David Eggert/AP

Conservatives gather at the Michigan Capitol to deliver thousands of affidavits requesting that lawmakers order a forensic audit of the 2020 election in Lansing June 17, 2021. State Senate Republicans who investigated Michigan’s presidential election said June 23 there was no widespread or systemic fraud.

The two dozen Kalamazoo County Republicans are rapt. They sit shoulder to shoulder in foldout chairs as the guest speaker at their party meeting, who bills himself as an IT expert from the West Coast, details allegations of fraud he claims occurred in Michigan during the 2020 presidential election.

No such fraud occurred, according to a report from a GOP-led Michigan Senate Oversight Committee released in June. The panel’s eight-month inquiry produced no evidence to back up former President Donald Trump’s repeated claims that the state’s vote failed to match the will of the voters.

But this audience believes. For close to two hours they listen and ask questions about the purportedly manipulated data on sheets glued to trifold folders positioned around the room. They take notes and snap pictures of the numbers with their cellphones.

“How do we –,” a man wearing a shirt with a bald eagle laid over an American flag pauses his question, and brings his hands together in front of his lips, as if in prayer. “How do we deal with all of this when our politicians are talking about wanting to move forward?”

A combination of laughter and groans rises from the crowd. “What we need to do is move backwards!” says another man in the front row. 

The scene illustrates in miniature the larger dynamic of forces increasingly enveloping the U.S. Republican Party. The GOP congressional leadership keeps saying it’s focused on the future – specifically working toward taking back the House and Senate in the 2022 midterm elections. But many of the party’s grassroots voters and activists, and the former president who remains its dominant personality, are looking in another direction, dwelling to an extraordinary degree on the past. 

For these Republicans the most important issue facing the party is what to do about their belief that the 2020 presidential election was “stolen.” They can seem much less focused on the usual tasks of preelection politics, such as recruiting candidates, raising money, and plotting how to turn out votes.

This split in direction can pit party newcomers against old-line Republicans, and it is on full display here in southwestern Michigan, where the 6th Congressional District runs from the city of Kalamazoo westward to Lake Michigan beach towns like Saugatuck and Douglas. Within the local GOP the struggle about how to handle false charges of election fraud has driven out some longtime members, attracted energetic new ones, and led some party leaders to try as hard as they can to straddle the perilous divide.

The area has long leaned Republican. It’s been represented in Congress since 1987 by Rep. Fred Upton, a relative moderate who was one of the 10 GOP House members who voted for the second impeachment of then-President Trump in 2021. But the city of Kalamazoo is solid blue, and Democrats are making inroads in suburban areas. Some former Michigan Republican officials say that chasing the phantasm of fraud allegations will only hasten the region’s partisan transformation, and perhaps damage the party’s prospects elsewhere in the state.

Overall, census data that’s favorable to the GOP and a majority of statehouses controlled by Republicans during congressional redistricting should mean bright prospects for retaking the House in 2022. But only, some Republicans say, if voters start looking toward future victories instead of relitigating past losses.

“Every variable in the political environment that we can’t control is positive for us [in 2022]. The one thing that isn’t positive that we can control is our own behavior,” says Jason Roe, former executive director of the Michigan Republican Party. “We are in the process of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.”

Stuck on November 2020

Nearly 10 months after the November 2020 election, it’s become obvious that Mr. Trump remains obsessed with the results and his false belief, backed by no substantial evidence, that he actually won.

The election remains the subject he mentions most in the tweetlike press statements he uses to communicate with the public now that he’s been kicked off Facebook and Twitter. 

In his statements Mr. Trump has often promoted the Arizona “forensic audit” backed by Republican state senators, which critics say is a deeply flawed, partisan effort. He has repeated debunked conspiracy theories about allegations of fraud that involved “routers” in Arizona’s Maricopa County, while continuing to insist that he won the “Rigged and Stolen” election. He promotes Trump-friendly Newsmax and One America News (OAN) while hammering at one of his favorite targets, the rest of the media, for not repeating his claims.

