Bridging: a new venture and a new blog

Like all who consider themselves progressives, I have spent the last few months trying to figure out what to do in a Trump-led nation. The election itself totally did not surprise me: I see it is one moment in a long-running conflict between those who want to open society to diverse experiences and values, and those who want to close down, withdrawing to familiar and harmonious walled communities. This conflict is a central theme of my book Trust in a Complex World. I expect it to go on for a long time, a century or more; and if we don’t destroy ourselves along the way (which is quite possible), I expect that the liberation of human capacities represented by the Opening, or progressive, tendency will win out.

But that doesn’t answer what to do at this critical moment. What I have come round to now is The Bridging Project.

There are, I think, three essential things that progressives need to do now: fighting, helping, and bridging. Fighting is trying to win specific elections and court battles to fend off the reaction. Helping is providing support for those hurt by the current policies – including immigrants, those who lose health care, victims of environmental degradation. Those two areas have already generated considerable action.

The third activity, bridging, involves reaching out to Trump supporters: trying to understand the roots of their disaffection with the establishment and progressivism, and to build with them a vision of a future that can include us all. It's hard -- hard personally to listen to and seek to understand views that we find abhorrent; and hard in practice to find venues for the kind of open conversation that’s needed.

Yet I think bridging, which is so far the most neglected of the three activities, is vital in both the short and long run. In the short run it may open ways to undermine the Trump base and thus diminish his impact. In the long run it is the only true exemplification of our highest values. We value inclusion, globalization, diversity; we cannot win by excluding nearly half the country who feel lost, undermined, humiliated by those same developments. We have to build a future with them. That may be hard to imagine, but it’s the only way human history has progressed in the past, and the only way progressives can genuinely win in the future.

So I will be looking for ways to advance a Bridging agenda. It’s not opposed to fighting, of course. It’s not about compromise or backing off core values. But it is about seeking understanding, even of those who have very different views from myself – understanding where they come from, and trying to imagine where we all together can go to.

For this purpose I have started a new blog: “Coming to understanding”. It will focus on practical efforts to develop bridging conversations,

We have to stop using the R-word: racism as a shared problem

One thing emerging from the heated start of the Trump presidency is that accusations of racism are emotional triggers: they trigger liberal pride and unity, and conversely intense conservative rage. A friend of mine, for instance, has been interviewing Trump supporters, and he consistently gets responses like this:

Q: “What do people think about your politics that just isn't true?”

A: “Where to start?  That I am some sort of evil, terrible, racist, sexist, bigoted, homophobe.  I am not any of those things.”

Arlie Hochschild’s book, Strangers in Their Own Land – which should be required reading for all liberals – highlights the same theme: at one point she comes to the realization that Rush Limbaugh serves as “a firewall against liberal insults”. She quotes a Limbaugh fan:

“Liberals believe that Bible-believing Southerners are ignorant, backward, rednecks, losers. They think we're racist, sexist, homophobic, and maybe fat.” (p. 22)

If the world were really polarized into racists and non-racists, it might be a good thing to unite the latter against the former. But it’s not: racism, like other -isms, is a complex phenomenon, not an inborn personality disorder. People learn to overcome racism, a journey that is long and arduous. Most conservatives have moved a long way in in that journey in the last half-century. Moreover, most liberals still have a long way to go.

We shouldn’t be polarizing this; we should be working together on it.

Most conservatives in Hochschild’s account of the Louisiana heartland, and many others, have entirely accepted the idea that Blacks should be treated equally, that they are not inferior, that they can be good neighbors. They often interact freely across racial lines at work, and probably as much as Northerners in churches and neighborhoods. They would not resist a Black family moving into the area, or Black or Hispanic children attending class with their children. And we should recognize that these are enormous and hard-won advances. One Louisianian recalls how he used the “N-word” freely in his childhood, like everyone else – and then abruptly recognized the hurt it caused and stopped using it. It was well within my memory that Governor George Wallace stood in the doorway of the University of Alabama proclaiming “segregation forever”. We don’t see anything remotely like that now; those attitudes have changed profoundly. It’s an amazing human achievement.

And how about ourselves, liberals of the coasts? Our neighborhoods, in my hometown of Princeton and my old hometowns of Boston and New York, are profoundly segregated. Our elementary schools in practice often reflect that separation. High schools have formally integrated, but then largely tracked races and ethnicities into different classrooms. Blacks continue to lag in income, health, and almost every other measure of well-being. Profound mistrust continues between police forces and minority communities.

