behaviors and other violence, but it also helps create a precedent where any one-off tragedy, whether purposeful or accidental, whether racist or non-racist, might be used to justify a large, destabilizing outpouring of anger.

And such a precedent gives an immense amount of power to the most antisocial and troubled people among us. Troubled people have learned that, if they do something horrible that’s associated in some way with the issues that divide us, there’s a good chance their actions will further derange and destabilize us, and drive many of us into an us-versus-them frenzy. And for troubled people looking for meaning and attention, that knowledge can make doing horrible things more tempting.

The high-emotion reactions to George Floyd’s death could be seen as a symptom of us losing all sense of proportion about our huge, complex country and its problems. It could be seen as a symptom that we were deranging and destabilizing ourselves in dangerous ways.

If you’re liberal, there’s a good chance you disagree with me on these points: you may be thinking of reasons why George Floyd’s death was due to racism and why angry reactions to it were justified. But for now, hopefully you can see how it’s possible for someone to question liberal-side narratives about Floyd’s death, especially the more angry and racially divisive ones. Hopefully it’s possible to see that questioning those narratives doesn’t mean that one is morally flawed, or a racist.

And as we work through various issues in this book, I hope you keep in mind that just as you have narratives that it can make you angry to hear questioned, so do people on the other side. If we care about reducing animosity, we should try to listen to disagreements on important topics without jumping to the worst possible conclusions about those doing the disagreeing.

For the full essay on our polarized views on race and racism, go here.

Leaving aside who’s more correct, we should recognize that toxic conflict results in a situation where many people perceive immense harm being done by the “other side.” This perception of immense harm is what then gets in the way of a desire to reduce us-vs-them feelings, warlike mentalities, and contempt. More and more people instinctually feel that conflict resolution ideas are at odds with beating the bad guys. Some may even support this work but think something like, “Your depolarization ideas are nice and all, but we need to focus on beating these horrible people.” Our instincts on how to defeat the “bad guys” lead to us taking more toxic approaches — which in turn leads to us helping create more of the toxic, us-vs-them behaviors on the “other side” that bother us.

But I think it’s important to see that these ideas are not mutually exclusive: it’s important to see that even when we think things are very bad, these ideas are still important — that they’re theoretically the most important ideas. And that if we want to defeat warlike, us-vs-them thinking (on the “other side,” on “our side,” or anywhere), we must take approaches aimed at reducing contempt.

And, yes, these approaches can be counterintuitive — but that’s because our instincts on how to behave when in conflict are so faulty and self-destructive.

This excerpt is about imagining a much worse state of toxic conflict in America, but it applies in general for when we think our opponents are doing horrible things.

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Excerpt: “What if things get worse?”

[This excerpt appears in different forms in both my two books.]

A common objection to this work from some politically passionate people goes something like, “Don’t you get it? We’re in a war and you have to pick a side. What if this were Nazi Germany? Would you still be telling people to try to understand the other side?”

To that I’d reply: We’re not in Nazi Germany. We’re also not in Civil War-era America. We’re also not in 1990s Rwanda or the French Revolution.

At this point in time, it’s possible to understand the beliefs and concerns of most of our fellow citizens. It’s quite possible to see how most people’s beliefs can be rationally held, even if we find some of those beliefs wrong or even dangerous.

But there’s a good chance things will get worse. As I write this section in March of 2024, I’m worried about all sorts of things. I’m worried about Trump winning and what the results of that will mean. I’m worried about how Trump’s more extreme supporters will react if Trump is sent to prison and how reactions to that might escalate tensions. I’m worried about such tensions kicking off significant levels of street violence, which will in turn make reducing polarization much harder. I’m worried about big and unpredictable events (like Covid) that might suddenly arise out of the blue to further destabilize and divide us.

Trump voters, for their part, have their own fears about undemocratic behaviors and authoritarian actions on the left, or about what lax policies on immigration and crime might result in.

So for argument’s sake, let’s imagine things get much worse, in whatever way you fear that happening. Let’s imagine that there comes to be significant political violence, whether mainly on one side or mainly on the “other side.” Let’s say that many people on one side or both sides have done horrible, unforgivable things.

It’s still valuable, even in the midst of chaos, to see the humanity of your enemies and to try to convince them of the wisdom of making better choices and taking better paths. It’s still important to attempt to win their hearts and minds.

You do this not because it’s the “nice thing” to do. You do this because some people on the other side may come around to seeing things your way — or at least seeing some of your points.

This is what many people miss about persuasion. It’s about much more than persuasion. When you try to persuade others, you show them the better versions of your arguments and you show them you’re a rational, compassionate person who can be reasoned with, and these things help lower people’s anger. Whether you “win” the argument or not, the attempt alone helps mend divides. But when we enter major conflicts, so many people quickly give up on even attempting persuasion. [An episode of my podcast about persuasion in polarized environments.]

David Blankenhorn is the co-founder of the depolarization group Braver Angels and also a scholar of Abraham Lincoln. In his book In Search of Braver Angels: Getting Along Together in Troubled Times, he talked about Lincoln’s depolarizing approach:

Lincoln never saw his opponents as his enemies. Even in war, the harshest of human social struggles, he did not demonize, did not indulge in abusive stereotypes, did not falsely exaggerate disagreements, and did not treat his opponents as either less than human or too depraved and delusional to even seek to understand.

Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederate States of America, was Lincoln’s opposite in many ways, including temperament. In 1861 he said: “Our people now look with contemptuous astonishment on those with whom they had been so recently associated.” Lincoln did not think or talk that way. Nor did he respond in kind to personal attacks, even as they rained down on him without cessation. [...]

In his Second Inaugural Address in 1865, as the Civil War neared its end, Abraham Lincoln could have declared his certainty that God favored his side. But in one of the most important statements ever uttered by a U.S. president, Lincoln, who could lead a war and sacrifice his life for his convictions while renaming deeply empathetic, said simply: “The Almighty has His own purposes.”

Lincoln was an example of someone who took firm action while keeping in mind the humanity of his enemies. Hopefully you can see the wisdom of this approach. If Lincoln had spoken in more polarizing, insulting ways, might he have provoked more passion in his enemies and caused them to fight harder? Might his way of being have been a factor in the North winning the war — or winning it as quickly as they did? Could his way of speaking have been a factor in reducing Southern animosity after the war and in holding America together?

Is it possible that empathetic leaders who understand these ideas always have a large advantage? Is it possible this is why aggressive, divisive, and narcissistic leaders so often fail?

The book The Anatomy of Peace also includes points about the strength of empathetic approaches, even in the midst of war. The book takes the form of a fictional story, with dialogue between its characters. Here’s an excerpt from that book that talks about Saladin, the Muslim military leader who, during the Crusades, recaptured large regions back from the Christian Crusaders:

“Let’s compare Saladin’s recapture of Jerusalem to the earlier capture by the Crusaders.” He looked at Pettis. “Do you notice any differences in the two victories?”

“Certainly,” Pettis said. “The Crusaders acted like barbarians.”

“And Saladin?”

“He was almost humane,” Pettis said. “For someone who was attacking, anyway.”

“Say more about what you mean by humane.”

Pettis paused to gather his thoughts. “What I mean, I think, is that Saladin seems to have had regard for the people he was defeating. Whereas the crusading forces seem — well, they seem to have been barbaric, as I said before. They just massacred all those people, without regard for human life.”

“Exactly,” Avi agreed. “To the initial crusading forces, the people didn’t matter. That is, the Crusaders didn’t really regard them as people so much as objects or chattel to be driven or exterminated at will. Saladin, on the other hand, saw and honored the humanity of those he conquered. He may have wished they had never come to Jerusalem, but he recognized these were people he was doing battle with and that he therefore had to see, treat, and honor them as such.” [...]

“In every moment, we are choosing to be either like Saladin or like the crusading invaders. In the way we regard our children, our spouses, our neighbors, colleagues, and strangers, we choose to see others either as people like ourselves or as objects. They either count like we do or they don’t. In the former case, since we regard them as we regard ourselves, we say our hearts are at peace toward them. In the latter case, since we see them as objects, we say our hearts are at war.”

Even in the midst of battle, we should try to remember this basic truth: that other people are like us. Not because it’s a nice thing to do, or because it makes them or us feel good, or because it helps us get what we want — but because it’s the truth.

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That was an excerpt that appears in my books Defusing American Anger (for all Americans) and How Contempt Destroys Democracy (for a liberal/anti-Trump audience). Learn more about my books here.

Read “Can you oppose Trump while also working on reducing toxic polarization?”

This excerpt is located towards the end of a section where I’d reviewed some of the ways that we can grow increasingly unreasonable in how we approach conflict (e.g., distorted views of the “other side”). But I wanted to emphasize that conflict can grow increasingly toxic and team-based based on truly held, passionate convictions. Sometimes it will be just a single issue we really care about that results in us being passionate supporters of one “side” or another.

Here’s the clip, if you want to watch it first, but the transcript of it is in the excerpt:

Excerpt from chapter “We can be angry about things we care about”

In all this talk about skewed perceptions and unreasonable team-based thinking, we should also remember that people can have passionate and deeply held convictions that make them behave in team-based ways. For some people, all it might take for them to behave in a team-based way is to see their political opponents as posing a threat to things they care about — or maybe even a single thing they care about.

A scene from the fictional TV show The Newsroom highlights the power that specific issues can have over us — and also how condescension can divide us. In an episode titled Bullies, the news show anchor, Will McAvoy, interviews Sutton Wall, a black, gay character who’d worked for the real-life Senator Rick Santorum, who’s against gay marriage. (This scene was loosely based on a real interaction that took place on the news show Hardball.) Here’s that scene from The Newsroom:

WALL (the guest): [Santorum] doesn’t find me disgusting.

MCAVOY (the anchorman): Yes, he does, and he certainly thinks you’re less than a man.

WALL: No, he does not. [...]

