How Radical Love Could Depolarize America

Why pro-democracy folks should avoid strategies that deepen the political divide and increase the chances of defections from Trump's base.

Last week’s post questioning the value of cross-partisan bridge-building in America during this time of intensifying polarization and authoritarian overreach struck a nerve. It also prompted pushback from two distinct quarters, both worth engaging.

The first came from across the pond in the form of an email from Alex Evans, a longtime Connector reader who is the founder and executive director of Larger Us, a British organization that draws on insights from social psychology to combat political polarization while supporting movements to address hard challenges like climate change. Evans started Larger Us in early 2021, after he was involved running an unsuccessful campaign for the UK to stay in the European Union and began to worry that his work was “deepening political divides rather than helping to heal them.”

Evans gave me permission to quote from his email. He wrote:

“I feel like you might be being a little unfair on bridge building!

While I’m not familiar with all the orgs you mention, I definitely take the point that one version of bridge building is a kind of split-the-difference, always-in-the-middle, morally-relativistic kind of centrism, and that stays silent about the march of authoritarianism on the right even as it zones out on “civility.”

But I think there’s another kind of bridge-building that you don’t discuss in the post, which is absolutely concerned with how to counter right wing authoritarian populism, but which sees bridge building as a way to do it (I’m thinking here of orgs like the Othering and Belonging Institute, the Horizons Project, More In Common, or Larger Us, which is the organisation I run here in the UK).

Common to all of these orgs, I think, is an analysis that authoritarian populism can’t be defeated purely by firing up ‘Progressive Activists’ (to use More In Common’s segmentation typology) at one extreme of the political spectrum, and that we need a much broader coalition in order to win lasting victories -- which in turns entails:

1. reaching and engaging other segments who may be much less engaged in politics (the ‘exhausted majority’ in More In Common’s Hidden Tribes report); and

2. encouraging and facilitating defections from people who may in the past have voted Trump (or Reform [in the UK], or other far right parties), both by welcoming them in, and through carefully avoiding contempt or othering that might encourage ‘mutual radicalisation’ that leads them to dig in where they are (as in Hillary’s infamous ‘basket of deplorables’ comment).

This can then yield everything from big picture strategies like the Radical Love campaign that saw the CHP [Republican People’s Party] defeat Erdoğan’s AKP [Justice and Development Party] in the Istanbul mayoral election of 2019 through to ground level tactics like deep canvassing of the kind Dave Fleischer and others have pioneered, or courageous conversations like those that Daryl Davis has with white supremacists.

…your Substack has been an incredibly rich source of examples of why we need relational organising, deep listening or peacebuilding approaches that recognise we need to end culture wars (or indeed real wars, in cases like Standing Together [in Israel-Palestine]) rather than trying to win them -- and I get that this wasn’t what you meant by ‘bridge builders’.

But this stuff is bridge building, and I think it’s important to say so, now more than ever as we face the far right at a time when many progressives want to denounce everyone who voted for Trump as a fascist -- when what we really need is to win them over.”

I love having such smart readers! I think Evans is 100% right and have long argued for the kind of open, empathetic listening that is the heart of the deep canvassing approach to persuasion over the transactional and shallow approach that typifies most voter canvassing efforts. Evans also opened my mind to some very intriguing political work coming out of Turkey, which has been dealing with an entrenched authoritarian populist, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, for quite some time.

Get this—after the Erdoğan regime annulled the April 2019 Istanbul mayoral election, Ekrem İmamoğlu, the candidate who was robbed of a very narrow victory (in a rigged competitive authoritarian system no less), did more than just urge his supporters to stay calm. He emphasized the importance of loving their opponents, saying the night he was prevented from claiming his win, “In our squares there is love. They will want conflict from us, they will want to hear harsh words from us. But we, the people who do not want this nation to fight, who want this nation to embrace, we will unrelentingly embrace each other.” He literally modeled this behavior by finding people who disagreed with him and hugging them. Instead of boycotting the mayoral rerun election two months later, he ran again, and this time won a clear mandate with more than 54% of the vote.

