Experts on both sides work against polarization
Groups gather statewide to find facts to agree on
The images of two men facing their computer cameras are displayed side by side over Zoom. One, with gray hair and a goatee, sits in a white room with paintings on the walls; the other, in a baseball cap and dark hoodie, sits in front of a backdrop of framed medals and U.S. Army logos.
They’re discussing climate change. “Right now in northern Wisconsin it’s freezing and it snowed 4 inches, so a lot people are like, ‘no (climate change doesn’t exist) because it’s October and it’s snowing.’ But people don’t understand, I think, the whole question,” says the man in the hoodie.
The two men begin watching footage of the 2020 presidential debates.
“A lot of Democrats don’t think Republicans respect the science behind global warming,” the older man says. They nod at each other often. The man with the goatee is Marc Kornblatt, a liberal filmmaker in his 50s who lived most of his life in Madison. The man in the hoodie is Todd Haskell, a conservative veteran in his 30s who lives in Hayward, a community of fewer than 3,000 people almost 300 miles northwest of Madison.
They’re featured in a web series called “Blue and Red — Respectful Encounters of the Political Kind,” created by Kornblatt, in which they discuss some of the country’s most contentious political issues — the kind that drive wedges into many relationships.
While they often disagree on the solutions to the country’s challenges, they find themselves agreeing on the nature of the problems themselves, and that has been the basis for their growing friendship.
The pair met when Kornblatt was filming another documentary on Wisconsin politics in 2018. “I didn’t need to talk to people like me,” he said. “I
wasn’t interested in hearing, certainly, from my insular place in Madison.”
When the footage Kornblatt shot of Haskell proved to be unusable, he continued to think about conversations they’d had and approached Haskell about doing a web series where they could explore their political differences in more depth.
Just months after one of the most divisive elections in American history and three weeks after a riot at the U.S. Capitol, in which a violent mob attempted to overturn the results of that election, conversations like the one happening between Kornblatt and Haskell might seem improbable.
But there are Wisconsinites working to create more encounters like these, with the hope that they will counter the disinformation and polarization that has led to violence.
Gerrymandering, demographic changes create political polarization.
By a number of measures, America is more polarized than it has been in decades, with opinions on major issues increasingly split directly by partisan lines. What’s more, those divisions spill over into personal relationships.
A Pew Center study conducted before the 2020 presidential election found that about four in 10 registered voters from both parties did not have a single close friend who supported a different major party candidate.
This has been increasingly true in Wisconsin, says Ed Miller, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, as part of a process that he says had been going on for decades before Donald Trump became president.
That polarization, Miller says, is the result of a variety of factors, including gerrymandering — the system by which congressional districts are drawn, usually by the majority party in the state Legislature, to ensure they win more seats in future elections. He also blames demographic shifts.
“There’s a demographic change in Wisconsin, and this is where a lot of the younger people are moving out of a number of places in northern Wisconsin,” he said. “They are going to college and not going back.”
With that movement, which is playing out in similar ways throughout the country, has come a long-term trend toward people with similar political beliefs living close to one another and farther from people who might disagree with them.
Hollow calls for unity do not work.
Shannon Hiller is a co-founder of the Bridging Divides Initiative, a research center based at Princeton University that tracks political violence and demonstrations and helps to connect peacebuilding and reconciliation organizations across the country. She says political polarization is closely related to outbreaks of political violence, like that seen at the U.S. Capitol.
“The more you see another group of people as ‘the other,’ really see them as unredeemable, unrepentant, un-savable, the easier it becomes to do violence.” Hiller said.
Those were important lessons she took from years of work in peacebuilding and conflict prevention overseas in Southeast Asia, Africa and the Middle East.
But, she emphasized, hollow calls for unity do not work. They have to be accompanied, said Hiller, by justice in order to reach real reconciliation.
To facilitate that process of peacebuilding, Bridging Divides provides information to partner organizations about other groups they can connect with, data on potential flashpoints in their communities and fact sheets on issues such as voter intimidation.
Some of the most important work that can happen to counter polarization comes from trusted local messengers in communities, long before violence occurs, Hiller said. Those messengers can often come from within civic organizations, faith groups and local government.
‘We have to have a common source of truth and a common source of facts.’
