Massively Parallel Problem Solving and Democracy Building: An Ongoing Response to the Threats to Democracy in the U.S. - Part 4

Hyperpolarization Graphic

Newsletter 291 — October 29, 2024

Heidi Burgess and Guy Burgess

 

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This is the fourth installment (of 5), drawn from Guy and Heidi's paper "Massively Parallel Problem Solving and Democracy Building: An Ongoing Response to the Threats to Democracy in the U.S,." which the Toda Peace Institute published on September 16, 2024 as one of their policy briefs.1 The first installment provided an introduction to several of the key ideas of the entire paper, and the second installment looked in more depth at the threats currently facing democracy in the U.S. The third installment looked at the factors that make U.S. democracy resilient, and hopefully able to meet these threats and emerge stronger and better than it had been before. We ended that newsletter with a list of seven goals that massively parallel problem solving and democracy building need to meet.  In this newsletter we discuss those goals in more detail.

Added on November 1, 2024: Since all the installments have now been posted, here are links to the entire series: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5.

 

Massively Parallel Goal #1: Cultivating Compromise

Another advantage of the massively parallel approach is that it encourages people to focus especially on aspects of democracy’s problems that have win-win potential and are not unavoidably win-lose. It encourages people to seek creative solutions which would enable each side to uphold its values and effectively pursue its most important interests and needs.

Of course, not all problems can be solved in a win-win manner. But if you assume from the start that the only way one side can win is if the other side loses, you are setting yourself up for a protracted struggle. When the power of the competing sides is about equal (as it currently is between Democrats and Republicans in the United States) this struggle can last for a very long time, prevent both sides from making progress on their goals, and do a great deal of damage to all sides along the way.

The same is true if you refuse to compromise, if you see compromise as “weak,” and if you view compromisers as “sell outs.” After all, a key tenet of democracy is the pursuit of compromise between people and policies that are different and, sometimes, even completely opposed. If one or both sides are unwilling to compromise, democracy grinds to a halt.

Massively Parallel Goal #2: Cultivate Respect for Society’s Many Identity Groups

One of the interesting opportunities for change is based on the fact that many of today’s political struggles revolve less around interests, and more around identity.  People are afraid to compromise because they feel compromise is selling out “their tribe.” But as John Burton and other human needs theorists long ago pointed out, while fundamental human needs, such as identity and security, cannot and will not be compromised, it is possible to maintain one’s identity and security without having to compromise.2 Indeed, the more security one side feels, the less likely it is to attack the other side. The more one side feels secure in its identity, the less it will feel a need to attack the other side’s identity. So, one key to a healthy democracy is developing a healthy respect for all the identities that make it up, rather than trying to place the various identity groups in some sort of hierarchical order of superiority. While this sounds a lot like the goals of “diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs” in the United States, these programs often bifurcate identity groups into two categories:  the virtuous “oppressed” and the evil “oppressors.” This, too, is a recipe for protracted struggle, while true respect for all people and groups (including those who are considered by the left to be “oppressors”) is the off-ramp to effective democracy and stronger societies that are better able to work together to address their many joint problems.

Of course, not all problems can be solved with respect for the other, and not all problems have win-win solutions. And, certainly, not all people deserve respect. But giving respect, even to those who do not deserve it, costs little. Respect does not mean acquiescence. It does not mean dropping one’s challenges of other people’s behavior or beliefs. It simply means refraining from calling people names, refraining from dismissing their views without considering them, and refraining from ignoring them or using illegitimate means to attack them. (Challenging people you disagree with through legitimate administrative, legislative, or judicial processes is still acting with respect.) Above all, it means do not dehumanize them.

In healthy democracies, when win-win agreements cannot be found and tough decisions have to be made, losers still need to believe that the decision-making process was fair. If everyone is given a chance to be heard, and the decision-making process is transparent and follows the law, losers are much more likely to accept the decision than they are if they consider the process to be unfair — if decisions are made in secrecy, without following precedent or law, or otherwise violating standard procedures. 

Also, to the extent that laws are passed, or policies are put into place, that so violate one side’s values that they cannot live satisfactory lives after the decision is made, that is also a recipe for trouble. For instance, the Dobbs decision that made it legal for states to outlaw abortion completely has resulted in women being unable to get treatment for miscarriages or to abort non-viable fetuses that threaten the mother’s life. The result is an extreme voter backlash against Republicans who advocated for such strict laws.

