Beyond Intractability
Hyper-Polarization Blog
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- Jean-Jacques Subrenat: Implementing Democracy -- Attacks on the rule of law in the U.S.A. are having an impact on the political mores of other democracies. The U.S. badly needs to update its own democracy to preserve the safety and prosperity of all around the world.
- Kristin Hansen: Are Bridge-builders Being "Too Nice" to the Right? -- The primary role of bridge-builders in America at this time is to "call in," not to "call out." That this does not make us irrelevant, it makes us essential.
- Matt Legge: Beware the Popular Idea That You Know a Hidden Truth -- This metaphor leads to a binary assumption: I'm right, they are wrong. We'd be well served dropping that assumption, and listening to others to learn how they might, actually, be right, and we are wrong.
- The 2022 Election – Did It Make Hyper-Polarization Better or Worse -- While the worst anti-democratic outcomes may have been averted, this election was still not good for hyper-polarization, and perhaps not good for democracy either.
- Frederick Golder on Common Ground instead of Polarization -- We cannot change anyone’s opinions, values, ideas, attitudes, judgments, or viewpoints, but, we can understand each other better through learning conversations and use those to find common ground.
- Guy Burgess: Finding Common Ground / Constructive Approaches for Addressing Differences -- This process focuses on five questions examining the nature of the different beliefs and opinions, and how they might be dealt with most constructively depending on whether they are fact-based, moral, or both.
- Andrew Harward: A Vision of Constructive Political Conflict in The United States -- A visioning exercise yields a credible plan for significantly reducing political polarization -- with many additional benefits to individuals, organizations, and society as a whole as well.
- Fighting Hyper-Polarization for Our Children and Grand Children -- This newsletter focuses on the importance of continuing our efforts to strengthen democracy, and considers one obstacle to doing that: being too sure of oneselves (the QED trap).
- Guy Burgess: The QED Trap -- The QED trap locks people into a win-lose struggle for power that eliminates any chance of learning, compromise, or collaboration.
- How Do We Get What We Want and Need? Through Polarization or Bridge-building, Reframing, and "Omni-Win" Approaches? -- Julia Roig, Lisa Schirch, Colin Rule and Duncan Autrey examine the meaning of, and the benefits and costs of polarization, and what could be done to limit the costs and improve our democracy.
- If You Don't Know Where You Are Going, it Is Going to Be Hard to Get There -- Newsletter 59 -- An argument that an improved and strengthened liberal democracy offers the most promising basis for imagining future in which those on both the left and the right would like to live.
- Julia Roig: Rethinking 'Polarization' as the Problem -- Polarization is good when it pushes us to change. It is toxic when it causes us to dehumanize and push away "the other." We need to sit with our conflict, explore it, and move through it together.
- Colin Rule -- Positive Reframing in Political Conversations: Avoiding the Race to the Bottom -- What outcome do we want to achieve? When we lash out in anger, do these behaviors help or hinder our efforts to achieve that outcome? Are they making the problem worse?
- Duncan Autrey: It's Time to Upgrade Our Democracy -- Our current democratic system is inherently flawed because it relies on elected officials to represent people without an effective means of listening to them. We must fix that!
- Ken Cloke: Hyper-Polarization -- Interest-based processes that allow us to capture the positive aspects of polarization while reframing, minimizing, and transforming the destructive aspects is essential for positive change.
- Responses to Our Crane Brinton Essay -- Conrad and Camus also pointed out what we called the Crane Brinton Effect--revolutions tend to lead only to an exchange of regimes with an even more brutal regime likely to replace preceding one.
- Kevin Clements et al: The Toda Peace Institute's Conversations on the Subversion of Democracies in the 21st Century -- Democracy is backsliding around the world, driven by polarization, attacks on democratic fundamentals by duly-elected "democratic" leaders, and clandestine, insidious incremental changes.
- If You Don't Know Where You Are Going, It Is Going to Be Hard to Get There -- Elicitive approaches can help us visualize a democracy in which we all would want to live.
- Developing a Vision for a Society in Which We Would All Like to Live -- With this newsletter, we start imagining a less polarized future with lessons from South Africa from Ebrahim Rasool as well as observations from Neal Kohatsu, Ken Cloke, and Duncan Autrey.
- Duncan Autrey: We All Win, or We All Lose -- We all agree society is in grave trouble. We all have different notions of how to fix it. If we pool our knowledge and work together, we can create a better world for everyone.
- The Crane Brinton Effect — Why Revolutions Fail -- Amid calls for a political revolution to fight systemic oppression, a critical look at why revolutions fail with contributions from the Burgesses, Peter Adler, James Adams, William Donohue, and Mark Hamilton.
- On Oppression, Justice, Advocacy, Neutrality, and Peacebuilding -- Additional Perspectives -- More insight into the complex relationship between social justice advocacy and peacebuilding from Larry Susskind, Louis Kriesberg, Jay Rothman, Ken Cloke, Greg Bourne, Lisa Schirch, and Martin Carcasson.
- Summary of "A Framework for Understanding Polarizing Language" -- Polarizing language demonstrates features that are readily identifiable. Can such warnings can be heard and action taken to enable people to shift from violence to problem solving before it's too late?
- Summary of "The Case for Principled Impartiality in a Hyper-Partisan World" -- To abandon impartiality completely and simply join the fray as partisans will likely only further erode our political culture and exacerbate the problems of polarization, distrust, and misinformation.
- On Oppression, Justice, Advocacy, Neutrality, and Peacebuilding -- Part 2 -- Bernie Mayer and Jackie Font-Guzmán offer a critique of our focus on hyper-polarization based on their book, The Neutrality Trap.
