Beyond Polarization: How Americans Can Talk About Politics Again

By Erin Norman and Lura Forcum

For RealClearPolitics

Amidst calls for cooling the political temperature after an assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump, we need to do more than talk about how we talk about politics. Americans need concrete steps they can take to enable them to discuss difficult subjects, and perhaps nothing is more difficult to talk about than politics these days.

People are sitting out of policy discussions and even politics itself because it’s impossible to disagree on policy without being lambasted as “snowflakes,” “anti-science,” or some other derogatory term. The only people willing to participate in that endeavor are those with the most extreme views, who enjoy arguing and name calling.

We can and must bring non-extremists back to politics, and that means understanding good-faith Americans even better. The State Policy Network (SPN) conducted research on voters’ values as a way of better identifying how people might connect with conversations about public policy, since a divisive political framework isn’t cutting it. By understanding what is important to voters based on fundamental human concerns – such as having adequate resources, belonging to a community, and understanding what constitutes right and wrong – we can determine the best ways to bring them into a conversation about policy.

You’ll notice the list above doesn’t include how people vote or what party they identify with. While feeling like a member of a group or a sense of belonging is a fundamental human concern, that need shouldn’t be met through party membership.

In fact, we designed our research so that if there were fundamental differences in values among voters that drew them toward one party or the other, we would be able to detect those differences. But those aren’t the groups that emerged in our clustering analysis. Out of the seven segments we identified, only one is strongly political. The rest are evenly divided across both political parties – and are made up of people who are united around their love of America, their feeling of deep community and religious grounding, or their need for more community.

What does this mean? By and large, Americans aren’t driven by politics; they are primarily driven by other, more profound motivations, and that is good news in our current climate.

Even better, a vast majority of Americans (76%) respect differing opinions, and over half co-exist peacefully with those holding opposing political views. Seventy-six percent of Americans similarly favor leaders who are honest and play by the rules, and it is crucial for such non-extremism to dominate our discourse.

Which brings us back to “how we talk”: Americans should talk to others about what their needs actually are, and how policy can meet those needs. When someone tells you they support a policy you disagree with, ask them to tell you why they support it instead of telling them why they shouldn’t. Look for areas of agreement on what the problems are, even if you disagree on the path forward.

It’s not that we need to agree with one another. Disagreement, when civil, is a way we can learn about others’ points of view and realize that there’s more than one lens through which to view a problem. The more points of view we can bring to a policy conversation, the more likely we are to arrive at effective policy that is embraced by the nation as a whole. Complex problems, like the ones faced by our nation, require as much knowledge and perspective as we can get in order to design real solutions.

The groups of voters we identified in our research have more in common than not, even though they are members of different political parties or vote for different candidates.

This gives us great hope. Our country is not as divided as it may currently seem.

America’s real problem is that reasonable people are opting out of policy and political conversations because those conversations are often dehumanizing and absurd, and they don’t seek to address the problems that people face. May the latest research inspire people to have conversations about what our challenges are as a country, what is good policy, and what is the proper role of government in addressing those challenges.