Читать книгу Bridge Builders - Nathan Bomey - Страница 7

When the COVID-19 pandemic erupted in early 2020, I thought perhaps this would be the catalyst that finally brought Americans together. Surely this crisis – a life-or-death situation for millions of people – would prompt us to rally alongside one another, bond with each other despite our differences, and set aside our political disagreements to get through it together.

Looking back on it, my hope was terribly naive. It didn’t happen. It was never going to happen.

Yes, Americans showed plenty of support for frontline workers who put their lives at risk to contain the virus. And we did a lot of Zoom calls with our friends, which was nice for a while until it got tiresome. But it wasn’t long before we began bickering over the roots of the COVID-19 crisis and arguing over what to do about it.

The tendency of some Republicans, in particular, to resist the exhortations of public health officials to wear masks placed them and others at risk of death and profound economic hardship.¹ One reason may be because then-President Donald Trump initially refused to set a good example by wearing a mask in public. To be sure, at various stages during the pandemic, many other prominent Republicans, including Ohio Governor Mike DeWine and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, publicly promoted masks, which were scientifically proven to save people from contracting the disease.² Nonetheless, mask wearing became so contentious that National Public Radio referred to it as “another signifier of political identity,” as Republicans insistent on maintaining their personal freedom declared that masks are “for the weak” and reflect “government overreach.” On the other hand, there were also reports of people – presumably Democrats in many cases – berating others for not wearing masks in socially distanced outdoor situations where they were scientifically unnecessary.³ Debate about the seriousness of the crisis even turned rigidly partisan, as Republicans became less concerned about it as the months went along, while Democrats became more concerned.⁴

We should not be surprised that the pandemic turned out to be a force of division. One-time events – no matter how significant – are no match for our chronic divisiveness. Even sudden disruption of our way of living cannot overcome the disgust we have for others who aren’t like us. Such disruption can provide only a superficial sense of togetherness – and usually for a short period of time – unless people on the ground are ready, willing, and able to organically transform their circumstances into an opportunity to build bridges toward each other. Absent such a concerted effort, we’d rather fight about our circumstances than fight together against our circumstances.

It was, in fact, virtually inevitable that the pandemic – which, by the end of 2020, had killed more than 340,000 Americans, infected more than 19.6 million,⁵ and ravaged the economy – would cast a spotlight on our national divides. Much like there was no quick fix for the pandemic after it began raging, so there is no quick fix for our crisis of polarization – no treatment that can eradicate divisiveness overnight. “The divisions between Republicans and Democrats on fundamental political values – on government, race, immigration, national security, environmental protection, and other areas – reached record levels during Barack Obama’s presidency,” according to the Pew Research Center, and those gaps grew “even larger” under Trump.⁶ During his four years in the White House, Trump personally and relentlessly attacked his political opponents, emboldened White nationalists, assailed reporters as enemies, and unleashed furious tweets day after day, among innumerable other polarizing actions and statements.

After Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s defeat of Trump in the November 2020 election, we can certainly hope that political polarization will ease a bit, in part because of the former vice president’s pledge to pursue bipartisanship and the perception that he could serve as the “healer-in-chief” following Trump’s intensely polarizing reign.⁷ But Biden’s win was far from the sweeping victory that might’ve signaled a national repudiation of Trump’s style of political vengeance and intransigence. Rather, although Biden received the most votes of any presidential candidate in US history while campaigning on a platform to unify the country – more than 75 million people backed him – Trump got more votes than any previous sitting president.⁸ Despite all the polarizing things he was responsible for, Trump still won the support of more than 72 million Americans on election day.⁹

And even though he outperformed expectations, Trump baselessly labeled the election results as fraudulent.¹⁰ His own Department of Homeland Security reported that the election was “the most secure in American history,”¹¹ yet Trump repeatedly refused to concede. In doing so, he injected further animus into the American political environment, threatening to erode voters’ confidence in future elections and further solidifying the fissures that plague our democracy.

