Heidi and Guy Burgess Talks with Frank Dukes About Balancing Teaching, Practice, and Advocacy

Heidi: We've somewhat moved on from where we were then. We are adopting more of the argument that we made at the ACR meeting that you were at. And we're still playing with what I'm now calling "the mediator's dilemma" [the dilemma of whether to be neutral or to take a side in the mediation if it is about something on which you have a strong feeling that one side has been unjustly treated.] We have been making the assertion that there is a role to play for third parties [in today's political conflicts]. And we think that folks in the conflict resolution and peacebuilding communities could do a lot more than they're currently doing to address the current situation, which we define as hyperpolarization. 

There is a lot of discussion over that word, only most people don't add the prefix "hyper" there. I can give you a story about how hyper-polarization is different from regular polarization. It's also different from affective polarization. I've advocated using the words everybody else uses, but Guy maintains, no, we need to keep the prefix "hyper" in there. It's certainly very severe. We've been focused on that now, certainly since 2016, maybe even a little bit before we got Trump. We saw the writing on the wall and thought things were coming apart. And then we thought they were coming apart more in 2016. Little did we know what 2024 was going to look like! So we still argue that there is an important role for third-party neutrals. There's also an important role for advocates. And so, I think it's a very interesting conversation and one that I would like to have with you about how we intermix and balance those two.

Then the other thing I was thinking about is that you've really played three roles. You've played the role of teacher, and you've played the role of third-party neutral, and you've played the role of advocate. So you're coming at this from three different directions, each of which probably balances that balance differently. So I think you've got interesting insights there. 

Frank: Yeah. I hadn't thought of that specifically, even though I think very seriously about the teaching role. I am very scrupulous about not injecting my views into my teaching. I'm very scrupulous about having students be able to think for themselves, rather than me spoon-feeding them and creating people that think the way that I do. I would never talk about voting for a particular candidate.  And that's just sort of the baseline minimum you know for that. 

Heidi: Remind me what you've been teaching. 

Frank: Mostly what I've taught at the University of Virginia regularly since I started there, or at least since 1992, (I started a year before that), is some variation of basically consensus building in community public issues. It's gone by different titles. Right now, it's called "Collaborative Planning for Sustainability."

Heidi: In what department or school? 

Frank: In the Department of Urban and Environmental Planning, which is in the School of Architecture,  So it's part of the planning element. So that's where the institute that we had is--the Institute for Environmental Negotiation.

Then, about five years ago, we changed the name because a lot of people were thinking that we were an advocacy organization. So, we changed the name to the Institute for Engagement and Negotiation. And then just last year, for reasons that have nothing to do with the substance of our work, but everything to do with the university imposing, basically, a penalty tax on all expenditures, we moved administratively to a different home. We are now at the Cooper Center for Public Service. It is still part of UVA, but it serves a statewide function, and it was set up and paid for in part, at least, by the legislature. So we're under them. And they're underneath the Karsh Institute for Democracy, which is a pretty comfortable place for us to be, because I've always thought that's really what we're doing, is democracy with a small d, that type of work.

I've taught other classes, including at George Mason University, but also other classes at UVA, one called Righting Unrightable Wrongs, and then one called UVA History: Race and Repair that a history professor and I taught. And I've taught mediation too.

But the basic course that I've taught for 33 years, and I'll be teaching again in the fall, is the one that's around the work that we do at our institute. We're not really teaching the students to become third parties. Rather, we're teaching the people that are entering the program-- who are mostly planners, but also people who are in the leadership and the public policy arena--how to  work effectively at bringing people together. Because they're all going to have some responsibility for doing that. I draw course material from a  lot of my work, but I also use work from people who are not mediators. I'm actually much more comfortable with the boundary between teaching and advocating: I'm not telling them what to do and what to think, or who to vote for,  or anything that would give them any indication of how I feel about that.

I do understand that, in the current world--this might not have been the same way three decades ago or two decades ago, but now, if you're talking about collaboration, if you're talking about equity, asking how is the process equitable? if you're even talking about being "trauma informed," if you're talking about history, then that's going to be seen as one particular kind of politics. So I'm not naive. I understand that that's the case.  But I'm not changing that part of it. The world has changed. 

Heidi:  I agree with you entirely that what you're talking about is small d democracy. But even talking about that has a political bent to it now.

Frank: Well, even truth telling is seen as political. A lot of our work we're framing as "equitable collaboration". And we also do evaluation. And we do some training, not a lot of training. We will help an agency, local government, state government, federal agency develop a community engagement plan. So it's not all mediation. 

