Pluralism Summit: Building Bridges

Optimism, Courage, and Doing the Work

I’m sitting in Reagan airport waiting for my flight home (well, I was when I started this post anyway) so it’s a prime opportunity to do a post about the Pluralism Summit hosted by the Mercatus Center’s Program on Pluralism and Civil Exchange this past week.

The Summit mixed academics, non-profit leaders, policy folks, and journalists. The unconference format gave me an unusual opportunity to pick the brains of people who are not primarily academics and who are doing bridge-building work all over the U.S., confronting the problem of toxic polarization from a range of perspectives and using a range of methods.

Meeting tons of different people with different approaches who are all doing pluralism (and what I call, roughly, moderation work) in practice, on the ground, was really inspiring.

I was one of the plenary speakers and while imposter syndrome is part and parcel of academia and is usually mostly unfounded, in this case I felt it was a bit justified. The other plenary speakers included Daryl Davis, whose outreach to KKK members has led over 200 of them to leave the group, Amanda Ripley, the journalist and author who has covered what she calls “high conflict” from gang life in Chicago to former FARC members in Colombia, and Joe Bubman, whose work on conflict resolution with MercyCorps and now Urban Rural Action is deeply inspiring. All three of these people are doing incredible on-the-ground work with metaphorical shovels and buckets and ladders, reshaping our shared landscape into one that we can all live in.

Their stories are all so different, but all share in common a commitment to getting their hands dirty and working with people from all walks of life on the ground.

I gave a talk about (what else!) radical moderation and spent the rest of the time taking copious notes and soaking up the wisdom.

The plenary speakers were great and I learned a lot from each of them, but I learned just as much if not more from the informal conversations we all had in the unconference sessions, discussing everything from structural barriers to pluralism work to race to civic culture building.

Local Bridge Building

I have a lot more to say on the summit, but for now I want to focus on one theme that emerged clearly and consistently from the speakers and people doing work in the trenches: the most successful pluralism and anti-polarization work is done on the local level.

That doesn’t mean that there aren’t things we can do at a high level structurally, like work to reform algorithms that incentivize extreme postings or make adjustments to our electoral system so that we can better represent the pluralistic ideas of the electorate. But the reality is that culture and capacity building really starts from the ground up.

Almost all of the people I met who were doing real and efficacious work were doing it on the local level. In one breakout session, we discussed with some despair the structural and incentive problems for fighting polarization and extremism at the federal level. We all know they’re problems and none of us quite knew what to do about it.

But everyone was hopeful about anti-polarization work at the local level because they had seen it work time and time again.

One practical tool that we got to try out is the Pluralist Lab, developed by Ben Klutsey and his team and that’s featured in the new film Undivide Us. Pluralism Labs encourage us to think about and characterize the other side in the most constructive way without forcing us to give up our own values and beliefs. It’s an incredible tool for having difficult conversations across differences as well as training participants in active listening and facilitation. The website above has materials and more info if you’re interested in trying it out in the classroom or anywhere else.

Navigating Local Landscapes

Why is the local approach so powerful? Local efforts benefit from a couple important things, all of which relate to the nature of our shared landscape and how we navigate it together or apart:

1. Face-to-face interactions build trust.

2. Local knowledge helps identify pits and who has the talents, time and energy to help fill them.

3. Local interactions tend to be problem/solution oriented, rather than ideologically oriented precisely because the problem they’re trying to solve is right in front of them and because it’s more clear at the local level that ideological explanations rarely fit.

4. Finally, because change is more immediate and more visible, it creates momentum and keeps people motivated.

All these together work to create positive feedback loops that can help drive change forward. This list obviously isn’t exhaustive either. There are lots of benefits to working together to solve a problem with people you can see and talk to.

On the national level, on the other hand, not only do the incentives work against anti-polarization, but the lack of positive feedback, the difficulty involved in building trust at that level, and the friction of working against those powerful incentives all create a negative feedback loop that stalls change before it can even get started.

Meet the Builders

Since this is already getting long, I want to end by highlighting some amazing people I ran into who are doing incredible work on the local level:

Joe Bubman’s work at Urban Rural Action is crazy inspiring for the way he applies his conflict resolution training from war torn regions to the conflicts in our own backyards.

Martin Carcasson’s work on deliberative democracy has been used to help local officials, non-profit leaders, and others tackle difficult conversations. He also trains students to do facilitation work, creating a ripple effect of civil dialogue outward. He wasn’t at the Summit, but his work was well known by the group.

Seth Kaplan’s new book on fragile neighborhoods takes his expertise on fragile states and applies it to our most local problems. I chatted with Seth a bit about the complicated legacy of race in my hometown of Rochester and I’m really excited to see what practical advice he offers in the book (it’s been added to the ever-growing list).

Chip Hauss has spent decades and dozens of books working on conflict resolution and peacebuilding. He wrote a great Substack post this week about how the Summit encouraged him to do the work of bridge-building internally, given that he walked into the Summit as a Lefty scholar with a lot of mental baggage about Mercatus that he had to shed pretty quickly once things started rolling. He and I chatted after one panel but I only realized after reading his Substack that he’s done work with David Sloan Wilson, my favorite professor in college and a major source of intellectual inspiration throughout my adult life, so it’s no wonder we immediately connected.

Liz Joyner from The Village Square does wonderful work creating a space for hard conversations across differences in Tallahassee, FL.

This is just a tiny list of the incredible people who were there and I’m definitely leaving out some wonderful humans building bridges across our deepest divides.

I’ll be highlighting more of this work in subsequent posts, but for now let me know what you think! Who is doing building work that you follow? What kinds of bridges and ladders do we need most in our communities to combat polarization? Are there gaps that we need to address and what are they?

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