America 251: Listening Across Political Lines

**Brian Lehrer** (0:10)
It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. We're going to start a series now that's kind of an experiment in how Americans can talk to each other better in these polarized times. So much of the talk around the country's 250th anniversary this summer was about that polarization, right? It was among the worst periods in the country's history for that. And that polarization was just taken as a given by the time we reached July 4th, that America 250 was an America that's coming apart. So we're trying an experiment that we're calling America 251 to see if we can't be a place where people talk better to each other as we move forward in time, not long for a nostalgic past from any point of view that may or may not have even been real. Maybe we can make a small contribution to not having as much political violence in our country as we have right now.
Some people even suggest we're heading toward a new civil war. Maybe we can do a little to help avoid that. There are also so many hate crimes being committed now. The city of New York, for example, as some of you know, has reported hate crimes rising this year and in recent years, while other kinds of crimes have been going down.
What we won't do in this experiment is pretend to have consensus or common ground where those things don't exist. The idea isn't to avoid conflict necessarily, it's to talk better about our differences and approach people who disagree with us in good faith, not in the name calling, enemies list style that is so prevalent today on social media. Maybe something like this helps just a little over time to get a country closer to cultural and policy outcomes that respect as many people's identities and interests as possible. Some of you have heard the spots we've been running that invite listeners who felt proud of our country on the 4th of July or felt more ashamed of it to engage with each other for today's segment. We do have our first pair of listeners who we will meet in a few minutes. First though, we'll welcome a guest who's been influence on us in creating this series, the journalist and conflict mediator, Amanda Ripley, author of the 2021 book High Conflict, Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out. She also writes a sub-stack newsletter along these lines called Unraveled. We'll talk about Amanda's work and she will help facilitate the conversation with our pair of listeners, with all the experience she's accumulated doing things like this in her work. Amanda, thanks for helping us launch America 251, and welcome back to WNYC.

**Amanda Ripley** (2:50)
Thank you so much, Brian. I'm excited to be here.

**Brian Lehrer** (2:52)
Your book is called High Conflict. You contrast it with a term you use throughout called Good Conflict. How do you mean those terms?

**Amanda Ripley** (3:01)
Well, one thing I've learned is that there are different kinds of conflict, and many of them are really good and healthy and useful.
But there's a special kind of conflict which we're seeing a lot of today, which is when conflict escalates to a point where it really kind of takes on a life of its own. And in this state, we behave differently. We make a lot of mistakes. We literally lose our peripheral vision. And the worst part is in high conflict, we always end up damaging the thing that we care most about, right? Whether it's our family or our country.
So that's high conflict. And it is, it's kind of like a perpetual motion machine. Like it's a cycle that is, if you just do what's intuitive, you will feed that cycle and it's very hard to stop. There are ways to stop it and we'll talk about that, but that is the kind of conflict that leads to violence. That is the kind of conflict that leads to perpetual war of different kinds. And it can, it generally leaves everyone worse off to different degrees.

**Brian Lehrer** (4:10)
So what's good conflict? Because some people may be hearing a description of high conflict and think, well, we want to avoid conflict. We want to have consensus. We want to have agreement.

**Amanda Ripley** (4:21)
Right. This is the, this is the problem, right? Is it feels like those are our choices. Like we either, we either avoid conflict and sort of suppress what we really think and try not to talk about politics. And that's what most people are doing. Like two thirds of Americans say they just don't talk about politics with their relatives and understandably so, right?