We have done a lot of work around monuments and public spaces and equity was really an important consideration for that. And then we realized that a lot of what we were doing, the way we were framing that, was going to be helpful for other work that we're doing. So, for instance, becoming trauma-informed. 10 years ago, we didn't really talk about that. Maybe in very rare cases that we worked in, where there was a history of violence, we might have mentioned that. But over the last 10 years we've been very specifically mentioning there are histories of trauma that people are bringing to public issues. Pretty much every inch of this country has been contested and has some elements of trauma. And oftentimes, people are bringing those traumas to the consensus process. In other words, they're not necessarily able to bring their whole selves the way that they would like to, to the issues. They're not able to control their emotions. They're not able to regulate themselves. And then we realized that, well, that doesn't just apply to these monuments.(Here I'm talking about Civil War monuments or monuments where there's a controversy.)

Almost all of our projects, whether it's housing, community development, environmental contamination, watershed protection, whatever. Almost all of them have some dimension of past trauma.

Heidi: So how does that change what you do in comparison to a mediator or facilitator who wasn't thinking about trauma and equity -- more like the standard Fisher and Ury, or Chris Moore approach. (Fisher and Ury's book Getting to Yes was about first parties, not third parties, so that's a bad example.  But maybe the Chris Moore Mediation Process approach?  

Frank: I very much still draw on that work, even Getting to Yes, very much so. That classic differentiation between interests and positions, separating people from the problem.  Those are all still valuable considerations. And I don't know that we're doing that much differently than a lot of our colleagues are, because a lot of them are talking about being trauma-aware and trauma-sensitive. But I would say that we're very explicit about it. Of course, we don't overtly say "we're going to make sure that your traumas are dealt with directly here." We're not naming that and putting people in a box of that sort. But when we talk about our work, we will say that. And maybe we'll talk about that with an agency,  or a local government, by saying, "Well, ask that question."  "What are some of the histories that are here?" "What might be some potential traumas that people might be bringing to the table? And how can we make sure that we're not making those worse in the work that we're doing?" So, it is interesting because, on the one hand, we've got this enormous push back against diversity, equity, and inclusion. But on the other hand, certainly before George Floyd, but definitely after George Floyd, so many public agencies are way more aware of histories of race and racism and other harms than they were before, and they want to be able to address them appropriately. So it's a really very what's it? There must be some word for the internal back and forth, the ping pong, back and forth that I feel for the agencies that know that if they're dealing with public issues, they've got to address these issues, while at the same time, they're being told by their bosses that they can't use the words "diversity" or "equity" or "inclusion,"-- not even inclusion, which is sort of a prime element. 

So we have six elements, right? So being trauma-informed, inclusive, responsive, deliberative , truth seeking, and adaptive.

I give the example from one of my advocacy roles. I was appointed to this commission in Charlottesville that was to change the narrative on race in the community by addressing our racial harms, including dealing with the Confederate monuments that we had in the community. And the city manager showed up at all of our meetings.  This was a Blue Ribbon Commission. The deputy city manager showed up for all of our meetings, the head of the Human Rights Council, the head of Social Services. Nobody took notes, and you couldn't see a meeting summary if you didn't attend the meeting. They set up an email address, but nobody from the city was actually monitoring that email. So that was, to me, not responsive.

And then another core element is deliberative, which is really the basis for our work.--the idea that we have something to learn from each other. 

And then truth-seeking. And in the environmental arena, a lot of times there's fact-finding. There's literature about that. But that's broader -- it's inclusive of fact-finding. But also, people are often bringing many truths and how do we help surface those truths?

 And then adaptive, which means that we don't bring a particular process. Instead, we say, "Well, we're going to use this X process that we need to adapt to the circumstances, and we need to adapt to the work in progress. We need to be learning from each other and be willing to change how we approach things, so.

 But what I meant to do, and I got off on that. But that's a big part of what we're doing. But I totally agree with you.  I absolutely think there's still a third-party role, very much a need for a third-party role certainly in lots of situations, but in the arena that I'm working in, community and public policy, yes, I agree. As you mentioned, the hyperpolarization and I can say that separately, and the bad faith actors are an important consideration.  There are institutionalized bad faith actors. now. So that is presenting a different challenge. But I'm not giving up the third-party role or the need to do that. We still have the very human responses for us work with. The fundamental attribution error and so many other ways that people respond to difference that sets people up to say "these are our enemies." In those cases, the third party can be very helpful. We have been very helpful at helping break down those barriers. So there is as much or more of a need now that there was before. It's hard to imagine more of a need, but there's certainly a great need.

