Tom Brenner/Reuters

President Joe Biden takes questions from reporters as he discusses the 2022 midterm election results during a news conference in the State Dining Room at the White House in Washington Nov. 9, 2022.

When President Joe Biden was asked at his post-midterms press conference what he might do differently going forward – given widespread American dissatisfaction with the country’s direction – his answer was blunt: “nothing.” 

The problem isn’t with the Democratic agenda, the president suggested; it’s that Americans are “just finding out what we’re doing.” And the more they know about recent measures, for example, to lower prescription drug prices and build roads and bridges, “the more support there is.”

The political context of his comment is key: The Democratic Party just defied expectations and survived Tuesday’s elections without the shellacking the past three presidents endured in their first midterms. Votes are still being counted, and control of the next House and Senate is still not determined, but President Biden feels empowered to stay the course. 

Republicans, for their part, are nursing the wounds of a missed opportunity – the candidates promoted by former President Donald Trump who likely cost them Senate seats and possibly control of the chamber; the competing agendas and messages; the uneven fundraising. 

What’s clear is that each house of Congress will be closely divided, as they are now, with current projections favoring a slim GOP majority in the House and the Democrats potentially keeping the Senate. 

A Democratic White House and partially or perhaps fully Republican-controlled Congress may seem to be a recipe for gridlock – or worse. There’s already speculation about a possible government shutdown over the need to raise the federal debt ceiling by early 2023. A Republican-run House is also expected to launch investigations, such as into the president’s son and his international business ventures.

But not everyone in Washington is pessimistic. 

“The country has a pretty long history of productive divided Congresses,” says Jason Grumet, president of the Bipartisan Policy Center.

A strengthened center? 

In Tuesday’s election results, Mr. Grumet sees the potential for a strengthened political center, after some centrist Democrats survived tough reelection fights against hard-right conservatives. He also points to Mr. Biden himself as a source of optimism, with his instincts as a longtime moderate senator perhaps coming to the fore in the next two years. 

“Going into a presidential election where all the polling says people want competence, there’s an incentive” to make deals, Mr. Grumet says.

Mr. Biden, in fact, could find divided government politically beneficial. A Republican-led House would give him a foil against which to operate heading into the 2024 presidential cycle, whether or not he runs again himself. And if Democrats hold the Senate, that would at least allow him to keep confirming federal judges (including Supreme Court justices) and senior administration appointees.

On policies that require congressional approval, the return of divided government in a highly polarized environment could lead to a variety of outcomes. A GOP-controlled Congress can be expected to pass bills that Republicans know will go nowhere, just to make a point. There’s the shutdown scenario, in which Republicans use their new leverage to try to force actions Democrats don’t want to take – such as cuts to social safety net programs. Or the two parties can swallow hard and work together. 

How divided government can work

Some Washington veterans point to former President Bill Clinton as a model for how divided government can work effectively. After the “Republican Revolution” of 1994, when the Republicans gained 52 House seats, President Clinton tacked to the center and worked with GOP House Speaker Newt Gingrich to pass significant legislation, such as welfare reform and tax cuts. 

By contrast, after both Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump suffered big midterm losses, they “didn’t get anything done,” says Ari Fleischer, who served as White House press secretary under President George W. Bush. 

“When the party out of power wins in the first midterm, the country is sending a signal that they want things to be different. It’s up to the president to decide how far or how much they’ll go along with it,” he says.

Although the Democratic Party has shifted steadily leftward over the past 20 years, if Mr. Biden “governs to the Joe Manchin center, a lot can get done,” Mr. Fleischer contends, referring to the conservative Democratic senator from West Virginia. He adds, “The Republicans have to play ball, too.” 

To that point, after the Democrats lost 63 House seats in the 2010 midterms, President Obama faced significant GOP intransigence in Congress, forcing him to resort to executive action to enact policy. It’s possible Mr. Biden will face the same GOP brick wall come January. 

The history of divided government shows that when both sides have an incentive to cooperate, they will do so, says Sam Kernell, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego. But those instances are more rare than common.

“Conflict is embedded in this relationship,” Professor Kernell says. 

Sometimes, though, a desire not to be seen as overreaching can prompt restraint.

When neither party has a mandate

Indeed, for all the president’s bravado at yesterday’s press conference, this was the type of election that can be seen as chastening for both sides. Neither party came away with a mandate from voters to swing for the fences. 

Mr. Biden’s job approval ratings, mired in the low 40s, and high inflation likely cost his party a number of congressional seats and possibly control of the House.

Likewise, following their weaker-than-expected electoral performance, there are already signs that Republicans are softening their posture. 

Before Tuesday, the GOP appeared to be teeing up an array of investigations into the Biden administration. An inquiry into Hunter Biden, who is already under investigation by the Justice Department over tax issues, and the president’s knowledge of his son’s business dealings still tops the list. But other possible investigations, including into COVID-19 origins, Dr. Anthony Fauci, and the messy U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, may fall by the wayside. There also may be less enthusiasm for efforts by some House Republicans to impeach the president. 

“Hunter Biden, the country will accept that,” former Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway told a Monitor Breakfast last week. “But why would you ever impeach Joe Biden? I want him to run again.” 

Democratic strategists say the midterms showed that voters want to move on from Mr. Trump and “MAGA”-aligned candidates, especially after the Jan. 6, 2021, violent siege of the Capitol by Trump supporters. Instead, they say, there’s demand for a return to the serious business of governing. 

“This election can be read as a rejection of extremism,” says Simon Rosenberg, founder of the center-left New Democrat Network think tank. “It’s my hope that the grip of MAGA has been a little bit loosened over the Republican Party.”

The 117th Congress has actually had its share of across-the-aisle cooperation. The Bipartisan Policy Center counts 20 significant pieces of bipartisan legislation that either were signed into law – including the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the CHIPS and Science Act – or are in the works.

Perhaps the Republicans and Democrats of the 118th Congress will decide they can keep working together. It doesn’t have to be big or expensive, observers say. Just something that keeps the muscle memory alive and shows voters their government isn’t broken.