In other words, we haven’t solved the problem of inclusion. We should be a little more humble about it. We have a lot of work to do, in the North as in the South and everywhere. Inclusivity is a process, and a hard one, demanding deep change in identities and ways of life, often triggering fear and anger. As a matter of fact, my sense is that in parts of the South Whites interact with Blacks more comfortably and frequently, and with more genuine equality, than in the liberal bastion of Boston. But of course no section of the country has reached the desired end point.

But now accusations of racism have become the flashpoint for really dangerous polarization, which is rapidly hardening into a divide that will be hard to overcome. And it’s unnecessary. Very few people are deliberately racist; pretty much everyone is racist in some respects; but liberals have claimed the moral sword and are using it against conservatives. And by setting up this battle, we make things worse: we lose the opportunity to find allies on many issues, to undercut the Trump coalition, by using the R-word as a battle standard.

It’s time for a reframing. We all have work to do.  And, by the way, racism is only part of  that work. The broader issue of diversity – the changing roles and status of immigrants, Hispanics, Asians, women, gays – is very much a continuing and unresolved challenge. The economic inequality that has torn apart the lives of factory workers in Michigan and oil workers in Louisiana – that’s something we are all part of as well, and all need to work on. These are not problems where one side of the political spectrum has all the moral right and the other has all the wrong; these will be hard to solve, and that we all need to play a part in the building the solution. As long as we keep hurling insults – and I’m looking at my own liberal tribe here – we will make it impossible to actually make progress on any of them.

The vicious circle of mistrust - and liberals' part in it

We of the left are still tending to delude ourselves in assuming that Trump supporters will come around to our point of view. We couldn’t believe that people would vote for someone as awful as Trump, and we were wrong. Now we assume that people will soon wake up to his awfulness and reject him. But it’s far from that simple. The root of the problem goes far deeper than lack of information or errors in calculating self-interest. Trump emerges from a collapse of trust – and that is not easy to reverse.

I know something about trust. I’ve written a book about it (Trust in a Complex World). And one thing I know is this: if you think trust and harmony will restored by others finally seeing that you are right, you will be sadly disappointed.

We of the Left look and Trump and see someone who constantly violates our deepest values, and assume therefore that anyone who supports him must be evil. Those of us who are comfortable in the current system – well-educated, benefiting from globalization, loving the growing diversity of music and food and culture around us – see him as a destroyer of the good. Those who consider ourselves expert on some part of the system – economics, or international affairs, say – see him taking reckless actions  that may blow everything up, and we assume everyone else will eventually see the danger.

But here’s what Trump’s supporters see: they see a world that for decades has undermined their communities, criticized their moral codes, weakened their status; they see a future that will increasingly marginalize their way of life; they see a leadership elite that is utterly alien to their sense of what’s right – a bunch of people on the coasts who love things that they hate and hate things that they love, who do not respect them, who treat them as idiots and boobs. And in Trump they see a guy who promises to break that elite, who delights in mocking them and enraging the pundits and the experts and the educated. Whether or not they agree with specific policies, Trumpists see a validation of their way of life for the first time in generations. And the more we object and protest, the more they feel Trump must be on the right track. For them, the fact that Trump is violating rules left and right is not a failing, it’s a virtue.

So what we have is a vicious circle of mistrust, one of the most dangerous of human phenomena. It has led throughout history to wars and mass destruction. When views get polarized in this way, the worse things get the more dug in the sides become. Opposition fuels a self-fulfilling prophecy. Things can literally never get bad enough that people stop and say, “Oh, we were wrong” – because they can always  blame failure on the opposition’s resistance.

We are in danger of that terrible dynamic. We of the Left talk a lot about inclusiveness, but we have done a very poor job of including much of the country. Now we’re finding ourselves forced into the position of claiming that half the citizenry is deluded or evil or stupid. That should make us uncomfortable – indeed, it should be completely unacceptable to us. But we are falling into the old pattern of saying if only those who disagree with us didn’t disagree with us, everything would be all right.

The vicious circle of mistrust won’t fix itself. It won’t end because our opponents see the light. It won’t end because our moral view of the world triumphs. It will not end with the victory of one side. It will end when the vast majority of the country – not 51%, but 75% or more – build together a sense of the future that they can all live with and live in. The only way to stop the spiral towards mutual destruction is to connect, to forge new relations of inclusion and understanding, across the lines. And the place we can start, those of use on the Left, is by understanding better where the Trumpists are coming from, rather hurling insults at them.

