Right after the U.S. presidential election, the dialogue field seemed to launch itself into activity. A November 14 post on the blog of the National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation proclaimed that “dialogue & deliberation is more critical than ever” and invited professionals to share their post-election activities. Based on the 34 responses in the Comments field—a huge number for most blogs these days—there’s a lot going on.

I’m sure some of this activity, even most of it, will prove fruitful in some way. Yet I cannot shake the gut feeling that we, as a field, are missing a very, very big point.

Specifically, I wonder if our prospects for authentic dialogue—at least on the national, global, policy, big-issue levels—have turned very dark indeed. I wonder whether the obstacles to further dialogue have become insurmountable, at least in the short term.

Here’s why I’m wondering this:

  1. It’s unclear to me that Trump supporters want to dialogue at all. Several disparate observations lead me to this.
    • Over several months, on my own social media feed, I put out several calls for Trump supporters to share the thinking behind their support. I received thoughtful, in-depth answers from precisely two people. Everyone else, even when approached directly, gave me evasions at best.
    • Separate from this effort, I’ve noticed that social media comments and posts from Trump supporters are nearly free of original content. (Before you think I’m jumping to the conclusion that Trump supporters are stupid, see point 2 below.)
    • In mainstream media, buckets of ink have been spilled reporting (and in some cases publishing research) on why Mr. Trump has attracted so much enthusiasm. There are many reasons why “the media” may have missed the whys and wherefores of this support. But could one of them be that many Trump supporters simply do not want to talk about it?
    • In NCDD (where I just finished two terms as a board member), we have long bemoaned the dearth of conservative voices among our membership. Some have pondered whether dialogue is a “liberal thing.” At the recent biannual conference, I don’t recall talking with anyone who supported Mr. Trump.
  2. No one who feels disrespected wants to dialogue with their disrespecters—and we all feel disrespected. I’ve noticed this within myself since November 8: amid all the talk of “reaching out to Trump supporters” to try understanding them, I want someone to reach out to me. Do Trump supporters feel the same way? Have they felt the same way for a long time? A corollary of this is “explanation fatigue”: people in marginalized groups often find themselves having to explain who they are and why they are, so putting the onus on them to explain themselves again in dialogue just adds to their sense of otherness and disrespect.
  3. The fissures are so much deeper, and more ancient, than we thought. I’ve been reading an in-depth history of the U.S. between 1788 and 1800, when factions and partisanship first became part of the political landscape. Some aspects of that history are so very familiar: a divide between city and country (link to brilliant and profane article on this topic here), between centralized government and small government advocates, between slave owners and abolitionists. I have no doubt that you could trace these divides much further back as well. Yes, the rise of Mr. Trump may be about immigration or economic opportunity in 2016—and these issues are important—but they do not begin to explain the divides of centuries. I don’t see our current attempts at dialogue even beginning to address this.
  4. In a post-truth society, we have nothing to dialogue with. The very nature of dialogue implies a search for truth of some kind: the truth of the other person’s experience, at least, if not some kind of transpersonal truth (e.g., gravity exists, slavery is universally wrong). We dialogue because there are truths we don’t know, either about the other or about the world. Mr. Trump’s campaign seems to have ushered in an era where one can say anything, claim anything, without regard for the accuracy or truth value of that statement. What then forms the content of our conversation? It can be anything, it can go anywhere, without regard for reality. This is not dialogue. It is not even conversation.

I dearly hope someone will read this and explain precisely why I’m wrong. I would love to think that dialogue efforts can proceed as they did before November 8—the same tools, the same techniques, the same spirit and attitude—just accelerated. But I don’t see it. What do you see?