Newsletter #335 — March 26, 2025
In Brief:
This is a summary of the second half our discussion with Tom Klaus and Lamar Roth for their podcast called "Getting to the Third Space with Lamar and Tom." (We wrote about Part 1 here.) Guy and Heidi were honored to be their guests in early January, where we talked about our work, and how what we are trying to foster with BI is very similar to Tom and Lamar's notion of "a third space." It was such an interesting conversation that we wanted to share highlights of it in our newsletter, just as we do for the people we have been interviewing. Our conversation was so long, however, that Tom and Lamar broke it up into two parts. They released the first part on Feb. 3 (available here in audio and here in video) and the second part on Feb. 17 (available here in audio and here in video. )As we did for Part 1, we are sharing some of the highlights below.
In this conversation we talked about some of the things that are driving hyper-polarization, and why we still think it is such a big problem. We talked about the ever-widening gulf between the highly educated, largely democratic "elites" and the traditional working class. We talked about the gulf between the progressives and the Christian nationalists, and the gulf between the "true believers" on both sides, and the less-committed and less engaged, but larger, middle. We also talked through our three recommendations from Newsletter 306 "The US in 2024: An Election That Worked and a Democracy That Doesn't" that we see as a middle ground approach that might help us break down our hyper-polarization and begin to develop a "power-with" democracy in which we would all like to live.
by Heidi Burgess
We started this second part talking about how the Democratic Party has become distant from the traditional working class that it used to represent. There is getting to be a vast cultural gulf, Guy said, between the Democrats who come out of universities, and especially America's elite universities, who are the people who end up running the country, and the people who don't. Unfortunately, the Democratic elite seems to view the less educated with a considerable amount of disrespect. And that disrespect filters through--the people who live in Red America sense it. When you define "people in need," the Democratic elite define those people as people of color and the LGBTQ+ community. They don't include the poor whites in Appalachia, or Billings, Montana, or Gillette, Wyoming — places we (Guy and Heidi) are more familiar with. Gillette is a former coal town, and its economy has been devastated by the green energy move away from coal. But when the city applied for federal assistance to help it transition its economy into renewable energy, it was turned down, because its population was too racially white. It is decisions such as these, Guy said, that are causing the working class to migrate away from Democrats and toward Republicans.
Another example, Heidi added, is much of the left, after George Floyd's murder, was calling for defunding the police. But many people living in the black communities were not in favor of defunding the police—they needed more police to make their communities safe. It was the rich, educated whites who were clamoring for defunding.
That's what is meant with the phrase "luxury beliefs," Guy added. The left has been accused of favoring all sorts of policies that sound good, but the elites don't bear the cost when they don't work. Defunding the police is one example.
Related to this, Guy said, the Democrats, starting with Clinton, started to change from the party of labor to the party of management. They started to focus on race, instead of class. So that, too, pushed the the white working class into the arms of the Republican Party.
We then talked about why American elections tend to be so close. Guy thinks it is due to what he calls the 51% Hammer Effect.
The 51% hammer effect is an explanation of why we tend to slide toward this hyperpolarized bifurcation of society. The basic argument is that in a democracy, if you can get a 51% majority, that is enough power to just barely seize control of the government. Then you can use that power to "hammer" the remaining 49%. So you've got 49% of the population to take things from and you distribute it to 51% of the population. Whereas, if you got 70% of the vote, then you are obligated to distribute the spoils of your victory to 70% of the population. And you'd only have 30% of the population to hammer to get those spoils. So it isn't nearly as lucrative!
Another factor driving our hyper-polarization is what Heidi and Guy call "the true believer" effect.
These are the people who really believe in their heart of hearts that the other side represents an existential threat. And if you really believe that, you're going to use all the resources available to you to defeat them. You will use tactics that you would normally think are reprehensible, because the conflict is so serious, and the threat is so serious, that you decide that you need to do whatever it takes to win.
Folks in the middle who are a bit conflicted and can see both sides have trouble deciding who to fight for. So the big fighters in the system are these true believers. And they're the folks who show up for primaries and they therefore have an outside influence on the election. And there are all sorts of rules — partisan primaries, for instance — that give moderate voters much less voice in the government than the extremists on each side. If we want to fix our politics we need to empower the middle.
As Tom mentioned in Part 1 of our discussion, he and Lamar decided to invite us on their podcast after reading our Newsletter-306, which was entitled "The U.S. in 2024, An Election That Worked and a Democracy That Doesn't." In that we proposed three key principles that could be used to bring America together. Tom and Lamar wanted to "unpack" each of those with us.
The first principle was that "efforts to "level the playing field" should focus on providing those who have been unfairly treated with assistance based on the extent of that mistreatment, and not some arbitrary trait such as skin color. Tom asked us for examples of that. One was Gillette, Wyoming, that we talked about above. Guy explained:
You would try to channel assistance to communities based on need. Communities that have been most egregiously treated in the past...would get a bigger share of assistance, while communities that have moderate amounts of difficulty would get a smaller share. It would be less hung up on proportionality and the Democrats' bifurcation of oppressor versus oppressed into a common safety net that benefits everybody. So people know that when their community faces tough times, [even if they are white], there will be some assistance available. It would take us from an "us versus them" fight into a community-wide effort to strengthen society as a whole.
The other big plank that we laid out in the essay is we would need to cultivate a flatter value-added hierarchy. All societies need a social hierarchy. We can't deal with the inequality problem by putting everybody on top. The way we should deal with it is by treating everybody with respect and encourage them to add value to society.
