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,