As the election showed us, the things that divide us are deeply embedded in the American psyche. They cannot be swept away with a particular electoral outcome or erased by an inspiring politician. Among Democrats, 61 percent view Republicans as racist, bigoted, and sexist, while 54 percent of Republicans view Democrats as spiteful and 49 percent view them as ignorant, according to a poll conducted in late 2019 for digital news outlet Axios. About one-fifth of Democrats and onefifth of Republicans view the other side as “evil.”¹²

Yes, that’s the same adjective we would typically use to characterize Maleficent from Sleeping Beauty or Scar from The Lion King – as in, the same way we would describe a maniacal sorcerer or a murderous tyrant from an animated movie. But there’s nothing cinematic or fictitious about our situation. No one is here to sing “Hakuna Matata” and explain how we’re all part of the circle of life.

Among both Democrats and Republicans, only 2–3 percent view the other side as kind, while no more than 4 percent view the other side as thoughtful, according to the Axios survey. The poll had a margin of error of three points, meaning the percentage of Democrats and Republicans who view each other as kind could be as low as zero.¹³ Think about that for a second.

The tendency of people of difference to loathe one another on a deeply personal level is what political scientists call “affective polarization” – and it’s coursing through America’s veins. “When polarization started emerging, it looked like disagreement about issues,” said Jonathan Rauch, a US political scholar at the Brookings Institution. “Affective polarization is different because it means you have an actual emotional dislike of the other side. It’s often not even issue based. It’s based on the sense that the other side is dangerous, evil, wants to endanger people like me – a threat.”

In lawmaking, affective polarization throttles legislative progress because politicians don’t have an incentive to work together if their constituents actively or passively support their obstinacy. That’s obvious to anyone acquainted with the unending stasis on Capitol Hill.

Our democratic principles are at risk of crumbling if we can’t have difficult conversations with people of difference, tackle challenging issues together, confront our personal biases, and see the world through each other’s eyes. As conservative scholar and author Arthur C. Brooks wrote in his 2019 book, Love Your Enemies, affective polarization is breeding a culture of contempt. It is undermining entire communities, interpersonal relationships, and institutional stability.

In the workplace, we have an actual financial incentive to get along, yet affective polarization is still prominent. Personal contempt is leading employees to spurn others who don’t share their political views. According to a study by research and advisory group Gartner, 36 percent of employees avoided talking to or collaborating with a coworker during the 2020 presidential primary season because of that colleague’s political views. Nearly one-third reported that they had “witnessed at least one instance of unacceptable treatment of a coworker because of their political beliefs, including being called offensive names, being avoided by colleagues, or being treated unfairly.”¹⁴

Before the pandemic had even begun, pervasive divisiveness had afflicted the personal lives of about one-third of Americans, of whom about four in ten had experienced depression, anxiety, or sadness because of it, according to a poll conducted in late 2019 by the nonpartisan research group Public Agenda for USA Today’s Hidden Common Ground project.¹⁵

If nothing else, COVID-19 has shown us that affective polarization can even be deadly. When we make lifestyle decisions based on tribalistic politics rather than science, we are putting the lives of the people around us at risk of contracting the virus. Yet, ironically, even if there were a vaccine to treat polarization, many Americans would refuse it. Just as a misguided slice of Americans – including a cross-section of those on both the left and the right – won’t listen to the science that vaccines are safe and necessary to preserve public health,¹⁶ many of us won’t listen to the facts on other issues if those facts contradict our preconceived notions about each other and the world around us.¹⁷

As a newspaper journalist, I’ve devoted my life to seeking out the truth. So it pains me to admit that publishing the facts through old-fashioned media isn’t enough to get people on the same page. The decline of traditional news media has frayed the relationship between Americans and professional journalists, whose collective bond of civic trust has been further ravaged by false accusations of “fake news” leveled at journalists from the likes of Trump and his hyperpartisan media supporters. Amid my industry’s financial implosion – which has led to massive layoffs, publication shutdowns, and so-called “news deserts”¹⁸ – social media platforms have become the new gatekeepers for the information that many people see about the world. These technology giants are enabling misinformation to flourish and profiting from it.¹⁹

Consequently, Americans have been largely left to fend for themselves on an information superhighway riddled with potholes of falsehoods that further divide our society. Owing to the classic psychological condition of confirmation bias, many of us believe and actively spread the lies. As falsehoods flourish, our emotions become supercharged, and our crisis of polarization worsens. And there’s no reason to believe our increasingly cacophonous public discourse will suddenly become symphonic, absent a new orchestration specifically composed to achieve harmony.

