Newsletter 337 — March 31, 2025

Heidi Burgess and Guy Burgess

We ended our answer on Saturday discussing the Afghanistan and Iraq wars that followed 9-11. While there was widespread consensus, at least initially, about the need to attack Afghanistan when they refused to turn over Osama bin Laden, there was much more skepticism about the Iraq war, which increased polarization once again. ButThe wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were not the only factors undermining the post-Cold War consensus on the ascendance and superiority of neoliberal democratic capitalism and the stable peace that that was expected to bring. 

The Globalization Backlash

Increasing globalization of the economy caused many workers in developed countries to lose their jobs when they were "offshored" to lower-cost foreign producers.  Discontent also rose as more and more job were lost to various types of automation. Other conflicts erupted as generations of more highly educated young people discovered that there were nowhere near enough high-level jobs to go around. This spawned intense struggles over who should get those jobs — struggles that were a major driver of identity politics and conflicts over which identity groups deserved the most favorable treatment. Widespread discontent over the progressive answers to these questions further polarized US society and was a major factor in Donald Trump's 2016 and 2024 victories.

The Impact of Cable News and Social Media

Also contributing to social tensions were the radical changes taking place in our increasingly complex and high tech media ecosystem.  The advent of social media exacerbated a trend that had started back in the 1980s, when cable TV first became available.  Before cable, there were only three major television networks  in the US: ABC, NBC, and CBS. Walter Cronkite was the CBS Evening News anchor, and he was considered to be "the most trusted man in America." (And no one was suggesting at the time that a woman would be more trustworthy.) We all got the same news, and we all believed it. 

This began to break down with cable TV, when we began to consume different news feeds, watching the ones that told us what we wanted to hear. This was exacerbated greatly with the rise of social media, which uses algorithms to amplify outrage because that generates more "clicks," and hence more money for the social media companies. Thus their business model was designed to make us hate and fear each other, so that we'll keep coming back to their news feeds to be reassured that we are right, and "the other side" is wrong. Sadly, social media companies have been extremely successful at that. Plus, they are extremely adept at addicting us, with teens spending between 4-7 hours per day on social media (when they could have been studying, working, engaging in sports, or socializing in person with friends) and adults spend 2 1/2 hours each day on social media (all the while complaining about how little time they have).  

And once polarization starts, it feeds on  itself. The more we hear that the other side is less deserving, or wrong, or evil, the more we begin to treat them as if that were the case.  And then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.  If we treat people with disrespect, they will treat us with disrespect. This then reinforces our notions that they are less deserving, wrong, or even evil. And so it goes. We begin to separate ourselves off from "them." We live in different towns, we socialize, date, and marry (if we marry) people who are just like ourselves. This breaks the cross-cutting social ties that traditionally hold societies together, and increases the misunderstanding, fear, and contempt each side has for the other. 

Distrust in Institutions

Another element that is driving political polarization is the increased distrust in American institutions, and the diminishing support for democracy, which is seen by many (on both the left and the right) to be dysfunctional, corrupt, and of little use to them.   Most of the people alive today are not old enough to remember "the Sputnik era." They don't remember what we learned about communism in the 50s and 60s, and why we were so convinced that democracy was a far better system of government. They also don't recognize the degree to which America is drifting towards Soviet ways of doing things. For instance, we learned in the 1950s that the Soviets rewrote their history books to make it more pleasing to the government in charge. At the time, we were appalled. But now much of the left supports the New York Times' 1619 Project which calls for a complete rewriting of American history to make it correspond to the left's view of events. We also disparaged the Soviet governments' control of the economy, believing that our free market, capitalist economy was far superior at creating wealth and innovation. Now much of the left is turning against capitalism, believing (with some cause) that it is the source of extreme inequality. But the Soviets/Russia hardly avoided that fate, and their economy was always much less productive or successful than was the United States'.

In addition, many young people don't even know the basic tenets of democracy, as high school civics classes became contentious, and many schools chose to deal with the contention by eliminating their civics classes entirely. So many Americans know little about the three branches of government or balance of powers; they don't know what is in and not in the Constitution, what a President can and cannot do, or what their rights and responsibilities as citizens are. So without really understanding the stark differences between democracy and autocracy, many seem to be favoring autocracy.

