Common good. Common cause. Common decency. Common knowledge. Common ground.
Each phrase rings with all-in-this-together camaraderie. Increasingly, however, expressions of commonality get muffled by snarling appeals to division. The common ground of civic aspiration is vanishing across the American landscape, provoking concern about the future. Is the nation’s motto — “Out of many, one” — being turned on its head into “Out of one, many”?
Wherever you look these days — at our information environment, political life, demographic situation or economic condition — you see disunity, often sharpened by conflict. Most troublingly, serious discussions of the possibility of violent unrest are amplifying anxiety about competing viewpoints. The conceit of a singular “body politic” is fast becoming anachronistic.
Today’s splintering of America is readily apparent to anyone in the 50 states but also to observers from afar. Last December, The Economist, a British weekly, raised a fundamental question to ponder during this year’s election season. “Can you have a healthy democracy,” it inquired, “without a common set of facts?” Behind that straightforward yet disorienting query lay the miracles and miseries of an information revolution spanning nearly a half-century.
Since the 1980s, that explosion of new media sources, with their oceanic flood tides of messages, has made access to “a common set of facts” more difficult than in prerevolutionary times. With cable, satellite and online news delivery, the ancien régime of a newspaper tossed at your front stoop or the rabbit-ear reception of relatively few television stations has given way to a technological largesse of inexhaustible possibility.
This media multiplication quickly placed on the shoulders of each citizen the responsibility of seeking the verifiable facts that foster a healthy democracy. But do basic informational guideposts exist today?
Some numbers offer an answer that isn’t reassuring. In 1980, the year Cable News Network (CNN) launched, the three major TV networks — ABC, CBS and NBC — drew on average a combined audience of 53 million viewers for their 30-minute nightly reports. By 2023, average viewership for the traditional trio had dropped below 20 million people. With population growth since 1980, this means approximately one in 20 Americans are currently watching these programs, rather than one in four.
Unlike the networks’ heydays, when CBS anchor Walter Cronkite topped polls as “the most trusted man in America,” eyeballs now easily find video information elsewhere. In a coincidence of history, the Fox News Channel and MSNBC both inaugurated their programming in 1996, with Fox supplanting CNN in 2002 as the nation’s most-watched cable news operation.
To say that Fox and MSNBC approach contemporary affairs from dissimilar perspectives is undeniable, a reality that works against viewers receiving “a common set of facts.” Sustaining a particular slant — rightward for Fox, leftward for MSNBC — means certain stories are deliberately downplayed or ignored with political intent.
Since 1987, when the Federal Communications Commission repealed the Fairness Doctrine, a 1950s-era policy that required the airing of differing perspectives on controversial issues, TV and radio have been at liberty to disregard such balance in discussions of factious subjects. While outlets aiming for mainstream acceptance continue to appear evenhanded, other venues, notably high-decibel discussion programs, make no effort to achieve equitable treatment.
With a facts-be-damned attitude, opinion has not only taken precedence but also dictates content, a situation recently exacerbated by the proliferation of podcasts. Examinations of current affairs by agenda-driven hosts have replaced more traditional, multisided accounts.
Even as TV and radio have exploded in all directions, newspapers and magazines have struggled to survive the internet-aplenty competition for attention. Common awareness among the citizenry of their day-to-day circumstances has shrunk amid the welter of digital alerts and smartphone notifications.
A Northwestern University study released last year predicted that one-third of the newspapers published in the United States in 2005 will be out of business by the end of this year. Ominously, nearly half the country now wanders in “news deserts” without access to homegrown reporting.
How bad is it for the “legacy media” that flourished before the World Wide Web? With all the closings and downsizing, state legislatures are debating “preservation acts” for beleaguered newspapers — bills that would, for instance, require social-media behemoths to compensate journalistic outlets for reproducing their stories — at a time when whispers about an “extinction-level event” for newspapers grow louder. Meanwhile, internet communities merrily multiply. Facebook, X, Threads, Instagram, TikTok and others operate together as message carriers and — presto — someone’s self-created information bubble takes shape algorithmically.
