Most days, the outrage motivating progressives on Bluesky is about something conservatives on X haven’t even heard about, and vice versa. Politically active people are at war with caricatures of their opponents, but they are not forced to actually confront those opponents as human beings with priorities of their own, or to acknowledge the possibility that what the two sides want might be the starting point for a negotiation toward an outcome they could both tolerate.
And the cultural gravity of these technologies is remaking our traditional civic spaces in their image. The culture of Congress, and of many college campuses, increasingly resembles that of social media. It fosters not disagreement (which inevitably involves mixing with the other side) but division.
Breaking through our divisions and lowering the temperature of our politics therefore doesn’t call for less disagreement and argument but for more. And it will require us to make those arguments concrete, and not just symbolic—to define substantive, tractable policy goals and then submit ourselves to the structured negotiating processes of our political system and our civic life to achieve them.
But above all, lowering the temperature will require us to recognize that the people we disagree with are not the problem to be solved. Each of our major political parties now behaves as if the other party is the country’s biggest problem. We need to see that this is just a way to avoid dealing with the country’s actual problems, and that dealing with those will require negotiation, accommodation, and a lot of patience for opinions that aren’t our own.
