For the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, I am currently studying the problem of polarization. Is polarization on the rise in the United States? What is the connection, if any, between polarization and violence? And what, if anything, can be done to reduce polarization?
I have been doing a fair amount of reading in an effort to wrestle these, and other, questions to the ground. I haven’t come to any firm conclusions as yet, but I thought I might use this space to think out loud about some of what I have been learning.
One recent book about polarization that has gotten a fair amount of attention is Amanda Ripley’s High Conflict, which came out in 2021. Ripley, a journalist who has written for The Atlantic and Slate among other publications, bases her book on reporting from four principal sources: professional mediator Gary Friedman’s political battles in Muir Beach, California; former gang leader Curtis Toler’s transformation into a peace advocate in Chicago; Sandra Milena Vera Bustos’ “demobilization” from being a guerrilla fighter in Colombia’s civil war; and Rabbi Jose Rolando Matalon’s effort to bring together liberal members of his Upper West Side congregation in Manhattan with conservative correctional officers in Michigan for facilitated dialogue.
Ripley is a good reporter and a talented storyteller — she weaves her case studies together with the craft of a novelist. Her central argument is that there is a difference between “high conflict” and regular conflict. Regular conflict can be a force for good, sharpening our thinking and helping to advance the search for truth. High conflict, by contrast, “is what happens when conflict clarifies into a good-versus-evil kind of feud, the kind with an us and a them.”
Each of Ripley’s four central tales is about an individual attempting to craft an escape from high conflict. As Ripley details, finding an exit is not so easy, even when someone is highly motivated. (Indeed, in two of Ripley’s stories, the stakes are literally life and death.)
Ripley doesn’t just want to tell entertaining stories however — she wants to leave the reader with concrete tools for navigating the world. In attempting to extract clear lessons, High Conflict sometimes reads like a self-help manual. Ripley describes how exiting high conflict requires someone to hit a “saturation point” (basically a bottoming-out moment when the costs of remaining in conflict seem to great to bear any further). Getting out will typically mean shunning “conflict entrepreneurs” and “fire starters” who actively seek to fuel disagreement. A key skill in the deescalation process is “looping” (essentially active listening). The list goes on. (Ripley kindly provides a glossary so readers can keep track of all of the buzzwords.)
Ripley’s “conflict hacks” will no doubt be beneficial to anyone attempting to manage an interpersonal quarrel. But she also seeks to explain larger social conflicts, like the growing gulf between Democrats and Republicans in the United States. Here Ripley is, understandably, less sure-footed.
According to Ripley, “the challenge of our time is to mobilize great masses of people to make change without dehumanizing one another.” She asserts that “political polarization is not its own category of problem” separate from neighbor disputes or marital discord.
I’m not sure I have an opinion yet on whether political polarization is a different kind of problem from other forms of conflict, but surely it is different in scale. And scale is the rock on which all sorts of efforts to build a better world have foundered. (A point that Aubrey Fox and I make in “The Practitioner Veto,” our chapter on government implementation in Gradual: The Case for Incremental Change in a Radical Age.)
Ripley closes her book by detailing an effort to bridge the religious, ideological, social, and geographic divide between a group of New York City Jewish liberals and a group of conservative Christians from Michigan. It is hard to come away from this story without being impressed by the thoughtfulness and decency of all those who participated in the convening. But it also hard not to notice how expensive and time-consuming this social experiment was, involving field trips to Michigan and New York for dozens of people over the course of several months.
The encounters did succeed in humanizing participants on both sides of the divide — for a time. But, as Ripley reports,
Then came the pandemic, the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, and protests around the world, followed by the 2020 election. The memories faded, as memories do. Some of the Facebook pages [of participants] became more extreme again…The adversarial assumptions roared back to life.
So, in the end, even this intensive, well-resourced project launched by competent, well-meaning people did not have much of a lasting impact. The challenge of how to scale up efforts to reduce polarization in a country with more than 330 million people spread out over more than 3.5 million square miles is very real.
As a writer, it must have been enormously tempting to end High Conflict with a heartwarming story that offered a simple, uplifting message to readers. Full credit to Amanda Ripley for resisting this temptation. In doing so, she is following her own advice to “complicate the narrative”:
In my own work, complicating the narrative has also meant finding space for the quotes and details that don’t fit the story I originally thought I was telling. The ones that show ambivalence or contradiction but are still true…Readers can handle a lot more complexity than most journalists think.
Reading High Conflict may not have provided me with clear answers about how to reduce political polarization, but it did convince me that the world needs more journalists like Amanda Ripley.