You do want to pay people more for acquiring skills that take a long time to acquire or for doing more dangerous and more difficult work to get people to do that sort of thing. But the difference between the upper and lower levels of the hierarchy does not need to be anywhere near as big as it is now. In the 50s and 60s, the differences between CEO pay and worker pay on the assembly line was much, much less than it is now. So we can flatten that and focus on the value people add to society. The building trades, various caring professions, all of these folks really add important value to society, and they don't get the kind of prestige and compensation that they deserve. And at the same time, we need to diminish the amount of prestige and compensation we give to people who simply claim value created by others — through sophisticated hedge fund, private equity schemes, for example. You get too much prestige for being a billionaire hedge fund manager and not enough for being a fireman that is there when you need him or her. So if we would rethink the social hierarchy and try to reward people who are contributing more to society, that would go a long way towards reducing tensions.
The last suggestion we made in that article, and on the podcast was what Guy calls the "secular humanism loophole."
In our society we have freedom of religion. The state cannot sponsor or endorse or favor one religious view over another. So you have different religious communities that have different ideas about relationships and family and sex, for example. But what's happened is that the progressive left developed a set of ideas about relationships and family and sex that differ substantially from conservative religious teachings. And since these ideas didn't have an official religious origin, they could be taught in the schools, but opposing religious values could not be taught. It wasn't even okay to criticize the progressive ideas, which is a big driver of the culture wars. If we would just treat everyone's cultural beliefs in the same way, regardless of whether they come from divine or secular teachings, that would get us through a lot of the most divisive cultural issues that we face now.
Tom observed that one of the things that he's been witnessing over the last several years is the rise of Christian nationalism. That movement, he said, is more about American exceptionalism and inclusion, not so much inclusion and equality. He and Lamar both have seen this, he said, even in their own churches, which are traditional "peace churches"— the Mennonites and the Quakers. He asked us how we can move toward greater inclusion and equality, given how strong those systems seem to be and how much stronger they seem to be growing?
Guy responded
I think that your chances of pushing back against the extremes of Christian nationalism would be much greater if at the same time you would push back on the extremes of secular beliefs that are getting pushed in a comparable sort of way. So, again, it's treating everybody the same way.
Heidi added that
I think we're seeing the rise of Christian nationalism as a response to the fear that Christianity was either not going to be allowed anymore or was being disrespected. There was the whole fear around gay marriage and abortion and then the whole gender thing and transgender rights and all of that and Christians began to feel that the progressives were forcing them to behave in ways that were counter to their religion. They're responding to the fear that they're not going to be allowed to pursue their religion in a typical us-versus-them, oppositional way.
We'd be much better off, we think, if we went back to traditional American values of freedom of religion and speech. The left can teach its beliefs, but then so can the right. Either that, or neither can teach their beliefs on religious topics in public schools. And the left can't use the loophole that sex and gender education isn't religious. It is, insofar as it directly contradicts others' fundamental religious beliefs.
Tom wondered how we would get to such a place? We seemed to be suggesting that we espouse a "live and let live" approach. but, he observed:
At the same time, there is real fear. There's fear on the left that the right cannot live and let live. The Christian right cannot live and let the Left live. And there is fear on the Christian right that the left cannot live and let Christianity live. I'm not sure how we get around that.
Heidi responded that both sides need to make what peacebuilders call "conciliatory gestures" or "disarming gestures." As long as we keep doubling down on our hurtful rhetoric, it is not going to work.
We're going to keep on swinging back and forth and back and forth. If we want to get off that pendulum, we're going to have to be willing to, again, listen and respect and respond to legitimate concerns and needs of the other side.
Guy added:
One of the things I think we need to do is to cultivate something we call a "great reframing." Right now, we think of politics as an us-versus- them game in which our enemy is the other side. And what we really need to do is recognize that our enemy really is the destructive way in which we deal with intractable conflict. And that if we can focus on reducing the destructiveness of intractable conflict, and promoting the constructive aspects of conflict, then we're all of a sudden on the same side.
Guy then told a story about how, just out of graduate school in 1980 or so, he worked at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Scientists there were just beginning to talk about how the climate was changing. And they realized they needed to step out beyond their scientific audiences and explain their findings to the entire world, and explain why it was so critical that we lay people and scientists alike do something about the trends they were seeing. Guy went on to explain that the conflict field is now in the same place. Peace and conflict studies is not just an esoteric graduate-school field. We all need to understand that the way we are approaching conflict is making it impossible for us to solve any of our other problems. And we all need to change the way we "do conflict," just as we need to change the way we use energy and alter the climate.
At the end of our conversation, Tom and Lamar invited us to ask them a question. We asked them to explain, first, how they came up with the notion of "the third space," and what, exactly they meant by that term. And if they meant what we thought they meant, then we wondered how we can scale up that space? How can we get more people to have conversations like this? How can we get more people to try to find a third space? They came up with a lovely answer — but it is too long to include here. So we hope you'll go to the full audio and video and hear us flesh out these ideas in more detail, and find out how Tom and Lamar conceptualize -- and try to scale "the third space."
Listen to our conversation on Substack or
Watch Our Full Discussion on YouTube
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About the MBI Newsletters
Two or three times a week, Guy and Heidi Burgess, the BI Directors, share some of our thoughts on political hyper-polarization and related topics. We also share essays from our colleagues and other contributors, and every week or so, we devote one newsletter to annotated links to outside readings that we found particularly useful relating to U.S. hyper-polarization, threats to peace (and actual violence) in other countries, and related topics of interest. Each Newsletter is posted on BI, and sent out by email through Substack to subscribers. You can sign up to receive your copy here and find the latest newsletter here or on our BI Newsletter page, which also provides access to all the past newsletters, going back to 2017.
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