Tag Archives: resistance

Breaking the Spell: From Polarization to Renewal

May 6, 2026 By in democracy, USA through a South African lens Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

How can we break the spell of a toxic downward spiral? In a piece recently published in Persuasion, I draw out “Lessons in Combating Polarization”by reflecting on the USA’s current crisis through the lens of South Africa’s successful reversal of two  polarization-driven downward spirals. This companion blog post has two purposes. First, it situates the Persuasion analysis within a broader framework that explores  what it takes for a downwardly spiraling trajectory of rage first to be interrupted, and then  transformed into a virtuous spiral of renewal.  Second, building on that broader framing, it lays out five propositions that  summarize and extend  the analysis in the Persuasion article. 

Until a decade ago, my focus had been on the tension between a technocratic search for ‘best practices’ and a pragmatic effort to find ‘with the grain’, incremental ways forward.  That work focused primarily on how to make incremental progress in messy, constrained contexts. But  at moments of discontinuous change the constraints themselves shift abruptly – sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. At such times something more than incrementalism is called for.  

I have long drawn inspiration from the work of the great twentieth century social scientist Albert Hirschman. My research on incrementalism was in the spirit of his classic analyses of development in Latin America. In the 1970s, though, the spirit of a “Bias for Hope”  collided with what Hirschman described as being   “mugged by [the] reality” of 1970s Latin America’s turn to authoritarianism. His response was to turn his attention to the drivers  of discontinuous change. Here is a flavor of his approach. (Note that  while Hirschman highlights ‘tolerance for inequality’ as the driver of change, the implicit  framework is more general):

“Tolerance for inequality is like a credit that falls due at a certain date. It is extended in the expectation that eventually the disparities will narrow again…. Non-realization of the expectation that my turn will soon come will at some point result in my ‘becoming furious’ that is, in my turning into an enemy of the established order.  No particular outward event sets off this dramatic turnaround.”

Paralleling Hirschman, I also was mugged by reality. Throughout the 2010s, I divided my time between the USA and South Africa – and in each I was witness to a hijack of the institutions of constitutional democracy, with both hijacks characterized by an insidious interpenetration of  rage-evoking ethno-populism and predatory state capture. In an effort to surface some parallels in what had happened across the two countries, I again turned to Hirschman, but now with a focus on his insights into discontinuous change.

For all of the power of Hirschman’s insights, what he did not do – and what is especially central in responding skillfully to the USA’s immediate crisis – was to carefully unbundle the causal mechanisms that drive change. To do so, it is useful to distinguish between  three questions, each addressing a different phase of the journey:

  • Once a downward spiral has taken hold, what does it take to break the spell?
  • Having achieved a pause in the downward spiral of polarization, what does it take to set a journey of renewal in motion?
  • How to sustain that journey once the initial burst of momentum has dissipated?

The Persuasion article focuses on  the first question. (See here and here for some initial exploration of the second and third questions.)

Here is the first of the five propositions that summarize and extend the Persuasion article’s argument:

  • While leadership matters, it only comes into play once the ground  has been prepared – and this happens through the interplay of civic activism and elite response.

In both of the South African episodes, the spell of us/them polarization was broken via a sequence that began with resistance, and was followed by a reset by a strategically important ‘middle group’ of elites—neither early resisters nor unshakably loyal to the incumbents—who saw where things were heading and became increasingly willing to try and move things in a different direction. Then came a hinge moment where the combined efforts of civic mobilization, action by these semi-insider elites, and leadership unleashed a far-reaching cascade of positive change.

The second proposition applies the first one to the US context:

  • The contrast is stark between the response of South African and American elites – so far a crucial subgroup of American elites largely has been missing from action.  

What does it take for a middle group of ambivalent-but-hitherto-acquiescent elites to reset its calculus as to the benefits and costs of inaction, and act accordingly? The American Purpose piece details when, how and why this middle group stepped forward in South Africa.  But in the USA, even in the face of an ongoing, relentless attack on the impersonal, rule-based economic and political institutions that have long underpinned a thriving economy and free, open and (mostly) stable society, a  middle group of corporate elites, wealthy individuals, and right-of-center political insiders has chosen to interpret what is unfolding as politics as usual.  Will this group continue to sleepwalk its way into disaster?

The third proposition locates the USA’s immediate challenge within  a longer time-frame:

  • Breaking the spell is an early step in a much longer journey from rage to renewal – and  what is needed is very different at each phase of the journey.

