{"id":45636,"date":"2025-01-15T06:10:44","date_gmt":"2025-01-15T06:10:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/buildersmovement.org\/?p=45636"},"modified":"2025-01-23T01:54:57","modified_gmt":"2025-01-23T01:54:57","slug":"to-solve-problems-need-bridges-ladders","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buildersmovement.org\/2025\/01\/15\/to-solve-problems-need-bridges-ladders\/","title":{"rendered":"To Solve America\u2019s Problems, We Need Bridges \u2014 and Ladders"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is a guest blog post from Lauren Hall, who writes the Radical Moderate\u2019s Guide to Life<\/a> and is a current Pluralism Fellow with the Mercatus Center\u2019s Program on Pluralism and Civil Discourse<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

In the wake of a bruising election, many Americans are looking for ways to build bridges across our divides. There\u2019s reason for hope \u2014 studies show that, despite perceptions, Americans agree on many policy fundamentals<\/a>. But not everyone feels hopeful about bridge-building.<\/p>\n

Some view building bridges as a distraction from the real work of reducing inequality. Others see the civil discourse that bridge-building requires as misguided tone policing<\/a>. Some believe such goals require compromise with misguided, ignorant people \u2014 or with harmful extremists<\/a>.<\/p>\n

While these concerns are understandable, they miss the deeper purpose of building bridges. Building bridges helps foster understanding and cooperation, which are good things on their own \u2014 but they are also what\u2019s needed to help us solve our toughest challenges.<\/p>\n

We should think not only about building bridges<\/em> between each other, but about building ladders to help people escape harmful \u201cpits.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Imagine our society as a shared landscape. We all live here, but we navigate the landscape differently based on our experiences, perspectives, and values. Those differences can sometimes create chasms that make it hard for us to connect with each other. That\u2019s why we need bridges.<\/em> Bridges help us connect across our differences and see different parts of this shared landscape.<\/p>\n

But our landscape also has pits.<\/strong><\/em> These are places where people fall in and can\u2019t get out. Pits include things like childhood poverty, addiction, gun violence, mental illness, and fractured families.<\/p>\n

Pits are really hard to get out of without help. They prevent people from pursuing their goals and they represent a net loss of talent, innovation, and wealth to our community. Pits are bad for individuals and for our communities. They\u2019re where we find our most challenging policy problems.<\/p>\n

Pits and bridges interact in a whole host of ways. A landscape full of pits is one where people are more focused on not falling in than they are about beautifying the landscape or working together to build a better future.<\/p>\n

A landscape full of pits also makes it hard to trust each other. Social and political capital is hard to build if people are constantly afraid of what\u2019s around the next bend in the road.<\/p>\n

A landscape with many pits also increases resentment between those who are most vulnerable to falling into pits and those who \u2014 for a variety of reasons \u2014 have an easier path to navigate through the same landscape.<\/p>\n

And it\u2019s in these areas where bridges and ladders interact. Building bridges isn\u2019t just about understanding each other better. That\u2019s an important goal. But we also need to work together \u2014 and building bridges helps us identify pits that we\u2019d otherwise miss. Building bridges helps us build ladders to help people get out of those pits.<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard for a middle-class parent to understand the challenges faced by a family with no health insurance. If you\u2019ve only read about immigration policy, it\u2019s hard to understand what it\u2019s like to actually navigate it. Without direct experience of the foster care system, it\u2019s hard to understand the isolation and challenges faced by foster children.<\/p>\n

By focusing on problems we know about, we\u2019ll also be less polarized. It\u2019s hard to care about partisan politics when you\u2019re focused on solving concrete problems in your community.<\/p>\n

Focusing on pits in our community can also reduce our sense of frustration and futility. In Why We\u2019re Polarized<\/em>, Ezra Klein wrote that \u201cwe give too much attention to national politics, which we can do very little to change, and too little attention to state and local politics, where our voices can matter much more. The time spent spraying outrage over Trump\u2019s latest tweet [\u2026] is better spent checking in with what\u2019s happening in your own neighborhood.\u201d<\/p>\n

By focusing on the pits in our communities, we defang polarization, increase trust, and recenter politics around the needs of everyday people. This makes building bridges even easier; it shrinks the chasms between us.<\/p>\n

We have lots of concrete examples of how building bridges help us figure out how to construct ladders. The Tennessee 11<\/a> is a fantastic example of a group of people who seemed to have little in common \u2014 but who built bridges of understanding and constructed a ladder of policies to tackle gun violence in their communities.<\/p>\n

On the Solutions Journalism Solutions Tracker<\/a> website, you can find similar stories from Wichita<\/a> to Philadelphia<\/a>. They highlight the local links between bridge building and ladder building. These and other examples remind us that, while our divides may seem vast, they\u2019re not insurmountable.<\/p>\n

We should look for opportunities to promote positive stories like these, which unfortunately get far less attention<\/a> than more divisive, angering stories. We can \u201cbe the change we want to see\u201d by how we interact with and share information.<\/p>\n

Activists must also see that only with bridge-building will they achieve lasting solutions. Without buy-in from an ideologically diverse set of people, political wins will often be temporary \u2014 prone to being rolled back when the \u201cother side\u201d gains power and the pendulum swings the other way.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a mistake to think about building bridges and civil discourse as distractions from social justice or addressing inequalities. In reality, they\u2019re anything but: They\u2019re what help us build a foundation for collaboration, empathy, and real, lasting solutions.<\/p>\n

This was a guest blog post from Lauren Hall, who writes the Radical Moderate\u2019s Guide to Life<\/a>. If you enjoyed this, read our piece \u201cIs political passion at odds with reducing polarization?<\/a>\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is a guest blog post from Lauren Hall, who writes the Radical Moderate\u2019s Guide to Life and is a current Pluralism Fellow with the Mercatus Center\u2019s Program on Pluralism and Civil Discourse. In the wake of a bruising election, many Americans are looking for ways to build bridges across our divides. There\u2019s reason for…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":45634,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"collection_feed":[],"type_feed":[77],"class_list":["post-45636","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nTo Solve America\u2019s Problems, We Need Bridges \u2014 and Ladders - Builders<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/buildersmovement.org\/2025\/01\/15\/to-solve-problems-need-bridges-ladders\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"To Solve America\u2019s Problems, We Need Bridges \u2014 and Ladders - Builders\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"This is a guest blog post from Lauren Hall, who writes the Radical Moderate\u2019s Guide to Life and is a current Pluralism Fellow with the Mercatus Center\u2019s Program on Pluralism and Civil Discourse. 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