William Galston – who cofounded No Labels and The New Center, groups that work to bolster the political center in America – began studying American polarization at the Brookings Institution during the second Iraq War. Polarization “seemed very serious back then,” he said. “It’s clear in retrospect we hadn’t seen anything yet. Every year I say to myself, ‘It can’t get worse than this.’ And every year it gets worse.”

Ensconced in our political echo chambers, we are constantly fed the premise that the other side is crazy. Talking heads say it. Social media says it. Politicians say it. Even journalists say it. And Americans have bought into it: 87 percent of Democrats and 84 percent of Republicans say the other side is hateful, while 88 percent of Democrats and 88 percent of Republicans say the other side is brainwashed, according to a June 2019 survey by the nonpartisan group More in Common for its Hidden Tribes of America project.²⁰

But are we truly as far apart as we feel? More in Common, which studies political tribalism in an attempt to bridge ideological divides, examined “second-order beliefs” – that is, what people believe others believe. It turns out that we may not be as polarized as we think we are.

The study concluded that “Democrats and Republicans imagine that almost twice as many people on the other side hold extreme views than really do.” For example, Democrats underestimate the share of Republicans who believe that “many Muslims are good Americans” by 29 points, and underestimate the percentage who believe that “properly controlled immigration can be good for America” by 33 points. Likewise, Republicans overestimate the percentage of Democrats who agree that “the US should have completely open borders” by 33 points, and overestimate the share of Democrats who believe that “America should be a socialist country” by 25 points.²¹

Perception, of course, is reality – so that wide gap in second-order beliefs has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. But that doesn’t mean Americans like it this way. “After more than a decade of intensifying polarization, even people who disagree with each other pretty vehemently are hungering for a politics that feels different, politics that sounds different, politics that doesn’t make us hate our neighbors,” Galston said.

He’s right. The Hidden Tribes project found that 67 percent of Americans constitute an “exhausted majority” containing “distinct groups of people with varying degrees of political understanding and activism” who “share a sense of fatigue with our polarized national conversation, a willingness to be flexible in their political viewpoints, and a lack of voice in the national conversation.”²²

“What is it that’s exhausting people? The constant fighting. The sense that we are devoting 99 percent of our energy to struggling with each other,” Galston said. “It’s like this giant social war where roughly half the country is pulling hard in one direction, and roughly half the country is pulling just as hard in the other direction, and the rope isn’t moving. We’re getting really tired. It takes a real effort to keep on going in a tug of war, but it can get pretty frustrating if the rope never moves.”

The rope is stuck in myriad ways. On immigration, for example, lawmakers have been deadlocked for at least a generation over how to handle people living in the country without legal documentation and how to handle border security. But most Americans are not divided on the issue, according to The New Center’s research. “You have one party that’s offering a wall and another party that seems to be offering open borders,” Galston said. “Majorities don’t want the wall, they don’t want family separation, they don’t want non-responsiveness to refugees fleeing a genuine fear of persecution. On the other hand, they don’t want open borders, they don’t want sanctuary cities, they don’t want to abolish ICE” – the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

What most Americans want is something in the middle. But political paralysis has prevented a solution, in part because people on the far left and the far right wield so much influence over public policy debates. Progressive activists and devoted conservatives make up only 8 percent and 6 percent of Americans, respectively, despite having an outsized influence on our political discourse.²³

“It’s been a political science truism for decades now . . . that intense minorities can have disproportionate effects on politics – and issues like immigration tend to attract passionate minorities on both sides,” Galston said. “They set the terms of the debate within their respective parties but not in the country.”

That paradigm is ensuring a political stalemate because the nation’s two-party system was designed to guarantee that neither side gets what it wants in full. “The political system for too long has been guided by the hope of both political parties that they were on the verge of winning a sweeping victory that would enable them to form a new permanent governing majority and just get their way,” Galston said. “Faced with compromise or stagnation, the system has elected to go down the path of stagnation.”

Indeed, compromise has become an anachronism in part because there’s little consequence for the engineers of stagnation. Politicians are consistently rewarded in lopsided, gerrymandered primary elections for standing their ground and refusing to budge based purely on their ideological principles. That stubbornness makes the pursuit of common ground extraordinarily difficult.