On Thursday he targeted Michigan. 

“Why are RINOs [Republicans in name only] standing in the way of a full Forensic Audit in Michigan?” Mr. Trump wrote. “The voters are demanding it because they have no confidence in their elections after the Rigged 2020 Presidential Election Scam.”

David Eggert/AP/File

Michigan state Sen. Ed McBroom, shown at the Capitol in Lansing in 2019, has said that an eight-month investigation into Michigan’s presidential election has turned up no evidence of fraud.

One of the alleged RINOs Mr. Trump mentioned by name was state Sen. Ed McBroom, a conservative, fourth-generation dairy farmer from Waucedah who some colleagues call the “King of the Upper Peninsula.” 

Senator McBroom is chairman of the Michigan Senate Oversight Committee. In response to complaints about fraud from the Trump campaign and Republican voters, he led an eight-month investigation on the subject, involving hours of testimony and subpoenas for relevant records.

In June he released a 55-page report that found some “glaring issues” in the Michigan election system but no “significant acts of fraud.” 

“Our clear finding is that citizens should be confident the results represent the true results of the ballots cast by the people of Michigan,” the panel concluded.

Since then some members of the Michigan GOP who back the former president’s false election claims have pushed for the party to retaliate against Senator McBroom. A state party panel rejected a proposal to call for his resignation, but on Friday the Republican Party committee of Macomb County, the state’s third-largest county and a jurisdiction that voted for Mr. Trump in 2020, voted to censure him.

“In the ballot box, I couldn’t do it”

Mr. McBroom is far from the only Republican to run afoul of the 2020-focused mood among some factions of the party.

Jason Watts is a 20-year member of the Republican Party and former treasurer of the 6th Congressional District GOP committee. He was ousted from his party post earlier this year after publicly admitting that he did not vote for Mr. Trump for president in 2020.

“Did I work for Trump’s reelection? Yes. But in the ballot box, I couldn’t do it,” says Mr. Watts.

A new breed of Republican has become engaged in committee politics since 2016, Mr. Watts says. After 2020 the change accelerated. Of the party activists he’s known a long time, maybe 20% embraced Mr. Trump, he says.

“The rest are no longer there,” says Mr. Watts.

Part of the reason that belief in election fraud has become acceptable in some parts of the state party is because suburban areas that used to be reliably Republican are slowly turning blue, he says.

“What I’m seeing is that, especially in places like here in Kalamazoo, county parties are refusing to deal with Democratic shifts,” says Mr. Watts.

The nearby suburb of Portage, for example, was long a GOP stronghold. But it began to shift in 2012. It went for Mr. Trump in 2016 but then shifted hard blue in 2020, according to Mr. Watts.

“And I don’t think [the Kalamazoo GOP] is doing anything to reverse that trend,” he says.

The task ahead: bridge old and new GOP

Across the nation grassroots Republicans have been receptive to Mr. Trump’s stolen-election claims. In a recent CBS/YouGov survey, 69% of Republicans said that there was widespread voter fraud in 2020, for instance.

The power of conservative media is one reason for this trend, says David A. Hopkins, a political scientist at Boston College. News outlets such as OAN have raised the bar for what it means to be pro-Trump.

Mr. Trump’s message also fits into a preexisting framework of belief among conservative voters, says Professor Hopkins. 

“The idea that Democrats steal elections through shenanigans in big cities is a very long-standing conservative theme,” says Professor Hopkins.

Party leaders thus have the difficult job of balancing between remaining party traditionalists and the Trump-oriented new breed.

For instance, Scott McGraw, chair of 6th District Republicans and the Kalamazoo GOP, has a nuanced view of local Republican Rep. Fred Upton’s vote to impeach then-President Trump in January.

He wishes Representative Upton had voted the other way, he says. At the same time, he’s not in favor of attempts by some party members to punish Representative Upton in some way.

