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Restorative justice work is an effort to help victims of crimes seek the emotional wholeness that perpetrators shattered. Part of the goal is to help a victim no longer self-assess as a victim, but as a strong player with sovereign agency. This is not the litigious search for monetary compensation, nor the prosecutorial efforts to criminally convict and punish. This is an effort to remove revenge and retribution from the struggles to hold everyone accountable.
In some ways, the initiatives that are meant to reduce the hostility and polarization must incorporate elements of restorative justice into their methods. They may do so in direct fashion or in more oblique ways. Dialog without debate--setting up identifiable oppositional sides with the idea that the dialog is meant to seek out the greatest and tiniest components of what and why people hold their views is quite direct. Hosting a monthly potluck with families is oblique. They can work together to advance a restoration of a society in which opponents in a policy discussion can do so without rancor, objectification, or enemy-making. While psychologists explain why people are actually comforted[1] in many ways by regarding others as enemies, restorative justice aspects of the work to undermine the autocratic drive that Trump embodies can reorient that need for an enemy to something else that can be seen as cruel and oppressive to a much wider range of the populace. Working with regular working people to create a social bonding over loss of Medicaid, for example, can help restore some unity that has been lost.
[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-big-questions/201110/enemies-enhance-the-meaning-of-life
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