About 50 people, many of them meeting for the first time, have gathered in this Greek Orthodox church hall in a suburb of Akron, Ohio. Over a buffet of chicken, pasta, and tossed salad, they politely get to know one another, five to a table, including this reporter, asking icebreaker questions provided on a sheet of paper. The atmosphere is cordial if a little hesitant.

After all, they didn’t come just for the meal. 

They cast sidelong glances to the front of the room to five spotlighted director’s chairs. Each chair sits behind a printed sign, from left to right: “agree strongly,” “agree somewhat,” “neutral,” “disagree somewhat,” and “disagree strongly.” 

Each chair will shortly be claimed by one of the dining companions; nobody knows who they will be. 

As the meal ends, Arlin Smith, one of the event organizers, fades the music playing from his laptop and picks up a microphone. “Let’s get ready to rumble!” he growls, emulating boxing announcer Michael Buffer. 

Before the “rumble,” Mr. Smith offers some guidance: Listen to the speaker, try to understand where he or she is coming from, use positive language, and be responsible for your own feelings. “We all have emotions. So when you feel those feelings kind of rattled up, try to get comfortable. Lean into the situation and take control of your own self,” Mr. Smith tells the diners. 

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

“I come from the perspective that people can change in their hearts; they can change in their heads. ... If we change one person, just one, we’ve made a difference.” – Arlin Smith, a retired medical-services executive and co-host of the Oct. 12 Dinner and a Fight event in Fairlawn, Ohio

Then he hands the mic to Ted Wetzel, the creator of this grassroots effort to help Americans of all political stripes disagree constructively and, perhaps, rebuild civic bonds in an era of intense polarization and social atomization. He titles this gathering “Dinner and a Fight,” but “Fight” is crossed out and replaced by “Dialogue.”

Mr. Wetzel, a retired small-business owner, wears a red checkered shirt and jeans with gray sneakers; half-moon reading glasses hang from his neck. He looks both elated and antsy. “This is the eleventh Dinner and a Fight, so give yourselves a round of applause,” he says. 

As the clapping ends, he explains that he’s about to reveal tonight’s “divisive topic.” (Previous topics have included face masks, guns, and gender identity.) Once the topic is announced, anyone can take a director’s chair: First come, first served.

“Does America have any easy problems?” he asks, pausing for some nervous laughs.

“They’re all tough problems. So we need to be exploring.”

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Clayton Cox (center), a retired technician for a water utility, lines up for a buffet dinner during a Dinner and a Fight event.

Mr. Wetzel’s disputation dinners in northeast Ohio are among a cascade of bridge-building efforts aimed at countering America’s scorched-earth partisanship. They seek to promote civil dialogue as a path to finding common ground on issues that don’t yield easy solutions, such as policing, immigration, and race relations. 

Red-blue divisions aren’t exactly new; some dialogue groups have been at it for decades. But Donald Trump’s rise to power, undergirded by social media tribalism, injected an outrage-driven intensity into public life that many traditional venues for discussion, from civic clubs and churches to office parties and family gatherings, struggled to handle. The violent Jan. 6 Capitol riot over the 2020 elections only served to deepen the political chasm.

For proponents of dialogue, reaching across that chasm is complicated by a suspicion on the right that liberals are setting the agenda. “Typically, [these dialogue forums] are very blue,” says Peter Coleman, a psychologist who studies polarization at Columbia University. “One side is more eager to do it than the other side, and that is part of the problem.”

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

“We’re allowed to be passionate here. We’re not allowed to be offensive here.” – Ted Wetzel, a retired small-business owner who founded Dinner and a Fight to get Americans talking again about difficult topics

But by advertising a fight and using folksy language and metaphors, Mr. Wetzel seems to have cracked the code. His speak-your-mind dialogue dinners attract conservatives and liberals, as well as independents. Older pro-Trump voters break bread with Bernie Sanders-supporting millennials. Racial and religious minorities join the conversations. Many come back for more.  

“It’s hard to get people who really see the same world differently into the same room, and he succeeds at that,” says Bill Lyons, a political scientist at the University of Akron and an informal adviser to Mr. Wetzel. 

Lately, Mr. Wetzel has expanded his initiative by recruiting attendees to join small panels that meet over several months to draw up policy recommendations. The first group, focused on threats to U.S. democracy, started in September. He has also found partners to hold dinners in California, Arizona, and Washington, D.C., next year, and eventually wants to create a playbook so like-minded groups can hold similar events in their communities.

The long-term goal, he says, is a rediscovery of bonds that are stronger than the political tribalism that divides us. “We’re really not that polarized. We’re proving to people that they can come together,” he says. 

People get to know each other over dinner during an event about elections. About 50 people attended.

For now, each dinner is something of a gamble: Who will show up? Will opponents find common ground? Might disputation turn into confrontation? It takes a large dollop of faith to believe that getting a roomful of strangers talking can hold back the partisan tide. Mr. Wetzel’s brother likens his work to “boiling the ocean.” 

But Mr. Wetzel isn’t about to quit. He’s just getting started. 

It all began, appropriately, with a meal, and a fight. It was 2017, and Mr. Wetzel and his wife were meeting two other couples for dinner. The two men were his former colleagues, back when he was a young engineer before he went into sales and management, then bought a specialist painting company in Akron.  

He had been looking forward to seeing old friends. But the dinner talk got heated over the topic of President Trump’s ban on Muslim immigrants and the perceived threat of sharia (Islamic law) to U.S. freedoms. The testy conversation continued over dessert and into the parking lot. “It didn’t end well,” says Mr. Wetzel. He knew that his rancorous reunion was being repeated all over the country, as friends and families clashed over politics. But he wanted to study the underlying problem, to figure out what really ailed American society and democracy. So he took a three-month sabbatical, which turned into a year and a half. Eventually he sold his paint company so he could work full time on this project. 

Among the first people that Mr. Wetzel asked for advice was Professor Lyons, then director of the Center on Conflict Management at the University of Akron. “He came with great humility. I was a little bit doubtful that anything would happen because he was so humble. He recognized a need, a problem to solve, but he didn’t know what to do,” he says. 

