Polarity Thinking Proves Worthy for Political Use

Part VIII of a series May 18, 2025

Imagine Republicans and Democrats having a productive conversation about a hot-button issue with no harsh words spoken.

“That’s impossible!” is likely your reaction.  “We gave up on that kind of thing long ago.”

Well ‘lo and behold it did happen, just within the past few weeks.  The experience provides useful direction as we wind toward conclusion in Our Common Purpose’s study of American values, how they unite and divide us, and what we might do about that.

The constructive dialogue among those of differing persuasions wasn’t just random happenstance.  Much of the credit goes to a somewhat nerdy technique called polarity management, more frequently known these days as polarity thinking.  By whatever name, it provides at least four benefits:

• A pretext to have a conversation.
• A means to be heard without needing to be argumentative.
• A structure to talk through a political issue in a constructive fashion.
• The potential for a win-win result, rather than the win-lose that is so typical in politics.

I was the moderator for the two sessions of two hours each.  The participants were two Republicans and two Democrats.  Two men and two women.  Each of them are a little older, each have been successful in their respective life pursuits, each of them are genuinely good-hearted.  And no doubt they were on their best behavior.

Skeptics would say the conversations were engineered to succeed.  There’s some validity to that, but on the other hand we were headed into uncharted territory.  There was no guarantee where the meetings would lead.  The participants were not scripted.  There was no telling what they might say.  I even wondered whether all four would even come back for the second morning of discussions.

Our Topic: Border Security

The topic was border security.  We were not subject-matter experts and we were not going to solve this issue.  The question was whether we could achieve some meeting of the minds.

True to the methodology of polarity thinking, we had to understand the core American values that are conflict in this dispute.  It begins on the one side with compassion.  On the other, law and order.

I know something about how Americans judge this conflict from the nationwide public opinion survey commissioned by Our Common Purpose in September of last year.  The 2,500 respondents were asked to position themselves on a sliding scale of -100 for compassion to +100 for law and order.

Although this might have changed somewhat between then and now, law and order was the clear preference in September.  It ranked at +30 overall.  Republicans put it at +57 and independents at +33.  Democrats were more on the fence but even they came down slightly on the side of law and order at +2.

The four participants in the discussion didn’t know about the above going into the discussion.  Asked the very same question as we began the session, the two Republicans on the panel were even more resolute on law and order, averaging +80.  The two Democrats leaned to compassion at -20, although one more strongly than the other.

Polarity thinking is built on the notion that neither pole should be regarded as the “problem” and the other as the “solution.”  Sooner or later, the tide will turn and the so-called solution will become the problem.  The much better approach is to realize – this being a rather humongous realization – that the two competing values both have their upside and their downside.  The ultimate objective is to find ways to balance the two so as to emphasize their respective advantages while avoiding their disadvantages.

True to that process, we began the discussion about border security by identifying the upside and downside of compassion on the one hand and law and order on the other.

Upsides and Downsides

As to the pluses of compassion, one of the Republicans noted, “the U.S. cares.”  It also got mentioned that the U.S. benefits from immigrants providing certain kinds of expertise and filling dirty, difficult jobs that we soft Americans don’t really want.

On the downside, a torrent of immigrants trying to cross the border in every way imaginable feels like an invasion.  The numbers overwhelm the system.  People take advantage.  And some number of undesirable characters are among those who filter into the country.

On the other side of the ledger, the advantages of law and order begin with security and protection.  “I have a fence and I lock my doors,” the other Republican offered up as a metaphor for protecting the border.  Beyond that, we establish a sense of orderliness and control.

All good but there is also a downside.  Law and order can get carried away with itself, in the form of overzealous enforcement and insufficient accountability.

This is not to suggest that everyone in the room agreed entirely with every one of these points.  The Republicans, one of them in particular, tended to demonize every undocumented immigrant.  The Democrats were more willing to let them make their case.   The biggest sticking point in the entire discussion, quite in keeping with the national debate, was due process.  The Democrats in the room insisted on it in every instance.  The Republicans protested that it “takes too long” and doesn’t apply equally to every situation.

