In this era of poisonous partisanship, The Reunited States of America is a lifesaving antidote. At a time when loyalty to party seems to be overpowering love of country, it not only explains how we can bridge the partisan divide but also reveals the untold story of how some of our fellow citizens are already doing it.
This book, a manifesto for a movement to reunite America, will help us put a stop to the seemingly endless Left-Right fistfight while honoring the vital role of healthy political debate. Mark Gerzon describes how citizens all over the country—Republicans, Democrats, and independents—are finding common ground on some of the most divisive and difficult issues we face today.
In this era of poisonous partisanship, The Reunited States of America is a lifesaving antidote. At a time when loyalty to party seems to be overpowering love of country, it not only explains how we can bridge the partisan divide but also reveals the untold story of how some of our fellow citizens are already doing it.
This book, a manifesto for a movement to reunite America, will help us put a stop to the seemingly endless Left-Right fistfight while honoring the vital role of healthy political debate. Mark Gerzon describes how citizens all over the country—Republicans, Democrats, and independents—are finding common ground on some of the most divisive and difficult issues we face today.
The Reunited States of America: How We Can Bridge the Partisan Divide
216
The Reunited States of America: How We Can Bridge the Partisan Divide
216eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
In this era of poisonous partisanship, The Reunited States of America is a lifesaving antidote. At a time when loyalty to party seems to be overpowering love of country, it not only explains how we can bridge the partisan divide but also reveals the untold story of how some of our fellow citizens are already doing it.
This book, a manifesto for a movement to reunite America, will help us put a stop to the seemingly endless Left-Right fistfight while honoring the vital role of healthy political debate. Mark Gerzon describes how citizens all over the country—Republicans, Democrats, and independents—are finding common ground on some of the most divisive and difficult issues we face today.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781626566606 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Berrett-Koehler Publishers |
| Publication date: | 04/14/2022 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 216 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Reunited States of America
How We Can Bridge the Partisan Divide
By Mark Gerzon
Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.
Copyright © 2016 Mark GerzonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-62656-660-6
CHAPTER 1
REINVENTING CITIZENSHIP
From Confirming to Learning
THE DANGER
Confirming what we already believe so unquestioningly that we become prisoners of our own points of view
THE OPPORTUNITY
Learning more about issues from those who differ with us so that we can expand and enrich our point of view.
SUMMARY
Reuniting America is about learning. We can't "know" the answer just by applying our ideology. Instead, we can learn how to harness the best ideas and practices from across the political spectrum to keep America on track. To reunite America, citizens are seeking opportunities to challenge their own assumptions, deepen their understanding, and expand their perspective on the issues that concern them. Instead of confirming what they already believe, they are learning beyond partisanship.
SPOTLIGHT ON
Mabel McKinney-Browning, John Gable, Eric Liu, Michael Ostrolenk, Roosevelt Institute Campus Network, University Network for Collaborative Governance, and the participants of the "Climate Change and Energy Security" retreat.
THE DANGER
Convinced of Our Own Correctness
FACED WITH A HYPERPARTISAN political stalemate between the two major parties, America is desperately in need of fresh ideas and new approaches to public policy. Another generation of diehard ideologues, who simply repeat the partisan errors of their elders, is not what our country needs. More citizens getting involved just to prove themselves right and the other side wrong won't help. We will just sink deeper in political quicksand.
Yet until recently, if one visited most college campuses in America, only two alternatives existed on campus. One could join the Democratic Club, where one was tutored and guided by various liberals, including the predictable baby-boomer survivors of the culture wars. Or one could join the Republican Club, where one could be instructed and inspired by assorted conservatives, including the local businesspeople who championed private enterprise and were suspicious of government. In other words, higher education was efficiently replicating the problem of kneejerk partisanship, not incubating civic innovation. It was creating cross-generational confirmation for one's point of view.
It is only natural to want our beliefs to be confirmed. Our political, religious, and/or cultural beliefs are the cornerstone of our identity. So we are naturally inclined to want information that reinforces our existing beliefs. Whether we lean to the right or to the left, we want to think that our values, attitudes, or principles are better than our adversaries'. So we seek out information that tends to confirm what we already believe. After all, who would not rather be right than wrong?
But if taken to extremes, we can become prisoners caught inside our own closed information loop. Living in a world in which all information reinforces or amplifies our existing beliefs can freeze us in place. Although we are blessed with freedom — of speech, of the press, of assembly, and of worship — we can easily become locked forever behind the bars of our own beliefs.
In 1960, this danger was given a name: confirmation bias. It means seeking and valuing information that reinforces one's opinions and, conversely, avoiding or dismissing information that challenges one's views. If confirmation bias is prevalent, even a well-educated and diverse populace can become increasingly polarized over time. Confirmation bias, multiplied by media preferences and social reinforcement, has made political views in America more extreme.