He sent Mr. Wetzel away with a list of books to read and advised him to reach out to communities of color to build his network. “Ted is a really good listener. He took a lot of notes,” Mr. Lyons says. 

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

“Everyone says we need to do more of this. We need to go deeper. Just getting together and talking to people who are not like us gets the creative juices going.” – Doug Oplinger, a former editor of the Akron Beacon Journal who has worked on other civil dialogue efforts and has advised Ted Wetzel for Dinner and a Fight events

At his brick ranch-style house in a Cleveland suburb, Mr. Wetzel filled a wall with sticky notes as he kept researching polarization and talking to others who shared his concerns. He self-published a book, “Is America Broken? 11 Secrets for Getting Back on Our Feet.”

But he didn’t have a formula yet for how to bring people together to disagree constructively. He tried holding a seminar at a church, but it fell flat. “Not one person said, let’s do it again,” he says. 

In 2019, Mr. Wetzel attended a national conference on civility in Alexandria, Virginia, where he learned about a dialogue method developed in 2004 at Arizona State University (ASU). The five-chair method offered an alternative to standard debates between hyperpartisans who reinforce a binary choice. Instead of a simple binary, the method gives moderates a greater voice since three of the five chairs are taken by those who somewhat agree/disagree – or are undecided. The occupants of the chairs start the discussion and can question one another; then the audience joins in. 

Serendipitously, Rob Razzante, an ASU Ph.D. graduate trained in the five-chair method, grew up nearby; Mr. Wetzel coached him in Little League. Last summer, Mr. Razzante joined Mr. Wetzel on his back porch, which looks onto a generous lawn flanked by mature oak and maple trees. No fences divide his yard from the surrounding lots, as is typical of his Ohio neighborhood. 

By then, Mr. Wetzel had tried the five-chair method in Professor Lyons’ classes and found it effective at guiding a respectful dialogue. Now, he told Mr. Razzante that summer evening, he wanted to bring it to the wider community and to insert it into a communal meal. And he wanted to call it a fight. Why? Because people “want to get into it,” he says.

Mr. Razzante liked the dinner format, but wasn’t sure about the name. He wasn’t alone: Other ASU dialogue facilitators also blanched at this branding. “The Arizona people were constantly trying to get him to call it a dialogue,” says Professor Lyons. 

Mr. Wetzel resisted. It was a fight – and a dialogue. He says the name is both humorous and honest about the fact that disagreement in public can be awkward. 

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

After dinner, people move to rows of seating, and the night’s topic is introduced. Here, they listen to a man who took the “agree strongly” chair voice his opinions.

Doug Oplinger, a former editor of the Akron Beacon Journal who has worked on other civil dialogue efforts in Ohio, also tried to dissuade Mr. Wetzel from advertising a fight. “Oh my word, Ted. You can’t do that,” he recalls telling him. 

But his determination to use that phrase was of a piece with his approach to the challenge, says Mr. Oplinger. He asks “wonderful questions” and absorbs information, but he also thinks outside the box. He “believes he can do things ... [and] ‘you can’t tell me I can’t,’” Mr. Oplinger says. 

The first Dinner and a Fight took place here in September 2021, amid a national surge in COVID-19 infections. Most of the 30 attendees had been personally invited by Mr. Wetzel or his associates. Mr. Razzante agreed to moderate. After dinner ended, the topic was announced, along with a dialogue prompt, which participants could support or oppose, or be neutral. 

It read, “Wearing a mask is the American thing to do.” The room fell silent. “You could cut the tension with a knife,” recalls Mr. Wetzel. He grins. “It was awesome.” 

Of the five chairs on stage, “disagree strongly” filled in seconds. Another man jumped up and said that he was “even more strongly opposed” than the man who had taken that chair. Neither wore a mask, says Mr. Oplinger, who was struck by their fervor. “It was one of the most dramatic things I’ve ever seen,” he says. 

Ihsan Ul Haque, a Pakistan-born cardiologist, took the “agree strongly” chair. He had met Mr. Wetzel at an interfaith dialogue and became an informal adviser. “It’s my civic duty to my adopted country,” he says. “We need to have a civil dialogue. We need to agree to disagree.” 

That night, he says, was a “high temperature” dialogue. He faced anger at his support for masking. But after others had left, he talked with someone at his table who opposes wearing a mask, and listened to the person’s defense of individual rights. “I’m not going to convince anyone all the time, but I can understand where they’re coming from,” he says. 

This is another feature of these events: Attendees return to their tables for dessert and continue talking about the topic, what they have learned, and the dialogue itself. “It gives people time to process,” explains Mr. Razzante. 

Mr. Oplinger says the post-dialogue table talk often alights on the fact that a frank but civil conversation occurred. “Everyone says we need to do more of this. We need to go deeper. Just getting together and talking to people who are not like us gets the creative juices going,” he says. 

To do that, the dinners need to bring in conservatives, including Trump supporters, who may suspect that dialogue groups are pushing progressive politics. “They turn off red Americans. They think it’s a plot, that we’re sneaking up on them,” says Professor Coleman, author of “The Way Out: How To Overcome Toxic Polarization.”

That dilemma confronts most organizations that work on polarization: Red-blue dialogues tend to get centrist or progressive Democrats talking to moderate, white-collar Republicans. The dialogues may be productive, but aren’t fully representative. 

Has Mr. Wetzel, who leans liberal, found a special sauce for inclusive bridge-building? He’s hesitant about claiming victory, but says, “We do seem to attract more of the disenfranchised everyday people who say, ‘This is what I’m looking for.’”

Daniel Messina, a Republican software developer, says conservative and libertarian friends push back when he invites them to these dialogue events in Ohio. They praise him for going, but say they fear being outnumbered by liberals and that “people are just going to pig pile” on them.  

