The state we are in: Resources
In the midst of an uptick in national American political tensions and violence (and a certain amount of despair), we want to share a few resources and news articles that have come our way in this past week.
A former colleague of Sara Jolena's, Marcia Stepanek at #newrules (which is primarily a substack newsletter), recently wrote an article about the increasing toxicity of political polarization globally.
We know that this is an issue that some of you are intimately familiar with and have been personally and professionally working on for years. We welcome any resources that you would like to share with us and the wider community around the topics of de-escalating political violence and re-crafting the public sphere.
Here's an excerpt from the article that includes some relevant data points to where America is today, and a few basics about de-escalating conflict.
After that, there are some general additional resources.
From Stepanek's article, High Conflict: We’re no longer simply polarized, says Amanda Ripley, a researcher on conflict and author of High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out. In her words, we’re “Zombie dancing” into a more dangerous sphere of conflict. Top political and behavioral researchers call it “high conflict” —what happens when deep discord distills into an intransigent, good-versus-evil kind of ongoing feud that is dividing many Americans into an “us” and a deeply disliked “them”—even though the “them” people are called names though are rarely ever met, seen, known or heard.
“In this high conflict state, the normal rules of engagement don’t apply,” says Ripley. “The brain behaves differently.” Once someone gets drawn into high conflict, they become certain of their own righteousness, make negative assumptions about those who have a different position on something and become increasingly certain of their own superiority. “… When we get into that kind of conflict, we stop listening,” Ripley says. “We stop interacting. We stop thinking. We replace debate with disgust.” At a deeper level, she added, high conflict traps us in a pattern of distress in which conflict, itself, becomes the point and the goal, which then sweeps everything into its vortex” and makes interaction nearly impossible, and truth hard to both find and fathom.
A flash poll taken by YouGov in the wake of Saturday’s shooting said 67% of Americans are “exhausted” by the rhetorical warfare but also believe more political violence is likely to occur before the November election.
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According to the Polarization Research Lab—a collaboration of Dartmouth, the University of Pennsylvania and Stanford University—nearly half of Democrats (45%) think Republicans support partisan violence and 42% of Republicans think the same of Democrats. The reality: Less than 4% of Americans back political violence.
Robert Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago who has studied American attitudes toward political violence since the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, conducted a nationwide poll last month on the topic of political violence. In his study, 10% of those surveyed said that the “use of force is justified to prevent Donald Trump from becoming president.” A third of those who gave that answer also said they owned a gun, and 7% said they “support force to restore Trump to the presidency.
In October, the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California, Davis, published a report that found that nearly 14% of those surveyed strongly agreed that there would be a civil war in the United States in the next few years. Nearly 8% of respondents to the study said they believed “there would be a situation in the next few years where political violence would be justified” and were intending to arm themselves.
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Here are some basics from Peter T. Coleman, director of Columbia University's Difficult Conversations Lab, to consider if you’re just getting started in working through difficult conversations in your community:
Complicate the narrative. Recognize that any story or “truism” that characterizes one side as consisting of pure heroes and the other of cartoonish villains is probably not true. Instead, ask questions. What is being oversimplified? What do you want the other side to understand about you? What do want to understand about the other side? What’s the question nobody is asking you about where you stand? What do you want to know about the political divide that feels like a blind spot? How do you know some of the things you believe others do not?
Reduce the binary. Us is who? “Them” is who? Break it down into a list of six different groups representing each “us” and each “them” and talk about what makes each group different in how it views an issue or event.
Marginalize the fire-starters. Avoid, at first, people who see their role as creating chaos and division. Cease listening to those who seem to get a thrill out of a fight.
Build rapport immediately. Building relationships is necessary to long-term learning and interaction.
Listen. Acquire advanced listening skills, the kind almost no one has naturally. More than half of what people need to ease high conflict is to feel heard. Those mired in high conflict rarely feel heard. Many executives can become better listeners. “Listening is the most powerful and under-appreciated leadership skill to acquire,” says Coleman.
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And here are some other news headlines that have caught our eye this week.
Populist opposition is threatening progress on climate change (PIEE)
School Vouchers were supposed to save taxpayer money. Instead they blew a massive hole in Arizona's state budget. (Propublica)
What Utah's redistricting means for voters' ability to change laws
Despite recent setbacks, there is still hope for democracy (This article includes an interview with Emily Amick about her recent book, Democracy in Retrograd)
Most hydrogen plants proposed near disadvantaged communities (Oil and Gas Watch)
Wall Street Pushes Back After Activists Escalate Protests (Bloomberg)
Hate High Power Bills? Blame Fossil Fuels And Climate Change (Forbes)
Puerto Rico files $1 billion suit against fossil fuel companies (The Verge)
Prosecutors Should Charge Big Oil With Homicide for the Latest Heat-Wave Deaths (Slate)
1 month into operation, erosion problems continue with Mountain Valley Pipeline (Roanoke Times)
Land Commoning in deagranized contexts: potentials for agroecology? (IDS Bulletin and larger academic paper)