The natural place for our civic beliefs to be challenged is in school. In a previous era, this was called "civic education" and was a respected part of the public school curriculum. Young citizens attended school, not just to prepare for the job market but also to learn about citizenship. But today, this kind of subject matter has trouble finding a place in the school day — and it shows. An authoritative study a few years ago revealed that students' level of proficiency was lower in civics (22 percent) and history (18 percent) than in arguably more challenging subjects like mathematics (35 percent), science (34 percent), and reading (34 percent).
When it comes to the skills of citizenship, concludes a leading civic education researcher, Robert Pondiscio, American students are "alarmingly weak." As "our national store of common knowledge" about our own history and civic institutions dwindles, we are left to our own devices. As a result, concludes Pondiscio, "we increasingly live inside our own information, entertainment, and cultural bubbles."
As undereducated young people reach voting age and become adults, this ill-informed electorate becomes easy prey for partisan politicians huckstering half-truths.
Beyond education, the other arena in which our views were once challenged is the news media. When previous generations of citizens picked up a newspaper or turned on the television, they encountered information that might challenge their opinions or broaden their perspective. But hyperpartisan politics has now so effectively polarized the institutions that provide us with our information that we are far more likely to find our views confirmed than challenged. We can insulate ourselves against disagreement by simply picking news sources that share our biases.
With partisan views reinforced by an increasingly partisan media, civic consciousness can become more poisonously polarized than ever before. The right watches Fox News; the left turns to MSNBC and other like-minded sources. If one finds the New York Times too liberal, one turns instead to the Wall Street Journal. Don't like liberals? Then tune in to The O'Reilly Factor. Can't stomach conservatives? Then switch the channel to Rachel Maddow. Want serious, multisided analysis? Good luck.
Responsible journalists who used to cover stories about serious political negotiations are having increasing trouble even finding material. "We reporters used to sit outside bipartisan negotiations waiting to see the results," Dana Bash, CNN's chief congressional correspondent, said at a meeting in Washington, DC, that I recently attended. "Now we don't sit outside those meetings because they just don't happen anymore. ... We have to fix the system because it's broken."
With even our news sources now feeding our preconceived ideas, the danger of confirmation bias only increases. The less capable the citizenry is of critical thinking, the more we can be manipulated. Indeed, the art of manipulation has become so advanced that a new word has entered the civic vocabulary to describe it: spin.
"'Spin' is a polite word for deception," writes Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a leading expert on political communication. "Both sides actively work to deceive the public." Like a pitcher's curveball, the words we hear coming out of candidates' mouths are not coming at us straight. They are loaded with spin in order to change direction suddenly in midair. It's designed to fool us.
As Jamieson makes clear, it is a systematic, calculated, and highly sophisticated strategy of both parties to package communication in order to manipulate rather than inform. Citizens are consequently becoming cynical about all political communication because they fear that candidates and their surrogates are intentionally spinning everything in order to get their votes and their money. No one, ultimately, says it better or more bluntly than ordinary voters:
"People get a little overwhelmed ... [sorting out] what's fluff, what's been engineered, and what's actually true."
— 40-year-old salesman, Georgetown, Kentucky
"They'll spin everything. You've got to wade through so much muck to try to find the truth."
— 61-year-old woman, retired product developer, Lavaca, Arkansas
The incentives to spin in today's hyperpartisan political system-party pressure, money pressure, media pressure-are almost irresistible.
In such a political environment, how can we, the people, open ourselves to learning? How can men and women running for national office not twist facts and put spin on almost every issue? Is the pressure to confirm our own correctness in public becoming overwhelming?
"We need men and women of good will ... building back the muscles of consensus, compromise, and solution finding," said Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush early in the 2016 campaign. A few months later, Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders made a similar plea in his speech at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University. After quoting the Golden Rule, Sanders challenged "those of us who hold different views ... [to] engage in a civil discourse."
Finding solutions? Civil discourse? They will only be achieved if we are first willing to learn.
THE OPPORTUNITY
Finding the Courage to Learn
JUST AS HYPERPARTISANS extinguish the fire of learning by requiring uniformity and eliminating inquiry, civic education kindles it. The key to sound civic education is being open to views that differ from one's own.
As the brilliant report of the Campaign for the Civic Mission of the Schools makes clear, an open mind needs to be cultivated when we are young. The report of the Campaign, co-chaired by Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and US Representative Lee Hamilton, titled Guardian of Democracy:The Civic Mission of Schools, explains why our most precious energy resource in America is not the coal in West Virginia, the natural gas in the Midwest, or the oil off the Gulf Coast or in Alaska. It is the civic energy of the American people. If we do not nurture and develop that energy source, the lights may stay on in America, but there will be no one home.
"We hope to give young people a deeper understanding of their responsibility as citizens," says Mabel McKinney-Browning, one of the key leaders of the Campaign. "Civic education at its best gives young people a sense that they can have an impact on their leaders and also make them more satisfied with their lives."
What has undermined its place in the school day is more than just the pressure of time and testing; it is also fear of being whipsawed by extremists. "Teachers are concerned that somehow teaching this material might offend someone," she says. "They fear some kind of backlash from parents or administration and naturally want to avoid that."