Professional gatekeepers at news organizations, editors selecting confirmable facts with the intent of arriving at common understanding, have little to no sway on a person’s news diet in this constant state of data discombobulation. Inaccurate or intentionally false “facts” circulate with the same serene efficiency as Scripture passages. Memes become the equivalent of junk food at the expense of more nutritional treatments of what really matters.
The bounty of the post-1980 mediasphere is a 24/7 smorgasbord of bulletins, posts, articles, images, tweets, videos, statistics and much else. People choose what’s to them most interesting, often without bothering to expose themselves to fare at variance with what they “like.”
This approach is understandable but civically chancy. A citizen’s worldview can skew, leading to a perception of reality far removed from one based on “a common set of facts.”
It doesn’t take a political scientist or sociologist to point out that distinct alternative realities can’t nurture the collective feeling of a commonweal or a vibrant democracy of civility and compromise. That’s a principal reason why the fragmentation of information sources deserves close scrutiny.
Abuses of artificial intelligence, so-called “deepfakes” with malign intent, and increasingly sophisticated disinformation bombard us with make-believe, portending a more virulent future. The burden to arrive at the truth — or the best obtainable rendering of it — becomes heavier for each citizen who is interested in knowing about a person or subject at a depth that allows critical assessment.
A major consequence of this ever-expanding mediaverse is that political partisanship can intensify to I-don’t-care-what-you-think polarization. Instead of the dialogue and debate that’s traditionally occurred in American history, today’s electoral combat — as we’ve seen so far in this year’s campaign — has a death-battle aura to it.
Extreme statements receive extensive attention not only because they energize the speaker’s supporters, but also because they satisfy the media’s innate attraction to conflict and controversy. The rise in “negative partisanship” — abject hatred of an opponent rather than mere ardent attachment to one’s own side — is fueled by repeated condemnation of a perceived adversary.
The encouragement of divisiveness by media outlets and political operators leads the citizenry away from almost every patch of common ground. Fences go up, many with razor wire on top. For many people, tribal allegiance replaces party affiliation.
In this climate, vastly different from much of the 20th century, political beliefs too easily lead to questionable behavior and even violence. The riot at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on January 6, 2021, the assassination attempt at a political rally on July 13, 2024, and other actions rooted in political discord illustrate today’s tinderbox of explosive behavior.
We learn in grade school that Congress has 535 members: 100 in the Senate and 435 in the House of Representatives. In 2023, the Capitol Police investigated 8,008 threats against members of the two chambers. That breaks down to nearly 15 menacing messages per elected officeholder.
Further, the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University reported earlier this year an alarming surge in abuse directed at state and local officials. That study appeared just as the U.S. Marshals Service revealed a substantial increase in threats aimed at federal judges and prosecutors.
Troubling as all the threats and acts of intimidation might be, public opinion of political violence is also undergoing change — and not for the better. The 2023 American Values Survey, conducted by the nonprofit, nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute, asked whether “true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.”
The phrase “true American patriots” is astonishingly imprecise — “patriotism” to one person can be “treason” to another — but 23 percent of respondents considered such violence justified. It was the first time in eight such surveys since 2021 when more than 20 percent looked favorably, at least in theory, on brute force as a form of legitimate conduct.
Moreover, another national survey released last fall found that nearly one-third of those polled believed violence was acceptable to attain political objectives. Specific goals justifying potential bloodshed included stopping an election from being stolen or halting perceived voter fraud.
As divisions deepen, fisticuffs and worse aren’t being ruled out by between a quarter and a third of adults interviewed in such surveys. Those percentages, as well as the disturbing number of incidents classified as domestic terrorism, have pushed the FBI and Department of Homeland Security to issue warnings about dangers posed by militia groups and lone actors with grievances against the government.