MCAVOY: In order to arrive at the conclusion that homosexual love is something less than heterosexual love, you have to begin with the premise that a homosexual is something less than a man. That’s inescapable. And so I’m asking you to explain to me why you would work for a man who believes that you’re inferior, that you’re damaged, that you’re ill, unnatural, a threat to children, unfit to serve in the military, unfit to be a parent, and unloved by God. [...] I’m asking you, sir—

WALL: Stop. Just stop. I believe in the sanctity of life. And if that word is too vague for you, then look it up. I support the senator because of all the candidates in the field, I believe he is the only one whose passion on the issue of abortion equals my own. And I believe he has the skills to make a fantastic president.

MCAVOY: I’m not talking, that’s not what I’m talking—

WALL: You will not interrupt me again, sir! I am more than one thing. How dare you reduce me to the color of my skin, or my sexual orientation? There are people who look just like me, thousands and thousands, who died for the freedom to define their own lives, for themselves. How dare you presume to decide what I should think is important? Yes, when it comes to equality for the gay community, Senator Santorum is wrong. But I am far more insulted by your highhanded implication that I need your protection.

MCAVOY: Sir, I certainly was—

WALL: Shut up, I’ll let you know when I’m finished! I came on this program because Rick Santorum believes that the right to kill an unborn child is not inalienable, and I stand with Rick Santorum, and I stand with the Catholic Church. I am not defined by my blackness. I am not defined by my gayness. And if that doesn’t fit your narrow-minded expectation of who I’m supposed to be, I don’t give a damn, because I’m not defined by you either. So get this through your head: I don’t need your help.

Here we can see that both characters have points. McAvoy has a point that Wall is supporting a political leader whose beliefs seem to be majorly at odds with his own. But Wall has a point that people can care about some things more than other things. Wall can perceive Santorum’s stances on some things as bad, while also seeing that badness as not nearly as important as the badness of other things.

And Wall resents being told what his moral priorities should be. It’s easy to see why that would make him angry; it would make many of us angry.

In the context of our divides, it helps to see that not everyone on the other side is enthusiastic about everyone and everything on their side. Sometimes they may just have a few things they really care about, and those things inform their political decisions. When we act as if our views and moral priorities should be held by others, and when we treat others as stupid for not seeing things the way we see them, we’ll amplify their anger at us.

[…] The fact is that we all have our own personal views about where harm is being done and who’s doing it. And when we see harm being done, it’s easy for us to grow angry, judgmental, and to lash out. It’s easy for us to insult and demean the people we think are doing harm. It’s easy for us to start perceiving the world in us-versus-them, good-versus-bad ways.

Even as I have my own views of who’s doing harm on various issues, I also think that how I engage with other people is of the utmost importance. How we engage with each other is, as far as I can tell, of more importance than my or anyone’s opinions on what harm is being done. This is because we’ll always have various disagreements about the harms being done around us. (For example, some people will think my criticism of gender identity ideas means that I’m the one doing harm. Sure, I think I’m right — but so does everyone with a strong belief about something.)

It’s clearly easy for rational, compassionate people to reach very different views about what’s harmful and what’s not harmful. It’s clearly easy for rational, compassionate people to be confident in their beliefs. This leads me to this conclusion: I should try to treat people I think are doing harm as I would want them to treat me if they thought I was doing harm.

This doesn’t mean that I can’t try to persuade others of my views or work for things I believe in. It just means that I’ll try to engage with people I think are doing harm in ways that don’t amplify the conflict for no good reason. It means I’ll try to engage with people who disagree with me in depolarizing ways.

That can be very challenging. But that is what we must ask of ourselves if we want to be a part of building a less toxic culture.

That was an excerpt that appears, in different forms, in my books Defusing American Anger (for all Americans) and How Contempt Destroys Democracy (for a liberal/anti-Trump audience).

Group polarization leads to polarized language. Groups in conflict grow to use different language (e.g., “illegal alien” vs “undocumented immigrant”). Some words will be perceived in completely different ways (e.g., “woke”). Some words come to be associated with one group or another for various reasons (e.g., “democracy,” “freedom”).

And polarized language helps drive the conflict. There are many ways that toxic conflict is self-reinforcing, and language is a part of that. Many people are constantly interpreting the other side’s language and slogans and catchphrases in the worst possible ways, which drives more anger and contempt (which drives more anger and contempt on the other side).

This is just to say: language is important in all of this. Language is how conflict grows; and thinking about language can help us resolve conflict.

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Over the past few years, I’ve occasionally added to a “depolarization dictionary” of mine. It’s meant to give guidance on specific terms that I think are often unnecessarily driving people away. For example, an activist might talk about common sense, not realizing why that can rub people the wrong way. Or a journalist might write about misinformation, unaware of how that term has liberal-leaning connotations. Or someone in the bridge-building/depolarization space might write a piece about the importance of moderation, unaware of the different interpretations of that word and how it may bother some politically passionate people.

Polarization makes us all speak in ways that polarize us further, whether we’re trying to do that or not (again, this is a naturally self-amplifying cycle). People who want to work on this problem (even as they also pursue their political goals) must try to be aware of the perceptions and reactions people have to various polarized, baggage-laden words and phrases around us.

With more awareness of the playing field, you’ll get better at using alternative words/phrases that get your point across just as well. Often, thinking through the various ambiguities and associations various terms have will, on its own, help make your writing more clear and more persuasive.

