Opposing political signs in neighbors' yards in Maple Bluff, Wisconsin | Photo by Ruth Conniff

“Truth Decay” is rotting our politics and public discourse, according to political scientist Ray Block. Block delivered the keynote address at the WisPolitics “polling summit” at the Madison Club this week, where a panel of pollsters discussed trends in the 2024 election. (Top takeaway: No one knows who is going to win.)

“We’re in a worrying place,” Block warned, with disinformation and misinformation eroding confidence in election integrity and public institutions. “Lies kill democracy,” he said. If people can’t debate in good faith, public trust, community cohesion and ultimately all of our democratic institutions will collapse.

Block is the inaugural Michael D. Rich Distinguished Chair for Countering Truth Decay at the Rand Corporation, where researchers first began focusing on the degradation of truth in our current political and social media environment because it posed a threat to the value of scientific and academic expertise. After all, if facts don’t matter, research and hard-won expertise lose their currency. 

But the antidote to the bitter polarization and the sheer wackiness of our new political reality, Block and his colleagues have decided, lies not with experts or even with identifying objective truth. Instead, he said, it’s a matter of rebuilding individual relationships among neighbors. 

As he spoke, I thought about my suburban neighborhood, where Trump and Harris signs bristle at each other across sidewalks and driveways. How will we ever get along again?

“You can’t ‘correct’ your way out of these problems,” Block said of some voters’ beliefs that, for example, massive amounts of voter fraud changed the outcome of the 2020 election, or that President Barack Obama wasn’t really born in the United States. It’s no use treating these pernicious narratives as “a wrong answer on a test question,” he added. Instead, we have to understand how such false ideas are attached to a sense of shared social identity and community — and then do something to rebuild community among people with different points of view. 

The antidote to polarization and fact-aversion, Block and his Rand colleagues have decided, is to rebuild civil society through individual acts of community engagement. He talked about the urgency of preserving local news, and he urged people to get involved in local community-building efforts. Rand is doing this by hosting community dialogues near its headquarters in Santa Monica, California. The events bring together people with opposing views to discuss and debate the issues that worry them. The idea, Block said, is to “get people used to the idea that you’ve got to live together even if you don’t agree.” 

It sounds simple, but it’s not an easy thing to do. 

Close to home, I saw a good model of what Block is talking about during high holiday services at Shaarei Shamayim, Madison’s Reconstructionist Jewish congregation, where my family and I belong.

Rabbi Laurie Zimmerman led a conversation on the war in Gaza on Yom Kippur, the traditional Jewish day of mourning. She invited people to share their grief, both for the people killed in the  Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel and the hostages who remain in Gaza, and for the tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians who have been killed and displaced in the ensuing war. “You are going to hear things you don’t agree with,” Rabbi Laurie said, to a group of congregants with conflicting views on Israel, Palestine and the war, “and that’s OK.

In her Rosh Hashanah sermon, Rabbi Laurie described her own uncomfortable conversations with family members with whom she disagrees, and her participation in a community forum on Gaza that devolved into shouting. In her humble, self-deprecating way, she described an unsatisfying conversation about the war with fellow rabbis. One of them pooh-poohed her suggestion that children learn about the complexities of the relationship between Israelis and Palestinians, including the history of repression and injustice Palestinians have experienced. He asserted that “kids need to know what side they’re on.” In his Sunday school classes, he said, he skips complexity and has children draw Israeli flags.

“It’s not soccer,” Rabbi Laurie grumbled. 

In the community forum, she found herself on the opposite side, arguing heatedly with an activist who insisted that the rapes and murders of Oct. 7 were justified — comparable to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of Polish Jews during the Holocaust. 

“​​The attack on October 7th and ensuing war has created, or maybe unleashed, deep polarization — in families, among friends, in congregations, and in the larger community,” Rabbi Laurie said. “It widened the discourse to the point where I have heard people I know and love say things that are untrue, conspiratorial, hateful, and bereft of the basic values I had thought we all shared.”

Despite the discomfort, she continues to pursue these awkward conversations, and encouraged her congregation to do likewise, “not to find solutions, but to become more connected with one another. To think deeply about the meaning of kinship and of justice. To become more committed to our deepest ideals.”

It’s a credit to Rabbi Laurie’s willingness to endure these difficult encounters, to persist despite not knowing where it will lead, that the Shaarei Shamayim community does, in fact, make room for a diversity of opinions. If people can talk to each other and hold onto their relationships through deep disagreement, there’s hope for peace and justice. It’s a good model for all of us going forward. 

As Block said, no matter who wins the election, “we are not going to make it if we don’t figure out how to work together.”