How talking can build a bridge to a better America

Manu Meel of the student organization BridgeUSA hands out leaflets on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley in September 2017. (Photo by Barbara Munker/picture alliance via Getty Images)

Polarization has become a national security issue for the United States. Robert Gates, who served as Secretary of Defense in both the George W. Bush and Barack Obama Administrations, has called it the biggest threat now facing the country. In a May 21 interview on Face the Nation, the former secretary acknowledged that some degree of polarization has always existed in the United States but argued that what’s changed today “is not just a measure of paralysis … but a level of meanness and a lack of civility among our politicians, or the sense that somebody who disagrees with you is not just somebody you disagree with, but is an enemy.”

Gates wasn’t exaggerating. Ideological conflict has long been a part of liberal democracy, and debate is an integral feature of the U.S. system of governance, which was designed for deliberation, negotiation, and persuasion. But the level of rancor seen in U.S. politics today is approaching dangerous levels. To function properly, the country’s democratic government needs its elected officials to effectively engage with their political opponents. Doing so becomes exceedingly difficult, however, when officials treat one another with extreme contempt. Such rancor, as Gates noted, can lead to institutional paralysis. And when polarization leaches into society, it can also lead to the demonization of fellow citizens. As Jan. 6, 2021, showed, the consequences of this trend can be deadly.

The core of the problem is that Americans, at all levels of society and government, have lost their ability to engage constructively with those who think differently. One organization, however, has shown that there is, in fact, a way for Americans to disagree productively.

‘Just some dude’

Manu Meel, the 24-year-old CEO of an organization called BridgeUSA, has spent the past six years fighting to reduce polarization. Meel grew up among very different types of people in very different locations. The son of Indian immigrants, he was born in New Jersey but spent a good chunk of his early childhood in India with his grandparents. After he returned to the United States at age 5, Meel and his family moved around the country every few years.

This background gave Meel an innate understanding of the value of engaging with people from dissimilar backgrounds. As he has observed, his story would not have been possible in a society that wasn’t fundamentally pluralistic. “Pluralism created the conditions for me to not only exist, but to understand, learn, to be a part of this melting pot that helps me be a better person,” he has said.

As a freshman at the University of California, Berkeley, Meel noticed his campus was becoming increasingly hostile to ideological pluralism. And Berkeley was hardly alone. Since 1998, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) has catalogued more than 500 instances where administrators, faculty, students, or other groups tried to stop politically divisive speakers from coming to campus. In a 2023 survey, FIRE found that nearly 60% of the students who responded reported feeling at least some pressure to not raise controversial topics in class. More than half said they wouldn’t feel fully comfortable raising those topics during discussions in common spaces, and about 70% expressed some level of discomfort publicly disagreeing about them with their professors.

A protester smashes a bank window at the University of California, Berkeley on February 1, 2017. (Photo by Josh Edelson / AFP / Getty Images)

Meel, who started college as a pre-med student, never imagined that his path would lead to politics or trying to heal campus culture. Everything changed for him in February 2017, when Milo Yiannopoulos came to Berkeley. Yiannopoulos, then an editor for the hard-right populist website Breitbart News, had built a reputation as a charismatic but deeply controversial critic of progressive views on issues such as gender, race, and free speech. When the Berkeley College Republicans invited him to speak on campus, it sparked violent protests at which Molotov cocktails were thrown. Citing public safety, university administrators ended up canceling the event just hours before Yiannopoulos was scheduled to speak.

Like most Americans, Meel didn’t consider himself a political junkie, but the incident stirred him to action.

In the immediate aftermath, Meel – who says he was “just some dude” at the time – tried to make sense of what had just happened. Like most Americans, he didn’t consider himself a political junkie, but the incident stirred him to action. As he recounts, the next day he “and some random people got together and were like, ‘the campus community is hurting.’ There [were] people that invited Milo. There [were] people that didn’t invite Milo. There [were] people that protested … Let’s just get everybody in a room.”

Meel says the primary motivating factor for students to attend the subsequent discussion was the strong emotion generated by the moment. Was free speech really under attack, people wondered, or was this something else? Meel and a dedicated group of friends engaged in a grassroots campaign on campus to promote the meeting; they posted flyers advertising it in dorms and asked professors to share the opportunity with their classes.

