What If JOINERS Is Too Simple?

Our political divide isn’t about policy—it’s about vibes

My friend Natalie reminded me that JOINERS is my job now. She also called me a shrinking violet. The last several times she’s seen me explain JOINERS to someone new, she noticed I don’t pitch it like someone starting a promising new venture or organization. I tend to frame it as a “project” and minimize what I’m working on. You see, Natalie is a raging capitalist, corporate raider (jk, she’s a climate investor) so she gets pitched constantly and coaches founders in her portfolio on how they can improve for other investors.

She’s not wrong. Part of the problem is I don’t want to channel the BFE™¹ that plagues the Bay Area. There have been far too many times when I’ve overheard someone at a coffee shop or dinner talking about how their [fill in the blank] is “going to change the world.”

I also know there’s still some sharpness missing because I’m still researching, refining, and validating my core hypotheses². And every day I’m learning something new that enables me to iterate and deepen my understanding of the problem space. But ultimately, I worry that what I’m trying to build is too touchy-feely and simple to have legs. I’ve often framed our dual challenges of polarization and isolation as a problem of proximity. The plan was for this issue of Joinery to lay out more of the why behind what I’m working on.

Then I happened upon an incredible paper by Rachel Kleinfeld³^,⁴, which reframed polarization for me. Instead of seeing it as simply a problem of proximity, I began to understand both the interpersonal and structural forces that entrench division in the U.S. political system.

I’m still working it out—and I’m going to work some of it out with you here today.

I’ve always chuckled at how my career path has “rhymed” as it’s continued to wind. As I was reading the aforementioned paper, I got that feeling again. You see, in undergrad I studied Philosophy, and then found out about the Cognitive Neuroscience⁵ second major. And then, while teaching, I was thinking lots about why schools don’t use research that much in teaching, so I felt really lucky again to find out about the Mind, Brain, and Education program at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. After some stopovers at school districts and edtech companies, I again felt incredibly fortunate to spend most of the last seven years at CZI at the intersection of learning sciences, teacher development, district implementation, and education technology.

It seemed like I was lucky in finding ways to build upon my previous experiences and knowledge. However, JOINERS seemed like a departure from anything that I knew (or thought I knew) towards something I felt.

Given my background in learning science and mental states, I expected this paper—rooted in democracy and politics—to validate “contact theory,” the idea that cross-group contact reduces bias. I assumed polarization was simply an outgrowth of its absence. But what I found was an entirely new construct (for me): affective polarization. In the literature, there’s been a

shift from thinking of polarization as an ideological, policy-based phenomenon to an issue of emotion, as well as the emerging understanding of polarization as both a social phenomenon and a political strategy.

It might only be funny to me, but I did think that my pursuit of JOINERS was bringing warm fuzzies to a political problem, but Kleinfeld’s entire argument is that we need to be bringing cognitive and social psychology-grounded interventions to our current democratic situation, and previous lab based interventions don’t sufficiently account for things like emotions, which govern even the most rational of us.

In short, ‘affective polarization’ is when members of one party dislike those in the other—not because of deep ideological differences, but because of perceived differences⁶.

Kleinfeld argues that these feelings of dislike aren’t just social—they interact with voter behaviors, candidate incentives, and our individual relationships.

I’d previously thought⁷ that there are ideological moderates who have withdrawn from the political system, thus leaving extreme perspective on the ideological poles. Kleinfeld argues that we misunderstand the “middle.” These former swing voters aren’t just politically disengaged—they are deeply distrustful of the entire system, with strong anti-democratic tendencies. Can you guess how these folks voted in 2016 and 2024?

The other actionable point (for me) Kleinfeld makes is that the affective polarization is driven by misunderstanding and perceptions⁸ of the other party. Folks tend to overestimate and misestimate the composition of other parties, what they care about, and what policy positions they hold. If I asked you to close your eyes and picture a Republican or a Democrat, what would you see? If you’re a Republican, you might picture a young, leftist activist or a union organizer of color. If you’re a Democrat, you’re probably imagining an old, wealthy, evangelical conservative. But in reality, “the modal⁹ member of both parties is a middle-aged, White, nonevangelical Christian.”

So there’s a need to restore faith in the system, despite an overwhelming perception (and history) of the system only working for elites. And people need to actually meet each other—to see that the “other side” isn’t just a caricature invented by Rachel Maddow or Tucker Carlson.

I think these two ideas are part of the work of JOINERS:

1. How might we get people to see government working in their communities, or get them to push government to work better for them at the local and state level? Or hell, even get them involved in the government. What are the smaller, proximate actions we can get people to take in fun, social ways?

2. And how do we build relationships across difference? Oakland may be overwhelmingly blue, but even here, there are important differences worth exploring. But the real challenge is in getting out of our bubbles — down 24 into the burbs, or into the Valley. I haven’t quite sorted this one yet, so open to ideas.

How JOINERS contributes to #1 and #2 is why I think lots about third spaces, clubs, organizations, and “social infrastructure.” Clubs, groups, and organizations are the training ground for participation and leadership in civic life and the spaces are the scaffolding that enables us to build strong, lasting relationships with folks who don’t look like us.

If we can do this—if we can build spaces that reconnect us, push government to serve us, and create real relationships across difference—maybe, just maybe, we stand a chance.

1. Big Founder Energy.

2. Please take my survey if you have 5ish minutes. And drop me a note if you’d like to participate in a user interview!

3. Truthfully, while going down a rabbit hole looking for possible funders.

4. Also, if anyone is connected to her, I’d love to chat!

5. Yes, a weird combination but at WashU the Cognitive Neuroscience program grew out of the Philosophy Department.

6. She notes they also don’t like their own parties that much.

7. e.g., from Robert Putnam’s writing.

8. A real philosopher would’ve have said phenomenology.

9. For the economists and my math teacher mom.