The Middle Shelf: Part 3 – A CGC Guide to Finding Common Ground through Reading

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One of the seminal books that should be required reading for anyone seeking to understand polarization and how there could be a possibility of bridging divides and reaching common ground is The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt. While the book has been out since 2013 we still want to recommend it because we find the author’s empirical approach to polarization based on his work as a social psychologist to be a rational way to view politics during this rather confusing time.

Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist at the NYU-Stern School of Business. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992, and spent most of his career (1995-2011) at the University of Virginia.

Haidt’s research examines the intuitive foundations of morality, and how morality varies across cultures––including the cultures of American progressive, conservatives, and libertarians. He was named a “top 100 global thinker” in 2012 by Foreign Policy magazine, and one of the 65 “World Thinkers of 2013” by Prospect magazine.

Haidt considers himself a centrist politically. A couple of years after he wrote the book, he explained that his main goals in writing The Righteous Mind was to “examine through applied psychology how moral psychology can help us understand the forces making American democracy so dysfunctional? Also how can moral psychology help citizens understand each other across the political divide?” 

What he found was that all political movements have blind spots even among those that acknowledge moral truths. The three pillars of political thought being the left right and libertarian, according to Haidt, all have their truths about how to create a society that is humane. The problem is that ideology, even if well meaning, can distort and make us blind to how others think.

Few books on this type of subject begin with the origin of life starting with bacteria! By looking at morality through both cultural and biological lenses, we can get unique insight into how humans make judgments. It is a multi-genre study that takes the reader across the academic fields of study ranging from social and political sciences as well as the humanities.

In his introduction, Haidt notes that there are aspects of the topic that are not easy:

“Etiquette books tell us not to discuss [politics and religion] in polite company, but I say go ahead. Politics and religion are both expressions of our underlying moral psychology, and an understanding of that psychology can help to bring people together. My goal in this book is to drain some of the heat, anger, and divisiveness out of these topics and replace them with a mixture of awe, wonder, and curiosity.”

The book is divided into three parts or principles:

  • Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second
  • There’s more to morality than harm and fairness
  • Morality binds and blinds.

Throughout the book Haidt offers graphics to illustrate his points. One of the ones we found particularly enlightening was:

 

There is so much more about this book that makes it an excellent addition to your summer, or any season, reading list. For more on this book please visit Jonathan Haidt website. 

As always, we would like to hear from you about your summer reading plans. Are there new books or any classics you think are worth reading on the road to common ground? Let us know what you think of our first two choices.

The Middle Shelf: Part 2 – A CGC Guide to Finding Common Ground through Reading

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As is often said, “Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.” (Actually, the original quote is probably from philosopher George Santayana and read “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.“). Nevertheless, the idea that we need to be cognizant of what came before in order not just to learn but to keep things in perspective is necessary. Each generation might wish to believe that its problems are unique but looking back to past generations can provide some guidance that we have in many ways been there and done that.

The difference today may lie in the fact that previous generations did not have either the benefit or some might say curse of having immediate news of or information on things that are going wrong. With immediacy comes reaction at lightning speed and often quicker polarization.  If we really stop to analyze what is taking place and try to put things in perspective, would we be more likely to process and think?  Would the road to common ground be paved a little smoother if we recognized that history has lessons to teach us?

The latest book by historian Jon Meacham suggests that while we may currently believe we are in our most polarized state, in fact, our nation has faced crisis and upheaval throughout its history and that we have come through to make progress.  In The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels, Meacham looks back to the very origins of the nation, debates over the function of the presidency, the Civil War and its aftermath, anti-immigration sentiment during periods such as the Gilded Age, and periods up to Civil Rights battles.  He profiles presidents that have shaped our nation and how policies, some good some bad, were created by the push me-pull you of politics. He finds some presidents such as Lyndon Johnson and Harry Truman who redeemed themselves by stepping beyond the political to guide the nation through some of its darkest hours.

