Why are difficult conversations, like politics, often
unproductive, and what tools can the Civil Discourse Center give
people to approach those discussions differently?
In many difficult conversations, some people shut down
and do not want to engage. Another set of people resort to debating,
but it's ineffective because they're thinking, "I want to win
this conversation."
Avoiding people and conversations is not going to get
us anywhere. We're not challenging ourselves or others, which is an
important part of engaging in civil discourse and thinking
critically in a way where the end goal is to improve ourselves and
each other.
My role as a civil discourse fellow is to equip
students to have tools at the ready for these kinds of challenging conversations.
It's, of course, an interesting time nationally. Two
polls came out in 2025: one said that
85% of Americans fear politically
motivated violence
or think that politically motivated violence is on the
rise; the other poll found that
30% of Americans believe that violence is
actually necessary to correct this course
that we're on.
I didn't grow up thinking that way. When I asked my
students about this last fall, they were appropriately upset but did
not seem that surprised. Young people tend to have this normalized
fear of ideological violence because that's what they're seeing
around them as normal. Many of them are even afraid of the word
"argument" because they associate it with this sort of
escalation of violence.
Part of my job as a faculty member, and I see this as
an important part as a faculty fellow, is to demonstrate what
collaborative argumentation or critical thinking actually looks like
for them.
I want to teach and demonstrate that these
conversations can be accomplished when the two parties are coming
from a framework of respect and love. It's going back to that idea
of improving the self and improving each other.
Campaigns will use ads designed to make voters
distrustful of the opposing party. How effective are those tactics
at increasing political polarization?
We have to think, "What is the purpose of this
ad?" And it's easy for us to retreat into an us-versus-them
mentality, a kind of binary opposition. It's what we do naturally
when we're confronted with uncertainty and it's something that we
have to actively train ourselves not to do.
Fearful people are easy to exploit. It's in the
interest of powerful people and powerful systems to strategically
divide people so that they're weaker. Political advertising works to
invoke these kinds of strong emotional reactions to make us feel a
certain way, so that we aren't exercising critical thinking.
With any advertising, stop and ask yourself, who
benefits from me feeling this way? The answer is never me. I don't
benefit from those feelings. It's always the company, the celebrity,
the party or even the system that benefits from me feeling scared,
resentful, doubtful, energized or distracted.
Ads like that are very effective. But none of this new,
of course. It's an intentional strategy to make people do something.
