this but i know he's incredibly proud to be an american. great respect for the anthem and all that it represents especially for our men and women serving in uniform all around the world. he also say of course part of that pride in our country needs recognizing their moments where we as a country have lived up to our highest ideals and means respecting ideal in these. >> tonight on book tv, a look at political polarization in america we start with the book, high conflict. or get tracked and how we get out. the author of the book breaking the social media presence, how to make our platforms less polarizing and later, a conversation about the book to speak your mind. >> amanda, it is a pleasure to get a chance toal talk to you about what is fascinating book exploring what ik think to call

the invisible hand of our time but when i was reading it, it almost seemed more like background music of our daily lives and that is the challenge of what you label high conflict, basically as you define it, distinct from, sort of natural conflict with the type of conflict that results into a true us versus them so i want to spend time talking with you today about that, diving into some of the markers and investigative work you did to bring this book and concept forward but i thought i would start by asking you to talk a little bit about what got you

interested in this particular topic. some ways, what i found fascinating about reading it was it is whatt we are living throuh an these stories in our daily life now but thought about in a way most of us never stopped to think about and process as these stories unfold. >> thank you. i am so glad to be back with you all talking about this. inappropriatee back story, we could get back to that but four years ago i felt like as a journalist i had to do something different. i felt it so easy as a

journalist to just make arkham political conflicts worse even if you didn't intend to. some intend to but most don't and get here we were in a felt like there was something i wasn't understanding about what was going on in the country and that is a problem, right? so i spent a lot of time with people who study conflict of all kinds. personal, political, professional, at scale, individual and the study of conflict as a system, particularly intractable conflict for me clicked everything else into place. there's a lot of forces that got us where we are back as an overly made everything makes sense in a distorted type of length. then the question was all right, what can we learn from people who have been through ugly conflict and got to a better place? so i followed a handful of people including a politician in california, a former gang leader in chicago, environmental

activist list, frustrated democrats in new york city and regular frustrated republicans in rural michigan and the goal was to see how they got from high conflict about this unpleasant conflict destructive conflict to good conflict because the problem is it conflict, it turns out. it can feel that way but the problem is the kind of conflict and all those people did make that journey was is incredibly encouraging. the book is really about how they did that and how more of us could do the same if we wanted to. >> and you talk about in the context of defining this realm, this most naturally -- comes to mind, this impractical forces.

i wonder if just to help viewers and listeners to understand this framework, if you could talk about how this appears in divorce cases, you talk about high conflict is a t mysterious force inciting people to lose their mind, and these vendettas. i was so struck in the start of the book as b you talk about ths context of divorce. >> that is where the phrase high conflict comes from. there are people who work in the divorce wealth and psychologist, lawyers may refer to high conflict divorce is one in which there are pervasive negative exchanges in a hostile environment for conflict is the destination. the conflict doesn't go anywhere, there is no movement. about a quarter of americans

divorce each year could be categorized as high conflict selects like 200,000 divorces so it turns out there are high conflict politics, companies the high conflict people so i think it is a useful way to understand this special category of conflict in which there is not progress where you are just stuck and is something, there is a distinct difference between good conflict and high conflict. i think it helps, for me at help me get out of the narrowing idea we have to have bipartisan unity or be at each other's throats. those are not the only two choices just like in a marriage, you don't have to get along all the time and you also don't have to verbally or emotionally or

physically abuse each other, there's a lot of in between. >> one of the things you have this quote that i loved and helped clarify for me a lot of what you're talking about where you quote the president of journey germany saying a kind of social rage and that really does seem like part of the challenge we are wrestling with in our politics where names matter were the names change but the outrage doesn't and i am curious as you trace this back and look at the roots, when did america lose its

mind? when did americann politics move from a natural tension over policies and philosophy, into something much more can today to a bitter sports rivalry? >> the interesting thing, most of the research on polarization dates back roughly around the 80s in the aftermath watergate and vietnam and other things that brought down the trust level in institutions and i would say the adversarial traditions of the news media, many reporters still think they are breaking watergate every day or trying to. there is this adversarial us versus them mindset from things like that and you find media outlets and figure out fox news that they could reliably not

