Explanation Day

For his column commemorating Independence Day, my friend and Hofstra University professor Michael d’Innocenzo points out that in fact July 2 was the date that the Continental Congress took the decision to become independent. And indeed, in a letter to his wife, Abigail, on July 3, John Adams predicted that “The Second Day of July 1776 will be the most memorable Epocha, in the history of America – I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding generations, as the great anniversary Festival.”

But it was not the decision that is now celebrated; it is instead the document explaining its necessity. One might call today “Explanation Day.”

Even more important was Adams’s view of what led up to the Colonies’ declaration:

“Time has been given for the whole people, maturely, to consider the great question of independence and to ripen their judgments, dissipate their fears, and allure their hopes, by discussing it in newspapers and pamphlets, by debating it, in assemblies, conventions, committees of safety and inspection, in town and county meetings, as well as in private conversations, so that the whole people in every colony of the 13, have now adopted it, as their own act.”

One gets the sense that across the countryside, people have been talking about independence, weighing its pros and cons. In taverns, at crossroads, in kitchens, stables, salons. All throughout the nascent America. Thomas Jefferson’s document captured its ethos.

Michael points out: “Adams’ approach to transformational change in politics and society is worth bearing in mind during our current polarized political season. John Adams had confidence that Americans can engage in communities of discourse in which their views can ‘ripen’ so that common ground for action is found.”

This is the democracy that lives, persists, grows whether the political system is amenable to it or not. The ordinary exertion of self-governance by everyday people. I see it happening all around me today, even as worried think-pieces tell me “democracy is dying.” I have not yet brought out my funeral clothes. The institutional mechanisms of democratic government may be under great stress, but the roots still grow.

Wrapping Up Spring at the Kettering Foundation

I was preparing my registration materials for an upcoming philanthropy sector meeting, and I was asked to give a recap of major items I wanted my colleagues to know about. The past spring (2019, in case you are reading this in the future) has been a busy one at the Kettering Foundation, and I thought the list might be more broadly of interest:

• • Report: Our Divided Nation: Is There a Role for Philanthropy in Renewing Democracy? American democracy faces challenges that raise difficult questions for philanthropy. This report from the Council on Foundations and the Kettering Foundation summarizes a two-day symposium the two organizations convened in May 2018 to wrestle with these questions. A group of prominent foundation leaders working at the national, state, and community levels explored how philanthropy can narrow the gap between people and institutions, strengthen public engagement, build civic capacity, and generally bolster democratic norms and practices in the United States. This report also served as the basis for a standing room-only session at Council on Foundations in April.

• • Paper: With the People: Making Democracy Work as It Should. In 1863, President Abraham Lincoln delivered his Gettysburg Address, and he spoke of an ideal of government, one that is of, by, and for the people. Do Americans today think our government is really “of” the people? That’s debatable. “By” the people? Doubtful. “For” the people? Perhaps for some, sometimes. This Cousins Research Group paper, based on a chapter from a forthcoming book by David Mathews, suggests trying another preposition—government with the people. It offers a strategy for bridging some of the divide separating the people of the United States from their government and from the country’s major institutions. It envisions a form of collaboration that would have institutions working with citizens, not just for them.

• • Event: A Public Voice, at National Press Club, DC. The 29th annual A Public Voice event was held at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, on May 9. The two-hour discussion brought together legislators, local elected officials, congressional staffers, and citizens from the National Issues Forums network. APV 2019 focused in part on the deliberations held in recent months using the NIF issue guide on political divisiveness, A House Divided: What Would We Have to Give Up to Get the Political System We Want? The program also looked ahead at what issues should be topics for issue guides and deliberative forums in the coming year.

• • Report: Beyond The Clash: How a Deliberative Public Talks about Immigration. Over the course of 2018, an array of organizations, under the auspices of the National Issues Forums Institute, convened 86 nonpartisan public conversations in 28 states across the country about one of the nation’s pressing issues: immigration. This report on the 2018 National Issues Forums on immigration offers a powerful demonstration that typical Americans with differing views can exchange ideas on immigration and that, as they listen to one another, their views become more nuanced and pragmatic. Most important, it shows that people with different starting points can and will find areas of common ground for action on which they would be willing to come together.

The Problem(s) With Facts

My friend, David C. Barker of American University sent me a copy of his new book, One Nation, Two Realities: Dueling Facts in American Democracy. It is an important addition to the current questions about “facts,” “truth,” “interpretation,” and “polarization.”