Some historians compare our time, with its emphasis on vocal and threatening extremes, to the 1850s. The pre-Civil War decade saw brawls and beatings involving members of Congress. Fistfights often occurred when Southerners argued with Northerners over slavery.
Today’s political rhubarbs are less regional and more national. This past spring a countrywide internecine conflict, provoked by extreme polarization, was portrayed in the film Civil War. An unexpected box-office hit, this cautionary and dystopian action thriller includes a scene in which a soldier confronts a journalist covering the carnage and asks: “What kind of American are you?”
The jarring question dramatizes the doubt over identity that different sides impose on other people of the same nationality. In the current moment, many people seriously wonder whether a person with a differing political or social viewpoint can be an American of an acceptable kind.
Besides the partisan hostilities vividly on display during this election season, the ongoing culture wars — high-pitched skirmishes over border security, reproductive decisions, gun availability, educational standards, library holdings and other contentious matters — have long pitted the far ends of the ideological spectrum against each other. Finding agreement is elusive, and arriving at a center point between the extremes is anything but commonplace. Arguments tend to remain unresolved as verbal combat grows shrill.
Another serious point of friction is the nation’s changing demographic reality. The white population of the U.S. numbered nearly 80 percent in the 1980 census. Blacks made up about 12 percent of the country and Hispanics just over 6 percent. Four decades later, the 2020 census captured what scholars refer to as “America’s diversity explosion.” Whites have declined to 58 percent of the U.S. population, while Hispanics jumped to 19 percent and Blacks remained at 12 percent. By 2045, according to several projections, the white population will drop to 49.7 percent, with Hispanics moving up to 24.6 percent and Blacks to 13.1 percent.
For some whites, the dramatic decline feels threatening and often serves as the motivation for hostilities directed at non-whites. In this new milieu, finding common ground may mean looking beyond age-old prejudices and accepting the inevitability of our shared demographic destiny.
Curiously, dissatisfaction with the direction of the country spans the spectra of left/right, radical/reactionary and unorthodox/hidebound. According to the Gallup organization, the last time majorities of Americans were “satisfied . . . with the way things are going in the United States” was in 2003 — over two decades ago. The 12 times Gallup conducted surveys about national satisfaction or dissatisfaction in 2023 resulted in an average of 19 percent of respondents who said they were satisfied, down from 23 percent in 2022.
One reason so many Americans think the country has taken a wrong turn is the widespread lack of trust in key institutions. The public’s regard for the presidency, Congress and the Supreme Court has plunged to historic lows, according to Gallup, with TV news and newspapers sinking rock-like, too. Of the 15 major institutions pollsters inquired about in 2023, just two — small business and the military — received a vote of confidence greater than 50 percent. Congress didn’t even reach double figures, with just 7 percent of Americans affirming trust in federal legislators.
Amid these worries over institutions, information and violence, a possibly cheeky question arises: Whatever happened to the American dream?
For much of the 20th century, the prospect of “progress,” interpreted as each generation prospering more than the previous one, animated a wide cross-section of Americans. Especially during the post-World War II economic boom, the nation for the most part seemed to be rowing together in the direction of the fabled dream.
Racial prejudice occurred with unsettling regularity, but Americans usually seemed united in confronting the threat posed by the Cold War rivalry with the Soviet Union and its communist satellites. Ownership of cars and homes flourished, and the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 created the interstate freeway system with greater mobility for work and leisure.
During the 1950s and ’60s, corporate chief executives were paid about 20 times more than the median income received by their employees. That differential has skyrocketed in recent decades. Last year, The Wall Street Journal reported that the pay for the C-suite leaders of the Big Three automakers was about 300 times more than the average worker’s compensation. At some companies, the pay gap was even wider. The effect is acute economic separation, making class-based discord more likely.
Last year David Leonhardt, a Pulitzer Prize-winning senior writer at The New York Times, published Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream. The past tense in the book’s title is intentional and meaningful.
