NEXT AVENUE SPECIAL SECTION
‘Can We Talk?’ How to Have Civil Conversations Again By Marie Sherlock
"A house divided against itself cannot stand."
Our deep polarization is "harming friendships, family relationships and community cohesion," says Joan Blades, co-founder of Living Room Conversations, a nonprofit working to help reverse this trend. Both Democrats and Republicans say the number one thing that “gives them meaning in life” is family and friends. A 2023 study found about 90% of both Democrats and Republicans embrace similar values, among them compassion, respect, personal accountability and fairness. Here's the rub: The study that found 90% of both parties overwhelmingly hold the same values? It also found that only about a third of each group believed members of the opposing party actually cherished those same principles.
Abraham Lincoln famously declared this principle (of biblical origin) in 1858. The nation was being torn apart by the issue of enslaving people — a dispute that would eventually result in four years of bloody civil war claiming the lives of an estimated 620,000 soldiers. We are, once again, "a house divided." A 2023 Pew Research Center poll found that, when scholars asked Americans to describe politics in a single word, an overwhelming, bipartisan majority (79%) expressed a negative sentiment with "divisive" the most frequently used word. And it's not just politics that we're disgusted with. It's become decidedly more personal: A hearty majority of us attribute negative traits to people on the other side. In a 2022 Pew study, 72% of Republicans surveyed said they believed that Democrats are more immoral than other Americans; 63% of Democrats felt the same way about Republicans.
A growing constellation of organizations is working to undo the damage caused by polarization.
In 2017, the #ListenFirstCoalition was formed with a common goal of "bringing Americans together across differences to listen, understand each other and discover common interests." More than 500 nonprofit groups have joined the effort, conducting research, providing training and bringing communities — even legislatures — together to build bridges. Many of these groups offer dialogue programs utilizing a “contact theory” approach — the idea that when individuals and groups interact with "outgroup" members they develop more positive perceptions of them.
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