My dictionary

This resource of mine is here in a Google Sheet:

Depolarization dictionary

I share it in case it might be helpful for some people seeking to communicate in less polarizing ways. If you like my approach, feel free to add a comment in the resource requesting that I add guidance on specific words/phrases you’ve struggled with or seen others struggle with.

This resource is far from complete; it just contains some of the more common and less obvious sources of unintentional agitation I’ve seen from journalists, activists, and bridgebuilders. Obviously there are many more words and phrases, but for many of those it can be fairly obvious what’s bothering people; I was focusing on some less obvious areas.

And of course these are just my own thoughts. Your mileage will vary. Even people who wish to lower toxic polarization will often disagree about approaches.

Related resources

And clearly I’m not the only person to put something like this together. For people interested in speaking in less polarizing ways, here are some other resources:

• AllSides Red-Blue Translator: Info about how different words/phrases are perceived by conservatives and liberals.

• Bridging Dictionary: From MIT’s Center for Constructive Communication, a resource with words that are used and perceived differently across the political divide.

• Civic Language Perceptions Project: A guide to “understanding the degree to which various civic terms are coded or loaded in ways that make them politicized.”

• ? What resources have you seen? I know I’m forgetting some, and there are probably some I don’t know about. Ping me here or via my contact page.

I also recommend watching Isaac Saul’s TED Talk; anyone interested in the relationship between language and polarization will appreciate that.

Activism and depolarization

Some might wonder: Why do you care about activists using more clear, more persuasive language? How is activism associated with the goal of reducing polarization?

As discussed in my books, I see the interests of activists as aligned with the interest of reducing toxic polarization. Unlike our instincts often lead us to believe, these goals can be aligned. Activists who want to win (and I mean win long-term; win in real ways; win in ways that don’t add to division, contempt, and dysfunction) should want to embrace persuasive approaches — and taking persuasive approaches naturally requires one to take less contemptuous and more empathetic approaches.

Contempt drives our narratives and beliefs further apart, making them binary, either/or, lacking in nuance, and more extreme. Improving how we disagree with each other will naturally change what we disagree about.

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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.

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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:

Read why polarization is a problem

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:

Our distorted views of each other

"Their horrible views on immigration"

"Their horrible views on America"

"They support political violence"

"The media is trying to divide us"

"I hate their leaders, so I hate them"

"Why is it on us to take the high road?"

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:

"Both sides are NOT the same!"

"Liberals don't contribute"

"Conservatives don't contribute"

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:

"You want us to be moderates!"

"You want us to engage with extremists"

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:

"We need our anger to fight them"

How polarization fractures alliances

These ideas can help win elections

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.

An appeal to understand each other

How this work ripples out

“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.”

— Guy Burgess (of ), in an episode of my podcast

In February, I had an op-ed in The Hill, Can we lower toxic polarization while still opposing Trump?. Some people asked if I might go into more detail about how one can be an effective activist while trying to reduce political toxicity: how one can fight one’s opponents while also fighting polarization.

In this piece I’ll share some thoughts on how we might pursue political goals (of any sort) while trying to lower contempt and toxicity.

To skip an overview about the nature of conflict and polarization and why you should care about these things, and get to the tips, click here:

Skip intro & go to the tips

The objection: “We can’t fight our enemies and work on resolving conflict”

In my books on polarization, I focused a lot of effort on overcoming common objections. Serious conflict leads to many people having objections to wanting to resolve that conflict. The core objection goes something like this in people’s mind:

Our opponents are horrible and dangerous. They are the cause of all this toxicity and horribleness. It’s not a we-problem, it’s just a them-problem. Your conflict resolution ideas are naive: please go away and let us fight them aggressively.

There are various iterations of this objection. A lighter form is:

Yes, I agree both sides have contributed to the toxicity of this conflict. But the threats posed by our enemies are so bad right we have to focus on that. We need our rage, even our contempt, to arouse more passion and defeat them. The conflict resolution stuff is nice but it can wait until after we win this war.

(If you’d like a good video discussing these objections, I recommend this talk I had with Vanessa Otero, founder of Ad Fontes Media, a media bias analysis company. Vanessa asked a lot of good questions about these common objections.)

Many people see political activism (e.g., trying to defeat Democrats, or trying to defeat Republicans) as something at odds with reducing toxic polarization. They think that you can’t do both. They may even think that contempt and mockery can aid your activism; that those are powerful things that help you accomplish your goals and defeat your enemies.

But this misses that how we engage with each other plays a role in how the conflict plays out. How we treat our opponents can change how they treat us — it can even change their stances. Our stances on issues are directly connected to our sense of threat from the “other side” — and how we treat them will alter their perceptions of the threats we pose.

In other words: the emotional intensity of the conflict is what helps create the very things many of us are angry about. Your best bet of defeating the people you see as extreme and hateful is (maybe counterintuitively) by reducing the us-vs-them contempt in society. That is how you remove the wind in the sails of those who embrace us-vs-them, zero sum views and who take contemptuous, divisive, us-vs-them approaches.

The way I see it, activism and depolarization are aligned. One can do activism while trying to bring down the intensity of the conflict. Or, at the very least, one can do activism while trying one’s best to avoid building tensions more.