Having explained how the years after 1945 brought the country closer to the hopes of the aspirational reverie, Leonhardt points out that since 1980 the U.S. economy has grown more slowly and more unequally, leading up to “worst period of stagnation in living standards since the Great Depression.” A typical American family’s net worth has shown disquieting decline.
As disheartening as economic hardships are, their social consequences can be downright crippling, especially for anyone locked in an unending struggle to pay their monthly bills. Leonhardt notes that in 1980 “average life expectancy in the United States was typical for an affluent country.” Since then, however, America has been “doing a worse job than any similar country of keeping its citizens healthy and alive.” One effect of this condition is the documented decline of life expectancy in the U.S., from 79 years at its 2014 peak to 76 years reported by Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health at the end of 2022.
Could there be a more urgent — or common — concern for a country than “keeping its citizens healthy and alive”? In such circumstances, political boundaries, with their unhealthy extremes, deserve to be torn down, and the multitude of media sources should be shining a spotlight on the principal causes and possible cures to remedy the problems.
If a country is generally perceived to be heading in the wrong direction and life expectancy itself is an issue, an all-hands-on-deck effort to overcome internal divisions would seem the logical place to start. But how? Initiatives to encourage civil discussion of opposing viewpoints are springing up across the country in an effort to air differences in agreeable ways.
Such organizations as Braver Angels and More in Common arrange workshops and other activities with the singular goal of having participants — no matter their political or social persuasion — understand perspectives contrary to their own. Awareness of others’ ways of thinking helps stake out areas each side might share, en route, they hope, to pluralism instead of polarization, consensus instead of conflict and agreement instead of anger.
Founded in 2016, Braver Angels has conducted more than 3,000 events involving over 30,000 people. Acknowledging in its defining statement that “growing partisan animosity is the crisis of our time and threatens our nation,” the organization confronts the current disunity directly. During its national convention in June, members were told, “Our nation may be on the brink of the most dangerously divisive election since the Civil War, but it doesn’t have to be that way.”
In a sense, this approach is colorblind, or at least color-neutral, with the primary political colors — Republican red and Democratic blue — fading into the background to reveal circumstances without any discernible hue. Commonality rather than confrontation is critical.
While Braver Angels operates exclusively in the U.S., More in Common sponsors activities in America, the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Poland. It is similar in addressing “the underlying drivers of fracturing polarization,” which make it difficult to build — in the group’s explanation — “more united and inclusive democratic societies, in which people believe and feel that what they have in common is stronger than what divides them.”
An example of a media-based effort to foster the exchange of dissimilar standpoints is One Small Step, an undertaking of StoryCorps, which has ties to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, NPR and the Library of Congress. Conversations lasting 50 minutes convene “strangers with different political views . . . not to debate politics, but to learn who we are as people.” What’s stressed is that a person’s political stance is just one facet of anyone’s life.
Promoting a series of dialogues rather than a succession of biased monologues might, indeed, be a “small step,” yet it’s an essential one. Doors open. Stereotypes shrink. Understanding expands. Nurturing give-and-take in any format can help narrow divisions, and some public figures are creating still other programs to underscore the importance of talking across the chasm with civility.
In July 2023, the National Governors Association announced its Disagree Better Initiative in hopes of promoting “healthy conflict” that leads to solutions “instead of endlessly bickering.” A wide range of activities — service projects, debates and bipartisan statements about key subjects — emphasizes an approach of working together, even as people disagree about the merits or intentions of a proposal or program.
Governors can act on their own with more latitude than the often-partisan lockstep of U.S. senators and representatives, which makes their effort promising. The trick will be whether their constituents become involved and put the governors’ recommendations into practice.
At the NGA winter meeting this past February, one session showcased what is becoming a periodic dialogue that champions respectful discourse in dealing with contentious topics. In these forums, U.S. Supreme Court associate justices Sonia Sotomayor and Amy Coney Barrett ’97J.D. sit down in front of audiences and talk about the importance of discussing public matters without letting substantive differences become personal.