“My hope is that we look at the whole thing. Fred has been a great congressman for us for 36 years,” says Mr. McGraw.

Asked about the election fraud issue, he says a lot of people believe the election was stolen, and that there’s a “huge” continuing push at the grassroots level for another audit. He says he personally hasn’t gotten over it.

He says he’d like to move on, but if the desire for an audit is so great it prevents that, they should push for one.

“There were a lot of improprieties going on,” he alleges.

The party needs to come together, in his view, because unless it unites, it won’t be able to beat Democrats in upcoming elections.

“We’ve always been split in two, but this is the worst that I think I’ve seen,” he says.

“I'm passionate about the truth”

Back at the Kalamazoo County GOP meeting, a weekly discussion hosted by a local county commissioner, the speaker billed as an IT expert is talking about vote tabulation and ballot chain of custody issues. His name is J.D. Glaser. The audience is sharing doughnuts and coffee.

Attendees hold hands in the air, waiting to get called on. Some have had their hands in the air so long they use their other hand to prop up their elbow.

The talk centers on what they can do to push the forensic audit issue forward.  

“I don’t know everything, but I’m passionate about the truth and I’ll die for it,” says the man wearing the eagle and flag shirt. 

Mr. Glaser starts naming people in state government to send letters to and lobby. He asks audience members to recruit others to their side. 

He mentions the number of affidavits they have alleging malfeasance. He complains about RINOs blocking their way. He alleges without evidence that 55,000 votes were switched from Mr. Trump to President Joe Biden in Kalamazoo County.

He quotes the Bible to support the point that you can’t have love or mercy without justice.

“If you just have the goal of sending two people to jail, a lot will change,” he says.

This comment causes the county commissioner to bristle, and Mr. Glaser walks it back. But he adds that if people in the room want justice, “you have to start acting on this stuff.”

The meeting ends with a prayer, as a woman, with head bowed, promises to continue fighting.

To Lee Pillaro, trout are more than slender freshwater fish with minuscule scales.

“From our business standpoint, we view those trout as business partners,” says the fly fisher. “Personally, I consider them friends.”

That’s why Mr. Pillaro is joining other anglers and guides respecting voluntary fishing closures throughout the drought-parched Colorado Western Slope. By adhering to requests from the state, they look at short-term sacrifices as helping the long-term benefit of fisheries.

“I think we’ve always had good compliance,” says northwest Colorado’s senior aquatic biologist Lori Martin. She credits strong partnership and communication with local recreationists.

Fish stress

Colorado, like much of the Western United States, is racked by ongoing drought that scientists say is worsened by climate change. Ms. Martin and her team at Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW) are trying to reel in drought effects on fisheries – especially since these areas include fish like trout that thrive in colder waters. 

High water temperatures, along with low flows and oxygen levels, all threaten their well-being. Under these conditions, even catch-and-release fishing and handling can tucker out trout to the point of death. And stressed fish may not be able to spawn successfully in the fall. 

That’s why the state is calling for voluntary fishing closures – both full and half day – on parts of some Colorado rivers this summer. Given that many variables affect fish stress, Ms. Martin says it’s difficult to determine the impact of closures. But relieving pressure from fishing is one factor humans can control.

Even though most waterways are untouched by these closures, “it’s not an easy decision to restrict anglers from fishing opportunity. We take it seriously,” says John Alves, senior aquatic biologist for southwest Colorado. The state encourages recreationists to seek opportunities in cooler waters, such as on early-morning excursions or at higher altitudes.

For Roaring Fork Fishing Guide Alliance President Kyle Holt in Basalt, compliance has meant offering shorter tours. 

“I’m pretty sure that most of us have sacrificed a little bit of business,” and customers have also sacrificed, says Mr. Holt, a guide himself. “It’s just something that we need to do ... for the future of the fishery.”