Massively Parallel Goal #3: Preserve Electoral Integrity and Continuity

In healthy democracies, people must feel that, even if they lose one election and the winners enact policies that they (the losers) find unacceptable, they (the losing side) can regroup and try again in the following election. If people fear that losing one election or one decision will make it impossible for them to uphold their values or meet their needs forever, they will fight as hard as they can to win – even by cheating or using violence or other destructive strategies in an all-out effort to prevail.

This is why the 2024 U.S. Presidential election is so frightening to so many people. Donald Trump has made no secret of his intentions to disregard Constitutional constraints and become much more autocratic in a second term, quite possibly throwing his opponents in jail, simply for opposing him. (He apparently sees that as “retribution” for the many attempts Democrats are currently waging to convict him of a vast number of criminal charges and possibly put him in jail.) Republicans, too, are angry and frightened, believing the Democrats are trying to change election procedures in ways that undermine Republican chances, while also implementing policies that threaten right-leaning groups through policies that give preferential treatment to those primarily affiliated with Democrats.

If we are to avoid escalating anti-democratic maneuvers on both sides to assure victory above all else, election officers and candidates and parties must make clear efforts to protect and uphold U.S. electoral and democratic processes and not threaten to use non-democratic means to win, even if one thinks the other side is doing so. If the other side is violating the rules, the thing to do is to call them on it and try to get the actions stopped through legitimate (usually judicial) channels.That is the way democracy is supposed to work. If we go around the established processes, even for ostensibly “democratic purposes,” we lose our legitimacy, and possibly, our democracy as well.

This is, of course, easier said than done. In a bitterly fought election like this one, both sides are likely to use a variety of clandestine, dirty tricks – often very close to election day. Then the short timeframe makes it functionally impossible to remedy the problem before the election and remedying it after the election becomes much more difficult.

Massively Parallel Goal #4: Expose and Delegitimize “Bad-Faith Actors”

Another key to a successful democracy is its ability to discredit, and to the extent possible block, the actions of “bad-faith actors” – people who try are trying to subvert or destroy democratic institutions and processes to advance their own selfish goals. Although it seems very clear to most Democrats that Donald Trump is one such “bad-faith actor,” (an assertion that is hard to dispute, given his hate-mongering tactics, continual lying, and repeated vows to act autocratically if elected to another term), there are more such actors on both sides of the political divide (although most others are less flagrantly extreme). For example, there are social and traditional media outlets that intentionally spin and falsify stories in ways that inflame tensions, in an effort to build their audiences and thus their profit. So, too, are there politicians on both the right and the left who are primarily interested in gaining power, prestige, and money, and are less (or not at all) interested in working to advance their constituents’ interests. This behavior needs to be exposed and denounced, not ignored because those doing it are “on your side.”

Massively Parallel Goal #5: Promote Reconciliation

Contrary to common assumptions, just because someone disagrees with you over a host of policy issues, that does not make them a bad-faith actor. We need to recognize that America is a very diverse society and, as Ebrahim Rasool said (with respect to South Africa, but he implied it also for the United States), “it belongs to everyone who lives here.” This line is not intended to make a comment about those who are in the United States illegally, but rather it is copied from the statement made by the ANC in South Africa at the end of apartheid. It was key to allowing the peaceful reconciliation between Blacks and Whites in South Africa to take place. In using this phrase in the American context, we want to stress that both progressives and conservatives “belong” in America, and their needs, interests, and rights need to be reconciled or at least seriously considered, both in terms of process and outcome. Only then will we be able to create an America in which everyone would like to live.

As Rasool also pointed out (though using different words), reconciliation needs to be both retrospective and prospective. Parties need to be able to learn the truth about, and make and receive amends for, what happened in the past. And they must do so in a way that allows them to live together successfully in the future. To be successful, reconciliation needs to be what John Paul Lederach calls a “meeting place,” the point at which “truth,” “justice,” “peace,” and “mercy” are balanced”; none can take precedence over the others.

Massively Parallel Goal #6: Promote Effective Communication and Problem-Solving

Effective communication is another key to successful democracies. Leaders and grassroots citizens must be able to understand: the nature of the problems we face; the concerns, interests, and needs of all of the stakeholder groups (not just their own); and the advantages and disadvantages of options for addressing those problems, concerns, interests, and needs. Many traditional conflict resolution processes, such as dialogue, consensus building, problem-solving workshops, and communication and conflict education and training can be useful in this regard. However, whenever possible, these tools need to be deployed in a way that scales up beyond the limited number of people who get to participate in such small-group processes.