target the whole country but grievances and anger, not all the time but much of the time to get this niche audience coming back and back to grow and grow and other media outlets have figured that out and as have social media networks so we designed our institutions to incentivize high conflict. the important thing about that is we can done -- we designed them. they're not from god, so we can't designed them to incentivize good conflict and you see that in your own life. we've all worked at places in a church or synagogue or neighborhood where there were cultures doing with conflict differently. maybe some places where people avoid it and that is how leadership dealsls with it, it doesn't usually work great but also very common and other places where conflict is

combustible. out-of-control. destructive to the things the organizations are supposed to be about other places that have tradition in rituals and policies in place to make conflict help your so it is possible to top increment just as we are hardwired for that conflict, humans are conflict. most of human history is about good conflict or we would not have gone here. >> one thing you talk about the toon reducing high conflict is breaking out of the binary. the idea that you can't reduce a situation whether political or personal or professional the idea that there are only two sides or two possible solutions and whenwo you say institutions don't come from god, who do talk about one you saw and learned

about in the context of naturally setting up a system that does not reduce things to put all parties or political binaries and i wonder if you could talk about this is what you saw it being able to teach us about how to do politics better. >> it's funny because i didn't know anything about this before i started working on this but the book was really about casting a wide nethe indexing, other examples of institutions that do conflict better institutionally, enshrined in what they do? the high is very interesting. the concept is that we are all connected, there is no us or them, there's a fundamentally.foundation, the idea is that we are interdependent so in some ways,

it's particularly appropriate for this moment in history when we are interdependent as we see with the pandemic and other things so the idea is revere jesus christ and believing all major religions come from one spiritual source started in the mid- 1800s and it spread just about everywhere. 150,000 adherents in the u.s., the largest community in india but anyway, what is interesting, it is significant, small but global based and there are no ministers, clerical leaders to run things so how do they make decisions? what they do is essentially, one form of politics, each spring everyone in each 17000 location gathers together to elect leaders so close to democracy operating in 233 countries here's the twist. everything about these elections

is designed to reduce the odds of high conflict. the thing about high conflict, once you are in it, it is tricky to get out. magnetic. lots of psychological and sociological reasons for that but the idealal is to stay out f it. don't let it start. there are no parties allowed, no binary categories, people can't campaign for a position even if i want it. you can even discuss you can only discussan which qualities e most needed and when they do the election, it's basically a sober process after prayer, each person writes down the names of nine people they think have the experience and character to lead the community at that moment secret ballot and nine winners are announced, there's no celebrating, it is considered ah duty, not a victory and once

they have people in place and they have to make decisions prefer the community just conflicts that arise and project and all of that, they have other traditions in place to keep ego in check and high conflict less likely, one of which meetings are called consultations and they do things like if you propose an ideas, once i proposd this idea, it's no longer my idea. these things that sound small but playly into how humans work and particularly conflict to reduce odds of the binary dynamic that we know leads to high conflict is interesting. >> you also mentioned the pandemic and that was the subject i want to spend some time talking to you about. you are a writer for the

atlantic and i wrote a piece at the start of the pandemic for the atlantic last year and i have sort of continued to chew over in my mind about whether i got it terribly wrong and i was thinking about it in the context of your book and rating on high conflict. i wrote about in the first year of the pandemic way back at the beginning, when i saw as this unique spirit in america, national moment of unity and desire to work together as americans that i saw as a unique moment in american history. a lot of my own history writing, 9/11 and speaking about unity

the country has after 9/11, never forget united we stand and feeling we were in same moment in the beginning and middle of march last year you saw individual americans making these choices about the pandemic, closing their businesses ahead of when the government told them to, schools closing ahead of the government telling them to and at that moment, i was sort of celebrating the spirit of 2020 that america is coming together to the pandemic and then of course every week since then, it has felt less like a united nation the base of the pandemic. i sort of keep coming back to, in the frame of high conflict, this question of how it seemed

like americans got response to the pandemic right and then politics must it up and sort of how do you think about, in your own high conflict frame the america you've lived through this last year? >> i think you were right then and there was opportunity for that to last longer than it did. we know all over the world, not just in america there was a real coming together, like you, i have covered disasters and terrorist attacks and it's always true that there is this golden hour after a terrible catastrophe or during when there is a very strong human pool to come together to help oned another. you can really feel it and it's an amazing experience and i

