HOW DIVIDED ARE WE?

NEW YORK, June 12, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — The Common Good hosted a crucial town hall addressing the growing national discord that stymies good governance, strains the bonds among Americans, and poses a significant threat to U.S. democracy. According to The Common Good Survey on Division, a staggering 72% of Americans share this concern that division impedes the ability to address critical issues head-on.

Watch the recorded town hall here

Key Highlights and Insights:

The town hall featured a very distinguished panel of some of the nation’s foremost authors and leaders, who discussed the deepest and most problematic forms of discord and political polarization and their sources. They explored how this level of conflict and rancor harms society and proposed practical steps to reduce the fracturing of our communities. The event was divided into discussions on the causes such as identity, “culture wars”, misinformation and disinformation, hate, economic inequality, election issues; and what are the possible ways to mitigate the problems such as electoral reforms, education reforms, regulation of social media, and incentivising cross-party collaboration.

Here are a few notable quotes from our panelists at the event:

Steven Brill: (on the efforts of credible news outlets combating misinformation) “You all remember when Nancy Pelosi’s husband was attacked? Right? That became a hoax in a so-called local newspaper called the Santa Monica Observer, which is a hoax online newspaper. We [News Guard] did a report about it a few years back, which among its other great scoops was that Hillary Clinton had died in 2015 and a body double had substituted for when she debated President Trump. So this is the online news site that says that Paul Pelosi wasn’t just the victim of a crime. He was engaged in an encounter with a gay prostitute. Elon Musk retweeted it, Don Jr retweeted it, it went viral. We are about to reach the point this week where there will be more of those hoax local news sites in the United States than there are news sites from legitimate daily local newspapers in the United States, and they all get programmatic advertising.”  David Jolly: “…We’ve got to hold a mirror up to ourselves, and I think that’s where I’m terrified of where we are coming out of the Trump verdict. To me, I saw the permanency of our divide. What we can do about it is where we need to focus. Part of it is simply tone. Lincoln’s admonition, “We are not enemies. We are friends, and we need to summon our better angels.” That’s true. We need leaders that do that. But we need community activists that do that. We need voters that do that. I need to do that. We each need to do that.”Frank Bruni: (on the challenges journalists face in reporting news during a highly polarized time) “I feel like it is more and more difficult to do our jobs because I think people are so divided. They make so many assumptions, they immediately try to figure out based on where you’re from and your media affiliation, what your biases are, what your rooting interests are, and they almost immediately set themselves up, either in opposition to you or they’re on your side. I’ve never encountered as many glares in my life as in the last eight years since like 2015, 2016. And just as disturbing, I’ve never so many times had someone say, thank you so much for what you do. That disturbs me because I’m not there to be thanked, and I’m not on a team. But everyone is trying to figure out, are you in my tribe or are you not in my tribe? And everything they say and do flows from that assessment.”Alyssa Farah Griffin: “I worry about what the second term looks like. You do not have guardrails. You do not have the people who were in the meetings that I was in that stopped him from doing the most dangerous things. They simply won’t be there. He will gut the federal government and take out any serious subject matter experts, anyone who would challenge him. He will absolutely gut our intelligence, community and entire national security apparatus. And then throw in that, he’s talking about rounding up 15 million undocumented and DACA population, people living in America. That means tearing families apart. That means people reacting to that. There are so many dangerous flashpoints that we will be running into in a second Trump term.”George Packer: “There is a disintegration of ties that hold people to some kind of realistic sense of what matters in life, what matters in their lives, what brings them, what binds them, and even what locally they’re arguing about. They aren’t arguing about it locally. They’re arguing now in this great national red versus blue scrimmage […] and now it’s as if they have ceased to exist as Americans. And the only thing that exists is what they see online or on tv.”Heather Cox Richardson: “One of the things that always worries me when we talk about how you’re either for me or against me, or you’re on my team or you’re not on my team, what we really are talking about is a divide between people who believe in reality and people who believe in a false narrative […] I’m the biographer of the Republican Party, and those were my people who got driven off a cliff. The Republican party is no longer a viable party because of Trump, but the people who believed in what the Republican Party believes in are still a viable part of American society.”Tim Ryan: (on the detrimental effects of globalization on American jobs and industry) “Politics is downstream of culture, and we have a traumatized culture across the board. I mean, you look at the older generation, there were air raid drills, we talked about Vietnam and assassinations, and the de-industrialization. We have to have a full frontal on trauma in this country. The suicide rates, depths of despair, the general anxiety, the anxious generation, just the way people feel. […] If we’re gonna get past this trauma, we have to start healing.”Andrew Yang: (on the harmful effects of disunity of political leadership) “If you want to understand why we’re so divided, it’s that if you step up and try to do the right thing, they’ll drum you out of the party for standing up to Trump. They’ll gerrymander you out of a competitive district to try and neuter you as a threat. And then if you play the party games to stay on the good side of your base, you’re fine. There were 10 Republican House members who voted to impeach Donald Trump. Eight of them did not make it back through the primaries. That’s Liz Cheney, Peter Meyer, Anthony Gonzalez, Adam Kinzinger, and the best of these people wind up on your TV screen because they’re really good-looking and very cogent and very compelling. But if they are not of that caliber, then they disappear.”

The Common Good town hall took place on Tuesday, June 4, 2024 at the New-York Historical Society.

About The Common Good: The Common Good is dedicated to fostering dialogue and understanding to help bridge divides and promote more effective governance and bolster a more unified democracy. Our annual surveys and events aim to highlight critical issues and encourage constructive conversations that lead to meaningful solutions. (See our website)

Future Actions:

The Common Good is committed to continuing this vital dialogue. Upcoming events include:

2024 Election Watch: Post RNC Convention: Tuesday, July 23, 2024, 6-7PM ET on Zoom2024 Election Watch: Post DNC Convention: Wednesday, August 28, 2024, 5-6PM ET on ZoomAmerican Spirit Awards: November 2024

For more information about our events and The Common Good, please contact: Patricia Duff, Courtney Stewart, TCG Email: [email protected] Phone: 917-331-0123

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SOURCE The Common Good