In a recent opinion article in the Los Angeles Times, Tamar Jacoby, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and coauthor of "Reinventing the Melting Pot: The New Immigrants and What It Means To Be American" urges Americans on both sides of the political spectrum to re-engage in political discussion - with each other.
As a Republican, she writes in the article to a Democratic friend:
I don't know about you, but I'm deeply troubled by the polarization that seems increasingly to hamstring our politicians and prevent them from governing effectively. As you and I know, polarization is not the same as disagreement. As a Democrat and a Republican, we used to disagree all the time. Americans hold strong opinions and argue them vigorously, and this is all to the good; it's how we decide what we think and how to move ahead. But in recent years, healthy differences of opinion have been giving way to unhealthy polarization — unnecessary, overly emotional or unbridgeable disagreement that's deadlocking our politics and making it impossible to reach the kind of consensus we need to solve the problems before us.
I know you're angry, and there are people in both our parties who feel the bitterness is justified. But think about the issues we've been too divided to grapple with in recent years: how to provide the nation with a reliable source of energy, how to fix our broken healthcare system, how to put Social Security on a solid footing. What kind of country can we hope to leave our children if we can't come together to deal with problems like these?
We'd like to repeat, "polarization is not the same as disagreement". Disagreement is good. It's healthy. A democracy depends upon both its people and politicians questioning and debating the critical issues. Just take a look at the discussion in the Unity08 Shoutbox and you'll see that disagreement is alive and well - but it can be done civilly without blinding bias.
Jacoby proposes three basic changes to get the country back on track:
- End the partisan legislative redistricting that makes it possible for elected officials to all but ignore centrist voters.
- Reverse the galloping Balkanization of our cultural life. That fragmentation has gotten so bad that many of us rarely speak to anyone we disagree with or read anything that doesn't confirm our entrenched views.
- Find a way to restore the fundamental trust that, in the best of times, has undergirded our politics.
Do you agree? What do you think is needed to get the country back on track?
