POLITICAL DEBATE THESE days looks more often like trench warfare than reasoned discourse on the pros and cons of important policy proposals. In our age of hyper-polarization, political adversaries are treated more like blood enemies, and issues are often characterized in absolute terms as black-and-white matters of right and wrong, even when they’re often far more complicated than that.  

Jim Peyser says a healthy, well-functioning democracy depends on us getting out of this cycle of vitriol and restoring a measure of civil discourse to our debates. His day job for all eight years of Charlie Baker’s tenure as governor was secretary of education. But Peyser, whose dad was a congressman from New York in the 1970s and early 1980s – and showed serious bipartisanship by switching parties during that time, from Republican to Democrat – has a deep interest in civic life and in finding ways to bridge some of the divide that has turned political debate into winner-take-all blood sport.  

“We’re essentially shouting at each other across the divide,” says Peyser, who joined CommonWealth Beacon executive editor Michael Jonas this week on The Codcast. Our positions on issues have been reduced to bumper sticker slogans, he said, “which is essentially crowding out or making it impossible to have an actual conversation around the issues themselves, the problems we’re trying to solve, and what some of the solutions might be.” 

Over the past year, Peyser has written a dozen issue briefs for CommonWealth Beacon in which he tries to show just what he means – taking on contentious issues facing the state that range from rent control to natural gas pipelines and proposals for a prison construction moratorium. He shows how arguments often come down to balancing trade-offs rather than the moralistic right-or-wrong framing used by those pushing each side most vehemently. (Read Peyser’s concluding essay here, which has links at the end to all 12 issue briefs as well as the two essays he wrote to launch the series that described the polarized state we are in – and how we might begin to chart a course out of it.)  

As to whether Donald Trump is the cause or consequence of our poisoned polity, Peyser says “both.”  

“He’s an accelerant. But he didn’t come from nowhere,” Peyser says, dating the coming apart to at least the 1990s. 

Peyser says we are in a more polarized time. But he also agrees with the arguments being made that the center of political gravity nonetheless is in, well, in the center. (A recent New York Times editorial made that case, as does a national report issued last month by a center-left group of Democrats, co-authored by Massachusetts activist Liam Kerr.)  

“I do think that the large majority of people are closer to one another than they think,” Peyser says, “and that the extent to which they can’t talk to each other or see each other or see the other side as the enemy – it has to do with some assumptions that are made about who’s saying what and what underlies their positions as opposed to actual engagement in a particular subject on a particular topic.” 

Voters’ view on a particular statement, for example, will be different if they are told it was said by Trump or by Joe Biden, Peyser notes.  

As for what it will take to shift the political discourse toward a healthier give and take, “I don’t think there’s a quick fix or silver bullet,” Peyser says. He thinks there are some “structural reforms” that might help. “I am intrigued by the idea of open primaries as a way of limiting the impact of the extremes of either party in terms of driving the candidates that the general election tends to ultimately get to choose from,” he says. (Open primaries are the subject of one of the ballot questions being proposed for the 2026 Massachusetts election.)  

“By the same token,” Peyser says, “I think it’s a cultural shift that’s just going to have to happen over time. There’s some efforts underway to try to stimulate some of that, some discussions across difference and across party lines. And those are all good. They’re all small-scale now and hopefully they’ll get bigger and have bigger impact. But I think, in some ways, it’s unfortunately hard to see a path through this other than sort of the day-to-day slog of trying to be more reasonable, both in terms of how we talk about issues, but, importantly, how we talk to and relate to one another.” 

During the episode, Jonas and Peyser discuss how robust debate can take a turn for the toxic (3:00), the genesis of Peyser’s series on bridging divides (11:30), and how so many voters seemed to hit “burn it down” on both sides of the aisle (23:30).