Mr. Holt brings along a hand-held thermometer in his boat, and says he was testing water temperatures before the state called for a voluntary closure on part of the Roaring Fork River last month. Though he’s been able to resume full tours since the state lifted the half-day pause on Aug. 10, he says he’ll continue to monitor water temperatures himself.

Eleven of these voluntary fishing pauses are currently in place. Besides weather forecasts, CPW considers these potential triggers before calling for a closure:

• Daily maximum water temperature is hotter than 71 degrees Fahrenheit 
• Stream flows are less than or equal to half their daily average 
• Fish appear to be “visibly deteriorating” 
• Daily dissolved oxygen is less than 6 parts per million 
• Other factors disrupt fish habitat (like fire, for instance)

Communities can also implement their own recreational or commercial closures, and CPW can mandate fishing pauses if conditions turn dire. One state closure on the Yampa River has been mandatory since May, meaning people caught angling can be fined and accrue points toward a suspension of fishing privileges. 

Voluntary closures are “a better opportunity for outreach and education,” says Holly Loff, executive director of the Eagle River Watershed Council based in Gypsum.

Her nonprofit plays a role in that education, by publishing a daily email with local water temperatures and tips for responsible fishing. Similarly, the Roaring Fork Fishing Guide Alliance posts river updates on social media. 

“When you explain things to people in a way that it makes sense to them, they’re like, ‘Oh, yeah ... we’re all in for that,’” says Mr. Holt.

Based on what wildlife officers have observed, CPW biologists report that the public is largely complying with the fishing closures.

“I think with the ongoing drought, people are becoming more and more aware of what is happening with our rivers ... and having to understand the balance of being able to enjoy them, but also being able to protect and conserve them,” says Ms. Martin. 

Other Western states, including Oregon and Montana, have also enacted fishing closures – sometimes called “hoot owl” restrictions. Faced with an imperiled salmon population, California wildlife officials have held off releasing over 1 million young fish into the wild until river conditions improve, holding them at hatcheries instead, reports The Associated Press.

“Healthy respect”

For Mr. Pillaro in Durango, mandatory closures might be better for getting more tourists to comply. But overall, he reports good compliance among fellow anglers and guides, from his vantage point as a sales manager and fly-casting instructor at the fly-fishing outfitter Duranglers Flies and Supplies.

The state called for a half-day closure on roughly 12 miles of the Dolores River for the first time this year. As of the morning of Aug. 17, this area recorded a flow of 4.7 cubic feet per second – 93% less flow than its historical average, according to state data. While Duranglers leads trips in other locations as well, Mr. Pillaro says the company has lost some business by avoiding that troubled area.  

Drought-related fishing closures aren’t new, but the timing has changed. “Really the only surprising thing this year was how early in the year [the state] had to do it, because the flows were so low,” says Christopher Myrick, professor of fish biology at Colorado State University. 

In the worst-case scenario, the state could restock fish-depleted rivers from hatcheries, he says, but it would “take years.” Plus, the state hatchery system doesn’t raise all the species currently found in the wild.

In the meantime, Mr. Pillaro says he’s trying to educate customers about the importance of pausing plans when river conditions are subpar.

“Everybody that’s in the fly-fishing community and industry, I think we all have a healthy respect and love for the fish and don’t want to do anything that’s going to cause them any harm,” says the angler.

It wasn’t fighting Russian-speaking separatists in Ukraine that spurred Roman Nabozhniak to stop speaking Russian. It was being misidentified on vacation as a Russian.

Mr. Nabozniak was one of thousands of Ukrainian volunteers who fought rebels in the Moscow-leaning Donbass region, who rose against the central government in Kyiv in 2014 citing in part its “violation” of their right to speak Russian. Backed by Russian weaponry and volunteers, the separatists forcibly carved out two “people’s republics,” where anyone speaking Ukrainian could be thrown in what rights groups and survivors call “concentration camps.”