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

“It’s hard to get people who really see the same world differently into the same room, and [Ted Wetzel] succeeds at that.” – Bill Lyons, a political scientist at the University of Akron who served as an informal adviser to Mr. Wetzel

Mr. Messina helps coordinate workshops for Braver Angels, a national dialogue group formed in 2016, and has joined several of Mr. Wetzel’s dinners. He tells his friends they’d be surprised at how friendly and civil the conversations are, and how much all sides can agree on. “You walk away a little more hopeful,” he says. 

“We’re allowed to be passionate here. We’re not allowed to be offensive here,” says Mr. Wetzel. Back at the church hall, he is warming up for tonight’s dialogue. He’s picked a topic – elections. It is both timely, less than a month from Nov. 8 midterms, and combustible. 

“We are not here to decide the 2020 election,” he adds, looking over his glasses at the attendees who have moved from dinner tables to the seating area. “You can breathe.” 

Then he reads the prompt, which has been carefully wordsmithed by Mr. Wetzel and his collaborators. (The challenge is to craft a prompt that is provocative but allows for shades of opinions.) 

“The results of the U.S. voting system do reflect the will of the people,” he reads. He declares the five chairs open as Mr. Smith fades up “Take a Chance on Me” by ABBA. 

The first chair to fill is “disagree strongly.” It’s taken by Mike – participants wear name tags – who is joined in “disagree somewhat” by Natalie. The other chairs fill more slowly; Mr. Messina takes the center chair. 

Mr. Wetzel thanks the volunteers and asks for opening statements of a minute, which he will time with a stopwatch. “It’s really good for people who need to find their off-ramp,” he says. 

To start, much of the discussion concerns whether 2020 ballots were secure. Both Natalie and Nathan, who sits in the “agree strongly” chair, worked as poll watchers that year, but came away with different views. While Nathan praises the “bipartisan effort” to secure voting in Ohio, Natalie says ballots were mailed to her two sisters who live out of state. “That’s a real concern to me. I want people’s votes to count and fraud to not be an option,” she says. 

Audience members challenge her claim, pointing out that Ohio mailed applications, not ballots, to households in 2020. A young man in the audience says he previously worked on the printing of ballots in Ohio and that “the checks and balances on the back end are insane.” 

Then the next speaker from the audience, an older man who arrived with a group of Kiwanis Club members, repeats electoral fraud claims, saying that “it only takes one county sometimes to tip the whole state ... and that is what we saw happen.” 

Mr. Wetzel and his stopwatch keep the conversation moving. The dialogue remains civil, if somewhat stilted. None of the fraud proponents say outright that 2020 was stolen by Democrats. Nor does anyone utter the name of the former president, who has been spreading untruths for the past two years about an election he lost. 

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

“I strongly disagree that the will of the people is reflected in anything in this country when it comes to government.” – Marsita Ferguson, a participant who works at a university in Cleveland and brought several students to the dinner

Toward the end, Marsita Ferguson rises from the audience and takes the mic. Ms. Ferguson works at a university in Cleveland and has brought several students to the dinner. She asks why nobody has talked about a history of denying the vote to Black Americans and women, why nobody is talking about a new wave of voter suppression in states like Georgia. “I strongly disagree that the will of the people is reflected in anything in this country when it comes to government,” she says.

It’s time to head back to the tables and review the debate over brownies. Mr. Wetzel praises a “great conversation,” saying that he feels “way more than informed” now. He compares it to a snow globe being agitated. “When we came in, all the stuff [was] sitting right on the floor – and we shook it up,” he says. 

If U.S. politics were a snow globe, the glitter would be calcified into opposing armies fighting over a castle. This polarization long preceded the Trump presidency; bipartisanship as measured by cross-party votes in Congress has been in decline since 1979. 

But this is not just a hardening of ideological differences. It’s also an emotional tribalism, a sense, say voters in surveys, that the other side is not just wrong but immoral.

The good news is that it’s possible to counter this animosity by humanizing the other side. Even light-touch interventions, such as asking Democrats or Republicans to talk about a friend or neighbor whom they respect and who supports the other party, lead to warmer mutual feelings. Studies show that correcting misperceptions about the other side also reduces polarization. 

This builds what Professor Coleman at Columbia University calls “reservoirs of emotional positivity” that can buffer partisan talk, something he’s observed in his Difficult Conversations Lab. 

The bad news is that reducing animosity doesn’t necessarily dissuade partisans from supporting extralegal measures, including violence, to defeat the other side. A 2021 Stanford study currently in peer review found that successful online depolarization measures generally didn’t reduce anti-democratic attitudes, though a larger study found that some measures did move the needle. 

Reducing polarization can be “a valuable outcome in itself,” says Jan Voelkel, a Ph.D. candidate at Stanford who co-wrote both of the studies. “Just think about the families that are divided” by politics, he says. But anti-democratic practices may need to be tackled directly in order to lessen the threats to a fair electoral process. 

Simply getting reds and blues to talk civilly “is a narrow conception of the problem. Our democracy problems extend far beyond an inability or unwillingness to talk to one another,” says Joseph Bubman, who runs Urban Rural Action, a nonprofit that brings together urban and rural cohorts to work on social problems. He says groups like Braver Angels, for which he’s volunteered*, are helpful but don’t address the underlying forces that fuel political distrust and violence. 

Mr. Wetzel recognizes these challenges. He knows that what he seeks – a reboot of American democracy, which he calls “We the People 4.0” – is beyond what a shoestring operation like his can achieve. But he also says that citizen-led efforts to make civil discussion a building block of democracy are essential. “It’s patriotic to have a good constructive disagreement,” he says. 

Mr. Smith, his co-host, says he isn’t deterred by the enormity of the challenge. “I come from the perspective that people can change in their hearts; they can change in their heads,” he says. “I tell Ted, if we change one person, just one, we’ve made a difference.”

Back at her table, Ms. Ferguson vents about the dialogue and how little time was spent on issues like voter suppression and the Electoral College. Her tablemates, who lean left, seem to agree. Clayton Cox says that he came tonight with Mike (“disagree strongly”) who is a staunch conservative prone to conspiracy theories. The two meet regularly for breakfast in Cleveland, explains Mr. Cox, and “we go at it” over politics but remain friends. 