Yet our leaders won’t change unless we change. Otherwise there’s no incentive for them to do anything differently. And that means we need to embrace relationships and conversation with people who aren’t like us. It means we need to immerse ourselves in friendships and interaction with people of difference that expose us to their perspectives and to the challenges they face, even when the process makes us uncomfortable. If we don’t work with each other – if we don’t build bridges – we’ll never achieve progress together.

Sometimes the path to conversation, understanding, and cooperation proceeds slowly, as we gradually learn more about each other and become more attuned to the structural issues that underpin our polarized culture. And sometimes it happens swiftly, when we become viscerally aware of the need to span the gaps that have divided us for ages.

When I began working on this book in late 2018, I never imagined we would see the type of national outcry over the compounding scourge of racism that we saw in the wake of the death of George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, on May 25, 2020, at the hands of the police in Minneapolis. The searing sound of Floyd pleading, “I can’t breathe,” and crying out for his mother as White officer Derek Chauvin kneeled on his neck while he suffocated²⁴ shocked many White Americans into realizing for the first time that racism manifested in the form of police brutality is still real and vicious. But, perhaps even more significantly, it also shocked them into recognizing that police brutality is just one element in a much broader societal scheme that keeps Black Americans under the knees of White privilege.

The death of George Floyd was the latest in a seemingly endless series of violent acts by police against Black people – including incidents like the killing in 2014 of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, which spurred outrage among some White Americans for a while, yet eventually faded from the national spotlight. But this time, the shock factor sparked a burgeoning awareness of the need for White Americans to step out onto metaphorical ledges and to begin building bridges across structural ravines that have long prevented Black Americans from escaping the trenches of economic inequality, underfunded schools, and lack of access to adequate medical care, to mention just a few obstacles to social justice.

The national outpouring of anger following Floyd’s death was largely directed at the White establishment, as Americans of all races hit the streets throughout the country to protest and demand change despite an ongoing pandemic that put their lives at risk. The groundswell of outrage can serve as the raw material for the type of bridge building that needs to be done to begin overcoming the whitecapped rapids of racism. The key will be to ensure that the protests translate into lasting bridges, which are the key to policy change. For that, White Americans, myself included, cannot ask Black people to meet us halfway. White people need to use their voices and places of privilege to speak up and take action by constructing the bridges that they have so long neglected to build.

Building bridges between people of difference against a backdrop of racism, political polarization, misinformation, and social division may sound like a milquetoast way of pursuing change. But it’s not. Rather, it’s a bold form of countercultural revolution. It stands in stark contrast to the typical way of doing things, in which we stand firm on our cultural biases, cling to social and political isolation, and refuse to consider the possibility that we could be wrong.

Bridge building does not, however, require unity. And it does not involve cultural assimilation. That is a false assumption. What’s required is the pursuit of understanding – that is, the pursuit of social trust, as David Blankenhorn of Braver Angels described it. Social trust paves the way for structural change that can bring about tangible benefits for our society at large.

But how do we pursue social trust when the things that divide us feel so overwhelming? How do we achieve policy progress when our polarized politics have taught us that we should never have to compromise? How do we foster improved communication to combat the crisis of misinformation that fans the flames of division? And how do we ensure that the movement that arose in the wake of George Floyd’s death turns into substantive change among White Americans who previously did not grasp or care about the need to fight racism?

As I began considering ways to address polarization in this book, I figured there must be people out there who aren’t accepting the status quo. There must be people who are bringing others of difference together. There must be people who are dedicating themselves to fostering dialogue, mending broken relationships, and finding common ground.

I’m here to tell you that they’re out there. I visited them. I talked with them. And I believe that we can – we must – learn from them.

They are not Pollyannaish. They are not impervious to discouragement. They are not flawless.

But they are hopeful, they are driven, and they are countercultural.

They are bridge builders.

Bridge builders are people like Eboo Patel.

About a quarter century ago, racial tension was high following the police beating of Rodney King, the O. J. Simpson trial, and what Patel called “the emergence of identity politics on college campuses.” “It wasn’t as politically divided” as things are today, “but it was socially divided in a variety of ways,” he said.

For a while, Patel was immersed in the divisiveness. “I spent a couple of years angry,” he said. “And then frankly I developed some perspective and maturity and judgment. Along the way, I discovered religion.”