Mr. Nabozniak and his comrades in arms, on the other hand, were linguistically mixed. Some volunteers came from western, Ukrainian-speaking regions. But others were from Kyiv or, like Mr. Nabozniak, from the central city of Cherkasy, where most of the population still speaks Russian with an accent somewhat similar to the Texan drawl. Russian was the dominant language in much of Ukraine during its time as a Soviet republic (which ended in 1991), while Ukrainian was seen as a parochial dialect.

“I spoke Russian every day, even during the war,” says Mr. Nabozhniak, whose 14-month military service ended in 2016.

But when he was vacationing in India a year after leaving the military, the hotel staff heard him speak Russian. “Indians started treating me like a Russian, and to me, it was unacceptable,” says Mr. Nabozhniak. After he got back from his trip, he started speaking only Ukrainian or English – and so did the staffers of Veterano Brownie, a cafe in central Kyiv he owns – even if it meant losing customers or earning an unfavorable review.

Since then, the political divide between Ukraine and Russia, which supports the breakaway Donbass region, has become a chasm. And as that divide has widened, the two countries’ respective tongues have become emblems of the split, not just between the two nations, but within Ukrainian society.

Though Ukraine has long been home to speakers of both Ukrainian and Russian, two linguistic siblings that use almost identical Cyrillic alphabets, the usage of one language over the other now polarizes the public and is used as a tool by politicians. And as new laws come into effect promoting Ukrainian and relegating Russian to secondary status, Ukrainians’ choice of language is feeding into biases about their loyalty – or hostility – toward their country.

Native tongues

The France-sized nation of 41 million, sewn together from the fragments of the Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman empires, is far from bilingual. Ukraine’s minorities speak Yiddish, Greek, Hungarian, two Turkic tongues, and Romani. But almost 30 years after Ukraine’s independence, Ukrainian has become dominant: Two-thirds of the population say it’s their mother tongue. Still, only 53% say that they “mostly speak it” at home, while 29% prefer Russian, according to a survey commissioned by the Space of Freedom nongovernmental organization last November.

The linguistic divide went right through the two-bedroom Cherkasy apartment where Mr. Nabozhniak grew up. His mother, Natalia, spoke Russian to him, and his father, Yuri, spoke to him in Ukrainian. Such bilingual conversations have been common throughout Ukraine for decades.

But since January, a controversial “language law” has made Ukrainian mandatory for all public service workers – changing conversations in many shops, government offices, and hospitals from Russian-only to bilingual. The law was signed in 2019 by then-President Petro Poroshenko, and followed steps that banned pro-Kremlin television networks and books published in Russia.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the current president, had seemed like he would reverse aspects of the language law. During his 2019 election campaign, he often spoke Russian and pledged to revise the law. He also grew up in a Russian-speaking family in southeastern Ukraine, and led a comic troupe that mixed Russian and Ukrainian in its shows and ridiculed the forced Ukrainization.

But the state pressure in favor of Ukrainian and against Russian has continued under Mr. Zelenskyy. In March, he said that Ukrainian is “fully protected.”

“Everyone who raises the issues of ethnicity, language, and church, these people just want temporary hype,” Mr. Zelenskyy said.

Ukrainian Presidential Press Service/Reuters/File

Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has a meal with service members near the front line with Russian-backed separatists in the Donbass region in Ukraine, April 8, 2021. Mr. Zelenskyy is a native Russian speaker, but has strongly supported his country's Ukrainian language laws.

Government officials have largely kept in line with the president. There was only one top official – Interior Minister Arsen Avakov – who stuck to Russian in public speeches, but he resigned on July 15 after months of tensions with Mr. Zelenskyy.

Some public officials and lawmakers tried to soften the language law. Fifty-one lawmakers from both a pair of pro-Russian parties and Mr. Zelenskyy’s ruling Servant of the People party complained about certain provisions of the language law that ban the use of Russian and other “minority languages” in schools, but Ukraine’s Supreme Court dismissed their complaints last month.

And as of July 16, every television show and movie in a foreign language broadcast on Ukrainian television is required to be dubbed, or at least subtitled, in Ukrainian – even decades-old Soviet classics that many Ukrainians know by heart.