The USA’s current crisis did not arise from nowhere—any durable reset will require grappling with far-reaching imbalances and frontier challenges that have accumulated over decades. But before any of the deep-seated structural issues can be addressed, the downward spiral needs to end. Keeping the phases of the journey distinct helps clarify –  both analytically and for purposes of  activism – both the  immediate challenges  and what must follow if any initial gains are to prove durable.

Thinking in time is especially crucial  for civic activists. As the fourth proposition highlights:

  • Civic mobilization is key to reshaping the broader societal calculus – especially among ambivalent elites – in a way that  sets in motion a journey of renewal. This will require a ‘big tent’ approach centered around building broad-based alliances.

Addressing economic and social imbalances will not be easy – but for that exploration to be a journey of hope, the spell of a  downward spiral of polarization must first be broken.  Resistance that seeks to  fight fire with fire would almost by definition accelerate polarization, further weaken the center –  and  risk nudging ambivalent elites towards acquiescing to so-called “strongmen” promising stability.  (The Persuasion article illustrates using the example of early 1930s Weimar Germany.)  What is called for from the start – and throughout –  is an inclusive approach to activism, one that skillfully balances urgency and hope.

Fifth, and finally: a critical juncture is fast approaching in the USA:

  • The upcoming USA midterm elections offer a focal point for breaking the spell.

The midterms matter not only as an electoral contest, but as a potential focal point around which expectations, behaviors, and elite calculations can shift. As we have seen in country after country, when those who fuel polarization also control the levers of state power, electoral contestation can all-too-readily be accompanied by an accelerating downward spiral of efforts to  undermine the election – subverting access to the polls, disputing the results, and  fueling street violence. And all of this could culminate in the siren song of a call for decisive state action to restore order.   But (as Hungary’s recent election has revealed) an opposite outcome – an electoral escape route from the downward spiral – is also possible, if  a critical mass of hitherto ambivalent-but-acquiescent elites put their weight behind free and fair midterm electoral processes, and voters go on to decisively repudiate us/them politics.

To be sure,  as South Africa’s difficult experience in recent years reveals,  even after the spell is broken,  many challenges lie ahead.  But South Africa also teaches that first things need to come first. The immediate task is to break the spell of polarization. Across America’s political spectrum, there is a choice to make:  pay the price of letting go of comfortable illusions now—or pay a far greater price later. Which is it to be?

Now what? – Strategic and unstrategic ways forward

January 22, 2025 By in Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Two days into DT’s second presidency, it is clear that constitutional democracy has (re-) entered into a time of extreme, urgent danger. Despair, complacency and (un-strategic) resistance traps abound. What, then, are ‘strategic’ ways forward? From the vantage point of January 2025, the crucial point is that the USA continues to be a democracy – and it is only 21 months until the next round of House and Senate elections. The overriding strategic goal is to act , between now and then, in ways that increase the odds that control of both shift back to the only political party in the USA that remains committed to constitutional democracy – the Democratic Party (and perhaps also to encourage any brave Republicans who run on a constitutional democracy platform in their party’s primaries).

Much follows from this point of departure, way more than can be said here. But (though the speed and ruthlessness are now much greater….) we were at a parallel point at the outset of DT’s first term. Back then, I wrote a piece, “hope in the dark”, that suggested some ways forward. What follows updates that earlier piece. [While I have added some new themes, and changed some emphases, much of what I said then remains relevant, and is quoted directly. Subsequent work, linked below, elaborates on some key themes. And here is a link to the original piece.]

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When power shifts and the presumptions that have underpinned our way of engaging the world no longer hold, what then? For the past quarter century, many of us engaged in policy analysis and implementation have worked in the spirit of ‘possibilism’ – seeking entry points for change that, though initially small, have the potential to set in motion far-reaching, positive consequences. But more than we perhaps had realized, our work has presupposed that the center broadly holds.

We have presumed that there is a reasonably stable ‘outer’ concentric circle within which experimentation plays out, facilitating an evolution-like process — momentum for initiatives that add value, and dead-ends for bad ideas.  But with the election of Donald Trump (henceforth DT) in the USA (and similar elsewhere, though in this piece I will write principally from a US perspective) we find ourselves in a world where the stability of the outer circle, the container, has itself been put into question. How, now, are we to engage?

In an earlier effort to explore possible pathways of development for messy democracies, I distinguished between long-run vision, medium-run strategy, and short run process. The vision as to what comprises the core elements of a flourishing democracy remains intact. However,  when confronting a risk of reversal of the magnitude which is possible under a DT presidency, strategy and tactics need to shift profoundly. But how?