He devoted himself to his faith as a Muslim of Gujarati Indian heritage. At the same time, he began learning more about the discordant role that religion was playing in the world, including in the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and in the Yugoslav wars. But he also began learning more about what he called “the positive role that religious identity had played in social movements,” such as the struggle to defeat apartheid in South Africa, the American Civil Rights Movement, and “the language used by everybody from Dorothy Day to Jane Addams to Martin Luther King, Jr., to Joshua Abraham Heschel.”

Patel’s personal journey gave him the conviction that “religion can be a bunker of isolation, it can be a barrier of division, it can be a bludgeon of domination, or it can be a bridge of cooperation.”

That led him in the late 1990s to form the Interfaith Youth Core (IFYC) to promote conversation, relationships, and cooperation among college students from different religious backgrounds. Today, the nonprofit provides training, organizes volunteer outings, and offers curricula on interfaith issues. By April 2020, IFYC had established a presence on more than 600 campuses throughout the country with about 100,000 student participants.²⁵

Patel has advocated for higher-education leaders to allay marginalization and sniping among evangelical Christians, atheists, and Muslims by integrating “conversations about religious diversity” into “first-year orientation, required courses, and policies that affect campus climate.”²⁶

Since Patel often finds himself attempting to bridge gaps between students from completely different worlds, I asked him whether he felt like his work was countercultural. I certainly think it is. But he disagreed – and his response was reflective of the way bridge builders tend to see the world differently. “If America is defined by cable news, then what we’re doing is countercultural,” he said. “But if America is defined by what we do on a regular basis in hospitals, in little leagues, in pickup basketball, in hip-hop ciphers, then it’s actually very much part of the American way.”

Patel said we can learn lessons from the apolitical nature of everyday life, which functions smoothly in spite of the things that divide us. “In our civil society, we naturally come together with people who are quite different from us politically, racially, religiously, to do cooperative things,” he said. “When’s the last time you heard about doctors in a hospital refusing to perform a heart surgery because they voted differently or because they were a different race? So the fiber of American life in a civic sense promotes cooperation. I think this is a big, big deal.”

Building bridges between people from different walks of life demands a different perspective on the same circumstances that cause others to feel divided. It requires a commitment to the development of authentic relationships, the use of dynamic communication techniques, and a realization that service opportunities break down social, cultural, and political barriers. It calls for a recognition that an attitude of inclusion is a hallmark of successful bridge building – and that exclusion, insults, and shame corrode the paths to social justice.

“The people who have made the most social change have been the ones who tell an inspiring story that draws a larger circle, that draws people in,” Patel said. “Building a diverse democracy is about three things. It’s really about engaging with the deep problem of marginalization, it’s about bridging polarization, and it’s about being able to handle deep disagreements.” Some of those disagreements are “rooted in deep and fundamental identities,” he said. And those identities must be honored, reimagined, or even confronted, depending on the circumstances.

Latasha Morrison is doing just that. In 2015, Morrison founded Be the Bridge, a nonprofit devoted to pursuing racial reconciliation through small groups, education, and spiritual talks. As a Christian minister and an African American, she works from within the church to foster connections. She travels throughout the country speaking to churches – in many cases majority-White, evangelical congregations – about the need for her fellow Christians to confront the racism, biases, and insensitivities that they have wielded for centuries against people of color, especially Black people. Morrison wrote a powerful book, Be the Bridge, on the same topic in 2019 and runs a Facebook group of the same name, using her platform to call Americans into robust conversations about racism and into relationships with people who aren’t like them.²⁷

When Morrison talks about our nation’s history of systemic racism – and how White Christians, in particular, have fueled social injustice – she is showing them how someone who reads the same Bible and prays to the same God has been afflicted by White privilege and White supremacy. What she asks of them is to “lament” the past, to learn about it, and to apply lessons from it to their lives. “The type of bridge we’re building is one that uplifts marginalized voices,” she said. “We’re truth-tellers – that’s one of our values.”

As a result, Morrison chooses to engage with people of difference who haven’t yet figured it out. They can be rough around the edges, but if they’ve signaled a willingness to engage, she’s in. “We give each other grace because there’s going to be times when I need grace,” she said. “Sometimes people are going to need grace to be ignorant and to ask a stupid question. I feel like no one gets this by yelling or demeaning them. So I think it’s important that we do this with grace, we do this with love and truth. We want to see justice.”