Guy: And this raises what I think is one of the big contributions that the field has to make. If you think of democracy as a giant dispute-handling system, a system where you need to pay attention to all of the issues that you just raised, and start building institutions that are able to do that, that's a very different image from the three branches of government, checks and balances, the very sort of almost mechanistic approach that political scientists tend to take. And I think that it could go a long way towards diffusing the hyperpolarization, which gets to the point where we're not just on opposite sides, but we really want to hurt the other side and there are no limits. And things are escalating in ways that are really scary. But if we start really thinking about the whole range of democratic institutions from the dispute-handling or dispute-resolution system perspective, I think it highlights all sorts of areas where we could really do a whole lot better. And also, the kind of things that I think folks on both the left and the right would agree is a whole lot better. 

One of the stories that we tell again and again was in the early days of our program when we were funded by Hewlett. We were the Conflict Resolution Consortium. And all of our advocacy friends thought we were traitors, and they wouldn't have anything to do with us. And then we got the bright idea to reframe things and start talking about how we can confront one another more constructively about these deep issues that we all care about? Literally, we went from a 95% rejection rate on invitations to a 95% acceptance rate. And I think that people do recognize that the way we're fighting is deeply destructive. But they're looking for more constructive ways, not ways of just giving up everything. 

Frank:  Yeah. Very much so. I know you all aren't doing this, but it's so easy to kind of fetishize polarization as being the problem, without removing it from the substantive concerns, as though we could just get rid of the polarization, and the differences in the human rights values that people have are not as significant.  I'm not framing this right. But I do see in some of our colleagues that hyperpolarization is definitely a significant issue. And when you have people who are being kidnapped and thrown into prisons across different countries, when you have leaders who are absolutely willing to lie, and people are trying to destroy the constitutional balance of power. To me, with polarization, if you're only focused on that, you're going to be missing a huge part of the screen. So bad actors are becoming institutionalized and are being centered in one political party, which I hate to say, because I've had plenty of Republicans that were great participants in work that we've done and leaders in work that we've done over the years. And in so many community issues.

We don't do a lot of policy work. We do some policy work, but almost no federal policy work. It's mostly state policy work. But our bread and butter is really working in the community. And things like data centers and solar farms and transitions in coal mining country and stuff like that. They can become politicized, but for most people, they're not. They're not partisan issues.  They're substantive issues and the differences don't align themselves very readily along political lines. So that's one reason why I think that the work we do is still so critically important, why we still need that third-party function to be able to function effectively. 

Guy: There's almost a whole series of different tiers of third-party functions. The one level may be the most advocacy, constructive- confrontation-oriented perspective. You have groups with real, legitimate grievances that are interacting with other groups and trying to really work out something and do constructive small-scale problem solving. There's a different kind of role for mediation in what you might call coalition building, building a big and strong enough coalition that will enable you to resist bad-faith actors. That's a different set of tasks and skills with a lot of overlaps. And then there's a place for making peace or at least minimizing the destructiveness of conflicts that really involve bad-faith actors. Yeah. Mary Fitztuff was fond of saying that "peacemaking is a dirty business."

During the Iraq and Afghanistan war era, there was a memorable meeting at the Pentagon, actually, where an Army major was talking about how peacebuilders would actually talk with terrorists and talk with all of these people that they were deathly afraid of. But figuring out how to really work with really disagreeable folks and to at least keep things from degenerating further and laying the groundwork for maybe some sort of eventual recovery. And we need all three of these at the same time. And you can't say that, "Oh, this is the right way and all this stuff doesn't work or isn't needed?" 

Frank: Yeah.

Heidi; We also, long ago, made a distinction between what we called "core conflict elements" and "overlay elements." So the core conflict elements are the substantive thing that you're really fighting over or arguing about your fundamental human needs, for instance, or truth of past wrongs or whatever. They're the fundamental issues. And then there's all sorts of junk that gets laid over that. And we talk about communication problems and fact-finding problems and escalation and polarization, which we wrote about 30 years ago without any idea that it was going to get to be what it is now. So we see those as the overlay and our approach to what we call "constructive confrontation" is first, just strip away the overlay because that obscures the actual core issues so much that you lose track of what they were. And once you strip away the overlay, then you're not solved. Then you have to deal with the core.

