Massively Parallel Problem Solving and Democracy Building: An Ongoing Response to the Threats to Democracy in the U.S. - Part 5

Hyperpolarization Graphic

Newsletter 292 — November 1, 2024

 

Heidi Burgess and Guy Burgess

This is the fifth and final installment 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. The fourth installment described seven goals that massively parallel problem solving and democracy building need to meet in order to succeed.  Here we briefly describe each of the 53 roles we have identified that are needed, and, for the most part, are already being filled to make MPPS and MPDB succeed.  And we note by "filled," we do not mean "full."  There is room for and need for everyone to get involved in this effort!

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.

 

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Massively parallel democracy building roles

To help potential participants better understand the many different roles that need to be played by the people and organizations working on this massively parallel effort (thereby helping people figure out where they might be able to fit in and “make a difference,”) we find it useful to distinguish between strategic roles and action roles.

Strategic roles are “left brain” roles – the people who figure out what needs to be done. They include people who are trying to look at the big picture, figure out what is going wrong, and what, in principle, can be done to fix to those problems.

Action roles are the “right brain” roles played by people who are actually “on the ground,” doing the work of implementing the fixes suggested by strategists. They tend to be more narrowly focused, both in terms of the location of their work, and the nature of the activities they undertake.

Both groups are essential and complement one another. (In practice, of course, many people can simultaneously act as strategists and actors – this is what “reflective practice” is all about.) What follows is a very quick overview of these roles. For a more extensive and detailed description of these roles, please see the complete list in Beyond Intractability.

Conflict Strategists

There are at least three broad categories of conflict strategists, each of which are made up of several discrete roles.

  1. Lookouts are people and organizations which warn of impending problems. They include:
  • Conflict Early Warners (such as the Trust Network which has an early warning/early action system that is on the lookout for politically-motivated violence in the United States),
  • Discrimination Fighters (such as Black Lives Matter and the Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism.
  • Governmental Watchdogs, such as the  Project on Government Oversight , that keep an eye out for governmental overreach.
  • Geopolitical Threat Monitors which warn of external threats (for instance from Russia, Iran, or North Korea), and
  • Canaries who warn about non-political threats (such as climate change, or pandemics).
  1. Democracy Firsters are people and organizations which try to help the larger society understand that democracy’s problems are preventing their societies from successfully addressing all other problems. As such, fixing democracy ought to be everyone’s first priority. This is a big part of what we are trying to do with Beyond Intractability (and this paper). So, too, are the organizations Democracy First and Issue One.
     
  2. Complexifiers are people and organizations which help us get beyond the cognitive biases that encourage us all to pursue simple answers and us-versus-them thinking, and instead, see our complex problems for what they really are. One such person is Amanda Ripley, the journalist who first introduced the concept of “complicating the narrative,” and the Solutions Journalism Network which developed a Complicating the Narrative (CTN) training program for journalists and newsrooms who help us better understand the complexity of each of the topics they cover, and the challenges each of those topics pose. Other Complexifier roles include System Thinkers who try to help us understand how complex systems work, and Political, Behavioral, Psychological, Communication, Social, Technology, and Economic Thinkers who try to understand the complex dynamics present in each of those domains.

Conflict Actors

We focus on the eight principal types of conflict actors – people who do the work of making the democratic dispute handling system function effectively. They include:

  1. Grassroots Citizens who (in this context) conscientiously exercise their civic responsibilities, while also supporting the larger democratic system and people working in the many other roles outlined here. They do not have special training; they are not playing one of the other roles. They are just engaging responsibly in their role of “citizen” and taking that role seriously, realizing that it not only entails rights, but also responsibilities.
     
  2. Visionaries and Healers who help us imagine a society in which we would all like to live (and be willing to work to help create). This includes people who help us look forward to envision a society in which everyone would feel secure, as well as those who help us look backwards and heal from past wrongs.  Examples of forward-looking Visionaries are the ANC which we described earlier as deciding that “South Africa belonged to all who lived there.” American examples include the New Pluralists, and the Liberal Patriot, both of which are trying to help people imagine a society in which disparate groups can live together in peace. An example of a Healer would be the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the many restorative justice programs we have in the United States.
     