The air is filled with talk of resistance, of the necessity of not normalizing  a DT administration. The urgency of the moment is clear, and I do not want to lessen it. So what follows might perhaps usefully be viewed as a complement rather than an alternative to this sense of urgency.  How can we act in ways that not only respond to the short-term imperatives, but also help incubate a platform for a reinvigorated politics and society?  Here (adapting some with the grain approaches for the current moment) are some  potential entry points.

First, checks and balances institutions – for societies endowed with them, these comprise the first, and crucial, line of defense against the erosion of freedom and democracy.

Second, protect the electoral process – and win elections. As per the opening of this blog, the 2026 midterm elections are only 21 months away. Those opposed to democracy will look to ways to fuel the flames of polarization in advance. [Think: “Reichstag fire” – on which, see more here.] Resist their provocations. Stay relentlessly focused on what it will take to win votes. Political parties are THE crucial actors.

Third, cultivate alliances. Beyond checks and balances institutions and programmatic political parties, the sustainability of democracy rests on a broad societal consensus in favor of democracy and the rule-of-law. This consensus has been America’s ‘civil religion’, one reason why it is so startling that so many voted for DT [in 2016 – and again in 2024]. But it is wildly premature to conclude that a short-term expression of discontent reflects a broader abandonment of America’s core principles. Defense of democracy requires a coalition that reaches across the traditional left-right ideological spectrum. Thus, rather than responding in kind to anger and polarization, opposition to DT needs to capture the higher ground of America’s political center.

Fourth, embrace a democracy-friendly discourse —  one which, as per Albert Hirschman, “moves beyond extreme, intransigent postures, with the hope that participants engage in meaningful discussion, ready to modify initially held opinions in the light of other arguments and new information”. DT’s discourse has, of course, been the exact opposite – an embrace of whatever might help to arouse supporters, with zero regard for its truth value.  But the breakdown in discourse goes beyond DT.

Openness to evidence comprises the bedrock foundation, the necessary condition, for civilization to thrive; yet we find ourselves in a world where the arbiters of the truth value of claims are losing their legitimacy. This can be explained, in our era of rapid change, by the power of cognitive dissonance to override inconvenient evidence.  But explaining is not enough. We urgently need to rebuild mutual confidence, a consensus across society as to the legitimacy, indeed the necessity, of fact-based discourse – else (if it is not already too late) all will be lost.

Fifth, focus on the consequences for inclusion and equity of the coming tsunami of policy initiatives from the DT administration. DT’s success is a (perverse) consequence of the accelerating dualism of American society – major gains at the top, stagnation for everyone else. In his campaign, DT promised to make things ‘great again’ for the struggling (predominantly white) middle. But the reality is (again) likely to be the opposite. Here are a few  examples:

Sixth, cultivate islands of effectiveness. Developmental forces continue to be present throughout society – within civil society, at state and local level, within public bureaucracies. As I explored in depth in my earlier work, in politically contested environments developmental actors can achieve valuable victories by focusing on specific initiatives, acting collectively, and building coalitions capable of fending off destructive, predatory influences. (Here is a link that introduces some new 2024/5 work that explores the possibilities of cross-cutting alliances between the public sector and civil society.) Not all space has closed. In a generally dispiriting time, showing what is possible continues to matter — both as antidote to despair and as inspiration, pointing the way towards a more hopeful future.

Some of the entry points I have highlighted above might seem inadequate to the moment. But it seems to me crucial that we look beyond a politics that offers nothing beyond deepening polarization. German politics in the interwar Weimar years of 1918-1933 provides a cautionary tale. As a white South African inspired by the fall of apartheid, as a Jew who has refused to be defined by history, the stereotypes of others (or a narrow ethno-nationalist vision of identity….), as a parent with two American children, I continue to believe that the life worth living is one fueled by our hopes and dreams, not our nightmares. The dream that all humans are created equal, with inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The dream of equal dignity. The American dream (perhaps even now in 2025….]. The human dream.