For one couple, reaching out to their faith group has become one way to start conversations like these. Rich and Lena Eng have been gathering fellow congregation members at their church in Brookfield to create conversations about some of the country’s most divisive political issues.
In classes of around 30 people holding various political views, they use that premise to have discussions about social issues that are important to their fellow church members and learn about how to have productive discussions with people with whom they might have ideological differences.
In one exercise, Rich Eng says, participants are put into teams with people who hold different opinions than theirs and given a real-world policy problem to think about, with a limited amount of time to come up with a proposal to present to the group. Facilitators are present to help the teams move forward in their discussions and prevent them from devolving into fights.
The class has also spent a considerable amount of time discussing the news media, media bias and misinformation, he said.
“We have to have a common source of truth and a common source of facts,” Eng said.
In another session, participants discussed the Black Lives Matter movement. Mentions of the group can cause discussions to become emotionally charged, said Eng.
But, Lena Eng said, “We actually went to the website (of the organization) and we helped everyone have a better understanding of what do they mean when they say (Black lives matter).” Eng says that even if they did not agree with everything they read, that was a key learning moment for everyone involved in the class.
Rich Eng said the riots at the Capitol filled him with “horror, anger, sorrow all swirling around together, but ultimately culminating in resolve that our mission to dispel fear, instill hope and radiate love is so important.”
But, he said, “Our group won’t be of help to those who are willfully blind and deliberately want to divide, not unite our church, our community nor our country.”
Seeing each other as ‘human beings, as opposed to political enemies.’
The Engs’ project was inspired, in part, by the couple having met Steven Olikara, a Wisconsin native who grew up in Brookfield and heads up an organization called the Millennial Action Project. That group has been trying to address the dearth of communication between political groups with a series of events called “Red and Blue Dialogues.”
The organization brought together community members and leaders at locations around the state throughout 2019 to discuss issues that directly affect them where they might be able to find common ground in areas like water quality, the energy grid or financing higher education.
“Wisconsin has in many ways become a symbol of political polarization,” says Olikara. “I saw how this is really a microcosm of what’s happening in the country where we’ve really moved toward the politics of contempt.”
In those dialogues, Olikara said he hoped people would have an opportunity to see members of their community differently while they discussed policy issues.
“The idea was that some of the unexpected common ground you might reach will have an impact on public policy, but perhaps even more important than that, is that community members started to see each other as human beings, as opposed to political enemies,” Olikara says.
For Haskell in Hayward, running into Kornblatt and working on the series provided him with something he said was becoming rare in his community, the opportunity to get to know someone with differing political views well and understand their beliefs.
“It was almost like everything we talked about — we can’t necessarily come to a full agreement,” said Haskell, “but it was a mutual understanding of why one would think that way.” He said he and Kornblatt found particular areas of agreement on the issues of the environment and the economy.
And on the issue of the Capitol riots, Haskell and Kornblatt agreed vehemently with one another.
A few days after the riot, they started texting each other with their reactions.
“It made me feel so sad for my country that I adore that not only were lies perpetuated but they violated one of the great sacred places of our country in the name of a lie,” said Kornblatt.
Haskell echoed Kornblatt’s horror. “I’m not against peaceful protest,” he said, but “that’s not even a riot, that’s sieging the Capitol.”
Haskell and Kornblatt said conversations like theirs don’t fall into the same category as calls for unity made by some politicians in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 events.
Kornblatt also said he thought conversations like the ones he was having with Haskell would be productive only if they were fact-based and had between people who were willing to listen to each other.
But, Haskell says, he thinks conversations like the ones he has had with Kornblatt could help people get past some of the misinformation they might see about people with differing political viewpoints.
In his community, Haskell says he doesn’t see many spaces where people of different political views can come in contact with each other easily. Small protests in the center of town often meet with hostility from passersby.
But, he said, if people want to make connections with others in their communities, it’s important not to go in with the idea that the whole purpose is to change the other person’s mind. “If you just shut your mouth for a little bit and open your ears,” Haskell said, “you’ll learn a lot.”
Renee Hickman is a Report For America corps member based at the Wausau Daily Herald covering rural issues in Wisconsin. Contact at rhickman@gannett.com or follow her on Twitter at @ReneeNHickman. Please consider supporting journalism that informs our democracy with a tax-deductible gift to this reporting effort at WausauDailyHerald.com/RFA.