In a recent interview, Meacham said that it is not about the party or that one side or the other has the better angels on their side.  “Our best moments have come when voices far from power – reformers, protesters, those who have been on the margins – have forced the powerful to take notice… our finest hours have come when presidential power has intersected with voices of protest to lead us to higher ground. And that may sound homiletic or may sound a little bit like a Fourth of July remark, but it’s not. It’s simply a historic fact.”

It should be noted that Meacham does have some strong negative views about the current administration. The author is a former editor in chief of Newsweek, a Pulitzer prize winner for his book about Andrew Jackson, wrote books about Thomas Jefferson, George H.W. Bush among others. What is worth gleaning from the book is not so much what he views about today’s President, but rather what he said the above interview: “As  a southerner and as a biographer, my sense of things is where Faulkner was in “Requiem For A Nun,” when he said the past is never dead. It isn’t even past.

Conversation Watch: Police and Community

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As we mentioned in our last blog and Facebook posts, we will be posting a book list of recommended readings that show how various people are seeking and sometimes achieving common ground. One of our first recommendations was Our Towns: A 100,000 Mile Journey Into the Heart of America which focuses on how individual communities are revitalizing through working on local problems and in some respects ignoring the noise of the echo chambers.

During our recent event in Charlottesville, VA featuring Donna Brazile and Michael Steele on the Role of Government in Bridging the Racial Divide, Michael Steele made the point that government can only do so much and that community engagement must be a major part of any achievement of common ground on the racial issues that rip communities apart. Michael added a personal antidote by recounting his upbringing where the local police for example lived and patrolled their neighborhoods and consequently knew exactly who those were most likely to create problems. Donna Brazile agreed with this point and added her own personal antidote of a similar experience growing up with civil servants and first responders who worked in the areas they lived in.

An example of the type of community conversation that Steele and Brazile were referring to took place this month in South Bend, Indiana which has seen its share of incidents where civil rights violations have been alleged and both sides have agreed over the course of time that work is needed to be done between the police and the community to restore trust while mindful of safety needs of everyone involved,.

The City and constituents mostly from African American neighborhoods in South Bend have been engaging for the last couple of years on a series of meetings both big and small to try to bridge some of the gaps and at least attempt to find some common ground on how police and members of the African American community can at least come to terms with how to approach the issues.  The most recent took place on May 1st that was organized and filmed by a local television station.

The central theme that emerged was that many of the issues that divided the sides stemmed from generalization rather than specifics and policies that were in place such as how a suspect is identified or detained is often at the mercy of departmental policies. Solutions may lie in more local policing where there is a higher familiarity with actual people. Additionally, communities need to be more proactive in discussing how these policies are created and become more engaged in the process.

If nothing else arises from these conversations, they are demonstrations that change is hard and will take time and continual discussion but the fact is that without some framework to at least try to hear what the other side is saying common ground cannot be achieved.

 

Links to the three-part video series:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

The Middle Shelf: Part 1 – A CGC Guide to Finding Common Ground through Reading

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Here on the East Coast the weather has FINALLY turned warm and thoughts are turning to summer and the proverbial book list everyone promises they will catch up on.  Here at CGC while we do not have any sizzling novels to suggest for your beach bag, we are kicking off our recommendations for books that focus on a variety of experiences and ideas on reaching common ground.  Beginning today and every Thursday during the 99 days of summer we will be sharing some ideas for books you might want to check out.  We encourage you to read as well as to send us your recommendations for our reading list. We are kicking this off with two books that approach the search for common ground from very different vantage points both geographically as well as politically.

The first book, Unified: How Our Unlikely Friendship Gives Us Hope for a Divided Country, is an inside the Beltway memoir written by Senator Tim Scott and Congressman Trey Gowdy, both from South Carolina.