The more people pursue persuasive, respectful activism, the more they’ll help others see things in more nuanced ways, and the less divisiveness and extremity we’ll have. The more people pursue depolarizing, de-escalating, persuasive, respectful approaches, the more our divergent narratives will move closer together. We’ll find that how we disagree with each other will improve the things we disagree about. Our debates will be smarter and involve less extreme, one-side-versus-the other framings.

In conflict, many people give up on persuasion. They think, “These people are crazy; their minds can’t be changed; it’s a waste of time to even try.” But this is a symptom of our distorted views of each other: for example, our tendency to see our opponents as all-as-bad-as-the-worst-people-on-that-side. We should see that almost all of us have all sorts of nuanced views, complex narratives, disagreements with “our side,” and the ability to quickly change our minds. Giving up on persuasion is what amplifies the toxicity of conflict — and helps create the very things we’re upset by.

How do we “fight back” in depolarizing ways?

But I realize all that might sound quite idealistic to people who see serious threats and harms presented by their opponents. People can think, “But we are facing serious dangers and harms now; what good do all these conflict-resolution-type ideas do us now? Don’t we have to fight hard?”

And I’d say: Yes, you can fight hard. But you can also, as you fight hard, think about the various ways to persuade others and get others on your side.

Abraham Lincoln provides a good example of this. Even in the midst of war, he was known for never speaking of the “other side” in contemptuous “they’re all bad” ways. He was careful with his language. He sought to speak persuasively.

In the book The Anatomy of Peace, it talks about this concept, too, and gives examples of leaders who, even in war, treated the “other side” as humans, as people like themselves. And this could actually be a big factor in their success. After all, it’s often the people who act most contemptuously and most aggressively that trigger the biggest backlashes against the things they do.

8 tips for doing activism while trying to reduce toxicity

Below are some ways I think political activists can pursue their goals while avoiding amplifying the toxicity of our conflict (and while also avoiding creating more support for their more polarized, angry opponents).

Now, to some extent, conflict is of course necessary. There are some things you must do in the course of conflict and activism that will inevitably arouse anger from your most committed opponents. That’s inevitable, and that’s fine. We’re talking here about trying our best to reduce unnecessary toxicity and escalation. And the truth is we’re surrounded by people, on both sides, who inject a lot of unnecessary toxicity into their activism (often without knowing it).

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These are some tips for depolarizing (but effective) activism. (And please let me know if you have some ideas for things I’ve missed; or let me know if you disagree about any of them.)

Tip #1: Ask yourself if you’re really trying to persuade or just vent your anger

The nature of toxic polarization is that fewer and fewer people care about persuasion, and more and more people care about venting their anger and signaling their allegiences. If you’re considering a form of activism, ask yourself if you’re really trying to persuade anyone, or if you’re just venting anger and speaking to the choir. (One of my more popular podcast episodes is a talk with a psychologist about polarization and persuasion.)

Tip #2: Ask yourself how you’d feel if they did it?

A “turnabout test” can help you see if a form of activism is unnecessarily bothersome and polarizing. It means taking a form of activism on “your side” and imagining an equivalent thing on the “other side.” For example, if you’re thinking about attending a protest with a “Fuck Elon Musk” sign, try to imagine how you’d feel about a “Fuck Joe Biden” sign. This is a high-level approach that can help you understand if the goal is persuasive activism or just a desire to vent.

Tip #3: Don’t insult the entire “other side”

When it comes to polarizing language, group-aimed insults are the most incendiary, so this is one of the lowest hanging fruits to avoid. We know that toxic polarization is a self-reinforcing dynamic: one side sees the “other side” as hateful and dangerous, which makes the other side’s hate and anger grow, which makes the first group’s hate and anger grow, and so on. Both groups have an exaggerated sense of the other side’s badness and the threats they pose. If we want to bring down the temperature, we must avoid speaking as if the entire “other side” is made up of horrible people. If you are saying things like, “Trump’s win shows us how racist and bigoted America is” or “Democrats are the real racists,” you are firing broad insults — and, I’d argue, only strengthening your opponents’ commitment to the fight.

You’d think this would be a pretty easy one to understand, but so many leaders and activists around us still lob group-aimed insults (some very direct, some more subtle). If we substantially reduced the frequency of this type of language, that alone I think would go a long way to reducing our toxicity problem. (E.g., if you dislike Trump, consider how much less Trump support there might be without all the “Trump voters are horrible”-type rhetoric.) (If your response is, “but they are mostly all horrible,” I recommend reading my book.)

Tip #4: Be hard on issues, soft on people

The more we use harsh personal attacks against people on the “other side,” the easier it is for them to think we’re motivated by hate and anger: that we’re being irrational and hysterical. Again, just think about how you feel when you hear someone say your preferred presidential candidate is a “lying piece of shit.” You might put together an entire story about what they’re like based just on that: you might feel you can guess their political views, and that you know the disdain they have for you and your views and concerns.