Frank:  Yeah. Very good. I used to say, but I haven't said it for a while, but that you know conflicts aren't caused by dysfunctional communication, but I don't know any conflict that doesn't have dysfunctional communication as part of what makes it hard to address.  So yeah. . That's interesting. Could you say those two distinctions again?

Heidi:  There's the core conflict elements. A then there's the overlay elements. And the overlay are all the things that make the core either impossible to see or harder to deal with. 

Frank: I think Rich Rubenstein at George Mason University used to say something about fighting over the right things you know as opposed to you know things that don't matter. 

I do an exercise, and I didn't initiate it.  It's an arm-wrestling exercise, and I don't remember when I first did it. But we tell people I had to not do it during COVID, and we actually had some way of pulling a rope to get to kind of the same thing. But basically, and setting this up and saying, "Okay. We're going to do an exercise in competition, right? I need you to find an opponent, and then you're going to be  arm wrestling." And I do give them two ground rules. One is you can't talk, and the other is don't hurt each other. I literally have a neighbor across the street who is in a woman's arm wrestling league, and she broke her arm in competition. So I tell people, , "If you can get your opponent's arm down 10 times in 15 seconds, I'm going to give you this imaginary gift." And sometimes I bring chocolate, you know they get it, right? 

Heidi: I've done this exercise!  So you go like that, right? {Heidi is waving her arm back and forth very quickly.]

Frank: Well, most people don't, because I've set it up, I've structured it as a competition. And then in more recent years, instead of debriefing it right away, I say, "Okay. We're going to do the same exercise, but I'm going to give you a different framework, right? So you're still going to be arm wrestling, but this is an exercise in cooperation. I'm going to give you the same instructions. If you can get  the other person's arm down 10 times in15 seconds, you're going to get this. You still can't talk, but  we want you to try to find a way to win.  I've given this to hundreds and hundreds of people, and maybe five people ever are able to figure it out without talking.  But sometimes one person lets them do it, but then the other person won't let them do it. And I tell them the way that, so often, the systems that we're operating in are structured, they force us into this sort of mindset that we have to beat the other person in order to win. But there was nothing in what I said about that.

But then I also debrief it further and say, "So what was important to you? Why not just let the other person get what they wanted?" Because it wasn't going to take away from you, but there's pride in your identity as someone who's not a pushover. And that's significant. That's real. Even though the issue wasn't real, that is significant, and that's real. So it's actually a great exercise.  It wasn't a mediator who taught it.  It was some completely different kind of person.

Heidi:  I don't remember where I ran into it, but. It was an eye-opening exercise. 

Frank: But  that does bring up the fact that identity and respect and recognition are human needs and are really at the core of so many of the issues, even though there's also substantive components, like do we build the data center or do we have it here or not? 

By the way, is that a fight that's going on over in Colorado? I assume wind energy would be a big one, but ...

Heidi: I haven't heard anything about data centers, have you?  

Guy: No. 

Heidi: I don't know why not. I mean, it's got to be all over.

Frank:  It's definitely a big deal. Typically, you've got a rural community or a community that's at least not particularly urban, maybe somewhat suburban, that just gets organized against it, because they hear that they're going to be using enormous amounts of energy and water, and they're building these all over the place.

And for a lot of rural communities that are losing people and jobs, so  of course, their leadership is going to say, "Wow, this sounds too good to be true." But then they're running into a lot of local opposition from people who ask, "Well, what's going to happen to our water supply? 

Heidi: They're probably not going to be hiring local people either, except for construction, maybe. 

Frank: Yeah. That's the other issue, too. But anyway, those are examples of issues that don't fall neatly within the Republican, Democrat, far left, far right arena at all. You see people on all sorts of different sides on that one, so. 

Heidi: We've been working with or meeting with and talking with a lot of folks around the country who are starting something that they're calling "civic hubs" or "democracy hubs."  And they've all come to the conclusion that the way to deal with our current fraught situation is to focus at the local level, not at the national level. And everybody at the local level sees that there are particular problems. And there are different problems in different places, although we just went to a meeting where it was noted that almost everybody will define homelessness as a problem. But other ones are focusing on other things. And they never fall along Republican/Democratic lines. And so they're able to do consensus-building and deliberative processes along those lines successfully. Whereas we're also hanging out with a bunch of folks that define themselves as bridge builders. And they're trying to do right-left dialogues. Braver Angels, I think, has probably been the most successful at that. A lot of the other bridge builders are complaining, "Well, we can't get Republicans to be involved because they don't trust the process." And I could understand that and see the problem from both ways. But the way you avoid that is to not focus on the R and the D. You focus on the issues. 

