Remembering how to be a people

The dust is settling after the 2018 midterm elections. Now what?

Introducing my first blog — and the reason I’m writing, period.

While the political dust settles from the midterms, it feels like exactly the right moment to introduce myself. My name is Peter Dunlap, and I'm a clinical and political psychologist working in Northern California. I’m launching a new website and blog because I think it’s time to bring psychology and politics together to create a new generation of community leaders. And I know how to do it.

While my primary political leaning is quite left, I’m more interested in finding out how psychology can help reduce the polarization within our country than I am in pursuing any specific liberal agenda. And, as the election results have just emphasized, the time is clearly now for citizens of all political leanings to find a way of working together. I think of this as the need for us to remember how to be a people.

We all have an experience of, or at least an instinct for, belonging to a community. We know that we are meant to be together. We also know that we are willing to fight to protect our community. Anything that threatens our family or our tribe naturally becomes a target of our suspicion, or even our hatred.

These feelings are so easy to experience. That’s exactly why they’re dominating our local and national experience and dialogue. Whether right or left, we are caught in a crisis of suspicion and hatred.

What can we do about it?

Well, simply put, we must become curious, and we must challenge ourselves. Is there a way out of our habit of circling the wagons around our own favored communities? Or should we tighten these circles, fighting all the harder against all newcomers? The natural pull is toward tightening and fighting. Do we have any other choices? I think that we do.

I hope you’ll explore my website and join me in imagining alternatives to our lock-step march toward red versus blue. While my contribution may primarily be within liberal and progressive communities, I am committed to helping anyone who recognizes that, as humans, we’re running out of time to learn how to work collaboratively. After all, we are all in this together. We have no real alternative but to remember how to be a people.

And without further ado, welcome to my first blog…

Remembering how to be a people

The need to belong and the desire to divide

Right or left; nationalist or globalist; rural, urban, or suburban — these divides just won’t cut it. It’s time to find out what drives us into these separate camps and talk about it. Does our desire to belong to one group compel us to be antagonistic to all others?

In that deepest part of our soul, we know that we belong. Yet, in this world, we struggle to know what we belong to. We may belong to our families, though tragically, not everyone has that experience. We may also belong to a church, neighborhood, or work community in which we find solace amongst a few dozen or more friends and familiar faces.

Yet, as soon as we glance upward, as soon as we look toward the larger world, we are faced with so many differences. Too often, this leads us to shut down, band together in small groups, withdraw in fear, and resort to blame.

Few things are harder than to step into the wider commons of our world. There are so many different people, with so many different traditions and different needs. That’s why, too often, when we turn toward the larger community, all we can see is everyone taking sides, building trenches and bunkers.

As a result, we have been reduced to speaking in the narrowest of political-speak. The rhetoric has become all about investigation, invasion, battleground states, contentious judicial appointments, and redistricting. The questions we ask are all about who’s going to run in 2020, and not so much about whether there’s any room to negotiate or actually govern.

This is frightening. Where is this going? Nowhere helpful.

Facing our fears without turning away from our crises

Of course, facing the widening divide, we become frightened. It’s only natural. We imagine that our right to vote will be further restricted, that abortion rights will be revoked, or that citizenship will be taken away from Americans born from immigrant parents. Such frightening thoughts are part of our current political culture. They make it much harder to attend to the multiple crises of our time.

The problem is that it is becoming increasingly impossible to talk about climate change, the loss of meaningful jobs, racism and sexism, and the collapse of traditional communities. These are core underlying issues that we need to address, but our political polarization makes it ever more difficult to talk about them. Amidst these issues, there is even less room to address the ache of not belonging, driving us further toward the politics of hatred and blame.

As a left-leaning citizen, I’m horrified by our inability to turn towards these political and psychological issues. As a political psychologist, I pause to catch my breath, doing my best to avoid looking at these issues from a purely political perspective.

What do I do instead? I teach, I run my weekly Hope and Leadership group, I talk to community leaders, and I read like crazy. I’ve got more than 20 books on my bookshelf written between 2016 and now that focus on these problems from a range of perspectives. Some of them are popular political commentary, though most are solid social science research. What I’m learning is that there is a wealth of understanding about what we are going through as a people, but not a clear sense of how we can put that understanding into action.

How we begin: by gathering together and relearning how to talk to one another

This lack of clarity on how we should take action means it’s all the more crucial we find a way to create that clarity. I posit that we need to begin by creating forums, places we can come together, where we can simultaneously discuss political issues while also attending to our root need to belong to a community. I’ve organized many such gatherings, primarily for liberal and progressive community leaders and activists.

In these gatherings, we pay as much attention to how we feel as how we think. We pay attention to just how difficult it is to turn our gaze up toward the commons and toward our communities, and we let ourselves acknowledge how much we’d rather circle the wagons around our friends and family. We talk about our privileges and our responsibilities. We talk about our loneliness, and we explore opportunities to be engaged citizens.

We need more such gathering places. We need to gather together to remember how to be a people. While this may not be the battle cry you expected, it’s the one that’s genuinely going to help us start coming together to solve the crises we face and learn to listen and take care of each other.

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