Bridge-Building in Times of Hyper-Polarization: An ACR-EPP Webinar
Newsletter 359 - June 10, 2025
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On May 7, 2025, Heidi and Guy Burgess were guests on the Association for Conflict Resolution's Environmental and Public Policy Section's webinar entitled "Bridge-Building in Times of Hyper-Polarization," Susan Goodwin, Co-chair of the Association for Conflict Resolution Environment and Public Policy Section started us off with introductions, after which Guy and I gave a twenty minute presentation. That was followed by a few questions and answers, and then we broke into small groups to discuss two questions related to how third parties, particularly those in the environmental and public policy area, might do more to help transform the hyper-polarization that is tearing the U.S. apart. The video of the full presentation and the Q and A session is available here, We summarize our key points, plus some of the ideas that came out of the small group discussion below.
Guy started us off by explaining that democracy was the best possible way to avoid what we call the "might-makes-right" approach to social organization, or what we called in Newsletter 357 and elsewhere, "I'll fight you for it rules." (named after a Carl Sandburg poem.) If unchecked, such form of social organization leads to gross inequality as the rich and powerful get more so, and the poor and weak also get more so. Eventually, as Lord Acton was said to have said, "power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely."
This is what we're really worried about— a true dystopia, a kind of a 1984 updated to 2034 technology in which we have a combination of political dysfunction, oppression, authoritarianism, and violence. Democracy is our best shot at avoiding all of this.
Democracy, Heidi, explained, is based on a grand bargain. " We get individual rights, the freedom to live the life as we choose, as long as we grant that freedom to others, and as long as we fulfill our collective responsibilities." These include granting charity towards others (treating others as we would like to be treated, following (and insisting our leaders follow) the rule of law, and being actively involved citizens.
We need to get involved, at the very least, through being informed and voting with that information every two or four years, but ideally a lot more than that. Getting engaged in our local government, being on boards, going to hearings, writing our congressmen and our state legislators to tell them what we think and how we want them to vote. Even involvement with PTAs and school boards amounts to what we would consider to be active civic involvement.
Distinguishing between "power-over" and "power-with" approaches to social organization, Heidi said that
democracy is a network of power-with relationships. We have relationships with our neighbor. We have relationships with our government. We have relationships with the rest of civic society. And to the extent that those relationships are strong and trusting, democracy works well. To the extent that they are polarized and distrusting, democracy starts to have trouble.
And of course, our democracy is in a lot of trouble now because our relationships are breaking down, and we don't trust our institutions and all of the social capital that should be holding us together is ripped and tearing us apart.
We showed a slide with four continua.
Democracy is characterized by the elements on the right, while authoritarianism is characterized by the factors on the left. American society, at the moment seems to be moving on all four of these continua from the right to the left. But environmental and public policy mediators probably know as much, if not more, about how to help people move from the left to the right than anyone does. Our small groups were focused on developing a list of ideas from the participants on how to do that.
Before we get down to doing that, though, Guy explained, we wanted to discuss a different way of framing the nature of the problems we currently face. Most people think in terms of a giant conflict between the left and the right, Republicans and Democrats. That conflict does exist and is quite intractable. But there is another conflict that is often overlooked. That is the conflict between the power-over actors, who are seeking to dominate and exploit the society using a divide-and-conquer approach, and the grassroots citizens on the left and the right who are trying to (or at least want to) prevent that. The only possible way to defeat, or even slow down the power-over, might-makes-right actors is for the grassroots people on the left and the right to reject the divide-and-conquerors, and instead, work together to establish a power-with approach to social organization that is able to stand up to and electorally (not violently) defeat the power-over actors.
So the big question that this way of thinking highlights, I think, and what I'd like to be the focus of our discussion, is how can we simultaneously diffuse the red-blue conflict, while we also promote power-with democracy by constraining power-over actors?
There really are big differences in terms of cultural values, economic circumstances, etc. between the left and the right. There's a lot of tension there. So we need to work through that in a way that prevents runaway escalation.
But at the same time, we need to figure out how folks at the grassroots level —both Democrats and Republicans together — can challenge the bad faith actors and constrain their power. That's really what we've got to figure out how to do.
One of the many things that makes this task difficult, Heidi explained, is the sheer scale and complexity of modern societies.
Mediators are typically used to working around tables. So family mediators have a husband and wife and one mediator. It's three people around the table. Environmental mediators often work with bigger tables. So you've got a consensus building process with 20, 30. I did one with 50 people around the table. That's tricky, but it's nothing like trying to put an entire society around the table. Obviously, that can't be done. So we have to come up with other ways of handling this scale and complexity.