But even during moments of disagreement, the discussion remained amicable.  Why?  Maybe because everyone thought they were being heard.  What they said went up on the white board.  One side or the other contributed more to one corner of the discussion than to another, but everyone had their turn.

An especially amiable moment of sharing came in response to two graphs showing that the U.S. birth rate is barely higher than the death rate (meaning we’re going to need more immigrants in the future).  The participants in the session from both sides of the table were suddenly off and running on a sidebar conversation: the ongoing changes in the role of women in society, the increasing involvement of fathers in child-rearing, the immature interests of young men, the reluctance of Gen X women to get married.  From the perspective of older folks, no wonder the birth rate is declining.

Reeled back to the main topic, now having played out the upside and downside of compassion and law and order, it was time to move on to the second part of the discussion.  Polarity thinking predicts that without effective management, a never-ending loop will occur between the opposing values.  In this case, the positives of compassion eventually fall victim to the negatives.  That causes a switch to law and order.  The benefits of law and order will eventually be overtaken by the objections.  That will lead us back in the direction of compassion.

In our current political system, the predictable switch from emphasizing one value to emphasizing the other is forced every four years with the election of a new president.

Seeking the Best of Both

The better way, according to polarity thinking, is to proactively manage the tension between values.  Rather than regularly flipping back and forth from one extreme to the other, the objective is to achieve some degree of constancy.  This is accomplished by figuring out how to combine the best of both worlds while minimizing their respective disadvantages.

The participants in the moderated discussion were game to give it a go on border security.  The focus of Day 2 was considering how we might combine the best of compassion with the best of law and order, and avoid the negatives.

Before we could get into the gist of it, the two sides shot off immediately on the current process.  “Stop managing by executive orders.”  “We can’t get it done legislatively.”   “It’s not what’s good for the U.S., but what’s good for me.”  “They’re protecting their own power.”  “Their own electability.”  With everyone in the room firing away like a Gatling gun, I’d be hard-pressed to say who said what.

When that target was obliterated, we were able to move on.  Due process remained the biggest sticking point.  Without a subject matter expert in the room, we were unable to pinpoint how “due process” for a migrant who just came through a hole in the fence differs from an undocumented immigrant who has built a life in this country for the past 10 years.

Out of this, however, we began to develop the basis for at least some amount of consensus.  Both compassion and law and order would be served by having a set of rules that are clear, simple and reasonable, resourced adequately to administer properly, and enforced fully and evenly with the consequences made known for each step of the process.

There was also support for the notion that asylum seekers should have what I am going to say here is a double burden of proof.  Not only that the person had a legitimate reason for fleeing his or her home country but that after some amount of time in this country they had shown themselves to contributing in some fashion, for instance by holding a job, to their new community.

The Outcome

Immigration law is a deep topic with lots of history.  There wasn’t anything original or brilliant in what we did.  The devil is in the detail, and we only began to scratch the surface.  There was, however, an air of agreement in the room.  As importantly, asked whether the discussion had been a good or bad experience, the participants all ranked it at +85 or higher.

The exercise to which they all contributed was no more than proof of concept.  It was just one of what needs to be dozens, hundreds, thousands of such discussions.  It gives basis, however, for three assertions:

• Republicans and Democrats, at least those of reasonable minds and good faith, are capable of having a fruitful discussion.
• Success is conditioned on properly identifying the core values that are in conflict and then conducting the discussion in a structured way. The moderator needs to be skilled enough to keep the conversation on track.
• The principles of polarity thinking are both adaptable, and could be invaluable, to the political issues that divide us.

Not to propose that any of this is easy.  The huge challenge is that it takes real work to make it happen.

— Richard Gilman

Next: Reflections and recommendations