They first became acquainted when Scott was a Congressman who served alongside Gowdy before becoming their state’s junior Senator.  While both are Republicans, Scott who is African American and Gowdy who is white, began forging their friendship following the tragic shootings in 2015 at the Mother Emanual Church in Charleston. While both are Republicans, they acknowledge that they have different perspectives which come not just from philosophical differences but from the very different backgrounds and upbringings.  Scott came from a poor, single-parent family while Gowdy was the son of a doctor.

 

Gowdy explained during a recent interview the pair had on CBS News, “I find it inspirational from the moment we became friends. I think his — the story of how he got where he is, is a story of hope that our whole country would benefit from. I think contrast is good. I think conflict is debilitating. We’re in a dangerous time in our in our history in terms of political discourse … I think there’s a hunger and a yearning for unity. And if you can find it with a handsome bald-headed guy from Charleston and a middle-aged son of a doctor from the upstate of South Carolina then I think everyone can benefit from unlikely friendships”.

 

Scott picked up the points by saying, “I think about the challenges of race in our state,” Scott continued. “We have a very provocative history on race in South Carolina. The truth is that after the 2015 Mother Emanuel Church shooting, I found myself turning to a white guy in the aftermath. It became clear to me that there is a chance to bridge real gaps in this country. And if that was an example of one real bridging of a gap — after a racially motivated shooting in Charleston, South Carolina, led me to turn to a white guy that I did not know before I came to Congress. Are there lessons within this friendship that can help our nation that seems to be so polarized, in such conflict, mired in challenges, and sometimes heading towards tribalism? If there’s a way to bridge that gap, can we and should we tell that story? I think we can, and I think we should, and we did.”

Link to CBS News article about the book 

While Unified is clearly about how two politicians have been able to find common ground in a divided Washington D.C., the book Our Towns: A 100,000 Mile Journey Into the Heart of America by the husband and wife team of James and Deborah Fallows doesn’t venture into Washington D.C but instead went searching for the answer of how Americans were actually living their lives and working together to solve community problems.

The Fallows are long-time members of the Democrat establishment and accomplished authors and journalists. After years covering overseas politics, they decided to turn their lives into a journey to find out what their own country really was about. They set off on a 5-year journey, in a single engine prop plane to visit and interview Americans from coast to coast but focusing primarily on smaller communities in the Heartland that were trying to revitalize. They made two-week stops in 24 places and 25 shorter stops in others.

The book is a fascinating view of what it is like to go beyond the echo chamber to see how people are really living not just how or why they voted a certain way.  As pointed out by journalist Lincoln Caplan in his review of the book and interview with the authors:

“OUR TOWNS is not naïve. In the May 2018 issue of The Atlantic, Jim writes about the book: “Everyone knows how genuinely troubled the United States is at the level of national politics and governance. It is natural to assume that these disorders must reflect a deeper rot across the country. And indeed, you can’t travel extensively through today’s America…without being exposed to signs of rot, from opioid addiction to calcifying class barriers.”

However, as the interview also points out, despite the numerous issues that are polarizing us, solutions are being found and communities that were once written off are rising again through local moxie.

“Suppose that you are skeptical of this fundamental claim, about the ongoing health of local American society,” Jim writes in The Atlantic. “I suggest the following test…: Through the next year, go to half a dozen places that are new to you, and that are not usually covered by the press. When you get there, don’t ask people about national politics…if it’s on cable news, don’t ask about it. Instead, ask about what is happening right now in these places. The schools, the businesses, the downtowns, the kind of people moving out and the kind moving in, and how all of this compares with the situation 10 years ago. See where that leads you. This process, repeated again and again,” led the Fallowses to the optimistic conclusion they reach in their book.

Link to the Harvard article for the book.

 

A bridge across the divide

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With the National Week of Conversation behind us, we wanted everyone who has been following us on this journey to get a full summary of the impact of this event. For those of you who attended an event. we applaud that you took action and were a part of the change that we here at Common Ground support.  For those of you who could not or simply did not participate, we implore you to take the time and still try to start conversations within your local areas about communal, national and political matters and to bring light and not heat to public discourse.

