By Chris Satullo

David French wishes you had more friends.

And, since you’re the type of person who hangs out chez Polman, he wishes he had more friends like you.

French is an evangelical Christian intellectual – living proof that those three words do not constitute an oxymoron. He’s senior editor of The Dispatch, an independent conservative site to which he migrated after leaving a post at the National Review partly because of its glide towards Trumpism. He also has a new email newsletter for The Atlantic called The Third Rail (subscribe!).

I got a chance to spend some time, virtually, with French before Thanksgiving, when he spoke to the UPenn community about America’s polarization and the threat of secession.  He did so for a program I run at the university that promotes viewpoint diversity and civil dialogue.

Here are a few things I can tell you about David French after reading his work enthusiastically for a while and chatting with him on Zoom for a couple of hours:

• He’s a kind of evangelical Christian who bears no resemblance to the popular liberal caricature. (He notes wryly that a large chunk of the people whom pollsters call evangelical Christians actually report going to church only one or two times a year: “They don’t really meet any authentic theological definition of evangelical.  They’re subscribers to the God and Country lifestyle brand.”)
• He’s deeply versed in the research into the psychological and sociological roots of our divided, dyspeptic civic state.
• He’s got a cool sabre leaning against a wall in his basement lair, which he got when he mustered out of the U.S. Army after a volunteer stint in Iraq.
• He’s as much of a Tolkien nerd as I am.
• He’s a lawyer who’s a passionate and well-informed advocate for free speech, on campus and everywhere.

And he’s worried you don’t have enough friends, particularly people who live in a different space – geographically, culturally, and politically – from you.

It’s partly due to the lack of such friendships, he said, that the most politically engaged Americans (i.e., you) are becoming “dangerously polarized,” even as the “exhausted majority” of Americans opt out of political discussion altogether.

He described his own community, Franklin, Tenn., as one of America’s “landslide districts,” places where one party routinely wins by more than 20 percentage points. His town tilts deep red, about as much as mine trends deep blue.

These pockets of political uniformity are spawned, he said, by our accelerating tendency to sort ourselves geographically by culture and political outlook.

French said many Americans are unfamiliar with, fearful of and alienated from people who differ with them politically. He noted the “law of group polarization,” which was explored by the scholar Cass Sunstein in his book Infotopia: If you gather a group of like-minded people in a closed setting, and keep out all people of differing views, the views of everyone in the group will become more extreme.

Whole American communities – both rural and urban, Sun Belt and Rust Belt – have become experiments in this phenomenon. Therefore, French said, he’s become concerned that secession, a breaking part of America, has become a real possibility.

“A few years ago, when I first began writing about this, people thought I was a loon for warning about it,” he said. “Now, a lot of people are saying: I think it might happen. Some are saying: I want it to happen, which is a whole different conversation.”

Paradoxically, French said, one way to avert the catastrophe of secession might to curb our habit of talking about everyday politics in catastrophic terms:

“Even though I worry about secession, I spend a lot of time telling people to chill out; that not everything is as big a crisis as you think it is. We need to calm down about the day-to-day give-and-take of politics. We need to guard against catastrophism, saying things like, America is over if this candidate wins. This constant exaggeration of the stakes of every political dispute is making people angry, putting them on edge. It makes them more vulnerable to misinformation and to claims that the world is crashing down around them, making extreme responses justified.”

Seeking “seeds of hope,” French turned to the large group of Americans that the recent Hidden Tribes of America Study dubbed the “Exhausted Majority.” This motley crew, ranging politically from garden-variety liberals to moderates to mild conservatives to the resolutely apolitical, is united by one thing: They are all sick and tired of polarized rhetoric and media cocoons.

The hope, French said, is that enough of them are becoming so disgusted with the nasty status quo that they are moving from “alienated to motivated”:

“They are saying: We’ve got to figure this out. We’ve got to find a way to live together in a 51-49, or a 53-47 world…They understand America is too diverse, too pluralistic, to have unanimity. You can’t eliminate conflict; you have to learn how to manage it.”

One way to learn those skills is to find your “Leo,” French said. Leo is the name of one of his closest friends, whom he met and bonded with in Iraq. Here’s how French describes them as a pair of buddies:

“I’m a white Evangelical conservative born and raised in the South. He’s a former Mormon, former Catholic, agnostic Mexican-American Democrat. (He says he belongs to the “church of the Hubble Telescope” because he only believes what he can see.)”

They’ve got little in common. They argue politics all the time and never persuade the other. But they love each other and would do anything to help if the other needed it.

If you’ve got some Leos in your life, French said, you’ll never fall for the toxic media messages that the other side has horns and hooves, that “They” are out to destroy your family and your nation.

But too few of us, particularly men, are forming such friendships these days. French cited a Survey Center on American Life study from this year. It found that the percentage of Americans who reported having no close friends has quadrupled since 1990, while the number counting five or more close friends has declined by more than 40 percent. Men reported being lonelier and more friend-starved than women.

Many such men, French suspects, seek some semblance of friendship in online communities. When those online communities are based on fiercely held political views, the polarizing impact of closed communities kicks into overdrive. To diverge in any way from your favored online groupthink is to risk exile from the only friends you may feel you have.

You can see the effects of this syndrome on the delusional QAnon right and the hyper-woke left, where new ways to find everyday language intolerably offensive seem to get invented every day.

“Norms change rapidly in polarized communities,” he said. “If you’re in the middle of these rapid changes, it seems normal and logical. You experience this change as enlightenment. But from the outside it can seem strange, exotic even bizarre. This happened in conservative circles, where people I know went very swiftly from holding their nose to vote for Donald Trump to piloting the third boat in the boat parade.”

Chatting with French, it dawned on me that – inside my own Covid-working-from-home cocoon – it has been a long time since I had such a pleasant, fun exchange with someone with whom I have some sharply diverging political views. I used to have such back-and-forths regularly when I was on a newspaper editorial board, but pandemic Zoom sessions aren’t particularly fruitful in that regard.

French has Leo. I’m not sure I have one anymore. That’s a new year’s resolution waiting to get made.

What about you?

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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia