BYADAM PIORE“And now what? What does citizenship mean now?” » P.
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was overrun and five people were killed,” Coleman
says. “That is a historic event in America. The evi-
dence suggests more is to come. Unless we do some-
thing to change course, extreme forces are going to
make things worse.”
Although the current state of affairs is dangerous,
Coleman believes that the nation may be ripe for a
new approach—86 percent of Americans are fed up
with the “dysfunctional divisiveness” in our nation
and are eager to overcome them, according to one
poll. We may have reached a tipping point, he says.
“Trump, COVID, racial injustice and storming the Cap-
itol is a pretty powerful wake up call for America. I’m
optimistic that enough people will say ‘enough,’ and
that will start to move us in a different direction. But
we have got to take advantage of this opportunity to
do the work that’s necessary to shepherd that process.”
Although Washington can support this effort,
ultimately it has to come from communities. Cole-
man, director of the Morton Deutsch International
Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution at
Columbia University and author of
the forthcoming book The Way Out,
How to Overcome Toxic Polarization,
spoke with Newsweek about how the
nation can heal.if president joe biden wants to heal the
divisions in U.S. politics, he needs to stop all
this talk about “unity” and instead focus the attention
of all Americans on a common foe: toxic polarization.
That’s the advice the Biden administration has
gotten from psychologist Peter Coleman. In a series
of memos, Coleman, a mediator with experience in
conflicts as far-flung as the Middle East, Haiti and
Africa, has advised the new administration that the
best way to repair and reverse the extremism in U.S.
politics is to focus the attention of Americans on the
virulence of their divisions and mobilize them to
attack the problem.
Coleman has come to this conclusion after travel-
ing the world consulting with peacemakers and pol-
icymakers and studying the societal conditions that
often precede war, as well as those that often lead
to peace. The current tensions in the U.S., Coleman
argues, have their roots in the cultural and political
shocks of the 1960s, which upset the existing order,
and set the stage for a new era of political partisan-
ship that began in the early 1980s and
has been growing ever since.
Today, the nation is once again
experiencing disruptive cultural and
RE political shocks. “Our Capitol building
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POLITICSThe Exhausted
Americans
A growing number of citizens are fed up and want an end to
“toxic polarization,” says crisis negotiator Peter Coleman. They
may be sufɿciently motivated to change the status Tuo.