If there was something we all learned through this and prior experience, it is that in our country,  grief is something both personal and visceral and no one, no matter how well-meaning can predict how long someone or a community will need to take to fully heal from a traumatic event such as that which occurred in Charlottesville last year.

Shawn M. Griffiths article from Independent Voter Coverage .com on the National Week of Conversation reflects the many positive experiences that happened during the recent conversations in Charlottesville. However, he also unpacked an unpopular and unspoken truth about the community’s and especially African American constituent’s uncomfortableness about opening the proverbial Pandora’s Box that was speaking about last August’s 2017 hate-filled protest.

Debilyn Molineux, Co-Director of Bridge Alliance, explained to Griffith her thoughts on this grief process and the current thought on healing in America:

“We move so immediately to taking action that people who are still traumatized can’t go with us,” Debilyn remarked.

“Somehow in this country, it has become unpopular to grieve, especially to grieve publicly. We are still in a period of grieving — a lot of us are. Not just about what happened on August 12 in Charlottesville, but what happened in past elections or what happened recently in Toronto. We have all of this trauma happening and we don’t really have a place to share and process it by pulling together. Instead of pulling us together, it ends up pulling us apart.”

When speaking to an audience member following the event, they asked if we felt we had all the answers since she, like many, felt too many people from the outside were invading their privacy in a well-meaning but albeit, misguided attempt to help. Outsiders could never truly understand the pain that their community has gone through and continues to process.  After a week of thought, we at Common Ground absolutely agree.

We do not have all the answers, nor do we think any one person or group will ever have all the answers.  Given this reality, we appreciate even more the overall positive feelings people spoke to us about after our event and the general uplifted mood everyone felt even if it was only for that afternoon. However, we need stones to build bridges to cross the divide and someone has to put the first stone down which being a part of the National week of Conversation in our mind was doing.

 

Thought from our President on our event in Charlottesville

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As co-founder of Common Ground Committee, I am very excited about our public forum, “Finding Common Ground on Government’s Role In Bridging Racial Divides” which will take place this Sunday, April 22 at 1 pm at The Haven in Charlottesville, Virginia. We will be the final session of the weekend-long Listen First in Charlottesville event, part of the National Week of Conversation. We will be joined in Charlottesville by a number of organizations who, like us, are working to heal the challenges of polarization and rancorous discourse. We are pleased and honored to be working with them. And we are grateful to Donna Brazile, Michael Steele and Wendi C. Thomas for being panelists and moderator for our public forum.

On a personal note, yesterday I had the opportunity to take a private tour of James Madison’s home, Montpelier. Madison is considered the “Father of our Constitution”. I learned just how true that is. When one thinks about how countries throughout the world have adopted the principles of government that Madison put forth it is hard to imagine anyone who has had a greater impact on the evolution of global political evolution. In the US, the Constitution is something we use every day. Madison was someone who truly changed the world for the better.

He was also a slave owner. A relatively new exhibit at Montpelier brilliantly captures the impact of slavery on our nation and on the lives of the enslaved, specifically those at Montpelier. It is an undeniable fact that the early and remarkable growth of the American economy was largely built on the institution of slavery. For people like me who truly love this nation, it is painful to see and acknowledge this blight on our history. But it is important that we do so if we are to successfully bridge racial divides. It has given me a different perspective as I think about our forum on Sunday.

States vs Federal: Where can we look for Common Ground?

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This past week we witnessed two vastly different approaches to common ground.  On the one hand, we watched as the State of Florida and its heretofore conservative Governor Rick Scott passed what could be described for that particular state as surprisingly progressive gun control legislation.  The package approved by the Florida legislature and signed by Governor Scott did not include everything that some constituents hoped for.  However, the new laws showed signs that the recent Parkland tragedy,  social media as well as in-person demonstrations from the students and populists were strong enough to move politicians that had until this moment been unwilling to enact this type of legislation limiting gun purchases.

