The fog started more than five months ago as the pandemic descended on the nation. For a few weeks it felt like the polarization in our society would give way to collaboration. Public officials worked across difference. People felt pride, togetherness and a can-do attitude.
It was short lived. The pandemic simply became the latest canvas on which Americans paint a polarized civic culture.
Polarization isn’t good for problem solving in a democratic republic, which requires working across factions to find solutions to challenges. Polarization is both in our face and illusive. Who is responsible for polarization? Them! Not us! How do we fix it? They need to change! Not us! I spoke to two prominent Kansas political figures this week, one Republican and one Democrat. Both bemoaned the hyper polarization in our state government. Neither saw their part of the mess.
Citizens often think the source of our polarization is the Legislature or Congress, but these are lagging, not leading, indicators. They reflect what’s already happening in society. This is hard to swallow for two reasons. First, it is more comforting, benign and simple to blame the polarization and a lack of progress on elected officials, especially ones we don’t know or like. Second, the leading indicators — our actions, the patterns in our relationships and our bias — are often unnoticed, almost like the air we breathe. Not until our worst instincts and behaviors are mirrored back to us in the collective body we voted into office do we see how polarized we’ve become.
Meanwhile, COVID-19 has moved in, disrupting organizations and communities, wreaking havoc on the education of our children, the strength of our economy and the health of Kansans. The fog of COVID leads to questionable logic. Authorities are making so many decisions on questions they have never considered and on which there are many points of view to be considered.
These decisions have such massive consequences — for the health of people and our economy — that it is impossible to expect civic officials to make perfectly logical decisions. They will make mistakes. Soldiers and generals talk about the fog of war. Public officials are learning about the fog of COVID.
Polarization makes the fog more dense. Because we are polarized we see our opponent’s lack of logic or mistake as abhorrent, but have little critique of the decisions made by our preferred people or faction. Things won’t be managed perfectly in the fog. It’s the nature of fog. But we engage politically as if there is no fog, as if there is nothing to excuse the illogical behavior of our opponents and as if there is nothing wrong with our behavior.
How do we find our way through the fog? Reducing polarization will help. How do we do that? In the short-term this looks like holding both radical empathy and radical accountability for public officials. But here’s the catch. Human nature is to minimize the missteps of our friends while exaggerating the missteps of our foes.
Do the opposite. Focus your most radical accountability for those in your faction. Why? Because you are in their camp, there’s a chance you can influence their behavior and help them through the fog.
Over the long-term, there is no easy fix. Polarization in our legislative bodies will only lessen once the polarization of the body politic ebbs. Do your part by building relationships across difference. Assume those who think differently than you also come from a morally serious place. Be curious about where their beliefs come from and seek common ground.
We crave a quick fix to our polarization. Two recent presidents were elected on a unifying theme. George W. Bush’s “I’m a uniter, not a divider” and Barrack Obama’s “There is no red America, there is no blue America, there is just the United States of America” gave voice to our desire for less polarization. And yet, our nation was more polarized at the end of their terms than at the beginning. Today it is even worse.
The solution won’t be quick and it won’t be found in the fog, just in ourselves.
Ed O’Malley is president and CEO of the Kansas Leadership Center. He wrote this for Kansas Reflector, an online publication.