Morrison draws a careful distinction between lamenting and shaming – “to me, lament elevates God,” while “shame elevates you” – but she is also careful to note that it’s still important to stand up to people who exude exclusion and ignorance, even when it makes them shift in their seats. Having difficult conversations about racism often causes White people to react defensively, as author Robin DiAngelo noted in her 2018 book, White Fragility. Which is why White people, in particular, need to cast aside their discomfort with conversations about their own racism.

“Am I doing something to tear you down? Or am I just saying some things that make you uncomfortable?” Morrison asked. “There’s a difference. Am I attacking you as an individual, or am I telling the truth about a system of brokenness that we’ve ingested? It just really takes some discernment, and we can’t go off of feelings. Sometimes we need time to process this.” Calling people out for the sake of embarrassing them is often counterproductive, she said, because it’s “about demeaning and not bringing solutions.” It often brings about the opposite reaction that is desired. Yet it’s critical to ensure that people aren’t being silenced for the sake of creating an edifice of civility, which simply triggers identity corrosion underneath the surface. “It causes trauma when we isolate and oppress people, when they can’t use their voice,” Morrison said. “For centuries here in this country, that has happened where, if you spoke out or complained or if you called out, you would die. . . . I want to challenge people to have a different perspective, to learn from someone’s different experience.”

When I spoke with Morrison, she had just recently returned from speaking to a White evangelical church in Longview, Texas, a town on the eastern side of the state that political observers might label as blood-red for its conservative credentials. In Gregg County, where Longview is located, 69 percent of voters supported Donald Trump for president in 2016, while only 28 percent voted for Hillary Clinton.²⁸ “I went in there, and I spoke some hard truth, but this was not rocky ground. This soil was ready for this message,” she said. “It may have been uncomfortable for some people, but they were ready to recognize some truth. If that’s happening in east Texas, that’s happening in other places.”

This book is not about literal bridge builders – as in the architects, engineers, and contractors who design and construct physical structures to bring two sides together. But their real-life processes provide lessons for metaphorical bridge building.

Using the “segmental” process, crews build small sections at a time as the span gradually widens across the ground below. In metaphorical bridge building, progress is often incremental and organic and hard-won – but the sum adds up to revolutionary change in the long run. Braver Angels is taking this approach by helping Americans gradually stitch back together the bonds of social trust.²⁹

Using the “cantilever” process, the span takes shape from the top of pre-built support pillars, gradually extending outward until each section attaches to the next section and ultimately forms a bridge connecting both sides of the gap. In metaphorical bridge building, people span gaps by leveraging existing connections or forming brand new relationships and then building outward from there. Eboo Patel is taking this approach with IFYC, as he seeks to empower members of different religious groups to extend toward each other.

Using the “incremental launching” process, a bridge deck is pre-assembled off-site and then pushed from one side of the gap to the other side. In other words, the bridge does not get constructed from both sides and reach completion by meeting in the middle. Similarly, in metaphorical bridge building, one common misconception is that people must always meet in the middle. That’s not the case. What we see in the metaphorical process is that sometimes bridges must be built from one side of the gap to the other. This is what Latasha Morrison is promoting as she guides White Christians to abandon their old ways of inaction and complacency and build bridges toward Black Americans whom they’ve oppressed for centuries.

Finally, in the rehabilitation process, crews reconstruct or restore existing bridges that have become dilapidated. Much like in real-life renovation, metaphorical bridge building often involves the renewal of decrepit bridges that have become difficult or impossible to traverse.

No matter the method, bridge builders must first measure the length of the proposed span before deciding how to proceed. At the same time, they must assess the nature of the soil that will ultimately support the bridge’s foundation. Then they must construct a firm foundation from which to erect the bridge. Lacking an adequate foundation, bridges can sink into the ground and become unusable, defeating the ultimate purpose, which is to facilitate exchanges between current and future generations. There’s always a risk that the bridge will fail if it’s not properly designed. A bridge collapse is, of course, devastating from a human, economic, and political perspective, which simply underscores the need to get it right in the first place.

Likewise, metaphorical bridge builders need to assess the status of the social, political, and cultural situations they face before proceeding with their projects. They must understand history, honor it, and learn from it to ensure they’re constructing a bridge that will last.