The idea of disarming your opponent with “radical love” seems deeply out of place in the current climate, though it isn’t hard to remember that this was a central element in how civil rights organizers like Martin Luther King Jr. sought to win the hearts and minds of middle America. Arguably, radical love was a centerpiece of Senator Cory Booker’s record-breaking filibuster last April, though he hasn’t done much more to make it a dominant theme of the opposition. This depolarization strategy can work both ways—I suspect I am not the only progressive who heard Erika Kirk’s expression of Christian forgiveness for her husband Charlie Kirk’s killer (in the midst of an outpouring of blatantly ugly statements from top Republicans) as profoundly moving.

(Cámara espía, Santiago de Chile - Marcha por la Diversidad, September 29, 2012, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:All_you_need_is_Love.jpg)

What’s important about this approach is that it removes fuel from the populist fire. Authoritarian populists benefit from widespread public distrust in existing institutions, so when “defenders of democracy” try to protect those institutions from attack, they inadvertently confirm the populist belief that “elites” are standing in the way of “the people.” As F. Michael Wuthrich and Melvyn Ingleby explain in their article on Radical Love in Turkey cited by Evans above:

“Populists benefit when the opposition focuses on the various ways in which the leader has transgressed the rules of ‘high politics’ and relies on vilifying him to mobilize support. These kinds of attacks on the populist tend to go hand-in-hand with vilifying and caricaturing his supporters, which usually keeps those supporters from switching allegiances. Supporters of populists are not primarily concerned with the cooptation or restructuring of institutions they have come to see as standing in the way of their leader’s attempts to address their grievances; what they want is governance responsive to their concerns.”

Larger Us has posted an English translation of the “Book of Radical Love” that was developed by strategist Ateş İlyas Başsoy for the İmamoğlu mayoral campaign. While all its insights may not apply here, it’s definitely worth a closer read. (Bonus link: Check out Evans’ Substack, The Good Apocalypse Guide.) Here are a few excerpts from the Book of Radical Love to whet your appetite:

Now we spend all our time on our mobile phones, day and night. The people of this country have stopped talking to each other even when walking together in the street, sitting together on buses. We’ve been divided, divided, divided… Not into two or three, but we’ve been divided into almost 82 million pieces. Individualism is being pumped into the society and separating us from one another. Even siblings have stopped loving one another.

The more we’ve become trapped in individualism, the more victorious has capitalism come to be by feeding on our loneliness. As we try to pay our bills off with debt, we become more indebted. The more indebted we become, the less loving, the less trusting we end up.

And:

Many countries are drowning in a sea of hatred caused by hate-mongers. Capitalism asks us not to love, but to feel fear, jealousy and rivalry for one another. People even compete in love, they even turn love into a source of jealousy, this is the goal of capitalism.

In short, the world has changed. The ambitions of capitalism and hate-mongers don’t only pollute our air or water, but also our souls. In order to combat this pollution, “love” is not enough on its own. We need to “love radically”. We call this philosophy radical love.

The main difference between radical and normal love is that the former denotes giving your love not only to those who already love you, but also to those who do not…. Radical love needs to be strong. United we stand. A nation that stands strong and loves each of its members is a nightmare or hate-mongers.

What I find interesting about this approach isn’t that it’s aimed at lowering the temperature for its own sake, but that it is designed to advance the political success of Turkey’s opposition party. It is bridge-building tied to a serious political movement that aims to replace a despot. We should study this.

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My post also got some smart pushback from Jonathan Stray, a senior scientist at the Center for Human Compatible AI at UC Berkeley, who writes the Better Conflict Bulletin. He left a comment but also wrote a longer post on his own site, which you can go read. In a nutshell, he is saying that even with the evident threat that Trump now poses to America’s democratic experiment, “bridge-building is essential.” Not to promote a particular political agenda, but to protect a functioning democracy. Since we need to create a coalition big enough to do that, we must recognize that the strategy of shouting that Trump is bringing fascism will not be enough—in part because the other side is just as fearful of Democrats and their “radical” agenda. Also, calling all of Trump’s supporters fascists makes it harder to convince some of them to defect from his base. “We’re too mad at each other to build a big enough coalition to solve the country’s very real problems,” Stray writes.

He cites the work of political scientist Jennifer McCoy, who wants us to “repolarize” the country away from the Red vs Blue divide and into an “us” that wants democracy against a “them” that wants authoritarianism and corruption “of whatever stripe.” And he argues that to get to that new “us” we have to bridge-build with people who we’ve disagreed with deeply over past issues. Which, to him, is what civic groups like Braver Angels are diligently doing.

