This past week, I was asked to speak at the annual meeting of the Arizona Townhall. The topic was how Arizona can move forward amid deep political polarization.
As I shared during my presentation, my qualifications to speak on the topic do not stem from being a political scientist or a well-trained theorist.
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However, I think I am very much like my neighbors and friends who care about our community and share a concern that politics and polarization have become dominant themes, often distorting the real discussions required to move our communities forward.
While I could discuss this at the national level, my focus here is on how polarization is impacting Arizona. As I was preparing my remarks, I found myself staring at two seemingly contradictory realities.
The first was Arizona’s remarkable success.
Over the past decade, Arizona has become one of America’s great economic success stories. New companies continue to relocate here. Capital is flowing into the state. Population growth remains among the strongest in the nation. Advanced manufacturing investments are transforming our economy. Entrepreneurs continue to choose Arizona as a place to build.
By almost any economic measure, Arizona is winning.
However, the second reality was harder to ignore. Trust is collapsing.
Americans - and particularly Arizonans - increasingly view those on the other side of the political aisle not merely as people with different opinions, but as threats. Many have stopped talking to friends and family members over politics. Confidence in institutions continues to decline. Election distrust remains elevated. Citizens report feeling exhausted by the constant state of political conflict.
So here is the paradox that stuck with me. Arizona is thriving economically while struggling civically. Most of our leaders are focused on the economic side of that ledger, and I understand why.
But I’ve come to believe our hardest and most important challenge sits on the other side. The biggest infrastructure project facing the state over the next decade isn’t a highway, a chip plant, a reservoir, or a transmission line. It’s rebuilding trust.
The Infrastructure We Cannot See
Say the word infrastructure, and most people picture physical things: roads and bridges, airports, the power grid, water systems, and broadband. Those investments matter because they let commerce and communities function. But there is another kind of infrastructure that gets far less attention, and it’s the one I want to talk about.
Call it civic infrastructure — the institutions, norms, relationships, and shared experiences that let people who disagree still work toward something in common. It is the operating system a healthy society runs on, and most of the time, we don’t notice it at all.
When it’s strong, communities can argue about hard questions without coming apart. They can lose an election without deciding the whole system is rigged. They can take on real problems because they have enough trust banked to act together.
When it weakens, the opposite takes hold. Every disagreement turns existential, every policy fight becomes a moral crusade, and every compromise starts to read as betrayal.
The 2000 book Bowling Alone by Robert D. Putnam is a landmark discussion that identified this risk and argued that American community life is declining due to a loss of “social capital”—the networks of relationships and trust that bind society together.
Arizona has spent decades investing in its economic infrastructure and almost none of that same energy on the civic infrastructure underneath it.
The Collapse of Common Knowledge
As I kept working on the topic and in discussions with the team at the Leadership Now Project, I landed on a phrase that organized everything else: common knowledge.
Not what any one of us knows on our own, but what we hold in common — and how that shared understanding holds up communities, institutions, and democracy itself. Steven Pinker wrote a whole book on the subject in 2025, and it has shaped much of my thinking about a practical way forward.
The basic idea sounds almost too simple. Knowledge is what I know. Common knowledge is what we know together.
For most of modern American history, that common knowledge formed on its own, through shared institutions: the local paper, the Rotary and Kiwanis clubs, churches and schools, business associations, the ten o’clock news, the conversation at a neighborhood gathering. People disagreed constantly about what should be done, but they mostly agreed on what was actually happening. That second part is the one that matters. Democracy doesn’t require us to agree; it requires us to share a reality.
That shared reality is getting harder to hold onto. We now take in information from wildly different sources. Instead of Casey Kasem sharing the week's top music charts on the radio or Walter Cronkite reading the national news, there are Spotify playlists and thousands of podcasts that will narrowcast to an individual’s specific interests.
Many Arizonans live in news deserts, where almost no one is doing local journalism. Others live on digital islands, fed a steady stream of content by algorithms that profit from keeping them there — algorithms tuned to reward emotional engagement over accuracy. Political operators have every reason to amplify conflict, and news organizations are fighting for attention in a market that keeps splintering. Add it up, and neighbors can end up living in genuinely different informational worlds.
The fallout reaches well past politics. Issues of importance to everyone—including policies that address vital issues such as water, affordable housing, educational attainment, public health, and economic development— make nearly every shared challenge harder when people can’t agree on the basic facts of the situation.
As Pinker puts it, societies weaken when their citizens stop sharing a baseline reality. I suspect that’s going to be one of the defining problems of this century.
The Incentives Are Working Exactly as Designed
If there is one thing running a company has taught me, it’s that incentives matter more than intentions. People tend to talk about polarization as though it simply happened to us, the way weather happens. I see it differently. I see systems doing exactly what they were built to do.
Social media platforms make money from attention. Political consultants make money from fear. Advocacy groups raise money on outrage, and news outlets increasingly live or die by engagement. Candidates win primaries by exciting the most intense voters rather than assembling the broadest coalition.
None of that is irrational — it’s people responding sensibly to the rewards in front of them. And when the rewards favor conflict, you get more conflict; when they favor outrage, outrage turns a profit; when they favor tribal identity, the tribes only harden.
Which is why I don’t think the answer is mostly about asking people to behave better.
The harder and more useful work is redesigning the systems that currently pay them not to.
That’s also why I’ve started thinking about polarization less as a partisan fight or a moral failing and more as a design problem. I find that reframe oddly hopeful. Design problems have solutions.
If you’re working on this, let’s talk.
Thanks for reading. These are thoughts & observations I share for discussion. Join in and subscribe to see which other topics I consider important to highlight.