The divide is currently unbridgeable depending on which factions you're talking about. Moderates, sane left, and sane right can still bridge the gaps, but not the fringes. And unfortunately, right now the fringe is kinda controlling the conversation.
Woke culture is completely incompatible with traditional American values. I know where that leads, which is why it worries me. I'm trying to understand how people can bridge the gap to stop this. The problem is that too few people on either side has the language to communicate with the other. The more ideological one is, the worse is the problem. Neither side understands the other, and they both are as uncharitable with their interpretations of what the other says. They don't communicate in good faith. They don't trust each other. These are all the rules you break intentionally if you want an unbridgeable gap. We're not doing this because we want to though. We're doing it because it is the default behavior. We are wired to do that.
If we want to bridge the divide, we have to have...I'll say it this way...a safe space. What I mean by that is that the environment for the conversation has to be one of mutual trust. An understanding between the people that both sides will communicate in good faith. And there's a lot wrapped around that term. Primarily it is an understanding that both sides have at least some value. In a recent podcast I listened to, one of the speakers equated it with signal to noise. Something objectively true is the signal. The noise represents is just ideological dogma. In just about every world view there is at least a little signal and everyone has at least a little noise. Some more, some less. But if we are interested in increasing our own signal and decreasing our own noise, we should be open to interact with people who disagree in even fundamental ways, to search out and receive the signal, while still rejecting the noise.
But that's literally an extraordinary conversation to have. There is a lot of evolutionary default behavior circuitry that we have to override to have that kind of conversation. I have yet to hear that conversation between woke people and even run of the mill liberals. Last year, maybe the year before, I sat through over an hour of Sam Harris trying to have that kind of conversation with Ezra Kline. It just wasn't possible. There was no bridging that divide. To Sam's credit, he did try. Kline could not think past his own ideological dogma. Kline seemed to take the attitude that Sam was wrong no matter what he said, and it didn't sound to me like Kline even listened. Sam talked, and then Kline went right into his wokology.