Co-authored with Morgan Marietta of UMass Lowell, the book is quite a comprehensive and I commend it to you.

In particular, the two write a remarkably clear description and outline of the the problem(s) with much of what people suggest as solutions to the “facts” puzzle. It is not so simple as just getting the right information out there.

I hope David won’t mind if I quote at length from the introduction which lays out some of the book’s argument; it is worth reading in its own right:

[T]he most commonly offered correctives—education and fact-checking—are not effective and may actually be counterproductive. Perhaps the most consistent (and sobering) finding across many recent empirical studies is that specific fact perceptions are not predicted by education or political knowledge. The evidence demonstrates that as citizens rise in political sophistication, motivated reasoning becomes stronger rather than weaker. Our findings regarding value projection reach the same conclusion. As cognitive resources grow, citizens simply become more adept at attaching their priors to their perceptions.

Contributing to education’s lack of efficacy in reducing DFPs [Dueling Fact Perceptions] is the erosion of trust in traditional sources of knowledge. Recent national surveys demonstrate that a surprisingly large proportion of Americans hold a low degree of trust in the knowledge created by universities. When the primary institution that discerns and disseminates knowledge for the nation is no longer trusted, this fosters a susceptibility to alternative sources of information. Our data bear this out more precisely. The changes in the perception of the university as an external source of authority are another foundation for pessimism about the effective role of education in creating a consensus.

For some of the same reasons, fact-checking does not ameliorate divisions in fact perceptions in the intuitive way we might expect. . . . [W]e provide a critical assessment of the epistemological foundations of the fact-check industry, and . . . reinforce other scholarly findings that citizens tend to reject the fact-checks that dispute their prior beliefs. Greater education merely facilitates this process. This is the case even among people who are predisposed to trust fact checkers, even when the perception relates to a candidate from the same political party. These findings further reinforce our conclusion that politically motivated fact perceptions are at least as much about value differences as they are about partisan tribalism and external leadership.

Finally, we find that the durability of DFPs is a reflection of the ideological symmetry of their origins. While some scholars have suggested that dueling facts are essentially a phenomenon of the Right, driven by conservative values and Republican leadership, it became clear in analyzing several years of survey data that this is simply not the case. . . . [T]he influence of value projection and partisan leadership is remarkably symmetric across various DFPs, and in some ways we find evidence of liberal asymmetry. . . .

Perceiving the world accurately has always been difficult, but the polarization problem has increased the epistemological problem. Unfortunately, there is more to the origins of dueling facts than laziness by the public and lying by elites; the core problem is not merely miseducation or misdirection but divided values projected onto perceived facts. Greater education and political sophistication are employed to sharpen rather than dull the connections between the strength of internal beliefs and the perception of external realities. The consequences of the dueling facts phenomenon include a degeneration of the close tie between education and democracy.

I urge you to buy and read the whole book.

Two Competing Mythologies

Many people speak of a “tribalism” that seems to be on the rise in America and in our communities these days. By this they appear to mean, for the most part, a bipolar set of group identities, locked in conflict with one another and whose boundaries are based in large part on antipathy toward the other. In other words, two “tribes” each internally united by their hatred of the other.

I thought I would examine the apparent mindsets of these two groups. (I recognize there are not only two such groups but I am responding to the dominant narrative.) My circle of friends, colleagues, and acquaintances spans both groups both in terms of social media exposure but also, more important, personal face-to-face interactions. I wanted to get a sense of the internal story of a generic member of each. It is relatively easy to articulate, from each perspective, the case against the other (indeed Axios reports on a study from Survey Monkey that indicates each group sees the other as primarily “ignorant” and “spiteful”). But I wanted to get a sense of the best positive case each group might make to itself about itself, and how that would then interface with the story they might tell about the other.

Group One:

Collective security drives the story this group tells about itself. The world is dangerous and we must band together in order to survive.

In a world where our survival depends upon cohesion, what is our strongest imperative? Maintain order. We value order above all, and shun disorder. There have to be rules, they must be followed, internal enemies must be overcome.

This organizing concept of order can be seen in the story this group tells about its rivals. They are a “mob.”

This organizing concept can also be seen in the virtue signals that group members use to reinforce their group membership. In everyday interactions, it is easy to see exaggerated displays of deference to protocol, reinforcement of hierarchy, expressions of opposition to protest, and statements of loyalty to authority which often serve as evidence of piety.