On the other hand, we also witnessed the House Intelligence Committee led by a Republican majority issue notice along with a 150-page report, ending their investigation into alleged Russian interference with the 2016 election.  What is important here is not so much what their findings were since depending on your particular political view you may or may not agree.  The Democrat minority on the committee found out about the decision and the report via the news as opposed to any personal discussions. This is disappointing and could be said to be an egregious break in the Congressional protocol that speaks to just how broken the federal legislative system is currently.

In the case of Florida, common ground was met in various degrees.  Whether or not it was motivated by emotion or the pragmatic thought that many of the students will be coming of voting age for the upcoming November elections is open to question.  However, the simple fact is, common ground was achieved in a state on a topic that up until recently would not have looked to enact this type of legislation.

Florida’s action raises the efficacy of our current federal system.  When Congressional committees cannot even observe the basic protocols of notifying opposition members of decisions of the majority, will we need to look to each state and its citizens to achieve common ground?

What then is common ground vis-a-vis the national interest or are we at a point where common ground will be that which each state views as such? How does this impact state to state border relations? While there has and always will be differences in how regions view many issues, are we swinging more towards a state’s rights system when it comes to many issues that divide us as a nation.  If so, what would that look like?

Does Common Ground Require Agreeing on the Common Good?

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“What are the American ideals? They are the development of the individual for his own and the common good; the development of the individual through liberty; and the attainment of the common good through democracy and social justice.” – Justice Louis D. Brandeis.

The above quote is from the new book The Common Good by former Secretary of Labor and now professor and author Robert Reich.  While there is no doubt that Reich is an advocate for liberal and progressive thought, his latest book raises an interesting thesis that is worth discussing as it relates to the notion of how to achieve common ground?

Reich posits that America has for at least the last five decades under both Republican and Democrat and liberal and conservative majorities, been mired in a cycle that has swung far away from the common good and more towards the individual to the detriment of societal trust in government and other institutions. As such we no longer have a sense of what the common good is but rather we are now a nation of shareholders as opposed to stakeholders.  While the book is critical of the current majority, he is clear that today’s divisiveness did not just spring from this administration but has been fomenting for a very long time.

Much of his book focuses on using economic principles as a way to measure just how far we have strayed from understanding what we owe each other if anything as members of the same society.  His stated goal in writing the book is as he notes, to at least advance a discussion of the good that we have in common and provide a means for people with different views to debate.   As he also points out, the idea of the common good is not new.

He makes mention of the Eighteenth Century philosophers and the Founders who all advocated the idea of a public good as a means to civic virtue.  In fact the concept of the common good can be found in writings dating back to Plato and the idea of social harmony.  But as Reich also points out, we should not romanticize any of this because common good even when it was a goal was clearly not always inclusive.  However, Reich raises the idea that we cannot advance today and break the current cycle of polarization unless we get back to at least the goal of common good.

“The goal of the Common Ground Committee is to pursue initiatives which will reveal common ground for finding truth, clarity, understanding, and progress on issues of importance in a civil manner that does not require compromise of fundamental principles”.

We would ask whether or not agreement on the common good is necessary to achieve common ground? Do fundamental principles require a consensus on what is the common good for all or can each side of the aisle have a separate idea of what is the common good? Do you think that in a country as ideologically diverse as we have become we can be both shareholder and stakeholder to achieve what Justice Brandeis described as the American ideal? We welcome your thoughts?

State of the Union Address: Part 3 – Does it still matter? The rebuttal.

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So far we have focused on whether or not the annual State of the Union address has relevance to the idea of not just informing the nation about a current President’s views on how the nation is faring, but if it can be used as a tool to reaching common ground.  The same questions can be raised regarding the rebuttal exercise that the minority party follows the speech with each year.