Now what? The despair, complacency and (un-strategic) resistance traps

January 21, 2025 By in Uncategorized Tags: , , , , 2 Comments

Back in 2016/17, when I was living in Washington, resistance was in the air. Resistance was not futile, but it turns out to not have been enough – so here we are. As history is again teaching us, in moments like these we risk falling into any one of a variety of traps. [One trap, which I am working to avoid in this opening paragraph – even as a principal purpose of this blog post is to share some extraordinarily apposite historical material – is to be too quick to draw the H—– or the Na– analogy……]. Complacency can be a trap (see the quotes below from Sebastian Haffner…). So, too, (as we learn from the same historical example…..) is unstrategic resistance – it plays into the hands of those who see accelerating polarization as the way to open up doors to personalized authoritarianism that had so far remained closed.

But, as we also are learning yet again, in times of crisis a nostalgic call to go back to the way it was cannot trump the peddlers of rage. As Antonio Gramsci understood, the crisis is precisely that “the old is dying, the new cannot be born, and a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” As readers of my Working with the Grain blogs know, my longstanding, Quixotic quest has been to try and give some shape to the “new”. (See, for example, here and here.) This effort continues; I have much new work to share in coming weeks and months. Today, though, I can’t resist sharing some gleanings from eight years ago that, yet again, serve for me as wake up calls. The photograph that leads this blog (….it can be a source of morbid amusement to play with possible captions…….) is new. But as you can see here (where you can also see the original photograph…..), the text remains the same……

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[July, 2018/October 2016]: Eighteen months into the Trump administration, I continue to be startled at the way so much of the Republican establishment has settled into a ‘politics as usual’ comfort zone, along the lines of ‘we may not like him, but many of our voters do, so for now we’ll go along’.    In the spirit of George Santayana (‘those who cannot remember history are condemned to repeat it’) here are a few extracts from three classic books on early 1930s Germany. (In the spirit of full disclosure, I wrote this piece in October, 2016; I’ve updated the first para, everything else remains unchanged.)   I begin with some contemporaneous observations (written by 25 year old Sebastian Haffner in 1939:

“At first the revolution only gave the impression of being a ‘historical event’ like any other: a matter for the press that might just possibly have some effect on the public mood. There was no revolution on January 30, 1933, just a change of government….. The general opinion was that it was not the Nazis who had won, but the bourgeois parties of the right, who had ‘captured’ the Nazis and held all the key positions in the government……. At the time, while I experienced the sequence of events it was not possible to gauge their significance. I felt, intensely, the choking, nauseous character of it all, but I was unable to grasp its constituent parts and place them in an overall order. Each attempt was frustrated and veiled by those endless useless discussions in which we attempted again and again to fit the events into an obsolete, unsuitable scheme of political ideas…….  How infinitely stupid the attempts at justification, how hopelessly superficial the constructions with which the intellect tried to cover up the proper feeling of dread and disgust. How stale all the isms we brought up. I shudder to think of it. …. Daily life went on as before, though it had now definitely become ghostly and unreal, and was daily mocked by the events that served as its background….” – Sebastian Haffner, Defying Hitler: A memoir (pp. 104; 136-7)

And here is a more scholarly description of some aspects of the process from Richard Evans: “Voters were not really looking for anything very concrete from the Nazi Party in 1930. They were, instead, protesting against the failure of the Weimar Republic. Many of them, too, particularly in rural areas, small towns, small workshops, culturally conservative families, older age groups, or the middle-class nationalist political milieu, may have been registering their alienation from the cultural and political modernity for which the Republic stood……. While conventional politicians delivered lectures, or spoke in a style that was orotund and pompous, flat and dull…..Hitler gained much of his oratorical success by telling his audiences what they wanted to hear. He used simple, straightforward language that ordinary people could understand, short sentences, powerful emotive slogans…..[General] Schleicher now [January 1933] saw a Hitler Chancellorship as a welcome solution: ‘If Hitler wants to establish a dictatorship in the Reich’, he said confidently, ‘then the army will be the dictatorship within the dictatorship’…” Richard Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich, pp. 265; 171

And here is an extract from Ian Kershaw: “Hitler was, in fact, in no position to act as an outright dictator when he came to office on 30 January, 1933. As long as [President] Hindenburg lived, there was a potential rival source of loyalty — not least for the army…… ” [BL: Then, as I summarized in an earlier post, came the burning of the Reichstag……and Hindenburg’s death in mid-1934]….. “…By summer 1934, when Hitler combined the headship of state with the leadership of government, his power had effectively shed formal constraints on its usage…. Conventional forms of government were increasingly exposed to the arbitrary inroads of personalized power. It was a recipe for disaster….” Ian Kershaw, Hitler: A biography.

Eighteen months after life had seemed normal,  disaster was well underway……