All I can say is that I’m with Stray up to this last mile. I strongly believe that we must find a way to combat the Trump-Vance-Miller juggernaut that unites all the Americans who do not approve of what they’re doing* and that doesn’t also give fuel to the other side’s resentments. But I’m not convinced that the Braver Angels approach, at least as I saw it on display during last Sunday’s urgent online meeting in the wake of Kirk’s shooting, is the right one. Nor is it even clear to me that they are trying to save democracy from Trumpism or if they see that all the things that the administration is doing to break democratic norms as a five-alarm fire.

For example, since last Sunday, Braver Angels CEO Maury Giles wrote an email to his members, who he addressed as coming from both sides of our national conflict, to let go of “who is right” and “who started it” questions and to focus on “how do we work the problem together, even when we have every reason not to trust the ‘other’ person’s hand on the controls.” To him, though, the problem is hyper-polarization causing us to view the other side as “evil.” The fact that one side is moving to use a massive imbalance of government power to impose its will on the other was not mentioned.

Is there a way to combine the “Braver Angels Way” of holding respectful conversations across political differences with a “Protect Democracy” ethos of combating the authoritarian playbook now that we are in the midst of a full-scale power-grab? I don’t see why not—though I’d love to be able to point to some real-world examples of groups or coalitions currently doing this kind of work. Chime in smart readers!

*See pollster G. Elliot Morris’ recent reminder that two-thirds of America didn’t vote for Trump and that he is a uniquely unpopular presidency at this stage in his second term.

For the Win

—All the people who threw together a rapid-fire boycott of Disney and ABC for suspending comedian Jimmy Kimmel’s show in the wake of FCC pressure deserve our applause. Disney’s rapid about-face, after seeing many people cancel their subscriptions and their stock price drop $1 billion, shows not only that a lot of Americans care about freedom of speech (including many conservatives). It sends a message to every other major corporation thinking about bending the knee: the administration’s hard-line actions are not popular and businesses should think twice about giving in to pressure. (Footnote – Lauren Egan, who covers “the opposition” for The Bulwark and typically does a solid job, really missed the mark with this report wondering why no one was organizing a boycott.) Also, the pressure campaign isn’t over – now it’s focused on Sinclair Media and Nextstar, which are still refusing to put Kimmel back on the stations they own. See the Friends Everywhere network for details.

—”Donors are still being taken advantage of on ActBlue on a daily basis and ActBlue isn’t yet doing enough to put a stop to it,” Josh Nelson tells Campaigns & Elections, offering a 30-day report card along with Haley Bash of the Donor Organizing Hub on the fundraising giant’s early moves to clamp down on spam PACs.

Three Good Reads

—Steven Levy, longtime chronicler of the tech industry, has written a reflective essay in Wired, asking himself what he got wrong about its politics, now that so many moguls have thrown in with Trump. The quick answer: he mistook innovative verve and drive “for character.” I’d add: they were never really committed to progressive values in the first place! (The piece is worth looking at solely for the hilarious graphics, by the way.)

—Stanford political scientist Adam Bonica has crunched the numbers on where political donations go, and come to this conclusion: “The fundraising industrial complex has become a parasite on the democratic process. When nearly one-third of all political contributions get recycled back into asking for more contributions, we’ve created a system that exists primarily to perpetuate itself while enriching fundraising consultants…. Campaigns that should be building movements are instead building donor databases. Political energy that could mobilize communities gets redirected into optimizing email subject lines and testing which desperate plea extracts the most dollars from exhausted supporters.”

—New America’s Lee Drutman has a guest post in The Contrarian on “How a simple electoral change could marginalize political extremism.” The change is to re-legalize fusion voting, which would make it possible for new political parties to form and compete for votes without risk of spoiling, and in our current context would enable common-sense moderates who are anti-MAGA but not pro-Democrat to organize their own party in the middle and build the cross-partisan “popular front” that is needed now.

End Times

This short video-doc of Bernie Sanders talking recently with Trump voters in Mingo County, West Virginia is a great example of the kind of bridge-building we need. Watch it and learn the real history of the word “redneck.”