This is perhaps clearest on the right, which voted for and supported Trump, even though he tried to overturn the 2020 election and threatened to be "dictator for a day" when he took office. In 2025, many Trump's supporters are cheering his executive orders, even when they far over-run legitimate executive authority. (We should note, however, that some of the things he is doing fall within his authority to do — we do not want to give the impression that all of his actions are illegitimate and illegal.)

The Democrats are appalled by Trump's actions, of course, but they were not at all concerned when Obama and Biden enacted far-reaching executive orders themselves, such as Obama's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program which allowed undocumented immigrants who arrived in the U.S. as children to stay and get work permits, or Biden's attempts to forgive student loans (at a huge cost as a gift, primarily, to his constituencies).

An ironic similarity (which is deepening the threat to democracy) is the fact that both sides think America democracy is failing them. The left maintains that it is structurally racist and needs to be rebuilt from the ground up to be fair to all. So many leftists are calling for profound structural changes, not only to democratic institutions, but to the U.S. Constitution itself, which they see as "outdated." But "fair to all" is no longer King's standard of judging people by their character, but rather by the color of their skin, putting whites at the bottom to even out, presumably, for the long years during which whites were at the top.

Similarly, the many on the right also think democracy is failing them because it hasn't brought prosperity to all, but rather extreme inequality. It also appeared — until Trump at least — to be controlled by the coastal elites who cared little and knew less about the lives of the people in "flyover country" (all the land between the coasts). And, under democratic administrations, it enacted "whole of government" policies, such as DEI, that were opposed by much of the electorate, and harmed much of the electorate without voters' approval. For this reason the right, too, is in favor of profound structural changes. But instead of more government which works to "level the playing field," or even "tilt the field in favor of the progressive constituents," Trump (with the help of Musk and DOGE) is trying to tear much of the administrative structure down, and quite possibly, not replacing it. And even though these actions are hurting many Trump supporters, they still (at least so far) support him because, as Jeff Bloodworth argues, hyper-polarization means our tribe identity is more important to us than anything else — even our security.

Bottom line, the world in which we now live is dramatically different from the earlier, much more optimistic era of stable peace that did so much to shape the conflict and peacebuilding field's core ideas and techniques. While a great many of these ideas remain relevant and applicable to our current crises, others need to be carefully reviewed and adapted to today's much more difficult circumstances.  We have to adjust to the fact that an institution like the United States Institute of Peace is now seen as a political target of righteous fury, rather than a noble effort with the deep bipartisan support it once enjoyed. The earlier era in which we thought that stable peace had actually arrived has now vanished into the history books. Today, the possibility of both civil and international war (as well as their hybrid, gray zone counterparts) Is something that must be taken seriously.

Theories of Continuity and Change

We think that Ashok raises an excellent point with his comment about the importance of developing theories of continuity to balance and restrain theories of change. There are clearly lots of people with theories of change that they are trying to implement, and interactions between these efforts are producing a kind of chaos that is similar to the one Guy often uses to describe the difference between "complicated" and "complex" problems. (A metaphor for a complicated problem is a pool table with a lot of balls on it, and one player trying to make the "perfect shot" that will get all the balls to go exactly where the player wants them to go. And if the player is skillful, this is possible to do. A complex system, however, is like a pool table with millions of balls scattered all over the place, and hundreds of thousands of actors (each with their own objectives and theory of change) who are all trying to take the perfect shot all at the same time. Obviously, that's a completely different game — one, that is, unavoidably, chaotic. No matter what you do, somebody else will likely have done something else that makes whatever you tried to do not work. 

There is one small area of agreement between the left and the right — at least before Trump was elected. Both sides agreed that our government was not working at all well. Democrats think it is working far worse now with Trump at the helm, and while many Trump voters still support him and think he is, indeed, making things better, at least as now. It seems likely that his support is going to significantly diminish once the pain of tariffs and deep DOGE cuts become apparent. So we don't think many people will be interested in a theory of continuity, if continuity means keeping most or all of what we have now. We certainly are not.

