wall and another party that seems to be offering open borders,” Galston said. “Majorities don’t want the wall, they don’t want family separation, they don’t want non-responsiveness to refugees fleeing a genuine fear of persecution. On the other hand, they don’t want open borders, they don’t want sanctuary cities, they don’t want to abolish ICE” – the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.
What most Americans want is something in the middle. But political paralysis has prevented a solution, in part because people on the far left and the far right wield so much influence over public policy debates. Progressive activists and devoted conservatives make up only 8 percent and 6 percent of Americans, respectively, despite having an outsized influence on our political discourse.23
“It’s been a political science truism for decades now . . . that intense minorities can have disproportionate effects on politics – and issues like immigration tend to attract passionate minorities on both sides,” Galston said. “They set the terms of the debate within their respective parties but not in the country.”
That paradigm is ensuring a political stalemate because the nation’s two-party system was designed to guarantee that neither side gets what it wants in full. “The political system for too long has been guided by the hope of both political parties that they were on the verge of winning a sweeping victory that would enable them to form a new permanent governing majority and just get their way,” Galston said. “Faced with compromise or stagnation, the system has elected to go down the path of stagnation.”
Indeed, compromise has become an anachronism in part because there’s little consequence for the engineers of stagnation. Politicians are consistently rewarded in lopsided, gerrymandered primary elections for standing their ground and refusing to budge based purely on their ideological principles. That stubbornness makes the pursuit of common ground extraordinarily difficult.
Yet our leaders won’t change unless we change. Otherwise there’s no incentive for them to do anything differently. And that means we need to embrace relationships and conversation with people who aren’t like us. It means we need to immerse ourselves in friendships and interaction with people of difference that expose us to their perspectives and to the challenges they face, even when the process makes us uncomfortable. If we don’t work with each other – if we don’t build bridges – we’ll never achieve progress together.
Sometimes the path to conversation, understanding, and cooperation proceeds slowly, as we gradually learn more about each other and become more attuned to the structural issues that underpin our polarized culture. And sometimes it happens swiftly, when we become viscerally aware of the need to span the gaps that have divided us for ages.
When I began working on this book in late 2018, I never imagined we would see the type of national outcry over the compounding scourge of racism that we saw in the wake of the death of George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, on May 25, 2020, at the hands of the police in Minneapolis. The searing sound of Floyd pleading, “I can’t breathe,” and crying out for his mother as White officer Derek Chauvin kneeled on his neck while he suffocated24 shocked many White Americans into realizing for the first time that racism manifested in the form of police brutality is still real and vicious. But, perhaps even more significantly, it also shocked them into recognizing that police brutality is just one element in a much broader societal scheme that keeps Black Americans under the knees of White privilege.
The death of George Floyd was the latest in a seemingly endless series of violent acts by police against Black people – including incidents like the killing in 2014 of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, which spurred outrage among some White Americans for a while, yet eventually faded from the national spotlight. But this time, the shock factor sparked a burgeoning awareness of the need for White Americans to step out onto metaphorical ledges and to begin building bridges across structural ravines that have long prevented Black Americans from escaping the trenches of economic inequality, underfunded schools, and lack of access to adequate medical care, to mention just a few obstacles to social justice.
The national outpouring of anger following Floyd’s death was largely directed at the White establishment, as Americans of all races hit the streets throughout the country to protest and demand change despite an ongoing pandemic that put their lives at risk. The groundswell of outrage can serve as the raw material for the type of bridge building that needs to be done to begin overcoming the whitecapped rapids of racism. The key will be to ensure that the protests translate into lasting bridges, which are the key to policy change. For that, White Americans, myself included, cannot ask Black people to meet us halfway. White people need to use their voices and places of privilege to speak up and take action by constructing the bridges that they have so long neglected to build.
Building bridges between people of difference against a backdrop of racism, political polarization, misinformation, and social division may sound like a milquetoast way of pursuing change. But it’s not. Rather, it’s a bold form of countercultural revolution. It stands in stark contrast to the typical way of doing things, in which we stand firm on our cultural biases, cling to social and political isolation, and refuse to consider the possibility that we could be wrong.
Bridge building does not, however, require unity. And it does not involve cultural assimilation. That is a false assumption. What’s required is the pursuit of understanding – that is, the pursuit of social trust, as David Blankenhorn of Braver Angels described it. Social trust paves the way for structural change that can bring about tangible benefits for our society at large.
But how do we pursue social trust when the things that divide us feel so overwhelming? How do we achieve policy progress when our polarized politics have taught us that we should never have to compromise? How do we foster improved communication to combat the crisis of misinformation that fans the flames of division? And how do we ensure that the movement that arose in the wake of George Floyd’s death turns into substantive change among White Americans who previously did not grasp or care about the need to fight racism?
As I began considering ways to address polarization in this book, I figured there must be people out there who aren’t accepting the status quo. There must be people who are bringing others of difference together. There must be people who are dedicating themselves to fostering dialogue, mending broken relationships, and finding common ground.
I’m here to tell you that they’re out there. I visited them. I talked with them. And I believe that we can – we must – learn from them.
They are not Pollyannaish. They are not impervious to discouragement. They are not flawless.
But they are hopeful, they are driven, and they are countercultural.
They are bridge builders.
Bridge builders are people like Eboo Patel.
About a quarter century ago, racial tension was high following the police beating of Rodney King, the O. J. Simpson trial, and what Patel called “the emergence of identity politics on college campuses.” “It wasn’t as politically divided” as things are today, “but it was socially divided in a variety of ways,” he said.
For a while, Patel was immersed in the divisiveness. “I spent a couple of years angry,” he said. “And then frankly I developed some perspective and maturity and judgment. Along the way, I discovered religion.”
He devoted himself to his faith as a Muslim of Gujarati Indian heritage. At the same time, he began learning more about the discordant role that religion was playing in the world, including in the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and in the Yugoslav wars. But he also began learning more about what he called “the positive role that religious identity had played in social movements,” such as the struggle to defeat apartheid in South Africa, the American