Mr. Wetzel has left a wrap-up sheet on each table for groups to fill out. At the top it reads, “We will not solve this vexing topic today, but we can make progress.” The first question asks for something agreed upon at the table. Their answer: “Election education is important.” 

The final question is about what “our community” tends to forget. The table chews this over. “It’s OK to disagree,” says Ms. Ferguson finally. 

“We’re all in this together,” adds Mr. Cox. 

Editor's note: This article has been updated to clarify Joseph Bubman’s relationship with Braver Angels. He was a volunteer.

Laurent Belsie/The Christian Science Monitor

Betty Lewis, pointing at her Boston apartment Oct. 18, 2022, has refused to pay a rent increase for four years.

The landlord’s letter sat on her dining room table for three months. The rent on her two-bedroom Boston apartment was going up $300 a month. Then, Betty Lewis made her decision: She wouldn’t pay the increase.

So every month for the past four years, she has paid her 2018 monthly rent of $1,800 a month, ignoring subsequent increases and monthly fines for failure to pay.

“I was frightened. I was angry,” says Ms. Lewis, who credits a tenant-rights group, City Life/Vida Urbana, for giving her the courage to act. “It just gave me encouragement to fight back, and not sit back and let people run over you.”

Ms. Lewis is not just defying her landlord; she is in her own way fighting inflation – a problem that has grown to be Americans’ top economic concern. In less dramatic fashion, legions of other consumers are doing the same – moving in with roommates or parents and curbing their demands for products by dialing back on purchases. Companies fight inflation when they boost the supply of their goods and services.

Inflation is often portrayed as a huge, unstoppable force that even central bankers have trouble reining in. The reality is that by millions of decisions every day, consumers and businesses tilt the economy – typically toward equilibrium, albeit with things like pandemics, war, or loose monetary policy throwing things off-kilter sometimes. And in housing, at least, there’s progress. Rents are showing signs of plateauing. That doesn’t necessarily mean a U-turn toward housing affordability, but it does promise some relief.

In the near term, because of the way the federal government calculates housing costs, the progress is likely to remain obscured in official statistics well into 2023.

For example, today the government reported that rent surged to a new 40-year high, whereas several rent-tracking services suggest that the unprecedented year-over-year increases in the first half of the year are now over. Just as the price of single-family homes has begun to fall, rents also are plateauing nationally. 

“If you renew now, you’ve got the building owner in a really good position,” says Jay Lybik, national director of multifamily analytics for CoStar, which runs the apartment-finding website Apartments.com. Since the winter season is a hard time to attract new tenants, landlords are motivated to keep their current ones, he adds. “You can be like, ‘Hey, if you want to keep me, don’t raise my rent a lot.’”

SOURCE:

Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University, Pew Research Center, Redfin

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Jacob Turcotte/Staff

High overall inflation – and housing’s role

While Thursday’s report showed the annualized pace of inflation easing a bit, it is still running at an unusually high 7.7% pace as of October. And inflation has popped up in many sectors of the economy, causing consumers to cut back on goods they find are now too expensive, such as:

• “A car, new or used,” says David Kurtz, an Illinois ad salesman in a social media message.
• “Plane tickets,” says Jessica Worful, an executive assistant in Michigan.
• “Almost anything in the grocery store, in a standard can or jar, that costs $5 or more,” says Sara Barnacle, a Maine retiree. 

Earlier this year, rent increases were through the roof – the economic equivalent of a 500-year flood, Mr. Lybik says. In March, the typical tenant with a typical apartment in a metro area was seeing an average increase of 17% over their previous lease, according to Redfin, a real estate search and brokerage services firm. In May, monthly rent for that typical apartment topped $2,000 for the first time. Such rapid increases are unprecedented in the United States since at least the 1940s.

“It makes my head spin,” says Dave Decker, founder of Decker Properties Inc., a real estate development and management company in Brookfield, Wisconsin. 

In fact, even with the plateauing trend, millions of households remain in financially tenuous positions amid high or still-rising rents. Especially low-income renters.

“I don’t know where to go”

In Lynn, Massachusetts, just outside Boston, a new owner took over Rita Martins-Beckley’s apartment building and in less than two years raised her rent by $400 a month and threatened to raise it another $100. Without an annual lease, the single mother of three is vulnerable to such moves, says Isaac Simon Hodes, director of Lynn United for Change, a grassroots community group.

“I don’t know where to go,” says Ms. Martins-Beckley, who earns $1,800 to $1,900 a month as an administrative assistant at a Boston hospital. Her rent now stands at $1,600 a month.

Banessa Quiroga in Elizabeth, New Jersey, got hit with a $500-a-month hike this past spring. A child care worker, she couldn’t afford the increase, so she took on another job and a tenant in her two-bedroom apartment to make ends meet.

“Despite billions in rental assistance, an estimated 200,957 New Jersey households remain at risk of eviction during 2022,” Make the Road New Jersey, a community organizing group, said in a report last month. The group highlighted Ms. Quiroga’s plight in its report. In her city of Elizabeth, where 3 in 4 homes are renter-occupied, the rent-control laws expire at the end of the year.  

Renewed calls for rent control

The rent squeeze has also invigorated the rent-control movement, at least in the five states where it’s still practiced. On Election Day, Pasadena, California, voted on Measure H, which would establish rent control in the city, potentially joining a string of communities in the state that have decided to apply the brakes to rent increases. But the vote is so close, it could take weeks of counting before it’s clear whether it passed. 

Laurent Belsie/The Christian Science Monitor

Betty Lewis has a rent increase protest sign in the window of her basement apartment in Boston, Oct. 18, 2022. “I really want rent control for everybody, not just for me,” she says. Praising the encouragement she has drawn from tenant-rights group City Life/Vida Urbana, she adds, “You can't do anything by yourself.”

Such local moves control inflation, at least in the short term. Critics, however, argue that such laws do more damage in the long run by discouraging new apartment construction.

Even in states that no longer have rent control, affordable-housing activists are organizing for other types of relief. 