think one of our great powers as society but it has to be harnessed and sustained, we saw late march 202590% of americans they believe they're all in it together, 63% from the fall 2018. it's hard to remember but the u.s. senate passed that massive first federal system was built by a vote of 96 -- zero. the quantitative absolutely were correct. people are wired into us and them and also to expand our definition of us under certain conditions. the shop, like a pandemic, can make us c encompass the whole world overnight. there's a huge opportunity in conflict to use shocks, conflicts write about this a

lot, shocks because high conflict is a system with interlocking diabolical parts self perpetuating the commotion machine, when you have a big shock to the system, it could be a weather event, a death, violence or a new common enemy like a virus, when you have a shock backing up and temporarily interlocking systems but you have to seize the opportunity which is usually left to leadership at the national or local or both levels. on the one hand, i would say opportunity was not seized particular week at theas nationl level, variance around the world and the country on that. it was certainly in some places in some towns and it's also true that the duration of this particular kind of cataclysm is important, it is hard for humans to sustain that feeling when it

goes on and on and no chance to recover. and this is why looking forward, the future pandemics, it is important probably for my psychological and sociological view as well as biological view, really start strong and united clear with clear consistent messaging tested on real humans in real time to try to frontload the reaction to make it shorter, fundamentally too much to ask for humans who are social creatures who need socializing and ritual and interaction, especially children the way they need food and water, too much to ask her to go on this long so i think both are true, it was a huge opportunity, there was a moment but we had a pre-existing condition, extreme polarization and high conflict so that

doesn't goo away when these things happen and i would say the last thing, hyper polarized societies, one thing is he is the news media becomes relentlessly negative on all sides of thehe spectrum and there's a lot of reasons but i also think that doesn't help us because even when the case load went down when vaccines started to look like s they were going o work, he didn't see a huge chain in tone and emphasis in the headlines in there was a study done on this about comparing negativity of major u.s. news accounts during the pandemic to international accounts of the pandemic and the u.s. covers more negative, even more negative than science coverage -- a lot of different things happening but the bottom line is, when you have this level of high conflict, it's hard to seize opportunities.

>> you talked a lot about it and i'll shorthanded here as the rogue husband problem, we are sort of all in conflict scenarios beholding to the most combustible people in the group or loyalty, you talk about competing groups and loyalties and identities. i wonder if you could talk about the way you call them fire starters, whatever things that cause people to be the source of high conflict? >> the rogue present comes from the story of hatfield and mccoy feud which many people may have heard of but quickly, in 1878, randolph according visited the

farm of the big sandy river in west virginia, these two families lived peacefully side by side for generations farming the land and randolph mccoy thought he recognized one of the pigs on his farm and it must have been stolen from his farm and no one could convince him to drop it. so he complained to authorities and organized a trial, mccoy lost the trial and it wasn't a great expense forth him but he t it roll off and everyone moved on. the problem is, it's a group problem because they have many relatives all over the area and for a year end a half after the trial, a few of his nephews got in a fight with a witness who testified against mccoy in the pig trial and they beat the man to death so this is the moment the feud became high conflict

and morphed into an attractive one and the next decade there was a stabbing, vigilante shooting, supreme court case, women were beaten, 80 people got drawn into the feud, i explained this toeg say that one of the conditions thate reliably lead o high conflict cases i've looked at, powerful identities made salience by leaders when we experience collective emotions, it's geometrically compounding conflict because you don't place with tax or insulted or humiliated by someone in your group fact or insulted or accumulated from fields, it is the same parts of the brain that is pain. it feels like it's happening tov you and the reverse is true when

somebody in your group do something amazing and powerful, you feel pride. fans after 13 and investable, they feel they are able to personally in games or context which is clearly not true but it feels true in the act true and it is our perception of the powerful group i think that thesel particularly when there are two, there's something about this binary, this is where our particular legal system of winner take all system or two parties is really designed high conflict based on what we know about human behavior. the powerful opposition groups, it doesn't bring up our best conflict as humans, i think it's fair to say. >> one of the things fascinated