In the wake of civic outrage about the deaths of African Americans at the hands of law enforcement officers, McKinney-Browning, the African American director of the American Bar Association's Division of Public Education, recalls how vibrant civic education programs a generation ago brought police officers into high school classrooms. "It gave the police officers an opportunity to engage with students and recognize students as individuals. It also allowed the students to understand the decision-making process of the police officers as well as the law. Research showed that it improved communication and helped bridge the gap and build a more positive environment between police and young people."
The civic education that the Campaign recommends is, in fact, a lifelong challenge. For it to remain vibrant and relevant, not a legal cliché, it cannot stop after we leave school or college but should continue to deepen and mature through our adult lives. This requires a disciplined commitment to recognize, but not be constrained by, one's own partisan beliefs.
"Like everyone else, I have partisan instincts and get angry," admits Michael Ostrolenk, a passionate libertarian and founder of the Washington, DC-based organization the Liberty Coalition. "But a motto that I attempt to follow is: 'There are no real enemies, only future allies.'"
To open himself up to other points of view, Ostrolenk has practiced something he calls the "30-Day Media Fast." It is a practice he believes can keep our civic learning fresh. "I recommend that everyone, from time to time, take thirty days off from being right. Stop reading, watching, and listening to things that confirm your own worldviews. I suggest during these thirty days you find podcasts, magazines, or periodicals with other perspectives that may seem unfamiliar. This might not be easy, but it is an important first step."
If you normally read Mother Jones magazine, Ostrolenk says, then read the American Conservative for a month. If you listen to Fox, switch to MSNBC. If you subscribe to the libertarian periodical Reason, then try the International Socialist Review — or vice versa.
But it's not just the act of reading widely that Ostrolenk advocates; it is also an attitude. "I encourage you to expose yourself to new sources of information, but not with your old perspective in mind. Don't read other points of view thinking, 'Oh that's stupid, that's dumb ...' Instead, I suggest you start to look for the partial but limited truths within their worldviews. There are some truths there with a small t. In all perspectives, even the ones you hate, there may be something of value. Try to find those nuggets, and see if you can integrate them into a larger worldview for yourself."
In addition to trying a media fast, we can change our media diet. We can choose to watch or listen to sources of information that stretch rather than confine us. Smart media choices can help us to strengthen our civic muscles. Unlike the superpartisan media that simply reinforce our narrow points of view, the more mind-opening media do just the opposite.
In the 1980s, John Gable was a typical political operative, working doggedly in Republican politics to get his candidates elected. But then he "got excited about technology." He left politics behind (or so he thought at the time) and joined the teams that developed Microsoft Office and Mozilla at Netscape. "I realized technology could move the world and change things in bigger ways than I could have imagined. I believe technology can empower people and empower a movement to change the course of history."
Despite his usual enthusiasm, Gable's diagnosis now is that the Internet is failing us. "In the last ten to fifteen years the Internet has boomed. It overwhelmed us with noise. So we pushed back. We created a 'bias bubble' around ourselves: we do everything we can to filter out people and ideas that challenge us and only let in what we already agree with. We begin to believe that people who disagree with us are either ignorant — or evil."
Given his fervent faith in high technology, Gable dreamed of designing a new application that could counteract this kind of media-magnified hyperpolarization. "We created the political divides," he argues, "and we can bridge them. We can use media to give multiple views of today's news and issues, providing new avenues and tools for civil dialogue."
Gable wants to create an antidote for this poisonous force driving hyperpolarization, and he is addressing the core problem: the overwhelming and often one-sided information flow. His start-up company, Allsides.com, for which he now serves as CEO, "bursts the bias bubble," presenting the news from multiple perspectives — left, right, and center — so that multiple perspectives become a natural part of our daily news flow.
If Gable is successful, his first major client will be the nation's schools. He would like all children to be able to strengthen their critical thinking by being exposed to competing perspectives on the news so that by the time they reach voting age, no one can fool them. They can distinguish truth from half-truth. They can think for themselves. And, last but not least, they can choose their leaders more wisely.
This shift from confirming to learning embodied by Mabel McKinney-Browning and John Gable is absolutely essential if we are to flourish as a twenty-first-century democracy. Recall for a moment the new narrative that is at the heart of the movement to reunite America:
Story #3: Americans can work together with people different from ourselves to find common ground that can strengthen the country that we all love.
There can be no genuine, productive search for common ground without a willingness to learn on the part of all of us.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Reunited States of America by Mark Gerzon. Copyright © 2016 Mark Gerzon. Excerpted by permission of Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Dividing—or Reuniting?Part I: Citizens Taking Action
1. Reinventing Citizenship: From Confirming to Learning
2. Leading beyond Borders: From Control to Relationship
3. Championing the Whole Truth: From Position Taking to Problem Solving
4. Serving the People: From Campaigning to Governance
Part II: A Movement Being Born
5. Born out of Crisis: Why the Movement Is Emerging Now
6. Out of Many, One: The Core Values of the Movement
Conclusion: The Movement Is Us