In Louisville, Kentucky, for example, rapid gentrification in the city’s West End has caused private investors to snap up properties and jack up rents, even on units qualifying for subsidized housing. The city in September saw rents rise 17.5%, the fourth-highest year-over-year increase of the nation’s major metropolitan areas, according to Redfin.

Shelia Nolan saw her rent go up from $77 a month (after federal subsidies) to $493, which accounts for more than a quarter of the $1,650 she receives monthly in Social Security and Supplemental Security Income for caring for her granddaughter. The whopping increase has forced her to rely on the food pantry rather than the grocery store, which means fewer fresh vegetables at mealtime, she says.

A local tenant-rights group is pushing for the city to pass an ordinance that would discourage the displacement of renters in the city’s historically Black neighborhoods by, among other things, pushing rents too high.   

Back in Lynn, an unprecedented coalition of three neighborhood groups rallied around the housing issue and lobbied the city for relief. On Wednesday, Mayor Jared Nicholson announced the city would use $5.5 million of federal stimulus funds it received for a community housing plan aimed at preventing displacement of low-income tenants and creating more affordable housing. 

Such inflation-fighting moves may ease renters’ burdens only at the margins. Nevertheless, there are clear signs that the rise in rents is easing. By September, rents were rising at an annual 9% rate, still very high but only about half the rise in the spring, according to Redfin.

Action from developers, employers

A big reason for that easing is that developers like Mr. Decker are bringing new apartments online at a rate not seen since the 1970s. It’s a sign of the economy’s equilibrium-finding process at work: A key indicator of demand (rising prices) is spurring a boost in supply. So many new apartment buildings are opening that it will take until the second half of next year before rents start rising again, estimates Mr. Lybik of CoStar.

Other companies are also alleviating the apartment squeeze and, in the process, fighting housing inflation. Some are stepping in to help their employees find cheaper housing, especially in high-priced and remote areas. 

On Massachusetts’ Cape Cod, a hospital and nursing home facility is getting final approval to build 48 housing units for staff. In Hana, on the Hawaiian island of Maui, where the median home price is $2.8 million, a small nonprofit hospital struggling to find workers is looking to build apartments for its staff. In Palo Alto, California, where the average rent already tops $3,000, Stanford University has bought a 759-unit complex to offer its employees housing.

The trend seems especially apparent in resort areas. Killington Resort in Vermont, which bought its first housing for employees in 2018, finalized its purchase of another lodge this April. Together, the properties will house more than 275 workers.

Official numbers lag behind the market

Despite these moves, the official inflation rate for rent in government statistics is unlikely to reflect any improvement for quite some time. That’s because changes in housing costs tend to lag price changes in other parts of the economy, especially using the federal government’s method of calculating the consumer price index.

“Although the markets are beginning to turn, for the next 12 months we envision yet continued higher elevated measures in the CPI,” says Judd Cramer, a Harvard lecturer and former staff economist for the White House Council of Economic Advisers during the Obama administration.

The problem lies in the way the Labor Department calculates housing costs. In March, when rent increases were surging by double digits, the CPI recorded a 4.5% year-over-year rise; in October, when rent increases had eased, it notched a new 40-year high of 7.5%. This lag has important implications far beyond housing. Because housing represents about 40% of the closely watched core inflation index, it means that officially the U.S. will appear to be struggling with high inflation for many months beyond what is really the case, economists say. In October, for instance, the rise in shelter (housing) costs accounted for more than half of the 7.7% of the overall rise in prices over the last 12 months. 

Such a perception could influence politics and policy – alongside the personal circumstances of housing costs, which for many still feel unaffordable. 

“I really want rent control for everybody, not just for me,” says Ms. Lewis in Boston. Massachusetts banned the practice in a state referendum in 1994. “You can’t do anything by yourself,” she adds. “You want to work together. ... You have to do this in order to get anything accomplished.”

President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. insists that his father was not a dictator. 

To hear him tell it, the elder Marcos – who is believed to have stolen $10 billion from the Philippines before his ousting in 1986 – was a hardworking and collaborative leader who was forced to declare a nine-year martial law to protect his country from the overwhelming threat of communism. His only fault, his son and namesake recently told an interviewer, was that he cared too much about Filipinos. 

Edita Burgos remembers the Marcos period differently. Widow of famed press-freedom advocate Jose “Joe” Burgos and former general manager of political newspaper WE Forum, Mrs. Burgos recalls how the elder Mr. Marcos ordered the arrest of hundreds of government critics, including opposition leaders, journalists, and student activists. She remembers her office being raided in December 1982, and her husband detained, for publishing an investigation into the dictator’s dubious war medals. This was a time, she says, when people were afraid to leave their homes, scared they’d be tortured or killed for speaking against the Marcos regime. 

She’s also witnessed an unrelenting campaign of historical denialism and distortion that began after the return of the Marcos family from exile in the early 1990s, and how the presidential campaign of Ferdinand Marcos Jr. exacerbated the trend. 

Now in office, Mr. Marcos continues to harness social media to spread misinformation about his family’s legacy and ongoing court battles. But the family’s success has also been a wake-up call for many Filipinos, who are rushing to protect and promote firsthand accounts of the martial law period. Some have started digitizing 1970s archives, while others search for ways to bring honest accounts of martial law to new audiences. 

Aaron Favila/AP

Protesters hold slogans as they mark the 50th anniversary of martial law during a rally at the University of the Philippines in Metro Manila, Philippines, Sept. 21, 2022. Survivors of torture and other atrocities under Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos marked his martial law era by pressing their demand for justice and apology from his son, now the country's president in a stunning reversal of fortunes for the once-reviled family.

“Disinformation has been happening even before the victory of Marcos Jr. and the problem is we started too late in responding to it,” says political analyst Antonio La Viña, who heads a broad coalition of lawyers, academics, and nongovernmental organizations known as the Movement Against Disinformation. 

“We should have done this three or four years ago, but it’s not yet the end of the battle,” he says.  