This year the Democrats chose not one, not two but four ways to rebut the speech and two alternate responses cropped up as well.  These included three televised “formal” responses from Congressman Joe Kennedy (network and cable), Congresswoman Maxine Waters (on BET) and newly elected Virginia delegate Elizabeth Guzman (Telemundo, CNN en Espanol and Univision). Senator Bernie Sanders used his YouTube live stream honed during the recent election to provide the Progressive view. Two non-Democratic party Donna Edwards, a former Congresswoman now running for county executive in Maryland, responded on behalf of the Working Families Party (not technically a Democrat response) and president of NARAL-Pro-Choice America, Ilyse Hogue also spoke.

Keep in mind that Republicans responded to President  Obama four different ways  back in 2014 with Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers giving the official response, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., giving the Spanish-language version and  Sens. Mike Lee of Utah and Rand Paul of Kentucky both speaking for the Tea Party coalition.

Looking at relevance and impact, the history of the rebuttals has been fraught with unforced errors as rising stars are often selected to make the response and rather than focusing on their views get derailed by morning after gifs and memes about water bottles and Chapstick and if these up and comers withstood the pressure of a national audience.

This year, as well as using 2014 as an example, the evidence of unity on the party of the responding party was lacking.  Different wings and bases of the parties are given the chance to state their position.  Obviously consensus is missing.

Given the above, do the responses to the State of the Union contribute in any way to reaching common ground for the minority party?  If people are more focused on the cult of personalities and are fodder for the social media amusement, what benefit do we derive from the response? And in general regarding the response and the main address being rebutted, if people are using these speeches as material for their own variety hour, the question of whether or not any of the speeches matter probably has been answered for a segment of the population.

Where then do we go as a citizenry from here? In the next few days we will discuss that question.

State of the Union Address: Part 2 – Does it still matter? The aftermath.

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Today, in part two of our notes on the relevance of the State of the Union address, we focus on whether or not the speech given by President Trump last evening represented a method for presidents to help achieve common ground, or rather in today’s technologically driven world, is simply a political anachronism that time and technology have left behind.  Tomorrow, in part three we will put the same lens on the opposition rebuttals.

The fact is that the speech’s success or lack thereof is probably in the eye of the beholder depending on which side of the political aisle you may be sitting on.  The issues raised by the President last night are not new and have been matters of division for a long time.  Immigration has been a hot button for many years, global terrorism and in particular North Korea have been wrestled with by the last four presidents, economics and wage growth and the relationship to the stock market continue to be a conundrum.  As such, there should have been no expectation that one speech each year by any president or any political figure would solve these issues.  Whether or not you feel this President in this speech offered a roadmap to actually solving these problems is a matter for your personal opinion.

One commentator derided the ceremonial traditions that surround the speech making it seem almost monarchical as well as almost redundant.  Historically this was one of the primary reasons Thomas Jefferson did away with the tradition all together.

Another  commentator suggested that the speech in general no longer has relevance, especially for this President, because whereas in the past it was a moment that allowed a president to be presidential and “forced the presidency into action and helped coordinate the bureaucracy, the congressional agenda, and public attention.” However, with a president that communicates multiple times via Twitter on a daily basis, the speech might be obsolete because his words are no longer “finite.”

There is no doubt that this president has thrust the presidency into the social media morass for better or worse.  However, because of the fact that today’s news is presented in short bursts that do not always allow for  true analysis, perhaps a long form speech that lays out the issues is not necessarily a bad idea.  While the solutions presented might not be to one’s liking, the delineation of the issues can motivate a citizen to do some of their own fact checking and research.

Did you watch the speech? Did you see and hear ideas and issues that led you to either change your mind or at least want to know more?  Does this yearly speech represent a unifier or a chance for the President to simply reinforce a particular partisan stance? If the speech were no longer required, what method would you fashion to replace it?  However, the question at hand is what purpose this annual exercise serves in accordance with helping to achieve common ground in a divided nation?