1) Don’t rationalize violence. Political violence is an escalating spiral: Many people see an attack on their side and think hitting back equally hard or harder is fair play. Leaders and authority figures play a special role. When they throw the rules aside, many followers do too. So hold your leaders to a high standard of restraint and respect for the Constitution and the rule of law and accept that criminally destructive acts call for punishment, whichever side commits them.
2) Confront extremism and dehumanization on your own side. Calling out offensive talk from the other side is the easy part. It’s harder but more important to speak up when it comes from people you mostly agree with.
3) Don’t blame whole groups for things individuals do. Don’t say “they” carried out the latest act of political violence when it was really one individual or a hotheaded few. “They,” meaning everyone who votes differently than you, didn’t collectively throw the rock or make the hateful comments on social media. Most ordinary members of that other party or faction lead everyday lives much like yours and learned about the incident the same way you did.
4) Don’t contribute to undermining trust in our election system. America is lucky: Even now, our democracy is the envy of most of the world. Any system can stand to be improved, but ours is generally well-run and its results trustworthy. Instead of forwarding the latest spicy online rumor, check out the voices of veteran state and local election administrators who have lately been joining across party and regional lines to dispel myths about our elections.
5) Protect the election process. We need to protect election officials and workers from violence and intimidation and also safeguard back-end election processes like certification from risks, including the danger that insiders will refuse to carry out their legal duties. Congress’s 2022 update to the Electoral Count Act stands as a fine example of how to accomplish bipartisan election process reforms. Relatedly, while public budget resources are inevitably limited, holding elections is a core function of government, and it’s a mistake to starve local administrators of the resources they need to do their jobs properly.
6) Promote civics education. The late Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor devoted much of her retirement to rebuilding America’s long-eroded civics education capacity. She wisely understood that a populace that does not grasp the basics of how government or elections work is all the more open to false rumors or a demagogue’s lies. And it can make a difference from day one for students (and indeed persons of all ages) to know which parts of the government are responsible for what, how to get involved in their communities, and how to distinguish rumors or disinformation from reliable sources.
7) Look at structural voting reforms that could help us move past our polarization. Curbs on partisan gerrymandering would be a good start. Quite a few localities have lately introduced voting methods that offer hope of bridging gaps between different groups, such as ranked-choice voting, open primaries or the innovative combination of the two now used in Alaska, where participants report seeing more consensus-building and civil debate across the political spectrum.
It will require many such steps to take us back from the brink, but it’s worth starting today. The future we save may be our own.