Protecting the archives 

In the weeks following the May 9 election, Reuters reported that books about the elder Mr. Marcos were “flying off the shelves.” Historian Francis Gealogo of the Ateneo de Manila University says that “only shows that Filipinos know the value of honest accounts about the past.” 

But like many who voted against Mr. Marcos in this year’s election, Karl Patrick Suyat worries those honest accounts are now under threat. 

The University of the Philippines student believes the Marcos family has every reason to target evidence of their patriarch’s decades in power, especially the martial law years. Indeed, since the junior Mr. Marcos took office, proposed budget cuts to the National Archives, the National Historical Commission, and other agencies tasked with protecting Philippine history have sparked backlash from lawmakers.

So Mr. Suyat started Project Gunita, a digital repository of dozens of books, magazines, and newspaper clippings that shine light on the political, economic, and social injustices during the martial law era. Human rights organizations reported at least 3,257 people were killed during the Marcos military rule, while some 34,000 individuals were tortured and 1,600 were victims of enforced disappearances.

“These materials do not lie. These are the most honest accounts about martial law and the abuses,” says Mr. Suyat.

The Bantayog ng mga Bayani (Monument of Heroes) Foundation – which aims to preserve not only “the horrors of martial law under the Marcos dictatorship but also … the bravery, courage, sacrifices, and the lives of those who fought for freedom,” according to executive director May Rodriguez – also started digitizing its collection earlier this year. 

However, as both amateur historians and major cultural institutions have learned, making archival materials available online is not enough to combat misinformation. 

“We haven’t even scratched the surface”

Mrs. Burgos says saving history from distortion “is the job of honest people,” and that new initiatives aimed at defending truth “give us – the older people who live through martial law – encouragement and hope that the dark days will never be forgotten.”

“However, as a nation of democracy defenders, we haven’t even scratched the surface,” she adds. “We only reach progressive thinkers and those who understand the importance of history.”

She donated copies of every issue of WE Forum and the Burgos’ other major publication, Pahayagang Malaya (Free Newspaper), to the Ateneo Library in Quezon City, but it hasn’t made a huge difference, she says. 

Mark Saludes

Karl Patrick Suyat shows the collection of old magazines, books, and newspapers related to the 1970s martial law of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos during an interview in an apartment in Manila this September. The University of the Philippines student founded "Project Gunita," an online repository of martial law-era materials.

“People do not know how to access them or they don’t know that a digital copy exists,” she says. 

Veteran journalist Inday Espina-Varona agrees. Archival work is “not enough if the truth will just sit” in a huge library or online database, she says. 

“We must learn to make truth our weapon,” says Mrs. Espina-Varona, who was the former head of the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines and has been a victim of vilification and misinformation online. “We must learn to get it, use it, and translate it into action.”

Bringing the past to the people

The Monument of Heroes Foundation is trying to do just that. While their digital archiving project is underway, Ms. Rodriguez says “our main weapon against historical distortion is the museum.”

The foundation is experimenting with new ways of getting people to visit their site, which includes a Wall of Remembrance featuring the names of 320 martial law martyrs. They recently organized a series of activities to bring people to the museum, including a clean-up drive that involved youth and environmental organizations.  

Mr. Gealogo, the historian from Ateneo de Manila University and a former commissioner of the National Historical Commission of the Philippines, in August led the relaunch of Tanggol Kasaysayan (Defend History), a group first established in 2016 with the goal of helping history professors and teachers combat misinformation about the Marcos family. In this new phase, Mr. Gealogo hopes to broaden the group’s reach, to rally “not only those who teach history,” but “people in all sectors who want to defend democracy and the truth.” 

They’ve started forming local chapters, tasked with promoting discussions on Philippine history in schools, communities, and workplaces. In October, Tanggol Kasaysayan released a book titled “Martial Law @50: Memory and History of Refusal.” It offers a collection of extensively researched essays to aid the public in learning about one of the darkest periods in Philippine history.  

While protecting and promoting existing records of martial law is critical, Mr. Gealogo also calls on survivors or any Filipino with insight into this period to create new knowledge by recording their stories. 

“We must do everything to fight any attempt to erase history,” he says.

Anyone who’s picked up a picture book by Eric Carle, from “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” to “A House for Hermit Crab,” instantly recognizes the vivid illustrations, which were assembled from layers upon layers of tissue paper. The late Mr. Carle’s collages inspire artists today to expand on his legacy, and to experiment with imagery from their own backgrounds and cultural traditions. 

Ekua Holmes, a Boston-based artist whose work appears in a current exhibition at The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art in Amherst, Massachusetts, has described collage as a kind of alchemy. “In its own small way, collage is recycling, upcycling, revitalizing items that already had a life. And I love that aspect. Because it already belonged to someone. And it brings that energy into a work of art.”

Showcasing the vitality and diversity of the art form is central to the exhibition, says Ellen Keiter, the Carle’s chief curator. “We wanted a balance, we wanted different generations of artists who worked in collage.” On the walls, art from classic stories like “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” and Ezra Jack Keats’ 1962 “The Snowy Day” is juxtaposed with work by contemporary picture book artists.

The practice of creative recycling plays a prominent role in collage – as both metaphor and technique. 

Most people are familiar with the concept of collage, which can involve scraps of paper, pictures, cloth, or even small objects rearranged to form something new. 

“We all need examples of [making] success out of chaos in a fragmented world,” says Nina Maurer, guest curator of the recent exhibition “Imagine That! The Power of Picture Books” at the Portsmouth Historical Society in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. “So if we look to worlds built with fragments of paper and other materials to make sense of our experience there’s a kind of joy in recognizing ... what collage can bring to us.”

© 2017 Ekua Holmes/Collection of the artist

Ekua Holmes designed the cover art as well as illustrations for “Out of Wonder: Poems Celebrating Poets” by Kwame Alexander.

Oge Mora, another artist featured in the Carle exhibition, says she was always drawn to colors and patterns, but she often found herself as a young artist getting caught up in ideas about what art is “supposed to look like.” 

“What does it mean for us as people, if we can look at the things that are around us all the time, the things that we overlook, or things we might throw away, and you can find something beautiful about them?” asks Ms. Mora. 

