Political peacemaking as a public health intervention

In America today, it’s easy to segment unique challenges facing the country into different silos: “Here’s the mental health crisis” and “here’s the economic crisis” and “here’s the crisis of political hatred.”
But, of course, none of this is so cleanly separate at all — with each of these cultural wildfires stoking the other in potent ways. In this final installation of our 10-part series leading up to the election in partnership with the “A Braver Way” podcast and KUOW, Seattle’s NPR news station, we bring together insights from the final episodes that effectively make a case for the value of political peacemaking/depolarization as something far beyond merely helping people “get through a contentious election season” or “learn how to navigate political differences at Thanksgiving.”
According to many indicators, the prevailing level of anger, fear and despair in America is also affecting our well-being in other ways, including our basic mental and emotional health and the health of our relationships. If you “can’t love your country if you hate half the people in it,” according to Democratic Gov. Wes Moore of Maryland, then it’s equally hard to love life and people around you with that much venom in your system.
If this is true — and the level of acrimony and agitation in our country is affecting our emotional health and well-being — then imagine for a moment: What would a public health intervention strategically targeting these sources of angst look like?
Short of outlining a full intervention, here are a few observations from the final pre-election weeks of the Braver Way podcast. Each summarizes another proactive step any one of us can take to counteract sociopolitical toxins in our own hearts and homes:
For those trying to “follow election news without losing your mind,” it can be helpful for any of us to reduce the overall amount of mass media — with Mónica Guzmán admitting, “If you were to look over my shoulder while I was reading the news 10 years ago, it’d be like 20 times more time than I’m spending now. And I think that’s been helpful.”
At the same time, the podcast host of “A Braver Way” encourages people to resist the temptation to simply ignore everything that’s going on — instead learning how to stay informed without “fueling polarizing flames” in yourself or others.
In Guzmán’s conversation with long-time national politics reporter Isaac Saul in a recent episode, he encourages attention to how different content makes us feel — but encourages people to go beyond that too.
“If you read for 12 paragraphs and it’s just Democrats trashing something Republicans did, and then there’s two sentences about how Republicans responded, and then it goes back to that,” Saul says. “You’re reading something that’s constructed in a way to inflame partisan tensions or that’s only giving you half the story.”
“Media is not just news and information,” Guzmán adds what should be obvious. “Media is influencing how we think, what we think of other people, what we think about our relationship to our country.”
It can be helpful to go to the original source of the story, Saul suggests — or even better, to proactively seek out counter perspectives. “If you are reading a story that is like about the Springfield, Ohio, controversy where Haitian migrants were ‘eating pets,’” and you respond with shock, “I can’t believe what’s happening,” Saul suggests searching the opposite headline: “Haitian migrants are not eating pets in Springfield.”
“Very intentionally engage the counter to the view that you are left with. I do that all the time,” says Saul, editor of Tangle News. “If I’m reading a story that’s about whether Israel should respond in X, Y, Z way, and I find the story really convincing, I will intentionally search for stuff that is the countervailing view to that perspective, just to balance out my own view or to challenge it.”
“Sometimes I’ll read the other thing and go, ‘Oh no, the original story I read is way more convincing, and this is not a compelling argument,’” Saul says. “But oftentimes I’ll be very moved by the other piece in a way that kind of draws me back towards the center.”
We can all be tempted to “trust maybe too much” and other times “trust maybe too little” in our interactions with different media sources, says Guzmán. “What is the right level of trust is probably one of the key questions” for people navigating our chaotic information ecosystem today.
April Lawson, Braver Debate Director and “A Braver Way” podcast participant, recalls spending time in China with its high level of carefully controlled censorship — and being struck by a Chinese young adult saying, “We’re actually better media consumers than Americans, because we know that we’re being manipulated. And so we read everything with a lens of this group wants us to believe this” — starting from the outset with an assumption there’s an agenda and a motivation behind content they see online.
Lawson goes on to suggest that many conservatives in America have come to share that critical tendency today and “do a good job with skepticism” — perhaps more so than some more progressive Americans who, in her estimation, are more likely to be like, “look at this large institution, which produced these numbers. That is what is trustworthy” (without always acknowledging that “even institutions have incentives”).
At the same time, some conservatives have narrowed who they trust to only a small set of voices, concluding, “The only person who I should listen to at all, who’s not giving me fake news, is this person.” In this way, conservatives can take the skepticism too far, Lawson argues, when she believes a better goal is to “listen to all the perspectives.”
It’s easy for any of us to assume that our online searching is a “search for truth.” Yet Guzmán describes times when she’s found herself in “a rabbit hole chasing more information, more commentary about something outrageous that’s been going on” — and eventually realizing that her goal in these voracious moments of news consumption was not always simply “to learn more about the situation, or to inform myself more.”
Rather, she admits to a sense of wanting to “see the people who I think are at fault” getting confronted. “Just give me that. Give me that.”
“It’s feeding something in me,” she says in retrospect.
That kind of recognition takes humility, points out Lawson. “Because you have to notice that you’re doing something that’s maybe not ideal.” Although challenging to “say this out loud,” Guzmán says, “I think this is not an uncommon experience.”
“Everybody thinks the next election will determine the future of human civilization,” American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Yuval Levin told former Judge Thomas Griffith recently, in a comment cited in “A Braver Way” and the Deseret News. “I think a lot of Americans now approach politics with the sense that … if we get this one wrong, it’s all over.”