Frank: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then that immediately sends me spiraling into one of the problems is that people are getting information from varied sources.  I'm subject to information that's totally incorrect or is exacerbating something from places that I get it. And you know, there's always been, of course, people taking advantage, getting personal advantage out of false information that they're using. But I don't know that it's ever paid so much to so many people to get clicks and views by spreading things that are completely untrue, but  generate fear and attention. So they've been able to monetize hate and monetize untruth and that feels like such an enormous project. At the community level, I'll participate in things like that or help facilitate things like that [to address this problem.]

But it doesn't address the bigger question of social media, the media generally, and the idea that there is a group of powerful people who are trying to eliminate, or are doing things that are unconstitutional, undemocratic, and that are hurting lots of different people. And so I'm wondering, is the way I'm spending my time useful? Is this the the way that I want to be spending my time? And my answer is, I try to do everything, which is not a happy answer. But it may be a necessary answer. And oddly enough, I've not lost clients, as I've done more work on human rights advocacy. It hasn't spilled over into people not hiring me --it is really kind of the opposite. I've gotten more work along the lines of really divisive issues oftentimes by people who will give me credibility because I've spoken out against some harm that was being done. So I've been very cautious in my career about that. And I still don't do advocacy on anything really environmental, because so much of our core of our work is environmental. But on issues involving human rights, I'm pretty outspoken. 

I joined the board of Not in Our Town, the anti-Hake group, in 2017. Basically, when I saw what was going to be coming down in Charlottesville, and what did come two months later, the Unite the Right you know rally that we had here. And so I am active in that type of advocacy. Not in Our Town will work with police, whereas some groups that I'm a part of are trying to abolish the police.  I'm not in that camp, but it is still a type of advocacy. And I used to be way more uncomfortable doing advocacy than I am now.

I said this at the 2019 ACR conference where we were doing presentations, and I said this again last night. The training for activists used to be held in a local church basement.  It was public, but also you had to know somebody to be able to get in.  It was for people who were going to be protesting. I asked "what are you getting out of this?" Part of it is that I feel that responsibility to my parents, one of whom quit one month short of graduating from college to join the army in World War II, and the other who was the victim of the Nazis in World War II. Their efforts gave me the feeling that the third-party role is just not enough. At least my choice is that it's not enough at this time.

I would not disrespect other people who feel as though they're able to do what they need to do, and they're aware of what's going on. You know They have a global view. And nonetheless, they say, "I think my time is best spent doing that third-party role." But I just don't feel like I can say that. 

Guy:  This is part of what we were trying to get at with that ACR presentation on this red, blue, gold divide, where there are really two conflicts. There's one conflict between grassroots citizens and bad-faith actors. And one of the things that's really terrifying, or at least I found terrifying, was an Anne Applebaum article that explained how 21st century authoritarianism is much more sophisticated than the 20th century version. It used to be that the authoritarians tried to convince people that their society was the best, even though it wasn't. Now they're just trying to convince everybody that everything's awful. So you might as well go with the devil you know, and destroy the idea that there is such a thing as objective information. It's something that the media companies are profiting from handsomely. But the real challenge is to build bridges between the red and the blue so you've got a big enough coalition to resist these bad-faith actors. And I think a lot of people don't quite just look at it as a simple binary, hyperpolarized conflict and don't realize that there really are this sort of parasitic bad-faith actors that have attached themselves, certainly to the right, and to a lesser degree, to the left. And we've got to figure out a way around that. 

Frank: Yeah. Yeah. And I get very frustrated at people who are very strongly anti-racist in our community and would rather maintain this sort of purity of the movement than actually do the work of reaching out to others.  I'm not talking about people of color really doing that work. I'm really talking about people that have privilege like myself.  There's a new book out by Loretta Ross, called Calling In: How to Start Making Change with those you'd Rather Cancel.  As the title says, its about calling people in versus calling people out. Ross is a strong, feminist, African-American. I just love the way she does that. And I've had other people describe that also, that calling people out is where there's such harm that's happening. You have to set up a barrier, saying that this is not acceptable, and I can't have this, and that in other cases, if at all possible, you need to call people in.