Also, in any conflict, leaders can become proxies for their side. Many Trump voters feel Trump has been treated very unfairly by a liberal-leaning establishment willing to do whatever it takes to bring him down; and that mirrors how they feel their views have been treated. Leaders being proxies isn’t just a Trump thing, either: some fans of Hillary Clinton and Obama and Biden would treat criticisms of those leaders as group-aimed insults, or as representing bigotry, no matter how measured and rational the criticism. This is what conflict does to us; it makes us feel protective of people on “our side.”

Now of course we won’t be getting rid of harsh personal criticisms and insults: this is politics, after all; I’m not naive. But if you want to do activism effectively, you should want to think about how your words will be perceived. Focus on making persuasive arguments about the ideas involved; the dangers you see in the ideas and the policies — and recognize that there can be hidden risks when you use personal attacks.

It’s good to be hard on issues and ideas, but soft on people. It’s just more persuasive.

Tip #5: Seek to understand and acknowledge opponent views and concerns

If you want someone to take something, it can help if you’re willing to give them something in return. If you want someone who doesn’t agree with you on an issue to change their mind, it can help to acknowledge the reasons they have for being distrustful of your views.

A major factor in people’s political preferences these days is they feel their opponents don’t care about their views and concerns. Many people feel their views and concerns are mocked and disrespected and attacked by the “other side.”

In a polarized environment like ours, effective activism requires showing that you understand people’s narratives and frustrations. But conflict makes many of us behave in the opposite way: we feel acknowledging our opponents’ views will give them “points” and help them; we may instinctually feel the concerns of the “bad guys” must be silly and unimportant (even as we’re more respectful when those same concerns are held by our allies).

As Ilana Redstone ( ) put it: “Critics of Trump, especially on the left, tend to think they’re defending democracy by calling out the damage he’s done and continues to do to its institutions and norms. And yet, when they do so without simultaneously acknowledging how the left created and sustained a culture where non-progressive views are reflexively viewed as racist or bigoted, they’re accelerating the very democratic decline they strive to fight against.”

And, of course, Republicans should also strive to see what makes people see their approaches as insulting and divisive.

For Trump-opposed activists, this would mean trying to understand pro-Trump narratives that are obstacles to your views being taken seriously (e.g., views that Democrats have behaved undemocratically; views that Trump’s aggression in taking the reins of government in ways that Democrats have; views that many interpret everything Trump does in worst possible light; these kinds of things). Again, you don’t have to agree with such views to understand the reasons people have them and to try to speak to them.

Tip #6: Use criticisms that come from their side

Criticism from our opponents (the out-group) are rarely persuasive to us. We’ll instinctively think, “They are being bad-faith in their criticism; they are only saying whatever they think will help defeat us.” Our passionate and genuine fear and anger runs the risk of seeming like purposeful exaggeration or unreasonable hysteria (which it sometimes will be). What is more persuasive to us is criticism from people on “our side” (our in-group). With that in mind, to criticize in maximally persuasive ways, you should seek out and use critiques of the “other side” that come from that side. (For example, if you were trying to persuade your adversaries that Trump’s economic policies were harmful, you’d be a lot better off using a piece by Republican Rich Lowry than you would using a piece by Bernie Sanders.)

Aside from persuading people, such approaches will inject more nuance into the debate, and show people that disagreements on the various issues around us don’t abide by simplistic, binary, us-versus-them dynamics.

Tip #7: Avoid catastrophizing and worst-case framings

Our divides lead many of us to catastrophize: to think the worst is going to happen. Our divides lead many of us to arrive at highly certain worst-case predictions and interpretations. For example, before the 2022 midterms, you could find some Democrats saying they believed many Republican candidates were going to follow Trump’s lead and start not accepting election results en masse. This, of course, didn’t happen. All around us, we can find many people reaching for all sorts of worst-case framings about things their opponents do and say. Our distorted and overly pessimistic views can make us jump to highly certain and worst-case conclusions about all sorts of things. Obviously there’s no objective boundary to abide by here (clearly our views of threat and harm can differ greatly) but if you want to be persuasive and avoid driving people away, you should at least consider whether your concerns will strike many people as hysterical, overstated, and unreasonable.

One example of a worst-case framing I’ve seen a lot recently is speaking as if it’s obvious that Trump and Elon Musk are trying to enrich themselves; as if their actions are driven by greed. As someone who thinks Trump and Elon are highly affectively polarized, divisive, and doing harm to America, I also think that they believe they’re doing good things; I believe they’re genuine in believing they’re helping America. They may have exaggerated views of the threats their opponents pose, yes, but that doesn’t detract from them being true believers in the righteousness of their fight. You don’t have to agree with me; the point is just that when people speak in certain “they’re motivated by greed” ways about such subjective and unknowable things as people’s motivations, it can easily be seen as insulting and polarizing.

Tip #8: Aim your language more at the people who are listening

A big mistake I see is activists who get in emotional fights with highly polarized, insulting opponents and “fight fire with fire.” They get drawn into behaving in the same divisive, insulting ways as the people they’re talking to. The problem with this is that the meta-level topic of the debate then becomes the insults; the aggressions; the actual issues are pushed to the background. When we’re interacting with someone we think is highly divisive and insulting, we should seek to aim our speech not at the opponent we’re directly talking to but at the people listening, some of whom will be undecided and may listen to our points. This is how we can inject more nuance into the public sphere — and also bring down the temperature.

