bigger “Democratic” tent.
A better mid-term strategy would build upon creating a greater sense of community, which itself can only be achieved when people learn again how to trust one another. At the core of such an initiative is a better understanding of human dignity and how to live a dignified human existence, as well as how cultures can advance responsibly, as this would better reveal what is meaningful to all Americans – both those with long ties to the country as well as to recent immigrants. Again, it all centers on better listening and communication on the micro- as well as macro-levels.
David Brooks frames it clearly – seeing each other and listening to others is the key:
Many of our society’s great problems flow from people not feeling seen and known: Blacks feeling that their daily experience is not understood by whites. Rural people not feeling seen by coastal elites. Depressed young people not feeling understood by anyone. People across the political divides getting angry with one another and feeling incomprehension. Employees feeling invisible at work. Husbands and wives living in broken marriages, realizing that the person who should know them best actually has no clue.
“Community is a bunch of people looking after each other, seeing each other deeply, taking the time to really enter into a relationship.”22 Finally seeing and understanding the other, each other, is itself the first step in starting conversations that will lead to healing among such divergent groups.
But to accomplish this requires a new ground game. As Tip O’Neill, who is most often associated with the saying, said: “all politics is local.” If true, Democrats and others who might wish to build a larger coalition must stop with the ads and start reaching out to actual individuals within communities. This means Democrats and others need to walk the streets, go door to door so to meet their neighbors; they need to speak to their neighbors in person about their interests; and they need to engage in conversation so to explore how common ground might be found. TV ads, sloganeering, lawn signs are messaging, they are not relationships. And it is relationships that form trust. You will inherently know this if you have ever been a member of a family or a neighbor. A fence serves to keep others out, a cake offered opens doors.
Long-term Strategy: Rethinking Frameworks and Systems that Would More Properly Reflect a More Inclusive Democracy
Fareed Zakaria, in his recent book, The Age of Revolutions, Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present, notes that when change comes too fast, people yearn for a time that was much simpler: for example, when the Dutch economy ballooned, “liberal ideas and practices powered the nation forward but destabilized it internally. The pace of change was so fast that many people simply wanted to return to normalcy.”23 As it was with the Dutch, so, too, do MAGA republicans turn reactionary: they believe technology and immigrants are costing them their jobs and their prospects. Trump plays into their fears to advance this own agenda. As Zakaria says, “Donald Trump sees himself as a revolutionary, but one who wants to bring back the world of the 1950s.”24 By presenting the facts, Zakaria serves as an example of providing the kind of narrative and framework identified as needed by the previous study on countering populism. Promise a better future.
Parag Khanna, wrting in Connectography and Move, outlines not only how communications and business networks are bypassing traditional state boundaries to reshape global governance, but how environmental changes are going to force migrations that will ultimately reshape the world.25
In Connectography, Khanna documents how “geopolitical competition is evolving from war
over territory to war over connectivity.” And he points out, “competing over connectivity plays out as a tug-of-war over global supply chains, energy markets, industrial production, and the
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