BUT, that said, there are many elements of the past and even the present that are worth continuing. In fact, the phrase "making America great again" implies reaching back into history and reconnecting with past continuities.

We believe that the core elements of liberal democracy are worth defending. We think our Constitution, perhaps with minor tweaks, is worth preserving. We think that our history is worth preserving — both the good parts and the bad.  The left seems to advocate that we ignore the good, pretending it didn't happen, or it isn't worth praise because it was done on the back of people of color (particularly black slaves). The right is accused by the left of ignoring the bad, although we think that is largely a false accusation. (Most people on the right support teaching about slavery, for instance, saying it was wrong. But they also think it should be acknowledged that it was considered by many to be acceptable at the time it was done. So, if our past leaders were slaveholders (as were George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and even Benjamin Franklin), most people on the right would say that we should not blackball them as scoundrels without also recognizing the good they did for the U.S.) We agree with that view. But we also agree that we should teach about slavery, the horrendous wrongs done to native Americans, and to Japanese Americans during World War II.  So if that is a theory of continuity, then we think that is a valuable idea, which needs to be combined with one or more theories of change, which, for us, is our massively parallel problem solving strategy. 

Can We Preserve Liberal Democracy?

We know from earlier exchanges with Ashok and from some of his writings that he believes that most of those in the conflict resolution and peacebuilding field have yet to fully recognize the enormity of the challenge before us. He sees liberal democracy in decline and illiberal autocracies on the rise.  That certainly seems to be the case, both in the United States, and around the world.  And indeed, democracy may be a lost cause. But we're not ready to give up.  If people like us do give up, it will certainly be a lost cause. 

So we would argue that those of us who value the benefits of liberal democracy should be doing whatever we can to strengthen it, advocate for it, and help it overcome its many current challenges.  That does not mean going back to what we had before. It means going forward to something better. As we have written often before, and will continue to do so in the future, we think we need to work to build a democracy that everybody would want to live in.  Not just the left at the expense of the right, or the right at the expense of the left, or people of color at the expense of whites or whites at the expense of people of color.  We need to realize that liberal democracy is not a zero sum proposition. It can, if we design it that way, be a positive sum proposition that benefits everyone.

And the way to start doing that is by working harder to help assure that everyone's fundamental human needs are met. As we also have written many times before, human needs are positive sum, not zero sum. The more security one side has, the less they need to threaten the other side, so the more security that side has.  The more one's identity is respected by others, the less one feels a need to disrespect others to ostensibly raise one's own image.  If we would realize that and start acting on those beliefs, we could create a much stronger liberal democracy that would take much of the wind out of the sails of authoritarian tendencies in the U.S.

If, on the other hand, the two sides continue to believe that they are in a zero-sum game and that, therefore, they must try to deny their political opponents their most basic human needs, then they create a situation in which continued hyper-polarization is, as Ashok suggests, both logical and rational. We need to understand that it is hyper-polarization that is driving us to believe that we are in such a zero-sum system.  So while it may be logical and rational, it is badly hurting us and preventing us from moving into the positive sum system in which polarization is harmful and hence not rational, if the goal of rationality is to maximize benefits for all.

As to Ashok's last comment about "de-polarization technicians," we certainly agree that people working in the field of de-polarization need to understand the nature of the world they are in and the challenges they are up against.  That is why we stress so often that this is a very large-scale, complex adaptive system.  A few dialogues here and there are not going to make a lasting difference.  We do believe that it is still possible to save liberal democracy,  but it is going to take a massively parallel effort from thousands of different people and organizations, each playing a role to make one little part of the system better. While there is no guarantee this will work, we are quite sure that if America ends up looking like Russia or China or Iran or Turkey, or Syria, we will all be very unhappy. So it seems far smarter to do whatever it takes to prevent that. 

Lead Graphic Photo Credit:  Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Peace_dove_noredblobs.svg; By: Elembis; Permission: Public Domain: Date Acquired: Mar 30, 2025

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