The culture minister, Alexander Tkachenko, said he tried to postpone the measure, arguing that it could be pricey for television channels and news outlets, especially when it comes to lengthy television series. “I am talking about a gentle Ukrainization,” Mr. Tkachenko told a news conference on July 8. But the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s parliament, rejected his attempt. Officials have already reported and fined several television networks for showing content in Russian.

In the coming months, tens of thousands of government employees, including health professionals, law enforcement officers and judges, schoolteachers and university professors, will have to “confirm” their knowledge of Ukrainian by taking several written and oral tests. There have already been reports about bribes of up to $2,000 per language-proficiency certificate.

Linguistic biases

“Russian is totally out of official use and stigmatized, and Russian-language media face difficulties and are marginalized,” says Nikolay Mitrokhin, a sociologist at Bremen University in Germany who conducts dozens of interviews throughout Ukraine every year. “But spoken Russian remains the dominant language of communication everywhere except for Ukraine’s eight western regions.”

Other analysts see the law as a ploy to marginalize the kind of multiculturalism promoted in the European Union – and to ghettoize Russian-speaking Ukrainians. “The language law is a step to a new segregation and a hidden political apartheid,” says Kyiv-based analyst Aleksey Kushch.

Some Ukrainians do feel marginalized. “We hate Putin just as hard as any Ukrainian speaker, and the fact that Russian is our mother tongue doesn’t make us Moscow spies,” says Valentina, a cook from the southern city of Odessa. She asked not to use her second name because she fears ostracism for sounding “pro-Russian.”

“If you don’t like the language people speak or the books they read, you’re an invader,” said Vasily Pilipchuk, a salesclerk in the southeastern city of Mariupol, in 2019.

But linguistic bias over Russian and Ukrainian can cut both ways. In the breakaway regions in the east, pro-Russian separatists banned Ukrainian, and anyone speaking it there could end up in one of dozens of makeshift concentration camps where thousands of people are held without trial and face torture and even execution, says professor Ihor Kozlovsky.

The religious scholar spent almost 700 days in several such camps between 2015 and 2017 after organizing a series of pro-Ukrainian rallies in the city of Donetsk. He recounts a conversation with a Russian intelligence officer who tortured and lectured him on the “Russian world,” a “civilization” Ukraine has been – and has to be – part of.

“The officer told me, ‘There are no nations. There are civilizations, and the Russian world is a civilization, and for anyone who had been part of it, it does not matter what you call it, a Tatar or a Ukrainian, you don’t exist,’” says Dr. Kozlovsky.

Diana Levine/Random House

Joe Keohane, author of "The Power of Strangers: The Benefits of Connecting in a Suspicious World."

Joe Keohane grew up in Boston in the 1980s and ’90s, when “stranger danger” served as a national parenting mantra to protect children from potential harm. But from watching his mom and dad, he absorbed a different life lesson about encounters with unfamiliar people.

“My parents have always talked to strangers, and I’ve seen how it’s been super-enriching and exciting and fun for them,” he says. “They’re well into their 70s, and they’re still making friends.”

The example of their openness inspired Mr. Keohane as he worked on his first book, “The Power of Strangers: The Benefits of Connecting in a Suspicious World.” True to that subtitle, Mr. Keohane advances the idea that showing greater interest in our fellow unknown Americans just might remedy the country’s loneliness epidemic and mend its fractured body politic.

The veteran journalist traverses evolutionary biology, psychology, theology, and anthropology as he seeks to counter the stubborn perception of humankind as a hopeless collection of warring tribes. In reality, he writes, we belong to “an ultra-cooperative species.” He travels to Los Angeles, St. Louis, London, and Helsinki to learn from experts in the art of bonding with strangers, and armed with their advice, he sets out to turn random interactions into meaningful moments.