or curious to talk with you about, what does america with the lessons you havee laid on facebook? we are locked into this high conflict in our politics and most of us don't want to be there and i think that's another part of your book talking about how conflict hollers out the middle he or something in politics and the war zone. what advice do you have to the country as we wrestle with where we are right now? >> it's collective levels, the macro level. one thing we were talking about about the binary, is to make

significant reforms to our electoral system and make third parties possible. the founding fathers did not want there to be parties, but among just two. there's no reason we have to stick with this formula, we know from the research done about polarization countries with multiple parties ranked choice voting representation tends to be less polarized and trust. if you itts is, which changes everything and lowered the volume in a sense, grievances and injustice some states have moved into this direction already, alaska and others are trying to accurately, session, introduced in congress to make this happen so that is what you can tangibly get behind that makes a lot of. the other thing that i think is

important to realize is how much is operating at an individual level and also operating on the people in power need to change what they are doing and they happen captured by high conflict, quickly about individual things people do not just lease everyone. things i've done in my own life from another condition of high conflict conflict of entrepreneurs who are people, companies, platforms intentionally exploit conflict their own and it could be a prophet but often i find it for attention, a sense of meaning, camaraderie and power. becoming aware of who they are in your life or social media

news diet and try to keep a distance between you and to them think of conflict, that ise something that is effective, the people i follow foror the book including this politician who found himself caught in this vortex of high conflict, one of the first things he did was to start rely on different people for political advice and moved away from the seasoned veteran political organizer advising him in this way, good and evil when were right news, those words and entrepreneur, and whether it was somebody who saw nuance inhumanity among the people he disagreed with. to take a more extreme example, curtis, former gang leader i spent a lot ofcr time with a chicago clearly across town to get out of conflict he was in just many years long vendetta so people can find him and went things went bad as they always

do, and his cousin he's very close to was affirmatively ordered, he didn't know who had done it. he couldn't react the way cooler, claudia the distance he creates poetically to select unconquered imprints. ... gag changed the way that you do your journalism. you know, i know it changed the way you talk to your family because you talk about the way that you tried to listen

differently around the dinner table but when you're out doing your job, how do you report and write differently and explain differently now that you understand the backdrop? >> the rules of engagement for journalism don't apply the same way. they just will not work and they will often backfire so for me i had to develop a whole new set to be useful and it's hard. i'm still figuring it out and i'm interested in suggestions a and working with the journalism network which is a nonprofit to help them do this. how do you cover controversy in ways that illuminate rather than just exacerbate the conflict. and one of the sort of overarching ideas is that you have to complicate the narrative that your audience has going into a polarizing issue and that requires knowing what that narrative is and it's going to

be differentyo for different audiences and figuring out where are the places. is it true or limited and using history or different locations or a wider lens on the problem to see what is happening to help your audience have a more youthful view of either the conflict, the other side or themselves. so that is now how i sort of try to measure success. is the story going to help illuminate anything about this conflict and if not, i'm not going to do it. it's easier said than done. but i think that many newsrooms and editors right now particularly at the national level have fundamentally underestimated their audiences desire and ability to handle the complexities right now and i think that most americans want something very different from the news than what they are getting so there's a huge

opportunity to do journalism this one is from richard. did you change your mind on any serious as the book unfolded in the research unfolded?ar what surprised you about your research? >> many things. i had a sort of different conflicts and different categories and i think political polarization is a thing. i don't think that's very helpful.he in different kinds of conflict

whether it's the war or political conflict, the behavior at a fundamental level is not that different. so i'm trying to be less sly load and how i look at the research and storytelling. the other thing i would say is i've become more suspicious of my own righteousness when it flares up and i want to be careful because sometimes people say it sounds like i'm saying you can to be passionate or angry or have radical ideas. i think we really need to get a more nuanced and how we talk about these things because you can have radical visions and movements for social change. we need those things without being in high conflict. so some of the differences between good conflict and high conflict are telltale signs and you can see them all around you. in good conflict, there's still

some curiosity. there might be moments of surprise. e you experience a range of emotions. in high conflict everything feels much clearer than it possibly is and you begin to generalize about many people you know and will not meet so that lack of humility and complexity is quite dangerous not just for the country though it is but also the most chilling part about high conflict in every story that i follow. hit eventually begins to mimic the behavior of their adversaries. consciously or not we can lean into the fight to stop. so the politician who goes into politics to make it less toxic and less inclusive, he made it more toxic and more inclusive

