To Solve America’s Problems, We Need Bridges — and Ladders

This is a guest blog post from Lauren Hall, who writes the Radical Moderate’s Guide to Life and is a current Pluralism Fellow with the Mercatus Center’s Program on Pluralism and Civil Discourse. 

In the wake of a bruising election, many Americans are looking for ways to build bridges across our divides. There’s reason for hope — studies show that, despite perceptions, Americans agree on many policy fundamentals. But not everyone feels hopeful about bridge-building.

Some view building bridges as a distraction from the real work of reducing inequality. Others see the civil discourse that bridge-building requires as misguided tone policing. Some believe such goals require compromise with misguided, ignorant people — or with harmful extremists. 

While these concerns are understandable, they miss the deeper purpose of building bridges. Building bridges helps foster understanding and cooperation, which are good things on their own — but they are also what’s needed to help us solve our toughest challenges. 

We should think not only about building bridges between each other, but about building ladders to help people escape harmful “pits.” 

Imagine our society as a shared landscape. We all live here, but we navigate the landscape differently based on our experiences, perspectives, and values. Those differences can sometimes create chasms that make it hard for us to connect with each other. That’s why we need bridges. Bridges help us connect across our differences and see different parts of this shared landscape.

But our landscape also has pits. These are places where people fall in and can’t get out. Pits include things like childhood poverty, addiction, gun violence, mental illness, and fractured families. 

Pits are really hard to get out of without help. They prevent people from pursuing their goals and they represent a net loss of talent, innovation, and wealth to our community. Pits are bad for individuals and for our communities. They’re where we find our most challenging policy problems. 

Pits and bridges interact in a whole host of ways. A landscape full of pits is one where people are more focused on not falling in than they are about beautifying the landscape or working together to build a better future.

A landscape full of pits also makes it hard to trust each other. Social and political capital is hard to build if people are constantly afraid of what’s around the next bend in the road. 

A landscape with many pits also increases resentment between those who are most vulnerable to falling into pits and those who — for a variety of reasons — have an easier path to navigate through the same landscape. 

And it’s in these areas where bridges and ladders interact. Building bridges isn’t just about understanding each other better. That’s an important goal. But we also need to work together — and building bridges helps us identify pits that we’d otherwise miss. Building bridges helps us build ladders to help people get out of those pits.   

It’s hard for a middle-class parent to understand the challenges faced by a family with no health insurance. If you’ve only read about immigration policy, it’s hard to understand what it’s like to actually navigate it. Without direct experience of the foster care system, it’s hard to understand the isolation and challenges faced by foster children. 

By focusing on problems we know about, we’ll also be less polarized. It’s hard to care about partisan politics when you’re focused on solving concrete problems in your community. 

Focusing on pits in our community can also reduce our sense of frustration and futility. In Why We’re Polarized, Ezra Klein wrote that “we give too much attention to national politics, which we can do very little to change, and too little attention to state and local politics, where our voices can matter much more. The time spent spraying outrage over Trump’s latest tweet […] is better spent checking in with what’s happening in your own neighborhood.” 

By focusing on the pits in our communities, we defang polarization, increase trust, and recenter politics around the needs of everyday people. This makes building bridges even easier; it shrinks the chasms between us.

We have lots of concrete examples of how building bridges help us figure out how to construct ladders. The Tennessee 11 is a fantastic example of a group of people who seemed to have little in common — but who built bridges of understanding and constructed a ladder of policies to tackle gun violence in their communities. 

On the Solutions Journalism Solutions Tracker website, you can find similar stories from Wichita to Philadelphia. They highlight the local links between bridge building and ladder building. These and other examples remind us that, while our divides may seem vast, they’re not insurmountable. 

We should look for opportunities to promote positive stories like these, which unfortunately get far less attention than more divisive, angering stories. We can “be the change we want to see” by how we interact with and share information.

Activists must also see that only with bridge-building will they achieve lasting solutions. Without buy-in from an ideologically diverse set of people, political wins will often be temporary — prone to being rolled back when the “other side” gains power and the pendulum swings the other way.   

It’s a mistake to think about building bridges and civil discourse as distractions from social justice or addressing inequalities. In reality, they’re anything but: They’re what help us build a foundation for collaboration, empathy, and real, lasting solutions.

This was a guest blog post from Lauren Hall, who writes the Radical Moderate’s Guide to Life. If you enjoyed this, read our piece “Is political passion at odds with reducing polarization?”