GVSU Expert: A Q&A about having civil discussions during election season

Why are difficult conversations, like politics, often unproductive, and what tools can the Civil Discourse Center give people to approach those discussions differently?

In many difficult conversations, some people shut down and do not want to engage. Another set of people resort to debating, but it's ineffective because they're thinking, "I want to win this conversation."

Avoiding people and conversations is not going to get us anywhere. We're not challenging ourselves or others, which is an important part of engaging in civil discourse and thinking critically in a way where the end goal is to improve ourselves and each other.

My role as a civil discourse fellow is to equip students to have tools at the ready for these kinds of challenging conversations.

It's, of course, an interesting time nationally. Two polls came out in 2025: one said that 85% of Americans fear politically motivated violence or think that politically motivated violence is on the rise; the other poll found that 30% of Americans believe that violence is actually necessary to correct this course that we're on.

I didn't grow up thinking that way. When I asked my students about this last fall, they were appropriately upset but did not seem that surprised. Young people tend to have this normalized fear of ideological violence because that's what they're seeing around them as normal. Many of them are even afraid of the word "argument" because they associate it with this sort of escalation of violence.

Part of my job as a faculty member, and I see this as an important part as a faculty fellow, is to demonstrate what collaborative argumentation or critical thinking actually looks like for them.

I want to teach and demonstrate that these conversations can be accomplished when the two parties are coming from a framework of respect and love. It's going back to that idea of improving the self and improving each other.

Campaigns will use ads designed to make voters distrustful of the opposing party. How effective are those tactics at increasing political polarization?

We have to think, "What is the purpose of this ad?" And it's easy for us to retreat into an us-versus-them mentality, a kind of binary opposition. It's what we do naturally when we're confronted with uncertainty and it's something that we have to actively train ourselves not to do.

Fearful people are easy to exploit. It's in the interest of powerful people and powerful systems to strategically divide people so that they're weaker. Political advertising works to invoke these kinds of strong emotional reactions to make us feel a certain way, so that we aren't exercising critical thinking.

With any advertising, stop and ask yourself, who benefits from me feeling this way? The answer is never me. I don't benefit from those feelings. It's always the company, the celebrity, the party or even the system that benefits from me feeling scared, resentful, doubtful, energized or distracted.

Ads like that are very effective. But none of this new, of course. It's an intentional strategy to make people do something.