Mr. Keohane, a former features director at Medium, spoke to the Monitor from New York, where he lives with his wife and daughter. He discussed the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on attitudes toward strangers, the value of listening in a culture of talking, and how even fleeting conversations with passersby can reaffirm our shared humanity. This interview has been edited and condensed. 

You’re clearly fond of talking with strangers. What effect did the pandemic lockdowns have on you?

Research has shown that it’s really beneficial to have interactions with strangers. It helps us feel like we belong to a place, helps us feel connected and less lonely and happier. So having spent the previous two years before the coronavirus randomly talking to people all the time while researching the book, I missed that sense of adventure. When you talk to strangers, you never know where the conversations are going to go. But they almost invariably go somewhere interesting and unexpected, and I really missed the loss of variety.

How did you and your fellow New Yorkers cope?

There was the initial panic where everyone just ran away from each other. But then, once people settled into the routine of living during COVID-19, you started to see people making more of an effort to raise their eyebrows and say “Hi” and wave, and find ways to show that they see the other person and they’re not afraid of the other person, that they’re only keeping their distance out of respect.

There’s a lot of research about what keeps us from talking to strangers, and there’s a big fear that you won’t know what to talk about. During the coronavirus, especially in New York, it bound everyone together. Everyone had this thing in common. So in one way, there was a barrier raised against interaction – you couldn’t get close to each other. But the pandemic also lowered the barrier and made for a certain intimacy that I found reassuring and inspiring. It made me feel good to see people in this extreme situation making the effort to be like, “Hi, I hope we’re all going to be OK.”

Even before the pandemic, there were growing concerns that relying on technology to communicate – especially among teenagers and young adults – has stunted our social skills. How much does our digital immersion contribute to an aversion to strangers? 

One of the interesting things I found was a lot of psychologists who teach in colleges and universities reported that they see students who react to the prospect of talking to strangers with panic and terror. They’re so accustomed to conducting all their communications through digital platforms that they’ve lost a key social skill. There’s also a mental health component. Loneliness rates, which are sky-high for everybody right now, are highest among 18- to 22-year-olds, and the hypothesis of researchers is that it’s because they’re not having in-person contact as much as other generations did.

So technology definitely plays a large part, and I don’t think it’s specific to young people. The entire society is seeing its social skills erode. The good news is that the research shows that these interactions tend to be much easier and much more positive than we expect – we expect them to go very badly, we expect to be rejected. But by and large, people are receptive to interacting with strangers. Once they start having conversations, they find they enjoy it.

Penguin Random House

What are basic ways we can start to rebuild our social aptitude?

First of all, pay attention. Look at people, notice people, think about what’s happening around you, take your earbuds out. That will open you up to a world of interaction. 

In those interactions we have that are scripted – the ones where we say “How you doin’?” and the other person says “Good, how you doin’? – no information is exchanged, we’ve not connected. So when you find yourself in those situations, just be sincere and be specific. Maybe you notice something or there’s something you’re both doing – maybe you’re waiting in line – and you can comment on it. Just making a statement about something you’re both experiencing simultaneously is really effective. 

You write about approaching conversations with strangers as “a collaboration, not a competition.” What do we gain if we don’t try to control the exchange?

When you have to follow the conversation wherever it goes, the benefit is that it makes it impossible to pretend that this is not a complex person in front of you. It robs you of the luxury of simplifying the life and the motivation of others. That’s healthy, and that leads to wisdom and helps people be more productive citizens of democracy.

So many problems we’re facing are dehumanization problems – partisanship, transphobia, racism – and only through contact can we alleviate dehumanization. You can read a lot of books, you can listen to podcasts – that’ll help. But the research shows us there’s nothing more effective for reducing dehumanization than in-person contact. And it’s because this person you’re talking to is going to come at you with their full complexity, and you have to deal with the fact that their reality might be different from your reality.

You point out that one key to talking with strangers is, in fact, listening to them. On a broader level, how could that help reduce the country’s political tensions?