“Why is this the moment when we’ve become persuaded that the stakes are absolute, and the fight has to be total?” Levin asks — pointing out that “whoever wins the next election is going to have a very narrow majority and basically not be able to do anything.”
Faith traditions across the ages have agreed that truth does something positive inside us — liberating, sanctifying, teaching, expanding people in a direction of more light, peace and joy. Yet very often, people who are most convinced they’ve discovered a larger truth being ignored by the masses can be full of anger, fear and despair.
“When you have a really well-rounded view or well-rounded perspectives on an issue,” suggests Saul, “almost always the issue is going to be more nuanced than you think, which probably is going to make you hyperventilate a little bit less about it.”
Hope seems to many a “simple soft sounding thing that seems so light and fluffy next to the big issues of our day,” Guzmán says — pointing out that amid the weighty issues of the day, “to even talk about hope right now can feel cute, distracting, but mostly so naive.”
She cites Greta Thunberg, the famous climate activist, who once said, “I don’t want your hope. I want you to panic.”
Yet in response to Griffith’s question: “Yuval, what keeps you up at night?” the AEI fellow shares his worry about the “condition of the country” — starting with “the shortage of hope in our public life.”
“Hope is not the sense that things are gonna be fine,” Levin quickly clarifies — differentiating it from rosy optimism, just as much as dark pessimism. “Hope says things are up to us, and they could be good if we are good.” Levin suggests this attribute has “defined the American character” in many moments of crisis in the nation’s history, but suggests this same kind of hope is largely “absent now” among many in the nation.
“There is not nearly enough hope, certainly among the young. There’s not enough hope in our politics.”
Insisting that calamity is an inevitable next step, Levin goes on to argue, can become “an escape from responsibility.”
“Letting any hope drain out of us,” Guzmán agrees, “isn’t a practical response to the future we imagine but a way of avoiding our responsibility to build the future we deserve, and to build it with our fellow citizens who disagree with us, even if that’s sometimes painful, even if it’s laced occasionally with hot displeasure, and to build it not just when elections go our way, but every day, all the time.”
Even responsibility can be done, however — with April Lawson speaking about her own tendency to feel responsibility for anything she reads about it in the news. “One of the reasons that I don’t read that much news is because I feel like I should fix it. … And so it’s exhausting to read about all the problems because I’m like, I’m not doing enough.”
But, again, there are things we can do — with awareness of the world around us guiding that response. In that sense, Guzmán asks, “What if hope isn’t naive at all, but empowering?”
Guzmán goes on to quote journalist Amanda Ripley, who summarizes more than 30 years of research by saying, “Hope is more like a muscle than an emotion. It’s a cognitive skill, one that helps people reject the status quo and visualize a better way.”
Guzmán encourages listeners to step back for a moment and look at the “big picture for a minute” — enough so to ask themselves, “What if hope actually is everything?”
In contrast with what renowned psychologist John Bowlby called in 1976 the “anger of despair,” there is another kind of anger that is healthier and constructive — more of a righteous indignation and ferocious desire to see a better world.
Bowlby calls this the “anger of hope,” which can be “fierce” as it motivates us through imagining something better. By contrast, “the anger of despair is something else entirely,” Guzmán says. “Instead of strongly rooted affection laced occasionally with hot displeasure,” this more corrosive variety of anger can become “a deep running resentment,” as Bowlby puts it: “At this point, hot pleasure may in some circumstances become the cold malice of hatred.”
“Whoever any of us wants to win, none of us wants our almost 250 year old Republic to lose the next election,” Guzmán argues. “So that’s a start” — especially if we can be open to exploring with curiosity some of the many “visualizations of a stronger, healthier society from countless hearts and minds.”
“No matter who wins this election, how do we make sure our democratic republic won’t lose?” Guzmán says, posing a question she’s brought up repeatedly throughout this podcast season.
“For some of you, this may sound kind of circular,” she adds. “We make sure our democratic republic won’t lose by making sure the other side won’t win. Which, hey, makes a lot of sense when you know what’s going to make or break us going forward and that your side, whatever it is, best represents it.”
“Maybe you’re right,” Guzmán says. “But one of these two sides will lose the next election. That’s how democratic things work.” So then, “If the losing side happens to be your side, no matter how hard you fought to prevent that, do you want to stumble out of the election not just defeated but in despair?”
And so you want to believe “that what is core to our country will 100% fail if the other side wins?” Avoiding that kind of emotional hole depends on being grounded in something higher or deeper — better and stronger — than simply the outcome of an election. What is that for you?
One byproduct of technological advancements is that media is being consumed on a “one to one level,” Guzmán notes. “It’s me and my smartphone, and the only conversation that’s happening as I’m consuming it is with myself.”
That makes critical scrutiny of the conversation itself hard to come by — especially compared with another era, she says, where a few people sit around a television, and “maybe somebody reacting to something and someone else going, ‘What do you mean, Junior, what is that face about?’”
Although we call it “social media” because of so many voices present, Guzmán points out that in practice, most people are sitting alone reacting to projections of other people’s lives (“Most people don’t even put their real picture up anymore”).
That means “we’re mostly talking to ourselves,” she concludes, before asserting, “We get to truth through each other,” far more than constant consumption of more media content alone.