No Images? Click here Purple AmericaA note from Better Life Lab Director Brigid SchulteIn the past days, I’ve struggled, as have so many other Americans, to try to understand what just happened in American politics, and the deep, bitter fissures exposed not only among political party affiliation, gender, geography, religion, ethnicity and race, but among each isolated group’s very different version of facts, interpretation of the truth, and vision for the future of the same country. The question on my mind is not only, what now? But how do we mend? And can we? I’ve read articles on why women voted for Trump, how only 107,000 votes in three states decided the election, and how a bogus press release on Presidents Trump, Putin, and Le Pen at a G8 Summit in May 2018 mysteriously showed up on a Quartz reporter’s hard drive after a software upgrade. I’ve listened to endless TV pundits across the cableland spectrum and devoured essays on how to survive the coming autocratic era, how to preserve liberal democracy, and an op-ed published in The New York Times arguing that monarchy is key to political stability. On election night, after such a dispiriting and rancorous campaign season, and bolstered by the polls that assured the awe-inspiring win of the first woman president, I decided to host what I called a “Restore Your Faith in American Democracy” watch potluck. I invited friends and neighbors over. We made statements about the values of American openness and big-hearted diversity we cherish in the food we brought: I made turkey and vegetarian chili and Mexican chocolate brownies. They brought Tres Leches, Swedish meatballs, Texas corn bread, and pita, tabouli, baklava and other delicacies from a nearby Middle Eastern deli. “Embracing difference is what makes America great,” I wrote under a photo of the spread I shared on Instagram. Throughout the previous year, my faith in that democracy, in the basic goodness of the American people, had been shaken to the core: When has vulgar slang for a woman’s genitals ever become part of the national presidential discourse? When has the FBI, or the Russian government ever openly intervened in an election? When has a candidate ever unleashed such vitriol and unwarranted hostility against any group other than able-bodied, straight, American-born white men? When have people ever screamed to lock up another candidate or so easily believed so many outright lies simply because they were said so many times? As the returns came in, one by one, my neighbors started to leave. My daughter asked if she would have to go to school if Trump were elected, as if that eventuality were a life-altering cataclysmic event, like a devastating earthquake or hurricane. I stayed up, disbelieving, until the bitter end, when, at around 3 am, president-elect Trump spoke to the nation he had done so much to viciously and aggressively divide to say it was time to “come together as one united people.” I live in Alexandria, Virginia, one of the most progressive, Democratic enclaves in northern Virginia, an area that helped deliver, at the last minute I might add, the state of Virginia to Hillary Clinton’s column on election night. I voted for her. But, as a writer and journalist, I’ve always been a registered Independent, beholden to neither party nor any set of ideologies. I grew up in one of the most progressive cities in the country, Portland, Oregon. I direct a fiercely independent program at a fiercely nonpartisan or “transpartisan” think tank, New America, interested in big ideas, broad conversations, and real solutions. I also have close ties of blood and love to small towns and deeply rural areas in places like Wyoming, Arizona, Nevada, and South Carolina. My beloved cousin, a Navajo, was just elected as a Republican to the state house in Wyoming. My parents, both college-educated white Catholic Republicans, voted for Trump. My father’s one regret, he told me heatedly last summer, was that the real estate magnate/reality TV star didn’t choose Newt Gingrich as his running mate, a man I had watched from a front-row seat while covering national politics turn civil discourse and the work of the government into a nasty, puerile food fight. In a brilliant essay in the Harvard Business Review, Joan Williams, director of the Center for WorkLife Law, argues that what Democrats missed and Trump tapped so electrically in forgotten rural and rust belt communities, the derided “flyover states,” is that class and geography are at the center of the divide. That our worlds rarely collide. That though 70 percent of Americans have no college degree, you’d never know it by reading the newspapers and magazines I write for and read. That economic anxiety has fueled racial resentment. And in the famous words of James Carville, it’s still the economy, stupid. “The best advice I’ve seen so far for Democrats is the recommendation that hipsters move to Iowa. Class conflict now closely tracks the urban-rural divide. In the huge red plains between the thin blue coasts, shockingly high numbers of working-class men are unemployed or on disability, fueling a wave of despair deaths in the form of the opioid epidemic. Vast rural areas are withering away, leaving trails of pain. When did you hear any American politician talk about that? Never.” Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who studies the psychology of morality, argues in a thoughtful new TED conversation that tribalism, now so painfully on display, is what has enabled humans to evolve and survive. He sums up the human condition this way: “I against my brother. I and my brother against our cousin. I and my brother and cousin against the stranger.” The only way beyond that often explosive tribalism, then, is to begin to get to know the stranger. There is nothing more powerful than personal connection, Haidt argues. Another cousin who most likely voted for Trump and whose Facebook photos of the beautiful mountains and meadows she lives near are a constant source of solace in my sometimes too-urban life, posted this on her Facebook page the day after the election: “If you win, Don’t Gloat. If you lose, Don’t Despair. This has been hard on all of us. Treat others the way you want to be treated. We all will need it.” On election day, I wore purple. I wanted to remind myself that, more than red vs blue, urban vs rural, more than my disbelief at the tenor of the election, or dismay at those like my 24/7 alt-right news-consuming father who took as gospel truth what I saw as the relentless savaging of Hillary Clinton, we are bigger than our differences. Or can be. That, no matter how “other” we seem, we do all share the fundamental ideals of American democracy and the American Dream—meaningful work that provides a sense of purpose as well as security, time to love, to make connections with others, to play and feel joy, to be grounded in community and a sense of place, to have boundless opportunity, to be part of something bigger, more hopeful than ourselves alone, and to engage with, not turn away from our neighbors at home nor in the rest of the world. That is what I will be holding to in whatever is to come. That in purple America, in our willingness to see, to listen and to hear each other, we can find our shared humanity. Follow us on Twitter and Facebook — and suggest your best reads for living a better life! Did someone forward you this email? Subscribe here! About New AmericaNew America is dedicated to the renewal of American politics, prosperity, and purpose in the Digital Age. Our hallmarks are big ideas, pragmatic policy solutions, technological innovation, and creative engagement with broad audiences. Read the rest of our story, or see what we've been doing recently in our latest Annual Report. About the Better Life LabNew America’s Breadwinning & Caregiving Program is thrilled to unveil a new name, the Better Life Lab, and an updated agenda to transform policy and culture so that people and families have the opportunity to live their best lives at work and at home. As a “lab,” we are dedicated to disruptive experiments, collaborative work, and innovative thinking. “Your Life, Better: News From the Better Life Lab” will be our way to keep you in the know, featuring the best of what we’re reading and writing about gender equity, the evolution of work, and social policies that support 21st-century families. We will be a clear signal amid the noise to share what’s fresh and crucial to an inclusive vision of work-life, gender, and income equity issues. Better Life Lab Real choices. Real parity. All people. |