For people like myself who have so many different privileges of race and gender and education and economic stability and so forth. I see that as more of my duty--to call people in. And I need to support the people who are doing the calling out at the same time. So that's a challenge. It is definitely a challenge to do both, and sometimes it drives me a little bit crazy.  I think I am, though, much more naturally the peacebuilder, the third party. I can see different sides. I really want people to be able to understand each other.  I understand that for us to have an effective society that can deal with our issues and deal with our inequities, and deal with our history, we have to have that capability to have effective conversations that are inclusive of people with many, many different views,  And I've done that enough successfully around specific issues, for instance, tobacco and coal mining and other things that are heavily polarizing. There is value in doing that and that people can build relationships and new alliances and new understandings can change how they are approaching issues. At the same time, I feel I need to strengthen my advocacy chops and strengthen my facilitation and mediation ability and strengthen both communities at the same time, which is a little bit disconcerting to be doing.

Heidi: Talking somewhat in generalities in terms of calling in and calling out, and I may be misinterpreting what you mean by calling out. But I find myself thinking that as soon as you call somebody out, you turn off the possibility of creating the conversation that you just described because I see it as basically name-calling, "You're the person, either you're the evil person or you're the person who's doing evil," and there's some distinction there. But either way, you're saying, "You're wrong. I'm right. And we don't need to talk about this further." So I was surprised when you said that I support the people who are doing the calling out. I don't. 

Frank: Not everybody. Right. But in many circumstances, yes. I'll give an example. We had the FBI visit us. I was working on a project that's still ongoing to take down the former Lee statue that was in our community. It's been melted down, and they're going to create new art. And our role was engaging the community in what should this art be? What should it look like? What should it speak to? What value should it speak to? And do you feel included in this community? And do you feel left out? And how might this be helpful? That type of thing. We had a visit from the FBI. There was somebody threatening the people involved with that project saying, "It's time to do something." So it was not a specific saying, "I'm going to kill them," or, "I'm going to shoot them," but it was calling that. So there's a need to call that out, right? There's a need to say, "This is not acceptable behavior." And there are less violent elements of that also that you can say, "This is not acceptable behavior, and I need to support the people that are fighting you on this." But it doesn't mean that I've given up on them as human beings.

When I was on that mission, we were trying to change the narratives on race. And we did a lot of things that didn't include the statues, but most of the attention was paid to our Confederate statues. We had a public meeting, and I recruited facilitators, and we wanted to get everybody who had whatever perspective there, including hearing from the people who had the perspective of, "This is a core part of my identity," so that we could understand their perspective. And if people are willing to come and to be heard, but also to listen, you know that's not going to be calling them out.  That is calling them in. So for me, that line is a pretty far line. But I also know that I have certain benefits, and there are other people who are more vulnerable. And  people who are trans, people who are LGBTQ,, people of color. Other people as well, for instance, rural whites, are in a different place. When something's being harmed, they need to be able to advocate for it.

And it doesn't necessarily mean that you're giving up on the humanity of somebody else. But for me, the ability to confront someone clearly and directly is an important ability to have, even if that's done in writing or in some other way, or protesting.

Guy: One of the arguments that we frequently make is that conflict's the engine of social learning. We say that the basic conflict interaction is "I think the world would be better if you did something differently." And what we need is a system that decides which of those suggested changes are appropriate and which ones aren't. It considers whether a change is wise. Will it achieve the desired result? Is it fair and equitable? That sort of thing. But one of the temptations, and I think this is one of many things that has contributed to our current difficulties, is that people, especially on the left, but the right do this too. They tend to suppress difficult conflicts. There are real issues about fairness and equity that swirl around race and gender, and people do have different cultural views. Part of this is evidenced by the fact that the beliefs that were considered unacceptable now were mainstream just a few years ago. And I think one of the dangers is -- and this is a variation on this calling out problem -- is you suppress conflict. It's one thing to call people out on something and have a conversation about it. It's another thing to intimidate people so they won't say anything. And then you run into the slow accumulation of tensions and big earthquakes, which are far more destructive than the little earthquakes of actually facing up to the fact that people don't agree with you. 

Frank:  Yeah. I've been teaching a series of asynchronous classes that are mostly for transportation professionals, mostly people from the state agency for transportation. And one of the participants said something really good.  He said "It's very hard to get somebody to be open-minded, once they've been made to believe that they don't matter. 

He was actually talking about his own agency, which generally does a pretty good job. But he was talking about the fact that too often, his agency is too quick to dismiss the concerns of people, especially when they have the engineering expertise, and they might know that a proposed action is actually not going to increase the numbers of accidents. They know that it is going to decrease the numbers of accidents." If you put in a roundabout, let's say (I'm just making that up, right?) But once you dismiss the people themselves, of course, they're not going to be open to learning or perceiving something in a different way. 