This is what a revolution feels like - from the wrong side

This post was written just after the election, then appeared as an op-ed in the New Jersey Star-Ledger.

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What Trump's populist supporters want is a revolution.

They feel left out of the big social and economic trends of the last 40 years: globalization, knowledge work, diversity. They feel deeply alienated from the coastal elites, who thrive in this new environment, who flaunt not only their wealth but also their tastes and moral codes - internationalism, foreign foods ("cheese-eating"), open homosexuality. The more those elites gain, the more marginalized the rest of the country feels.

These revolutionaries have lost faith in the system. In the 1950s, those in small towns already felt alienated from the Eastern intellectuals and experts, but also proud of the progress of science and the economy, and confident that the benefits would flow to all. Now large numbers of people, especially away from the coasts, have lost that confidence. "Progress" continues, "experts" keep inventing things, but all that they experience is that their lives are disrupted and their status diminished. And they want it to stop.

They see Trump as someone who will break the system.

It really doesn't matter what he says; what matters is that he doesn't care what the elites think. The experts say that globalization brings economic good; Trump tells his supporters it doesn't. The experts say that things are getting better; Trump tells them things are getting worse. What Trump tells them is much closer to their experience than what the experts say.

I am part of the meritocratic elite, the aristocracy of the current period -- the educated class that has profited nicely from globalization and the knowledge economy. Of course I don't feel like an aristocrat: I'm not at all (think I) like those foppish prigs on "Masterpiece," who ride their horses over peasants in their path. I work for human rights and social justice; I vote for those who would increase my taxes in order to strengthen social programs for the poor.

And yet in the important ways I, and my meritocratic friends, are indeed like all aristocrats. We have high status and self-confidence, while the revolutionaries have been losing all that for decades. And if truth be told, we harbor scorn for a large part of the country who, as Obama once put it, "cling to guns or religion"; or whom Hillary Clinton lumped into a "basket of deplorables."

I hear constantly my colleagues marveling at the stupidity, the ignorance of Trump's supporters, or dismissing them as racist and so not worth talking to. Some of us are kinder than others to the downtrodden, but the revolutionaries make no distinctions among us.

We aristocrats are naturally horrified by Trump. We know from our expertise and rational analyses that his policy proposals are destructive, and we feel disgusted by his crudeness and hostility. But that is what elites have always felt in the face of revolution. The French aristocracy were offended by the vulgarity of the uneducated mob; so has every aristocracy at every historical turn. The Eastern establishment felt pretty much as horrified by the radicals of the 1960s, with their long hair and loud music, as they do about Trumpists today. Revolutionaries are deliberately ugly and hostile and crude. Their leaders always relish sticking fingers in the eyes of established leaders, and revel in provoking outrage.

In this election Clinton represented the continuation of what has been going on for the last 50 years -- a perfect embodiment of the current establishment, everything that the revolutionaries reject. She is a wonkish expert, has been in government forever, deeply connected to international financial moguls; she made promises for improvement, but they are the same promises that everyone has made over all that time. Even her gender represented a culmination of the long elite push for moral change in roles.

I myself voted for Clinton with considerable enthusiasm. I believe deeply in the ethic of diversity and progress that she represents. But I also think she did not understand the revolution, and its roots.

The revolutionaries were not calculating their material self-interest, and are not interested in incremental improvement. The current system makes them feel lost and overwhelmed and excluded, and they voted to break it.

Revolutions fail most of the time: they become repressive or chaotic, and often turn on their own supporters. The exceptions are rare. Once in a long while a true revolutionary, someone who has led the charge against the elites - Nelson Mandela, for instance - turns out to be a transformative leader. Once in a long while, leaders emerging from the elites, like FDR, seemingly safe protectors of the existing order, break the system themselves and reconstruct it. Much more often, however, revolutionaries turn out to be more like Robespierre or Mao, perpetuating destructiveness. Trump seems more likely to be a destroyer than a positive leader.

Those of us who are caught on the wrong side of this revolution will have a very unpleasant time. Aristocrats and elites do not get treated well by revolutionaries. Many things we love will be destroyed; we will have to bow our heads, humble ourselves, give up privileges, mute our views. True, the world will probably get worse for everyone, including the revolutionaries, but that's the way history works.

My main hope is this: The counter-forces are quite strong. Large parts of the advanced industrial democracies - especially urban areas -- really have become something like successful multicultural societies over the past half century. And cities are growing rapidly all over the world.

There has been a tremendous development in capacities for dialogue and collaboration. We need to build on those engines of change in civil society, while the national political sphere is blocked.