For example, if I were in a debate with Trump and he was insulting me, I’d seek to criticize the behavior while avoiding insulting him. For example, I might put on a carefree, unbothered smile and say something like, “Come on, Donald, let’s focus on the issues and not get drawn into these personal insults; the American people really don’t like this stuff; let’s talk about the issues.” I might say something like, “Donald, I think your approaches to a lot of things have been very wrong, but I think you genuinely want what is best for America” Part of my confidence that would be a good strategy is that I know relatively few Americans actually like Trump’s aggression and insults. My rhetoric would be aimed at the majority of people listening, not at Trump. Also, I know Trump likes it when people treat him respectfully; if done right, and not weakly, I think that approach would disarm him and give me more power in the dialogue, not less. I think activists and leaders are often too afraid of looking weak; they become too afraid of what their most angry allies will think of them.

Some people will think I’m being naive or weak here — but I think people who return insults with insults are being naive and weak, and are letting their anger lead them to act in self-defeating ways.

“But the time for such approaches is past!”

There will be some Trump-opposed who say, “The time for such things is past! We need to fight back harder than ever! We can’t hold our tongues; we need more people to show their rage!” (And if Harris had won in 2024, we’d see many Republicans saying similar things.)

But note that this is nothing different than what has happened since 2016 (and even before that). Many people, across society, raged about Trump and held nothing back, and did their best to morally judge and correct the backward and wrong perspectives they saw around them. And what happened? I and many other people think all that contempt and moral judgment helped create more support for Trump. As Musa Al-Gharbi said, “If this is resistance,’ I’d hate to see what active support of the Orange Man looks like!”

We should recognize that some things haven’t changed, in these areas. Anti-Trump people should seek to embrace new ways of resisting Trump.

And I’d say the same to anyone doing activism, of whatever sort: I’d also say to Republicans that aggressive, morally righteous, contemptuous approaches have helped build support for the far left ideas that anger you. Both sides have played a role in making their opponents more extreme and committed.

What did you think of this?

Did you like the ideas in this piece? What would you disagree with? What would you add? I’d really like to hear your thoughts. I will probably be updating this piece over time as I refine some of my thoughts.

• Thoughts on the different ways we can see “democracy” and what is “undemocratic”

• A talk I had with Elizabeth Doll, of Braver Angels, about what she sees as undemocratic on the Democrat/liberal side

This is a very rough set of ideas that I was thinking through for purposes of writing a more edited, final piece. If you have any thoughts you want to send (in comments or more privately via my contact form), I'd much appreciate hearing from you. There is probably someone who's written about this idea in a better, more intelligent way, so I appreciate hearing about any leads on such writings.

I think there is a lot of ambiguity in how people talk about "democracy" and what is "democratic" and what is "undemocratic." This ambiguity creates a situation where often people are talking about entirely different things when they accuse each other of being "undemocratic."

This is a general dynamic for a lot of polarized, contentious issue debates; language is always imperfect, and I think often people are talking about entirely different things and misunderstanding each other at fundamental levels. For example, in my books I describe attending an online Braver Angels debate about CRT (critical race theory) and its presence in schools, and yet no one at any point ever defined the term and it was clear that the perceptions/definitions of what CRT was were all over the place.

This dynamic is I think common for so many contentious issues. Our hugely divergent narratives lead to huge blind spots as to how the people around us are using language in entirely different ways. This "Tower of Babel" effect then leads to further division; misunderstandings and worst-case interpretations compile and compound. (For some more observations on this, I recommend ’s TED Talk on language and polarization; I also recommend subscribing to Isaac’s Tangle News.)

As with most things I write about, I am less interested in "what is true" or "what is right" than in understanding people's perceptions of these areas. For many of the things that lead to contentious debate, what is most obvious to me is that the complexity of these topics is such that it's possible for smart people to form all sorts of views of what is true or right. (For more on this, I recommend ’s work on “rational polarization.”) I think acknowledging this basic truth helps us lower contempt for each other. It helps combat the arrogance and contemptuousness that I see as our core dysfunction; arrogance and contempt lead to more arrogance and contempt. (I recommend ’s book The Divide for insight into our arrogance problem.)

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But bad things are happening: Why care about this stuff?

As a politically passionate person, you might wonder, "Why does this matter?" For example, you might think Trump is doing so many bad things, clearly undemocratic things, and think, "It's so clear that the things he's doing are bad and undemocratic, it's not my job to think about how people may be using these terms differently or how my language is perceived; that stuff is weak; we just need to arouse more judgment and anger about these clearly bad things."

Or you are a Republican/Trump-supporter and have similar objections about Democrats/liberals/the-establishment: “Who cares about this weak intellectual crap? The things they are doing are clearly bad and unfair and undemocratic; to hell with people who don’t see these things; we just need to arouse more judgment and anger to beat them.”

But I'd say that: if you want to be able to persuade people of your views (or, more realistically, be able to show others that your views have merit so as to inject a bit more nuance and reduce contempt for your views and, as a result, shift the debate in more productive directions) you should be curious about these language-related and conflict-related ideas. If you want to be an effective activist and advocate for your goals, you must be curious about the ways in which we misunderstand each other and the ways in which we can speak at cross purposes.