  3. De-Escalators who help us reverse escalation and polarization dynamics, stop and prevent future violence, and cultivate mutual trust. They include:
  1. Constructive Communicators who communicate across difference in constructive ways and who can model and teach others to do the same. This category also has a large number of roles, and fortunately, a large number of organizations already working in each role. They include:
  • Bubble Bursters such as AllSides, who work to get people out of their narrow information bubbles, Communication Skill Builders such as Essential Partners, who train people to use dialogue to help “build relationships across differences to address their communities’ most pressing challenges. Bridge Builders such as Braver Angels and Living Room Conversations, which try to help people build bridges and understanding across divides,
     
  • Mass Communicators such as Search for Common Ground which has successfully used soap operas to teach peace and conflict resolution skills (although they are not yet doing this in the United States).
  • Free Speech Advocates such as FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) and the Institute for Free Speech
     
  • Convenors/Facilitators such as The National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation (NCDD), a very large network of organizations that convene processes to help people better understand each other, the challenges they face together, and how best to work together to address those challenges.
     
  • Disinformation Fighters such as  AllSides, and Ad Fontes Media that report on media bias and Comparitech which monitors censorship, 
     
  • Media Reformers such as the Solutions Journalism Network which helps journalists cover problems fairly and in depth, focusing on solutions, not divisions, and
     
  • Conflict Educators and Trainers who help people engage in conflict more constructively.
  1. Issue Analysts help us understand the specifics of a particular complex problem and evaluate possible solutions. There are at least four different roles here: Technical Experts, Technical Reporters (who translate technical jargon into understandable language), Evaluators who help to incorporate public values into the analytical process because science cannot do that, and Science Reformers who focus on holding scientists and technical organizations to high professional standards and protecting them from political pressures that undermine the quality of their work.
     
  2. Collaborative Problem Solvers are people who help us move beyond our us-vs-them/win-lose mindsets and help us work together collaboratively to address our many common problems. This category includes Negotiators, Mediators, Consensus Builders, Peacebuilders, Constructive Advocates (who are people who help activists and advocates use conflict resolution knowledge to make their cases most effectively, without unnecessarily alienating opponents), Global NGOs, and Philanthropists. This is another category that is well represented by many people and organizations – but there is always room for and the need for more.
     
  3. Power Balancers are people who enable us to wisely and equitably make tough decisions in cases where mutually acceptable solutions aren't achievable, and also organizations that help low power groups gain power by networking, organizing and building their civic skills. Roles in this category include:

8. Defenders: People and organizations who study the tactics of bad-faith actors and develop ways of defending the larger society from their actions. Examples include Senators Susan Collins and Joe Manchin who sponsored and championed the Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act of 2022 that revised aspects of U.S. voting, vote certification, counting, and the Presidential transition process in an effort to prevent another crisis similar to the one that occurred on January 6, 2022, when President Trump tried to use loopholes in the Electoral Count Act of 1887 to overturn the election of Joe Biden.

Altogether, there are 53 roles listed above, and many we have probably missed. Many of these roles have many organizations actively engaged in them; others are less well covered. But our hope is that people will look at this list and gain confidence that there really is a massively parallel movement to defend democracy well underway. And there is a place for pretty much anyone in it.

Conclusion

The United States’ democracy is an enormously complex conflict handling system that is not working nearly as well as it needs to work. This complex problem requires a similarly complex solution. It is not simply a matter of voting the “good guys” in and the “bad guys” out. It is not simply a matter of changing a few laws (such as the Electoral Count Act) or reforming electoral processes (by implementing ranked choice voting or nonpartisan primaries or Congressional reforms), although all those things can help to fix one part of the complex system.

It is more a matter of examining all the diverse systems, sub-systems and processes, determining what is broken, how it is broken, who is being helped, who is being hurt, and how it might be fixed in order to best meet the needs of the whole society, not just part of it (particularly, not just helping Democrats or Republicans, or certain races at the expense of others). Changes should help everyone, or at least as close to everyone as possible.

The only way we know of doing such a large-scale analysis and intervention is by utilizing a massively parallel approach which has myriad people and organizations working in different substantive and geographical areas to assess local problems and fix those “little things.” But together, these “little things” can build on and reinforce each other, such that the entire system starts to become more effective. And once innovations become valuable locally, the pressure to institute similar changes at the national level will grow. Ideally, that will enable leaders and their constituents to work together much more effectively than they do now. This, in turn, will enable most everyone to work together to start addressing our myriad substantive challenges including immigration, climate, health, education, inequality, and racism.

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.

 


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About the MBI Newsletters

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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