The experience, which turned out to be a major success, had a huge effect on Meel’s thinking:

This student showed up and was like, “I’m going to protest this thing” … By the end of this discussion, he was like, “Not only was this a fascinating dialogue, but I actually became a better advocate for my arguments” … The next day we held another discussion; more people showed up. So we called it BridgeBerkeley. We had these amazing friends at Notre Dame and [the University of Colorado] – Boulder that built BridgeCU, BridgeND. [We] linked up and created this thing called BridgeUSA.

As Meel explains, the organization is “the largest and fastest-growing student movement” trying to change how young Americans talk about politics. Its goal isn’t to train students to compromise, necessarily, but to become better debaters, and “better agents in society.”

BridgeUSA Leadership Summit in Washington D.C. in April 2022. (Photo Courtesy of BridgeUSA)

Modeling moderation

BridgeUSA works by creating environments that encourage people with diverse views to engage in a civil fashion – what Meel likes to call “healthy conflict” – in the pursuit of productive disagreement. Meel is quick to emphasize that BridgeUSA aims to “supplement” its members’ politics, not to dictate what they should believe. The problem BridgeUSA aims to combat isn’t ideological but “temperamental,” as Meel puts it. The solution is to learn how to disagree better. The underlying idea – to get people who think differently to start talking – may sound simple, but executing it in today’s climate is very difficult.

BridgeUSA seeks to overcome this problem through structured dialogue grounded in four norms that Meel calls the group’s “Holy Grail.” First, listen to listen (and understand) rather than fixating on how you’ll respond. Second, don’t interrupt or have side conversations. Third, remember that a person represents themselves, not a broader demographic or group. And fourth, when disagreement arises, critique the argument and its substance, not the person making the argument. Every Bridge chapter receives training from the national organization in these norms so that they can provide peer moderators to enforce the structure.

Another critical aspect of the BridgeUSA model is its emphasis on student ownership. Meel defines this concept as giving young people opportunities to make a difference and to control the direction of each chapter by determining what would be most effective at their particular school. As he explains, what works at the University of Mississippi won’t necessarily work at the University of North Carolina or at Berkeley. And students need to feel like they’re in control of the dialogue.

Meel’s experiences at Berkeley and those of his peers elsewhere suggested that students have a strong desire to interact with peers who don’t agree with their opinions. As FIRE’s research shows, today’s students feel considerable fear about engaging faculty and peers on controversial topics – both in the classroom and in other common spaces. So they need an outlet for constructive conversations that might feel forbidden.

BridgeUSA tries to help students understand that the loud, extremist voices don’t represent the views of most Americans.

Meel believes that providing a forum for those discussions boosts the morale of participants, particularly those in what he describes as “the exhausted majority” (though he’s trying to switch to the more positive “hopeful majority”). This concept was first articulated by the organization More in Common to describe the nearly 70% of Americans who are tired of polarization, feel overlooked by their political leaders, and believe it’s possible to find common ground on different issues. BridgeUSA tries to address the problem by helping students understand that the loud, extremist voices don’t actually represent the views of most Americans.

While Meel says that BridgeUSA is succeeding in bringing together students from across the political spectrum, he confesses there isn’t a secret sauce for doing so beyond creating spaces where people can safely express divergent opinions and then promoting those spaces and discussions. The idea, essentially, is: Build it and they will come.

BridgeUSA emphasizes to its chapters that hot-button issues such as abortion and gun control are not good starting points for exploring healthy disagreement. Moderators initially focus on building relationships among participants by focusing on less controversial topics such as mental wellness and self-betterment, knowing that they can get into more difficult issues once they’ve established trust.

Many chapters also focus on local, not national, issues that are central to the city or state where that chapter is located. The Wayne State University chapter, for example, focused its recent discussions on the auto industry and the gentrification of Detroit (where the school is located).

BridgeUSA makes starting a new chapter easy. It never requires a financial contribution from students. According to Meel, the organization has three main sources of funding: private foundations committed to better civic engagement, such as the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations and the Fetzer Institute; individual philanthropists; and small donors who support the cause. A given chapter only needs one interested student (and, ideally, one faculty member or teacher) to get started. After submitting a form found on BridgeUSA’s website, students are then connected with a Chapter Development Consultant (CDC) – usually a former chapter leader – who is a full-time employee for BridgeUSA.

CDCs typically communicate with individual chapters every two weeks, providing consultations and member training based on the group’s four norms of dialogue. The national organization also provides civic engagement workshops, skills development, and networking opportunities for individual chapters through an annual leadership summit. But the individual chapters take the basic but important steps of providing space, selecting discussion topics, and enforcing the norms for dialogue.