If you are not interested in such things, you will, in my view, often by unintentionally creating more pushback and building support for the very leaders/stances that anger you.

On the different ways we can see things as 'undemocratic'

Here are three broad categories I see as to how people define “democracy” and how it relates to what ideas/actions people can call “undemocratic”:

• Related to a system of governance that enacts the will of the people: either 'pure democracy' or 'representative democracy.' In this view, things that block the people's will (e.g., negative views of electoral college; or perceived voter suppression) are 'undemocratic'. Democratic approaches can be both criticized as enabling a "tyranny of the majority" and praised as the "will of the people"; this helps us see how easy it is to either praise or criticize anything we like or don't like that results from a democracy.

• Related to a more conceptual, idealistic and hard-to-define concept of "democratic ideals." This has to do with protecting individual freedom, political rights, societal rights, making sure various individuals/minorities are protected and their voices heard and respected. This framing is often used by liberals/Democrats (e.g., framing assorted conservative-associated stances as 'undemocratic'), but it is also used by Republicans. For example, many people think liberals/Democrats have unfairly maligned Republican-associated views as racist and bigoted; that behavior can be seen as undemocratic, in the sense that it can seem aimed at trying to delegitimize people’s views and remove them from the public sphere. The subjective nature of this category allows people to easily criticize stances they see as unfair or harmful as 'undemocratic'.

• Related to the American constitution (or other founding documents that establish govt operations). Related to the above point: a Republican-associated view is that the U.S. constitution establishes the checks/balances necessary for a real and practically useful large nation built on democratic principles; it is what allows for a representative democracy that tries to protect individual freedoms and tries to set up checks against the 'tyranny of the majority' that results from pure democracy. This is what leads to defenses of the electoral college and the form of the Senate as being intelligent designs that should be protected (e.g., in books like Enlightened Democracy: The Case for the Electoral College) In this view of things, people who say they want to "save democracy" by changing the constitution are misguided, dangerous, and hypocritical because they aren't seeing that the constitution is something that in their view establishes/preserves democratic ideals.

While I’m on this topic, I’d like to hype Robert Talisse’s great book Sustaining Democracy, which is about the fundamental difficulty of democracy (that it allows a citizenry to legitimately enact policies that we may see as harmful and dangerous — and even “undemocratic”) and how that fundamental difficulty relates to toxic polarization.

My question to you is: do you think this rough categorization makes sense? Do you think I'm accurately categorizing the main perceptions and frustrations that people can have in discussions of what is "undemocratic"?

A talk about this

I recently had a talk with Elizabeth Doll about her grievances about liberals/Democrats who she sees as behaving undemocratically. Elizabeth Doll is a Republican and she works with the organization Braver Angels. I wanted to talk with her because I was curious about the different ways we can see “democracy.”

That talk is here:

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.

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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.

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.

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A few notes on this:

• Beyond Intractability shared this piece with some of their own thoughts after it. They have a lot of experience thinking about conflict so I recommend reading their thoughts. Read that here.

• This is about one iteration of the most common objection to political conflict resolution work: “Our opponents are so bad and harmful; how can you expect us to want to work on lowering toxicity and contempt?” I see this work as, in large part, continually overcoming that basic objection to caring about this work or helping with it. (And my books focus directly on overcoming such objections.)

• It might be obvious but just in case: being anti-Trump is not a requirement to work on depolarization. Often people on both “sides” assume that such work is a secret cover for the agenda of their opponents; conflict naturally makes many poeple distrust conflict resolution efforts. So I just want to emphasize that there are indeed Trump voting Americans who work on these depolarization endeavors.

• As always with these pieces on such tough-to-talk-about topics, as soon as they are published, there are things I want to change. In this case, one thing I would have focused more on was the impulse we have to assign the worst possible motives to our opponents. One example of this I see from the anti-Trump side is to speak as if Elon Musk’s DOGE-related work is driven by a desire to help his businesses and enrich himself. Could that be possible? Sure. But personally I think Elon is a true believer; I think he’s filled with righteous rage and an accompanying contempt for his opponents. He is, as they say, affectively polarized; something I wrote about in another Hill op-ed. Could I be wrong? Sure, but the point is that it can be hard to tell what motivates people; it is often far from clear. But when we’re full of rage, we’ll often reach for the most pessimistic interpretations of our opponents, and that will amplify polarization and contempt. Assigning the worst-possible motives to his opponents is something Elon Musk does often — and if we want to reduce tensions, it is something we should avoid without very good evidence.

Here’s my op-ed again: https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/5158612-can-we-lower-toxic-polarization-while-still-opposing-trump/

Some related pieces that might be interesting:

• A talk about persuasion in polarized environments, with psychology researcher Matthew Hornsey

• Is political passion at odds with reducing political toxicity? (I wrote that for Builders to try to overcome those objections)

• Pluralism in the Trump era

• How Democrats can survive the next 4 years

• What anti-Trump Americans can learn from Andrew Jackson’s presidency