How everyday Americans can help pull their democracy back from the brink
I normally try to be an optimist about America and our ability to persevere as one nation, but it has admittedly gotten difficult lately. I fear most normies (I use that term endearingly, not condescendingly) don’t fully understand the depths of the political divisions between partisans today, and how those divisions are quickly moving us toward open, violent conflict.
But political polarization is far from the only thing that has created fertile ground for such conflict. Allow me to share some words a friend recently sent me:
A lot of things are being pushed to a breaking point all at once — politics, business, cultural institutions, families, social cohesion, geopolitics. Nihilists love it, but it rarely turns out well for most people.
And it’s hard to see a way out of it. Our politics is so FUBAR, and people won’t agree on anything to advance national interests above party/ideological ones — or even give it a try. This isn’t just about Trump (although he’s an accelerant to the fire) or Democrats (who are clueless), but about a total collapse of social trust and trust in our basic economic and political models. Slow but steady decline for sure, punctuated with various outbursts and possibly some nastier stuff like war.”
To some, it may sound crazy to think about America openly at war with itself in the year 2025. I don’t think that route is inevitable, but few people seem vested in proactively finding solutions to ratchet down the temperature and move things in a healthier direction.
In light of this, I want to offer a few ideas that folks can adopt in their daily lives to help strengthen the bonds between us and our fellow citizens:
Invest more time in community. Becoming more engaged in one’s community helps strengthen the social bonds that bind people together with their fellow countrymen and women—including those who have different politics. Even just volunteer work or membership in a civic organization goes a long way toward these ends (and has the added benefit of being good for one’s mental health/sanity). Americans have retreated from much of public life over the past half-century, which has made us more estranged from one another. People have more in common than they realize, and it’s harder to fight with those whom we know and trust.
Watch Alex Garland’s 2024 movie, Civil War. This may seem out of place here, but it’s a good warning about how bad things could get if we don’t course-correct. Garland deliberately uses a non-partisan lens to lay out in gory detail what things might look like here if they ever got to the point of sustained, violent conflict between warring tribes. Spoiler: it’s not good for anyone, including partisans, nihilists, or even the normies who try to stay out of it.
Change your media diet. If the media you consume only ever tells you things you agree with and never challenges you to consider other perspectives, it’s time to change things up. The world is a complicated and messy place, as are the people in it. No singular worldview can perfectly explain everything or is morally pure, but much of our media can make us believe it is so. Cable news has a financial incentive to keep people outraged. Social media algorithms are designed to keep you on the apps and will feed you content you already agree with in pursuit of that end. No matter one’s politics, education level, or news-consumption habits, anyone can fall prey to faulty patterns of thinking and logical fallacies if they stay ensconced in hyper-insular information bubbles for too long.
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America is an idea worth defending, but it won’t carry on all by itself. Many people have busy lives—they work full time, have a family to care for, and just want to unwind at the end of a stressful day. But Americans also can’t take the freedoms and relatively comfortable lives we lead here for granted. History is replete with warnings about societies that don’t continually work to preserve their democratic norms and values. Once we tip over the precipice, it won’t be easy to go back.
Further reading from me: Growing Tribalism Threatens the American Experiment
Re media diet, I've found the daily Tangle newsletter to be outstanding in presenting a diversity of views on the news of the day.
I understand that the fragmentation of opinion and news through podcasts, youtube, social medias, and yes, even substack is largely due to stressors + incentives + revenue of traditional media.. but this fragmentation of opinion/stories is also a symptom of this extreme polarization. I mean to say, this substack is part/symptom of the problem. The number of newspapers, magazines, blogs and podcasts I have to read is unmanageable. I love reading and my academic accounts give me a lot of access simply not available to others.
It is a commonly repeated "secret" that NYTimes reporting doesn't do any justice to any viewpoint that is not theirs. I use the NYTimes example only because being the largest newspaper in the US, its leading (shaping?) reporting has been reported in many other publications. But to get multiple lens, I have to read so much instead of relying on one which can do reasonable justice to the spectrum. Believe me, we normies are not the problem.