These days, the national organization and its individual chapters host a variety of activities, including moderated roundtables and discussions. They also organize talks with speakers from both sides of the political aisle; one example held at Notre Dame in 2019 featured the former Secretaries of State Condoleezza Rice and John Kerry, where they discussed a variety of topics – all the while modeling civil discourse. BridgeUSA even uses humor to spread its message; in 2022, for example, it launched Let’s F*cking Talk to Each Other, a public awareness campaign.

U.S. Governors at the Disagree Better event, Sept. 2023 (Photo via Twitter (X)/BridgeUSA)

Measuring movement

To ensure the organization is having the desired effect, BridgeUSA’s leadership looks at quantitative indicators, such as the number of chapters established and the number of events they host. It is also developing tools, based on the Civic Health Project’s Social Cohesion Impact Measure (SCIM), to track how participation in its programs changes attitudes. SCIM is designed to show the effect of specific interventions on depolarization by helping an organization identify the outcomes it wants to measure, testing those outcomes through surveys, and developing an instant-analysis mechanism. When students participate in various BridgeUSA gatherings, this methodology, which includes pre- and post-event surveys, allows the organization to measure how the events affect open-mindedness and tolerance. While such research is still in its early stages, Meel says the initial findings show progress.

Meel’s goal for his organization is ambitious: He dreams of a day when BridgeUSA becomes a formative experience for “every practicing political leader in the country.” While that reality remains far off, the organization has experienced significant growth since 2017, ballooning from three chapters in three states to 42 chapters in 24 states plus the District of Columbia. BridgeUSA has done a good job of attracting a diverse range of schools, including big public institutions such as Louisiana State University and private schools such as Georgetown University.

Because young people are often interested in politics, culture, and society well before college – and are also exposed to controversy and polarization as children – BridgeUSA is expanding to high schools, having established 12 such chapters in California, Massachusetts, New York, and Virginia.

Various college chapters have already made significant changes to some of their campuses. Following the 2017 Yiannopoulos protests, the Berkeley chapter hosted events for the school’s “free speech year” that informed the subsequent Chancellor’s Commission on Free Speech. The Arizona State University chapter has helped launch the School of Civic and Economic Thought. And in 2019, the Oregon State University chapter conducted an 800-person survey on self-censorship in the classroom and was then approached by a faculty member interested in using the data for a business ethics course.

BridgeUSA’s national leadership is also shaping the broader conversation over polarization by identifying challenges, changing perceptions, and injecting the ideas of young Americans into policy solutions. For example, the group’s Chief Operating Officer, Ross Irwin, joined a 2020 task force hosted by the Bipartisan Policy Center, which produced a report offering recommendations for how universities could better protect academic freedom and free expression and alleviate political polarization.

Beyond Bridge

BridgeUSA has proved that Americans are indeed capable of having difficult debates in a respectful, productive manner. And if students can do it, politicians, policymakers, and other adults should be able to, as well. The reality is that there is nothing especially complicated about what BridgeUSA does. The model is quite simple: Find a space, set ground rules for respectful dialogue, and hold conversations that encourage people with different views to speak up. Then – most important – keep it going.

Finding leaders willing to resist the loudest and most extreme voices in society, and to encourage more open and more civil engagement, seems to be the bigger challenge. But other Bridge-like organizations are already applying similar formulas to their areas of focus. The Multi-Faith Neighbors Network, for example, helps rabbis, imams, and pastors in cities across the United States create interfaith networks based on goodwill and respect for differences in dogma.

A handful of prominent elected leaders have also begun publicly embracing civil engagement with political opponents. In July, after Utah’s Republican Gov. Spencer Cox took over as Chair of the National Governors Association, he teamed up with Colorado’s Democratic Gov. Jared Polis on a yearlong initiative focused on how to disagree better. The initiative relies on a formula similar to BridgeUSA’s, in that it focuses on temperament, convening people who think differently, modeling civil dialogue, and equipping people with the skills for productive disagreement.

As such efforts and organizations gain prominence, they will help American society at large learn to disagree more effectively. Civil society, faith communities, and governments should not worry about creating overlapping or duplicative programs; the more organizations that work to promote civility, the better.

And no one should forget the power of personal agency in depolarizing the United States. As Meel has observed (and exemplified), “We’re the main characters in our story. You can do something. You can educate and activate yourself.”