So that's kind of our big challenge, isn't it? How do we make sure that everybody matters and to do so, though, in a way that allows us to surface our differences and then to be able to address them in ways that are respectful of human rights and that are not going to be giving people unnecessary power over others. So, this has been our battle as human beings, since time immemorial. 

Heidi: And that's why we focus on hyper-polarization because what it's doing is it's making us choose camps. And once we've chosen our camp, we are dehumanizing and making irrelevant everybody in the other camp. Even people who aren't really in that camp, but we think they're in that camp. And that means that according to the statement that you just made, nobody's going to change their mind. So we're just getting more and more adversarial with each other. 

Frank: Unless people are made to believe that they do matter, right? So if you have the tobacco farmers talking to the health advocates and the health advocates actually paying attention to them and actually even supporting them on some issues that were important to them, which is what happened regarding, for instance, crop insurance. It's a long story. I won't get into it. But once they're made to believe that they do matter, they're willing to listen and actually learn themselves and vice versa.

Heidi: So we both agree that this is easier to do at the local level. Can it be scaled up? 

Frank: I know there are examples of that. Even recently, I was reading stories of elected officials traveling together, Republicans and Democrats traveling together, and then working together on particular bills. Obviously, it happens. A lot of legislation still happens. But typically, it's legislation that is not necessarily local, but it's a localized group like veterans, working on particular veterans' issues or something of that sort. 

I don't know. There are larger structural issues that are so hard to overcome for that. I think it's worth doing. But how do I deal with the fact I've got a congressman who just says things that are absolutely untrue over and over and over again? And then we'll not have a meeting, but he has a meeting in his district with private businesses where people in those businesses are not allowed to ask questions. Yet he posts a photo with them raising their hands and then says it was great to do a question and answer for this.

And then the people that were there saying, "No, we asked, "How many people are interested in so-and-so?"  So he was just literally lying, and lying in such a way that was so easy to disprove. So to me, there's got to be some ability to fight that sort of untruthfulness. And it takes fighting to do that, which I hate to say. That is the lesson I took from my parents: my mother suffering because of the war, suffering because of the Nazis, and war is just so destructive to so many people. And the fact that my father chose to participate in that war. And because of that and him and other people, my mother didn't end up having to live under the Nazis for more than six years.  If that hadn't been the case, I don't know what would have happened there. So I'm not disagreeing with anything, and there's not an easy way forward at this moment. But sometimes there are pretty easy ways forward when you are  dealing with local issues. So, I don't think that's an easy way out, but it's within our sphere of influence.

So, I'm still doing that work and still see the value in that work. But again, I'm also continuing to question myself, asking "is this the best use of my time, given threats you know that are happening to people?" So I know. I wish there were 10,000 people that were doing this type of work instead the small group that is -- you probably know everybody or all the groups that are doing this kind of work.

Heidi: Well, the good news, I think, is that there are 10,000 people doing this work. They're not visible. And that's one of the things that we're trying to do, just in our own little way, and we're two little people and can only do so much. But we're trying to make it visible, because I think that part of the problem is so many people feel hopeless. They feel like everything they care about is going down the tubes and there's nothing that they can do about it.  And people constantly ask me, "Why are you doing what you're doing? Nobody's paying you. You might as well be off going to, I don't know, Cabo, which is where a friend just went. Go have fun.

And I say, "Well, I'm staying sane by doing something that makes me feel like I have a role, some agency, in addressing what's going on." And I think if more people saw more local initiatives like the ones that you're talking about, and we're talking to people who are doing all sorts of things, and there's at least 10,000 people doing work like this.

Frank: Yeah, you're right.

Heidi: There's likely 50,000 people who are doing this! If people knew about it and got involved in it, then it could grow. And my pipe dream, and I'm hoping maybe it isn't a pipe dream, is that if enough people get involved in deliberative, consensus-building processes at the local level and see that it works, and see how transformative it is, then maybe they would start demanding that their federal-level representatives start behaving differently.  

There have been small instances of people doing things differently. There's the Disagree Better campaign of the National Governors Association, which is trying to deliver this kind of message at the state level.  There's the House Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress that ran for four years with Derek Kilmer, who's one of my great heroes. And we got to interview him, which was a major thrill. They did amazing things getting Republicans and Democrats to sit down together and pass, I think it was 200 some, pretty much unanimous resolutions of ways to do things differently.  That was the federal level. I asked Derek, since they were so obviously successful, why every other House committee didn't follow their procedures. And he kind of laughed and said, well, some of it was skill and some of it was will and laid out the obstacles to everybody following them, but said that there are a number of the innovations that they did in that committee that are getting copied elsewhere in Congress.