and there's a million examples like this. so this is the warning about high conflict is if you want to change the world, this is important. make sure because otherwise you will end up risking the thing you hold most dear. are there any political leaders or state-level political leaders that you see the conflict that we want to be encouraging? like who does this well on the national leveldo that you've se? >> it's funny that you should say that because i'm trying to work on the project of actually quantifying members of congress and other high-profile leaders in the news media and other

places. it incentivizes just like twitter we have set up every incentive for this and no disincentive at this point and again that is all fixable, changeable and should be fixed and changed, but we are asking people to be something different than what they have been rewarded for being for many years. but i think it's a great question and i'm working on it. i have some theories but i have some data and intuition. >> i have no shortage of entrepreneurs in society but the flip side of it would be

trusting projects but not know what part they are reading in. question here for lawrence. whatat is the role of technology in encouraging high conflict and sort of how much of this is basically the tools that we are using to live in the digital age versus something that is actually new to our society? >> any attention economy is going to play to the high conflict. so, whether it is news media or social media. anything that makes money off of seizing your attention, literally the cheapest way to do that is through fear and indignation so that is the way to the bottom that we've seen in

many different industries. so i think that has definitely accelerated it. that said, i think we focus a lot on, you know, social media which is definitely important to focus on and reform but this started before social media, and some of the most, some of the people that are most captured by the high conflict in their rhetoric and the sort of estranged family members in the research are not on facebook and twitter so if you look back where you see a lot of this starting is with talk radio and cable news. i think it's important to cast a broad net when we talk about the ways technology has incentivized

high conflict. it's true and it's not just social media. >> another question here from elizabeth. her question is how do we help kids develop the muscle to avoid high conflict and i will personalize it a little bit by saying how do you parent differently now that you understand high conflict? >> it's tricky because, yes, i have a teenage son and he is living in the world and reading the news and it is easy for him to slip into sort of sweeping generalizations about goodza people and bad people and i get that and i don't want to be the person that's just like let's look at the full picture but i also have found if i try to

connect it to his own life or our own family, like how do you resolve conflict among your friends or in a soccer game or in our family and think about how do we overlay that. it sounds simplistic but i think it's complex to try to make that connection and the thing that i do and i did this and all of my interviews and this is the thing that's changed most for me personally and professionally is asi do this technique called moving. if somebody is upset about something happening in the world or in his life, the first thing that people want is to be heard. there's a ton of research on this. that's what people want, and they almost never get it.

so once people feel heard and not just by nodding and smiling but it sounds like what you're saying is you feel like it is fundamentally unjust that you can't go back to school in person even though your teacher is vaccinated. i'm making this up, but you first acknowledge that you heard them and then you have to ask if you got it right. did i get that right, like with genuine curiosity. you cannot fake it. when you do this it is amazing what it unlocks in people. this different life experiences and once they feel heard which they don't mistake for agreement byth the way. they don't think i agree but once they feel like you are really trying to get them they open up and they say less

extreme things afterwards and all of us get stifled in high conflict and they are more open to information. you don't have to argue it or make your case you just make sure to feel heard and everybody can move on, so it is an incredible skill that we should absolutely be teaching kids to finally answer the question. >> thank you so much for joining us and for putting together such a wonderful and relevant and kind of book. if you are watching out there, you can pick up the book anywhere that you buy books, but particularly through our partners at politics and prose here in washington and use the

code special ten at checkout for an extra discount. i want to thank the ambassador for sponsoring the book series and most of all amanda, thank you for putting such an interesting book together about the backdrop and background of our modern times. a. >> thank you for having me. i enjoyed the conversation. >> june 13th, 1971, "the new york times" published the pentagon papers, a classified history of the vietnam war. this subsequently led to the creation of a special investigative unit in the nixon white house which became known as the plumbers. author michael dobbs for early of the "washington post" has written a book titled king richard which takes a look at that special unit which eventually resulted in the

resignation of the president of the united states. fifty years later, he focuses on that time in our history and event that is well known today as watergate. listen wherever you get your podcasts.