Don’t Escalate Doesn’t Mean Don’t Fight
Activism can be compatible with bridge-building. – BCB #139
“How can I make peace when my enemies want to destroy me?”
This is an eternal question that seems especially relevant in the current moment. In the first weeks of Trump’s second term, many Blue-leaning Americans have called for putting depolarization work in the backseat. It is time to fight, they argue, because the threat of autocracy is simply too dire.
But as polarization researcher and friend of BCB Zachary Elwood recently argued in a thread on X—and later an op-ed for The Hill—depolarization and political activism aren’t inherently at odds with each other. “[O]ne can do both — and I’d argue aiming to do both actually makes one’s activism more persuasive and less likely to create pushback.”
I think a lot of anti-Trump approaches have backfired. When liberals unfairly demean Trump supporters, or interpret Trump’s statements in the worst possible light, they deepen conservatives’ feeling of being under siege and push them further into warlike thinking.
This works both ways. Aggressive, insulting rhetoric by Republicans can make liberals feel more defensive. For example, saying that Democratic stances on immigration stem only from a desire to win votes is insulting, and will strike many as a malicious smear. Such insults create pushback — and can even shift people’s stances in the opposite direction.
This is the core problem of polarization. We escalate, thinking we’re fighting back effectively, but we’re actually reinforcing the cycle.
The key to getting out of this trap, Elwood argues, is to shift how you’re looking at your political opponents. You don’t have to agree or even get along with them. You can feel fear and frustration. But you also need to find and take opportunities to help people “see that we are caught in a self-reinforcing cycle of contempt and provocation” or “doom loop.” When scorched-earth politics is the only kind, neither side gets what it wants because it destroys what we value about our society and ourselves. This is the travesty of war.
To this end, Elwood has a few suggestions. First, he points out, it’s useful to try decoupling people’s beliefs from their approaches to conflict. “This clarity helps us focus on what matters and makes it easier to reduce support for us-versus-them approaches,” he explains. Additionally, he suggests people on both sides work to avoid are issuing righteous, hateful pronouncements about one’s political opponents, and catastrophizing about the current state of the country:
When we speak as if the sky has already fallen, we help create an arms-race mentality. I’ve heard some people act as if it’s a certainty that Republicans will refuse to ever relinquish power in future elections. Framing that as inevitable makes it easy for Republicans to believe such concerns are only an excuse for aggressive countermeasures (as was the case for some perceptions of attempts to remove Trump from the ballot). We should keep in mind that, in conflict, it can be hard to distinguish between defense and offense.
None of these moves have to get in the way of fighting for what you believe in. Crucially, they may well help you persuade a few of your opponents rather than pushing them further away. As political scientist Daniel Stid pointed out last summer (and recently reiterated), pluralism can be a crucial tool for navigating through dark times in a democracy:
Rather than glossing over fundamental differences of principle, pluralism pushes us to choose between and among them where we can, balance them where we must, then take responsibility for our choices. There is nothing about pluralism that prevents us from taking moral stances. But we are also obliged to recognize that others in the political community can reasonably and invariably will assume different stances; ours will not necessarily trump theirs. The resulting impasse is where the hard work of politics in a liberal democracy begins.
The goal is not fighting in itself. It’s to come to some sort of reasonable change. If you only wield the stick and not the carrot, you’re missing half of the strategy.
What would politically neutral AI mean?
BCB editor Jonathan Stray here. I don’t often talk about my job at UC Berkeley’s Center for Human-compatible AI here, but I’m researching the effects of AI on conflict there. Recently I wrote a long article on the question of how we could build “politically neutral” AI, that is, intelligent machines that don’t mess with our politics. Quoting myself:
If we do not want AI interference in human politics, we need to be able to say exactly what that means – and it has to be possible to implement it in practice. This is a surprisingly tricky thing to do. It doesn’t work to train an AI to have no effect on what humans believe, because such a machine would lie to try to prevent you from changing your mind. It isn’t enough to say that all AI output should be accurate and truthful, because there are plenty of ways to be deceptive using only true facts. And while “objectivity” is sometimes taken to mean balance or fairness, it’s not a coherent enough concept to be useful.
We need to look elsewhere, at ideas of what deliberation should look like in a democratic society. Drawing on this, I propose the following definition of AI neutrality: when asked about a controversial topic, the machine should produce an answer which 1) as many people as possible from each side of a debate would say fairly includes their perspective while 2) ensuring that the same percentage of each side approves. I’ll call this idea maximum equal approval. This is a pluralist view of AI alignment, where the goal isn’t to find one perfect answer but to equitably balance competing values, interests, and groups. It can also be seen as a quantitative formalization of Wikipedia’s successful “neutral point of view” policy.
In particular, a “neutral” AI would persuade people sometimes — when a balanced argument favored one side or the other. It would have to, because never changing your mind no matter what the evidence is absurd. The trick is defining “balanced argument.” For an external perspective on this idea, I encourage you to check out Tech and Social Cohesion’s writeup.
Standing on Principle Means Fighting for Everyone
Typically, people invoke lofty principles like freedom of speech only when it favors their argument. It’s rare to find an organization that fights on principle no matter who benefits, but the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) has become a contender.
FIRE has often been viewed as Red-leaning, particularly because it had long argued against campus cancel culture and has historically received funding from a variety of conservative groups and individuals. But if you’ve paid close attention to the issues the organization has taken on recently, you’ll notice that FIRE really seems to be following through on its commitment to “to defend and sustain the individual rights of all Americans to free speech and free thought.”
In recent weeks FIRE has filed a lawsuit on behalf of an LGBTQ+ student organization at Texas A&M after the university system banned drag performances, defended a representative in Maine’s legislature who was prohibited from speaking or voting on the House floor after she posted on social media about trans athletes, probed the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil and encouraged other Columbia students being investigated for criticizing Israel to get in touch.
In a Substack post last month, FIRE’s president Greg Lukianoff spoke to the organization’s commitment to its principles—and offered tips for others seeking to do the same. His lessons for being nonpartisan in a hyperpartisan age are:.
Be willing to drive the bus into a wall before compromising your values
Promote and preserve viewpoint diversity within your organization
Be wary of ideological drift, or “O’Sullivan’s Curse”
Call out abuses on all sides
Give credit where credit is due
Be willing to make common cause with ideological opponents
Don’t throw the people you’re defending under the bus
Remember that the current political moment isn’t new
Quote of the Week
It’s crazy that the post-WW2 international order is coming to an end due to a decade long Tumblr vs. 4chan war
(If you’re missing the deep lore here, see this wild piece of internet history.)