So I think it can scale up. But we've got these bad-faith actors that are doing their damnedest to prevent it from doing so. 

Frank: Yeah. 

Guy: I think there's going to be some sort of a train wreck. I don't know quite what it will look like, but Trump does not have the personality profile of somebody who's going to be able to sustain this. And he's doing enough things that are likely to have catastrophic outcomes that, sooner or later, we're going to have what you might call a "boiled frog moment" where we say, "Oh, my God, we have got to go a different path." And if the choice is to go directly back to the Biden-era Democrats, it's going to be tougher. But if we can lay out a vision of how the left and the right really can work together to solve problems and address inequities in reasonable ways, and a vision for a democracy in which everyone would like to live, we might be able to forge a better path. There's going to be a window of opportunity where people become very interested in that. And the thing is to be prepared to take advantage of that opportunity. If we're not prepared, people may just get even more disillusioned and go back to all-out hyperpolarized politics. 

Frank: And the young people are very interested in that. At least the students that I see, including students on the right as well. There are many examples. Do you know the example of Silverton, Colorado?  A good article on it appeared in the New York Times in 2023. The town had sort of a classic conflict between  newcomers coming in with ideas and ways that conflicted with the longtime residents. National politics intervened too. But they brought in an outside consultant, who held consensus-building sessions and eventually, even the town leaders, who had been pushing people apart, saying these outside consensus-builders were not what they needed. Eventually, they came around and developed a master plan that almost everyone agreed on. It's just a great example, not only of just one community, but one person who just believed that we don't have to be that way [hyper-polarized]. And this was the outside person. But somebody brought them in, also--a foundation, I guess, maybe.  And there's lots and lots of that type of work going on. 

So Guy, what you were talking about, you know the work that we do, the consensus building, collaborative decision-making, whatever, is certainly not sufficient to create the type of society that we want to have, right? But I can't imagine any sort of democracy, or any sort of community, that could exist without having that capability of being able to bring people together from different views, to be able to address the differences honestly.   So we need to have that capability. And that capability alone is not sufficient for us to have a strong democracy. We also need the judicial system. We need advocacy.  We need a lot of different things. We need different ways of thinking. We need multiple political parties and so forth.

Guy: This is what we've been trying to get at with our notion of massively parallel peacebuilding or democracy building. And we've identified 55 different roles. And there are important contributions that people are making in each of these different roles. And the truth is that society as complex as ours needs people in each of these different places. But the dispute resolution field is at the nexus of an awful lot of it. 

Frank: Yeah. Yeah. I loved the [ACR] session that you had where we talked about what is the role of the field in all this?  You talk about the mediator paradox, right? So I guess I'm going to continue to do both. I'm going to continue to nurture that third-party role and the advocacy role and let that continue to be sort of a puzzlement for me. It's much easier to pick one or the other.

Heidi: Yes!

Guy:  What we're trying to do, which is a bit of a variation on that, is to also devote a lot of attention to understanding the ways in which these bad-faith actors are really trying to prevent democracy from working. All the various tactics they're using and things that people are pursuing to try to counter those tactics. It's a slightly different way to look at the advocacy issue and really focus in on the bad-faith actors. 

Heidi: And we are calling them out. I should have realized when I said was against calling out, we are calling out the bad-faith actors. I think you have to. 

Frank: Yes. You lose credibility if you don't, and you lose democracy too. 

Guy: You can try to make it easy for them to repudiate that approach and come over to the good side. 

Heidi: Again, calling out the bad faith action is better than calling out the actor.  

Frank: Yeah, yeah, yeah.  

Guy: We need to end this, as we have some appliance installers coming shortly.

Frank: All right. It's great to see you. Thanks again for your webinar. It was great. Thanks for your work. I know I went all over the place, but I'm sure your editing can get rid of that. 

Heidi: Well, we both went over the place. And I think it's interesting to see how thoughts develop. And hopefully, people find this valuable.  

Frank: Well, it's great to see you. Thanks again for your webinar. It was great. Really. 

Heidi: Well, good. We're going to be meeting next week, I think, or the week after that with Barry and Susan and talk about next steps, so we'll see where this goes.

Frank:  Good. Okay. Take care. 

Guy: All right. Thanks.