There is research that shows the feeling of not being listened to can lead to extreme political beliefs. And when you hear how people who feel estranged and alienated from the culture talk about their relation to the whole [country], the point that comes up over and over again is, “No one’s listening to me.” So demonstrating that you’re listening can turn some of the heat down. It also takes away a lot of your blind spots if you do it with enough curiosity and openness. That’s valuable, especially in a time when partisans have turned it into a virtue to not listen.

You make the case that human beings, for all the havoc they’ve inflicted on each other throughout time, have figured out how to more or less get along. What solace can we take from that in this polarized moment?

I think there’s a pessimistic reading of human nature as xenophobic. There’s this idea that we were small groups of people who hated and feared strangers throughout our existence until, by some fluke, we ended up together in cities. The reality is a lot more complicated. Civilization would never have happened if our default mode was xenophobia.

I’m looking out the window of my office in New York, where there are 10 million people, and people are exchanging greetings and helping each other and not bumping into each other. This is a very cooperative species, and it gets a bad rap for being xenophobic and savage. It certainly can be those things, but I think you can make a better argument that our default mode is cooperation. When you come to understand that none of this – modern civilization – happens without an extraordinary capacity for talking to strangers and working with strangers and living with strangers, then you understand the power of that aspect of our personality.

Does that give you hope that Americans can bridge their differences?

Putting two strangers in a room is not going to solve all the really sticky issues. But what it will do is show that we can have a conversation, we might kind of like each other, maybe we can fix some potholes together. And then maybe after we fix some potholes, we can talk about something else we can work on. We have to rebuild trust. It’s a lot of work, and as a nation, we have to decide if we’re going to do it. I’m not sure if it will be done. But I’m optimistic it can be done.

AP

Zambian President-elect Hakainde Hichilema talks to reporters in Lusaka Aug. 16 after he won the southern African country's presidency, defeating President Edgar Lungu.

After his death in June, Kenneth Kaunda was widely praised as a pioneer leader in post-colonial Africa. Fondly known as KK, he led his nation of Zambia to independence in 1964. Perhaps his most lasting legacy lies in teaching the practical worth of universal, God-derived dignity to a people long ruled by Britain. Son of a preacher, he exemplified that quality in 1991 when he graciously handed over power after a humiliating election defeat and 27 years as president.

His kind demeanor during his downfall “suddenly transformed how Zambians saw him,” Africa expert Stephen Chan wrote in a tribute on the African Arguments news site. “It was as if nothing became him as much as leaving office with such dignity.” His public display of equality as a citizen was really a call for national unity. Despite being overshadowed on the continent by Nelson Mandela, he became a beloved elder statesman.

This past week, that legacy paid off in an election on Aug. 12. The incumbent president, Edgar Lungu, whose rule was seen as corrupt and heavy-handed toward opponents, lost to a longtime opponent, Hakainde Hichilema. Turnout was large at more than 70%, with a high number of first-time voters under age 24. While Mr. Lungu at first suggested fraud for his ballot loss, he backed off quickly and conceded to Mr. Hichilema, calling him “my brother” and promising a peaceful transfer of power. In Africa, such events are rare; sitting presidents win 88% of the elections that are contested.

For his part, Mr. Hichilema, a former CEO at an accounting firm and a cattle rancher, promised an inclusive government that draws from Zambia’s diverse ethnicities. He held no grudge for having been arrested during Mr. Lungu’s regime. The two men met to start the transition. In a speech, President-elect Hichilema offered this to the departing president: “We are not going into office to arrest those who arrested us.”

Mr. Hichilema won with a landslide because of his business experience and his promises to fight corruption, improve Zambia’s democracy, and lift a dormant economy. Yet in their post-election behavior, both candidates are winners for living up to KK’s legacy of civic dignity.

Zambia will now have its third peaceful transfer of power between a ruling party and an opposition party since 1991. Not many countries in Africa can claim that record. No wonder KK’s death was a moment of self-reflection for Zambia’s 18 million people.