The conversations between Sotomayor, a liberal in jurisprudence, and Barrett, a conservative, remind those who attend or read about their parleys that judicial judgments belong in a distinct, disputed sphere removed from the daily interactions of people who work together in close proximity.
“When we disagree, our pens are sharp,” Sotomayor is fond of remarking. “But on a personal level, we never translate that into our relationship with one another.”
Barrett, who was a Notre Dame Law School professor from 2002 until her 2020 elevation to the highest court, echoes her colleague’s commitment to comity. At a George Washington University conversation between the two justices, who have lifetime appointments, the 52-year-old Barrett noted, “We’re not going anywhere, so we have to get along.”
She later applied this notion to the public at large. “But shouldn’t that be true of all of us in a civic community?” she asked. “Why should any of us want to obliterate the opposition or even see another person as ‘the opposition’? I think we should all be trying to get along.”
What the two justices are doing outside the rarefied atmosphere of the Supreme Court might strike some as a staged throwback to a more genteel time. Yet besides the civil discourse, what else exists to define the common ground required to deal with politically charged concerns?
The two justices aren’t the only figures in Washington attempting to lower the volume of public disagreement. Last March, a Democratic member of the U.S. House of Representatives, Derek Kilmer of Washington state, and a Republican colleague, Andy Barr of Kentucky, reintroduced a bill, originally offered in 2022, with this aspirational title: “The Building Civic Bridges Act.”
If passed and signed into law — highly doubtful in an election year — the legislation would create an “Office of Civic Bridgebuilding” within AmeriCorps, the U.S. government agency that oversees the volunteer service of some 5 million Americans. Competitive grants from the new office would fund projects devoted to similar goals as Braver Angels or More in Common. The bipartisan proposal, endorsed by more than a dozen cosponsors, illustrates that some federal officeholders recognize the need to come together to iron out breach-producing subjects.
The first sentence of the Declaration of Independence includes a ringing phrase about having “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind.” That ethos is a hallmark of these civic initiatives and directly connects to a central principle of the nation’s founding.
Since many of today’s disputes and divisions derive from political partisanship, it’s perplexing that large numbers of Americans don’t identify as having a party label. Gallup researchers in June documented that a majority — 51 percent of people surveyed — regard themselves as politically independent. That number stands in stark contrast to the 25 percent of self-described Republicans and the 23 percent identifying as Democrats.
Are respondents being truthful with pollsters in declaring their political allegiances? Are forces such as the ideologically driven media responsible for amplifying extreme messages that sharpen the perception of fierce separation between and among people? What are the facts of the matter that might lead to common understanding?
With the country so evenly divided in recent elections — we inhabit “50/50 America,” the media keep saying — independents are critical to winning. They are also the constituency probably most inclined to applaud those figures in the two major parties who are working together on the nation’s vexing dilemmas. Emphasizing what opposing sides agree on would help establish a foundation on which to build for joint action.
In theory, this sounds relatively easy. Vigorous battles are bound to occur, but if the work begins with collective recognition of specific concerns, leaders will have taken an initial step toward common ground.
All Americans share a legacy of liberty and slavery, of opportunity and oppression, of glory days and dark times. Though it might seem too idealistic to seek unity of purpose in our disputatious era, any campaign season serves as a prelude to governing. This new beginning for those who are elected up and down the ballot means new possibilities for finding solutions to problems we all share. If we collectively take the initiative, we’ll find an opportunity for officeholders — and for all of us — to join in common cause to shape our elusive commonweal.
Robert Schmuhl, the Walter H. Annenberg-Edmund P. Joyce Professor Emeritus of American Studies and Journalism, is the author of Mr. Churchill in the White House: The Untold Story of a Prime Minister and Two Presidents, published in July by Liveright/W.W. Norton.