“Collage is all about how you want to express yourself, and what you want to say, so it’s a real rebel medium,” she says. 

In her experience, that rebellion has largely been based in her culture as a Black American. During college, Ms. Mora had to learn to trust herself and question the artistic spaces around her, as well as the motives of the gatekeepers who decided what was included and what wasn’t. 

Collage as rebellion

Acts of resistance also largely informed Mr. Carle’s work, says Ms. Maurer, the curator. “Carle was rebelling against what he experienced as a child in Nazi Germany. He said that it was the impression of those gray walls and the lack of color in his world that he fought to counter in his career as an artist.”

Although he’s now famous for his cheerful picture books bursting with color, Mr. Carle’s childhood was anything but. His family moved from Syracuse, New York, to his father’s hometown of Stuttgart, Germany, when he was 6, just before the start of World War II. 

The move thrust Mr. Carle into the rigid, colorless, and sometimes physically abusive Nazi school system. He found refuge in his high school art classes, where he was encouraged by a brave teacher to pursue the loose shapes and forms of abstract art, which was forbidden by the Nazis. Art became a means of escaping his dismal surroundings. 

Mr. Carle moved back to the United States as a young adult in 1952. By the time of his death in 2021, he had illustrated more than 70 books, most of which he also wrote. 

© 2020 Oge Mora/Collection of the artist

Illustrations by Oge Mora grace the book “The Oldest Student: How Mary Walker Learned To Read” by Rita Lorraine Hubbard. Ms. Mora's art appears in the exhibition “Celebrating Collage: A 20th Anniversary Exhibition” at the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art in Amherst, Massachusetts, through Dec. 31.

Rising above adversity 

On closer look, the story of collage is also one of ingenuity – overcoming adversity by finding beauty and self-expression in things cast aside. The centuries-old traditions of African American quilt-making have an improvisational quality that reminds many people of collage. While the quilts served a utilitarian purpose, reusing scraps of fabric and keeping out the cold, they also showcased their makers’ personalities and artistry. 

Ms. Mora says she was drawn to the “language and aesthetic” of collage as she was looking for her artistic voice. She says she was not only inspired by African textile traditions but also by contemporary African Americans working in three-dimensional media, such as Aminah Robinson, an artist from Ms. Mora’s hometown of Columbus, Ohio, who created tapestry-like quilts from recycled objects like old jeans and lost buttons.

“I always really gravitated towards her work from a very young age,” says Ms. Mora, who is now based in Providence, Rhode Island. 

She adds that Ms. Robinson’s work taught her to see what could be made out of unconventional objects or materials. She regularly thumbs through old books for inspiration. 

“Papers and stuff that are commonplace, when you put them on the page, suddenly they’re profound,” she says. 

© Nine Crews 2020/Collection of the artist

Exuberance characterizes the collage that Nina Crews created to illustrate the children’s book “A Girl Like Me” by Angela Johnson.

Children’s books and collage

Collage was popularized in children’s books in the 1960s by Mr. Carle and Mr. Keats. It’s an approach that had the potential to appeal beyond the target audience. 

“[Collage has] an immediate attraction for young children because they recognize it as a bridge to them. ... It’s got color. It’s got bold shapes. ... It’s got a surprise with the turn of one page to the next,” says Ms. Maurer. “That pleasure of discovery,” she says, “is universal and does not fade.”

“We have incredible nostalgia and memories tied to picture books as adults, but as children, we are engaging and learning things from them,” says Ms. Keiter, the Carle curator.

“The Very Hungry Caterpillar,” for example, has sold over 50 million copies and has been translated into more than 60 languages since 1969. Its success and that of Mr. Carle’s other titles, along with a desire to raise the profile of children’s book art, led the artist and his wife to open the museum that bears his name in 2002. 

“Celebrating Collage: A 20th Anniversary Exhibition,” which continues through Dec. 31, includes the work of 20 picture book collage artists, including Ms. Mora and Ms. Holmes – who continues to be impressed by the accessibility of the medium.   

“One of the things I love about collage ... is that it’s very democratic; it’s very grassroots,” Ms. Holmes says. “Whatever you have on hand you can work with. I think that’s a perfect message for our time, because in many aspects of life right now we’re getting lemons, so we need to be making lemonade.” 

Reuters

The Indian Supreme Court building in New Delhi

India will soon become the world’s most populous country, yet it is already one of its most diverse – by religion, ethnicity, and caste. Civic equality may be enshrined in the constitution, but that has not stopped Prime Minister Narendra Modi from pushing a kind of Hindu nationalism over eight years that has led to widespread discrimination, which includes women and civil society.

Now, however, the Supreme Court has appointed a new chief justice – a champion of equality for minorities – who might correct India’s direction. For one, the new top jurist welcomes criticism.

“Dissent is the safety valve of democracy,” Justice Dhananjaya Yeshwant Chandrachud, who had been an associate justice, said in a 2020 speech. “The silencing of dissent and the generation of fear in the minds of people go beyond the violation of personal liberty and a commitment to constitutional values. It strikes at the heart of a dialogue-based democratic society which accords to every individual equal respect and consideration.”

In India, chief justices are elevated by peers rather than political appointment. Justice Chandrachud is young enough that his tenure will not be curtailed by mandatory retirement (at the age of 65) before Mr. Modi’s current term expires in 2024. The son of a former chief justice, he holds two law degrees from Harvard University. His past decisions and dissents mark a sharp divergence from Mr. Modi’s attempts to rein in or redefine rights pertaining to citizenship, gender, and group identity.

“The craftsmanship of a judge,” he told students at the National Law University in Delhi last month, requires “not overreaching the actual problem you are deciding, but yet laying the groundwork for a much broader recognition of rights.”

During his tenure as an associate justice on the high court, he argued ardently against laws that violate personal privacy, upholding the universal basis for individual dignity. “Every judge in the country has an immense power to do good and with it comes a duty to serve society with compassion,” he said last month. “Our institutions are vital to preserving the rule of law.” The coming court cases in India may help define the country’s identity for decades.