“The type of bridge you’re going to build . . . has to be a function of where you’re building it,” said Pinar Okumus, a structural engineering professor and member of the board at the University at Buffalo’s Institute for Bridge Engineering. “For example, steel bridges tend to be lighter than concrete bridges, so if you try to build a heavy concrete bridge on a soil that cannot support it, then your foundation would be terribly expensive.”

History is full of examples of bridges revolutionizing society:

 The Brooklyn Bridge’s opening in 1883 marked the first span between Manhattan and Brooklyn, greatly improving transportation and paving the way for them to merge five years later.30

 The Ponte Vecchio in Florence, Italy, was initially built sometime before 966 and reconstructed after a flood in 1345. It became a vital connecting route for the region, provided a place for locals to sell goods in shops overlooking the river Arno, and survived World War II as an “everlasting symbol” of hope for the city.31

 The Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge, built in China in 1968 during dictator Mao Zedong’s oppressive Cultural Revolution, enabled easy transportation for people who previously had to cross by ferry and for trains that previously had to be disassembled and loaded onto boats to make their way across.32

There are countless others. The point is that bridges enable dynamic change. They breed engagement. But building them requires sophisticated design, engineering, material sourcing, and plain old-fashioned hard work. “Sometimes when people hear the term ‘bridge building’ . . . they don’t think it’s going to be hard, they don’t think they’re going to be uncomfortable, they don’t think they’re going to be challenged,” Morrison said. “It’s going to be difficult. It’s going to be uncomfortable.”

To be clear, this book will not commit the sin of false equivalence – that is, the tendency to give equal weight to two sides that do not deserve equivalent consideration. As such, I will not suggest that everyone needs to meet squarely in the middle. That’s because in some cases, one side is right and the other side is wrong, plain and simple. Moreover, I don’t want to suggest that bridge building solves all our problems. It simply sets the stage for us to achieve progress through new policies, for example.

Rather, this book serves as a forensic dissection of the bridge building strategies employed by leaders who are going against the polarized grain. It seeks to illuminate the ways in which people are overcoming gaping divides in areas such as politics, race, religion, class, and culture – and how we can apply those lessons to our lives and to the institutions that govern society.

And I say “overcoming” because bridge building is a journey that’s never truly complete. It’s a process – a lifestyle, if you will. After all, bridges need maintenance almost as soon as they are constructed. They get potholes. They rust. And they become obsolete if we neglect them.

As I considered whom to feature, I decided not to write about anyone particularly famous. That way you won’t have preexisting opinions about them. I also thought it was critical to feature a diversity of voices because we can’t learn how to build bridges effectively without listening to experienced people from a broad cross-section of backgrounds who have approached the process from many different angles. Similarly, I decided to feature people from a wide range of sectors, including government, faith, nonprofit, business, education, and journalism. Each person’s expertise is vital, just as the builders of physical bridges have a wide variety of experiences in areas ranging from environmental assessment to material science to structural integrity.

“Everyone within that system is important, and it’s important that they communicate with each other and bridge that knowledge gap that exists between them in a very seamless manner,” said Atorod Azizinamini, a renowned bridge engineer who chairs Florida International University’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. “If one area fails, it can cause the complete collapse of the bridge.”

Despite its transformational qualities, bridge building often attracts considerable resistance – sometimes legitimate, sometimes not so much – from environmental activists, budget hawks, developers, and locals with not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) syndrome. In many cases, that’s because bridges promise to disrupt the status quo for people who previously benefited from or preferred social isolation.

But new bridges are often necessary despite the risks and despite the opposition they engender. They’re the only way to reach the other side. After all, nobody changes the world from the isolation of an island.

Exceptional bridges transcend the basic functionality and economic vitality they were designed to provide. People take trips to see great bridges. They walk across them, take pictures of them, and depict them in artwork. Great bridges capture our imagination. They are feats of engineering. “That’s why there are so many beautiful designs out there,” said Azizinamini, who was honored by the White House in 2015 for making the nation’s bridges safer.³³ “People identify a location, a community, a city by that bridge.”

When we build bridges, entire societies are often transformed.

“If I tell you, ‘San Francisco,’” Azizinamini said, “what’s the first thing that comes to your mind?”