Our solution to this problem is "massively parallel democracy building" and "massively parallel problem solving." This isn't calling on people to do something new. Rather it is describing something that many of us are already doing — we're just putting a name on it.
The idea is that there are lots of people and organizations who are doing different things, but they're all pursuing roughly the same goal. You might call it "strengthening democracy," "defending democracy," "building collaboration," "lowering hyperpolarization." You can call it whatever you want. But we're all basically on the same page, working towards making this society more functional than it currently is. You have bridge builders, and educators and trainers, and consensus builders and constructive advocates and civic reformers. We've come up with a list of 54 different kinds of actors who are currently engaged and need to be engaged in this strengthening- democracy project.
We divided these roles into two categories: strategists and actors. (if you're interested in reading more on this, we described these in four earlier newsletters. (See Newsletters 223, 226, 236, and 239. The strategists are people es who are trying to figure out what's going on and what needs to be done. They include "conflict lookouts," and people who we call "democracy-firsters". (They are the people who say, "We've got to fix democracy before we fix anything else because, we can't fix anything else, If we don't fix democracy first.) Another category of strategists are the "complexifiers." Complexifiers try to get people to stop focusing on us- versus-them, simplistic ideas about what's going on and look at the real complexity of the situation.
We have a much longer list of actors: grassroots citizens, visionaries and healers, de-escalators, constructive communicators, issue analysts, collaborative problem solvers, power balancers, democracy defenders, mediators, facilitators, and consensus builders. Environmental and public policy mediators do many of these things. So we think that the people in the EPP section of ACR are particularly well positioned to play a lot of the massively parallel roles.
After a short Q and A, we broke into small groups, and asked participants to discuss two questions.
What do we, as a field, know that could make a significant contribution to efforts to defuse hyper-polarization and build a democracy in which most everyone (on both the left and right) would like to live?
In keeping with the massively parallel democracy building strategy that the Burgesses have outlined, try to identify as many substantive and procedural opportunities as possible for improving the way in which our deeply divided society handles conflict.
We asked participants to record their answers on a virtual white board, as well as sharing highlights briefly when we came back together at the end. When I (Heidi) looked at the white board, I was impressed. There were lots of ideas there, some fleshed out a bit, but mostly snippets of ideas. Wondering how I could put these into an essay (as we had promised to do), I decided to follow the lead of several of my colleagues, and asked Chat GPT to do it. I thought the raw essay it came up with was great, although upon more careful scrutiny, I discovered it left off a few ideas, which I added in. One of the people I shared it with thought ChatGPT used too much of a "declarative tone or directive tone," missing the nuance of the conversations. I understand her point. It is equivalent, I think, to our observation that people should talk about “good practices,” instead of “best practices,” because some practices will be “best” in some situations, but not at all good in others. However, I felt comfortable with most of its assertions — I thought they rang true to what I have been doing, and know others do when trying to bridge divides. You can read the full (lightly edited) ChatGPT summary in the full webinar report. But in short, recommendations included:
Building relationships, trust, human connections (ironic that that was the first recommendation made by a computer!)
Using carefully structured dialogue (and pre-dialogue preparations) to allow for safe conversations across difference.
Shifting narratives to ones that see commonalities, complexities, and less us-versus-them framing
Focusing on values not positions. (and interests, too, of course, but respondents did seem to talk more about values)
Honoring context and social justice concerns
Building everyday civic competence (including knowledge and skills)
Reinventing procedures for public meetings to make them more collaborative
Working locally for national impact
This is just a sampling. There is much more in the full report.
As we knew and this session made clear again: environmental and public policy mediators know a great deal about how to run small group processes effectively to diminish distrust, build relationships, and often, resolve conflicts and make decisions. They also have ideas about how these skills and processes can be scaled up to work at organizational, community, and even higher organizational levels. We would argue that there has quite possibly never been a time in U.S. history when this knowledge and skill is more needed than now. We look forward to continuing this conversation with the EPP group, and anyone else who would like to join in. If you have more ideas about our two questions, please share them with us if you are willing. We will include them in an upcoming newsletter and add them to the full webinar report.
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BI sends out newsletter 2-3 times a week. Two of these are substantive articles. Once a week or so we compile a list of the most interesting reading we have found related to our topics of interest: intractable conflict, hyper-polarization, and democracy, and we share them in a "Massively Parallel Peace and Democracy Building Links” newsletter. These links include articles sent by readers, information about our colleagues’ activities, and news and opinion pieces that we have found to be of particular interest. Each Newsletter will be posted on BI, and sent out by email through Substack to subscribers. You can sign up to receive your copy here and find the latest newsletter here or on our BI Newsletter page, which also provides access to all the past newsletters, going back to 2017.
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