Group Two:

This group’s story rests on being treated fairly. In a dangerous world in which we must work together in order to survive, I must know I am not being taken advantage of by those with more power in the group.

How does this translate into a driving value that we share and propagate? Demonstrate compassion. We show compassion above all, and shun meanness. People must be treated fairly, that means especially the vulnerable. Inequitable outcomes must be corrected.

The story this group tells about their enemy group: they are “hateful” people.

The virtue signals people in this group deploy are similarly easy to see: exaggerated displays of intra-group empathy, expressions of guilt about one’s privilege, expressions of opposition to “hate,” and displays of anger at perceived injustice towards other marginalized subgroups.

Most of my professional work is aimed at undermining this polarized way of looking at what is a much more nuanced landscape. For instance, it is simplistic to think there are only two such “tribes” and to treat them as monolithic. Note, too, that the fundamental drivers of each group’s story are universal: all human beings want to be treated fairly, and all human beings need collective security. So it is not strictly correct to say that there are “order” people and “compassion” people. These are constructed identity groups.

However, I still feel it can be useful conceptually to examine the two competing self-mythologies. They are, after all, the stories we tell ourselves. I need to understand and empathize with people’s starting points before I can see them as whole beings.

Local Democratic Governance

This is more than just funny. It is a wonderful example of the predominant institutional-centered thinking when it comes to communities. Watch this, and take every word deadly seriously — this is what I am delighted to try to undermine daily, by propagating a greater sense of agency by people in communities.

Finding Tension

One of the things that gets in the way of making sound collective judgments is that, too often, we avoid facing the tensions inherent in the problems we share. When we sit down to talk about what to do about some community problem, we avoid tensions and indeed we actively seek to remove them when they crop up. There is a whole field devoted to “conflict resolution.”

Unproductive conflicts between people and groups should indeed be reduced, diminished, and healed. But when we need to make collective judgments about what we should do about some community problem we share — how to produce public safety, how best to educate our young ones, how to create more wellness, how to address economic change — we need to lean into the tensions inherent in these goals.

For example, if I want to live in a community where people are safe, there is a tension between group security and individual freedom. The more security I have, the less freedom I may experience. And there is a similar tension between personal freedom and being treated fairly. A great deal of freedom may result in my being treated unfairly.

These community problems are so difficult because such tensions are embedded and unavoidable. We cannot choose between them, they are not binary. There will be no “solution” but instead a collective judgment, for now, of how we will live with these tensions. The answer we come to today may not hold tomorrow.

Further, the tensions are not tensions between groups of people — they are within each of us. All at once, I want to be secure, to have freedom, to be treated fairly. This is how we are wired as human beings who live in groups.

Sometimes when I talk to people about community problem solving, and I raise the idea of tensions between these things that all hold valuable, I get the sense that what is being heard is “tensions should be reduced.” One hears it quite clearly these days: many see the healing of divisions as the clearest path to improvement.

Certainly tensions between people that develop into conflict need to be mitigated. But the tensions within issues need yet more attention. We may, for instance, heal relations between members of marginalized communities and institutional police forces. But we will still have the collective challenge of living in a safer society and how we ought to do that — and in making that decision we will have to face up to the tensions within that question.

It is in clearly looking at, and accepting, these tensions within issues that we can make sound judgments.

Report from National Conference on Citizenship on “Civic Deserts”

The National Conference on Citizenship today released a new report, “Civic Deserts: America’s Civic Health Challenges,” by Matthew N. Atwell, John Bridgeland, and Peter Levine. It is an important, and wide-in-scope, analysis of the long decline in a range of civic health indicators across years and decades. To learn of this decline will not be a surprise to many, but this is a comprehensive look and it is sobering.

One aspect of the research, from which the piece takes its title, is that there are increasing numbers of places that can be characterized as “civic deserts:” where the formal opportunities to take part in public life are few and disappearing. The work of citizens solving problems in community is necessarily driven by people, and in another piece I have cautioned against stopping at simply identifying such deserts. But it is true that the structures that used to foster a connected citizenship are dwindling, and their lack makes any movement towards civic renewal more difficult.

Peter Levine, in his article announcing the research, aptly puts it this way:

The analogy is to “food deserts”–geographical communities where there is little or no nutritious food for sale. You can still be an active citizen in a civic desert, just as you can grow vegetables in your back yard; it’s just that the whole burden falls on you.

This is an important report for anyone who cares about the civic health of this nation.