Using mass media and social media for such ends, rather than using it for bad-faith purposes, is one way to scale up such efforts. Peacebuilding NGO Search for Common Ground has been a path breaker in this area for decades, pioneering the use of soap operas to teach conflict resolution communication and decision making skills in deeply divided and post-conflict societies.  A newer approach is using people who are now called “influencers,” widely followed role models who can set the tone for more constructive interactions between individuals and groups on different political sides. Two examples are Utah Governor Spencer Cox, who, as head of the National Governor’s Association, started the “Disagree Better” Program. He was recently joined in that effort by the Governor of Colorado, Jared Polis, who is now the leader of the National Governor’s Association.

The Disagree Better initiative will look at the problems of polarization, elevate the solutions that groups around the country are already implementing, and feature Governors showing what disagreeing better looks like. Through public debates, service projects, public service announcements and a variety of other tactics, Americans will see a more positive and optimistic way of working through our problems.

When scaling up isn’t possible, these tools need to be implemented widely and need to be supplemented with other tools that do scale. Examples of other tools include citizen assemblies, advisory committees, policy dialogues, and other processes that come out of the fields of public policy and public administration.

In addition to widely implementing such integrative processes, existing democratic structures and processes need to be examined to determine whether they are:

  1. Operating as intended, and if not, what changes are needed?
  2. Delivering decisions that are seen as wise (decisions that do, in fact, yield the expected and desired outcomes, and are reasonably equitable to all groups)? If not, what changes might be helpful?
  3. Delivering decisions that earn public trust? If not, what changes might be helpful?

Massively Parallel Goal #7: Limit Massively Parallel Partisanship

The Achilles Heel of this whole approach is the fact that massively parallel processes for organizing complex systems can also function in ways that drive the hyperpolarization spiral higher. Right now, in the United States, most people are, indeed working roughly toward the same goal. But it is not any of the goals listed above. Rather it is the goal of decisively defeating “the other side,” “the enemy.” The result is massively parallel hyper-polarization, or as we have called it elsewhere, “massively parallel partisanship.” That is the dominant dynamic in the United States going into the November 2024 election.

Escaping from this dynamic requires a great reframing in which people come to realize that that the principal “enemy” they face is not each other, but rather, the hyper-polarization dynamics that are destroying the democratic institutions that everyone relies on to protect their interests. They need to come to understand that their preferred leader is not going to be able to “save democracy” if that leader ignores the will of close to half of the U.S. population. As people come to this realization, they will discover that, rather than being on opposing sides, they have a shared interest in working together to make democracy work.

It then becomes possible to develop a set of shared principles that guide personal and political interactions – such as vowing to listen respectfully to each other, even across lines of difference, looking for areas of common ground and pursuing those, looking for possible compromises when disagreements remain, and if compromises cannot be found, then agreeing on a standardized process for making a legitimate (though not consensual) decisions, such as passing a law or pursuing a court case. Such principles can, in turn, make major collaborative, cross-party or trans-partisan efforts viable.

In the final installment of this set of newsletters, we will discuss the 53 roles that people and organizations can and are already playing to help massively parallel problem solving and democracy building succeed.

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1Our thanks go to  Olivia Dreier for urging us to write the policy brief and being patient when it took us a very long time. And thanks to Olivia and Rosemary McBryde for your editing and posting on Toda. We also very much appreciate Toda's willingness to allow us to repost the paper in our Substack Newsletter, and on BI, and more broadly, We also appreciate Toda's support of our work. We have learned a great deal from our participation in the Toda Global Challenges to Democracy Program.

2 John Burton, ed. Conflict: Human Needs Theory. London: Palgrave Macmillan. 1990. and John Burton.  Conflict: Basic Human Needs. New York: St. Martins Press. 1990.


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BI sends out newsletter 2-3 times a week. Two of these are substantive articles. Once a week or so we compile a list of the most interesting reading we have found related to our topics of interest: intractable conflict, hyper-polarization, and democracy, and we share them in a "Massively Parallel Peace and Democracy Building Links” newsletter.  These links include articles sent by readers, information about our colleagues’ activities, and news and opinion pieces that we have found to be of particular interest. Each Newsletter will be posted on BI, and sent out by email through Substack to subscribers. You can sign up to receive your copy here and find the latest newsletter here or on our BI Newsletter page, which also provides access to all the past newsletters, going back to 2017.

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