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Few things can change your perspective for the better more than being attacked from both sides of America’s culture war.
If you think the left is uniquely intolerant, how do you process right-wing censorship? Or if you think the right is uniquely prone to political violence, how do you process far-left riots? When faced with similar behavior from one side or the other, hard-core partisans retreat to specious comparisons. They comfort themselves with the idea that no matter how bad their own tribe might be, the other side is worse.
But there’s a different perspective. Remove yourself from a partisan team, and you can more clearly see that human nature is driving American conflict just as much, if not more, than ideological divisions.
I had that exact thought when I read my newsroom colleague Nicholas Confessore’s masterful and comprehensive report in The New York Times Magazine on the failure of the University of Michigan’s huge investment in diversity, equity and inclusion.
There are two troubling components to his story. The first is found in the bottom-line results of the university’s D.E.I. program. In spite of spending staggering sums of money, hiring scores of diversity administrators and promulgating countless new policies, the efforts failed. Michigan still hasn’t come close to becoming as diverse as it wants to be. Black students, for example, are stuck at around 4 to 5 percent of the undergraduate population in a state where 14 percent of the residents are Black.
The second is that those ineffective policies were promulgated and enforced in part through a campus culture that was remarkably intolerant. Confessore’s report is replete with examples of professors who faced frivolous complaints of race or gender bias, and after Hamas’s terrorist attack on Oct. 7 — when the university’s commitments to pluralism were put to their toughest test — Michigan couldn’t meet even its most basic legal obligations.
In a June news release announcing the resolution of two civil rights complaints against the university for antisemitism, the U.S. Department of Education said that it “found no evidence that the university complied with its Title VI requirements to assess whether incidents individually or cumulatively created a hostile environment for students, faculty or staff.” The school also did not “take steps reasonably calculated to end the hostile environment, remedy its effects and prevent its recurrence.”
In spite of immense expenditures intended to foster a climate of inclusion on campus, Jewish students could not even count on their school to comply with the law. The school couldn’t cross the lowest possible bar of acceptable behavior.
If I’d read Confessore’s story 15 years ago, when I was litigating free speech cases on campus, I would have had a simple response — there goes the campus left again, intolerant and ineffective.
After all, I’d directly experienced a version of that intolerance in my own life and work. I was shouted down more than once by far-left peers in law school, and much of my legal career was dedicated to responding to what we’d now call D.E.I. excesses — instances where diversity efforts infringed on free speech, religious liberty and due process.
But in 2024, I have a different thought. I have seen and endured right-wing institutions engaging in the same (and sometimes much worse) intolerance as left-wing institutions. When I wrote about my own recent cancellation at the hands of my former denomination, I was flooded with hundreds of personal emails relating similar stories. Even the smallest deviations from the required right-wing orthodoxies were being met with a withering response in conservative churches and conservative religious organizations across America.
To understand what’s happening here, let’s turn back to Confessore’s Michigan report. He wrote that the growing D.E.I. bureaucracies “represented a major — and profoundly left-leaning — reshuffling of campus power.” University faculty members lean far to the left, yet “administrators were even more politically liberal than faculty members, according to one survey, and far more likely to favor racial preferences in admissions and hiring.”
In other words, the campus D.E.I. bureaucracy was attempting to address an almost impossibly difficult and important task from within an ideological monoculture. It was doomed to fail, and it was doomed to fail in toxic ways.
It’s not because the D.E.I. bureaucracy is leftist. It’s because it’s full of human beings. It’s a fact of human nature that when like-minded people gather, they tend to become more extreme. This concept — called the law of group polarization — applies across ideological and institutional lines. The term was most clearly defined and popularized in a 1999 paper by Cass Sunstein. The law of group polarization, according to Sunstein, “helps to explain extremism, ‘radicalization,’ cultural shifts and the behavior of political parties and religious organizations.”
In my experience, the more ideologically or theologically “pure” an institution becomes, the more wrong it is likely to be, especially if it takes on a difficult or complex task. Ideological monocultures aren’t just bad for the minority that’s silenced, harassed or canceled whenever its members raise their voices in dissent. It’s terrible for the confident majority — and for the confident majority’s cause.
I’m currently teaching a college class called Why Is American Politics So Insane?, and when I was putting together the syllabus, I went back and forth between thinking Robert Putnam’s book “Bowling Alone” was the most prescient book of the 2000s and thinking that distinction belonged to Bill Bishop’s 2008 book, “The Big Sort.”
“Bowling Alone” highlighted the collapse in communal activity in America and how that loss of connection is driving an immense amount of our national polarization and pain.
“The Big Sort” highlighted the fact that Americans were increasingly living in like-minded communities and like-minded communities radicalize us. “Mixed company moderates,” Bishop wrote, “like-minded company polarizes. Heterogeneous communities restrain group excesses; homogeneous communities march toward the extremes.”
It’s not that moderates are always right and radicals are always wrong (abolitionism was once a radical idea), but a moderate temperament is more inclusive, more open to different ideas, and the more difficult the task (easing and hopefully erasing the lingering effects of hundreds of years of formal, legal racial oppression in the United States), the greater the need for different perspectives.
Even people who possess radical ideas should be open-minded enough to understand that their radical ideas might be wrong or that even good ideas can benefit from sharp critique.
Instead, monocultures narrow the frame. Required D.E.I. statements — in which prospective faculty members are forced to state their own views about diversity, equity and inclusion — are often used as ideological screening mechanisms. As Confessore reported, articulating even mainstream arguments in favor of de-emphasizing identity-based differences or creating a “level playing field” in admissions could be “career suicide” at Michigan.
The university’s vast D.E.I. bureaucracy seemed uninterested in one of the most critical aspects of diversity — the diversity of ideas. Michigan’s D.E.I. bureaucracy could even take issue with the idea that “students should be expected to encounter uncomfortable ideas.”
This is not a university-specific phenomenon. One of the most culturally significant institutions in the United States is the evangelical church, and many of its denominations are on their way to becoming as ideologically one-sided as the most progressive college campuses.
Ryan Burge, a scholar who studies religious trends in American life, recently observed that Southern Baptists were evenly split between Republicans and Democrats as recently as 2008. By 2022 the denomination was 75 percent Republican and only 21 percent Democratic. Voting data from 2020 indicates that other Protestant denominations are even more weighted toward the Republican Party.
Hidden behind numbers like that are countless stories of alienation and exclusion. There are family rifts and behind-the-scenes power struggles. All for the sake of purity and righteousness that religious fundamentalism perversely makes more elusive. The mysteries of God are too great to be contained within ever-narrowing human orthodoxies.
I’m inherently suspicious of the notion that simple ideas can solve complex problems, but what if a simple idea can help us embrace complexity? Intellectual diversity matters. Opening your mind to a wider range of perspectives is transformative. It doesn’t just protect the minority from the majority; it also helps protect the majority from itself, and the institutions that learn that lesson will be far more tolerant and successful than those that close their doors to opposing points of view.
No American faction — or party — has a monopoly on virtue or insight. For those of us who see diversity, equity and inclusion as good values, the answer is less for the right to beat the left or for the left to beat the right but rather for the right to be open to the left and the left to be open to the right.
If only it were as easy as it sounds.
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